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Schultz will make his Tour debut in Denmark as part of La Grande Boucle’s 3,328-kilometre journey to the Champs-Elysées in Paris, but not even he could have predicted this reality a few months ago.
Before the Vosges, Alps or Pyrenees had captured his imagination, the 27-year-old was long locked in an entirely different uphill climb - one geared towards a previously-thought "impossible" phone call from Team BikeExchange-Jayco.
"At the end of the season last year we had our team get-together in October or November, and you sort of make a general plan," Schultz told SBS Sport.
"On my general plan was, 'the target is the Tour to France', and that's what we were working towards.
"Obviously you still have to earn your place on the team, and you have to tick all the boxes along the way, but that was the big goal of the year and that's what I was aiming towards.
"It kind of got off to a pretty poor start pretty quickly; I had a couple of illnesses through December and Christmas and then I got COVID-19 in January after that, and then a knee injury, and I constantly felt like I was catching up, you know, sort of taking a few steps back, couple steps forward, few steps back, and this carried on until the end of April around the Ardennes Classics.
"I was hit with a big saddle sore in March at Paris-Nice and I had to take nearly two weeks off, which, I mean at that point, when we talk about the work that goes in or the goal or the plan, I thought it was impossible that I'll have a shot at going to the Tour of France.
"I was so far on the back foot that I was kind of almost resetting and trying to remotivate myself for different goals. But once things settled, I just sent myself to a lot of hard work.”
That hard work came in the form of almost two months in Andorra, training at altitude and building the body back to a level worthy of reaching the pinnacle of professional cycling.
Schultz, together with partner and fellow cyclist Lizzie Holden, spent six weeks in an environment devoid of distractions, where last month’s Criterium du Dauphine was the only reprieve from an otherwise unrelenting schedule that included thousands of metres worth of elevation per day.
The Brisbane-born rider would amass anywhere between 20 to 25 hours of on-bike training each week, replicating the “diesel engine” required to earn one of eight places in BikeExchange-Jayco’s squad.
Such a regime, though at altitude, came easy to Schultz.
What didn’t, however, was the key ingredient that’s taken his performance – and the standard of cycling as whole – to a completely different level.
"For most of us, the actual training on the bike, that's what we love to do, that’s the easy part," Schultz said.
"I love being out on the bike for hours on end but sometimes those little things off the bike, like having a big focus on nutrition and making sure you’re sleeping, they're the things you don’t see that, to get to this event, need to pretty much be perfect for quite a long consistent period.
"Nutrition is evolving a lot and I think that's why, in general, we're seeing the level of the sport rising.
"Even from when I tuned pro six years ago, I go about nutrition in a completely different way, and I can single-handedly credit good nutrition to better consistency and better performances. It’s had a bigger impact than any changes in training – the training is still the same, it’s just what you do around it.
"Typically, what it is now is this move to fuelling for performance. Five or six years ago it was all about being as light as possible, having calorie deficits to lose weight – everything was about the number on the scales and now that’s completely changed.
"Obviously, it's still very important to be at an optimal race weight but the way in which we go about that and the way we fuel is very different; it’s far more tactical.
"I’m eating more than I ever have as a bike rider in my career but it’s sort of tactical. I eat differently depending on what training I'm doing which is sort of a big shift. You give exactly what your body needs to enable you to do the work that’s required on that given day, and we take that approach in the races now also.
"In training it's not as strict, I don’t follow an exact plan but, certainly for myself, it's having a massive breakfast – porridge and toast or whatever – and then post-ride it's also pretty basic; it could be rice or pasta and some sort of protein content like meat or eggs, and then similar again for dinner.
"But then if there's a recovery day the day after, then maybe I dial back that dinner a little bit and it's not as carbohydrate-dense, it might be a bit more meat, bit more salad and vegetables. And that's what I mean, it's a lot more tactical and something I think is evolving and changing at the highest pace in our sport – it’s constantly getting looked at and a big, big performance improvement."
Being a climber, what’s required of Schultz will differ to that of Dylan Groenewegen, the Dutch sprinter set to lead the team’s hunt for stage wins at the Tour, though that hasn’t stopped him from aiming just as high.
It might not be the Australian’s first Grand Tour, but it is the Tour; the "childhood dream", and now, he has all he needs to reap the rewards of his training in the many editions to come.
"Getting the tracksuit is one thing but actually delivering on that and performing at a world-class level is the next thing to do, and there's no reason that can't start at this one," he said.
"I'll be doing my best to be at the ultimate level here, but this will most likely become an annual goal.
"The ultimate dream would be to wrap up a stage win somewhere along the line in my career at the Tour de France, and I wouldn’t be wrong in saying most cyclists dream of that. That’s the next big target."
