“I’ll be watching Valverde closely: At Stirling and Willunga he'll be a real threat”
Australian national champion Simon Gerrans can now understand the kind of emotions his former British team-mates at Sky experienced two years ago when the team was founded.
Gerrans was one of a select minority of foreign stars at the predominantly British Sky Pro Cycling team but now, rather than being an outsider, he finds himself as part of the spine of the new Australian GreenEdge team as it prepares to make its WorldTour debut at the Tour Down Under in Adelaide.
“I'm probably feeling at GreenEdge the same as what all the British riders were feeling at the beginning of Team Sky,” said Gerrans at the GreenEdge presentation on Saturday.
“I really felt I was a part of Sky but you could see that the real core of the team were English riders. I'm so much more excited about this project than I was at Sky, just because of my personal attachment to the team.”
Sporting a slick yellow and green jersey as Australia's national road race champion, Gerrans appeared on stage alongside GreenEdge general manager Shayne Bannan, sports director Matt White, and the team's remaining six riders in a strong all-Australian roster.
Besides the 31-year-old Gerrans, the inaugural GreenEdge team features last year's Tour Down Under winner Cameron Meyer, veterans Stuart O'Grady and Robbie McEwen, sprinter Matt Goss, and up-and-coming stars Leigh Howard and Luke Durbridge, the latter a last-minute replacement for the injured Jack Bobridge.
A stage winner in all three Grand Tours, Gerrans's arrival at GreenEdge in the close season seemed almost as inevitable as World Champion Mark Cavendish's switch to his former team.
“It was a natural progression for Cav to go to Sky,” said Gerrans, who tipped his former team-mates to become even stronger following the arrival of the world's best sprinter.
“Sky have a super talented roster and I'm sure they'll have a great season,” he said. “You've seen the progression from year one to year two and the improvement in the results, so I'm expecting them to be one of the real bad-ass teams.”
Cavendish's pending arrival at Sky – coupled with the unmissable opportunity of riding for Australia's first ever professional cycling team – made Gerrans's decision to join GreenEdge an easy one.
But it was far from simply a sentimental decision for the 2006 Tour Down Under winner Gerrans, who feared his free role within the team would have been jeopardised by the arrival of the fastest man in the peloton and an increased focus on Bradley Wiggins to reach the Tour de France podium.
"When I started with Sky I had no intention of going anywhere at the time. But Sky changed their focus with Cav as well as the GC side of things, and I just didn't see myself with a future at that team.
"And at the same time, GreenEdge came along and they are really focusing on what I see myself as being all about – and that's a one-day rider and one going for stage victories in the big races."
Despite becoming the first (and only) Australian to notch wins in the Giro, Tour and Vuelta, Gerrans has never won a stage in the Tour Down Under – and with GreenEdge making its much-anticipated debut in Adelaide this week, the scene is perfectly set for Gerrans to break that duck.
The introduction of a "mountain-top" finish at Old Willunga Hill (stage five) and the inclusion of the punchy uphill sprint at Stirling (stage two) is music to the ears of Gerrans, a specialist on such terrain.
However Gerrans is not the only one who has targeted these two stages in what appears to be the most open Tour Down Under in its 14-year history. Spain's Alejandro Valverde is making his highly anticipated comeback following his two-year ban, and the whole cycling community knows just how good the Movistar rider is when it comes to steep, fast finishes.
“I'll be watching him [Valverde] closely in the races,” said Gerrans. “He was the number one rider in the world and he's a rider that excels at the kind of races I do. At Stirling and Willunga he'll be a real threat.”