While he finished towards the fore on today’s opening stage of the Volta a Catalunya, placing seventeenth, Nicolas Roche has said that he isn’t sure what to expect of himself in the race. The Ag2r La Mondiale rider has had a complicated run-up to the WorldTour event, and so he said today that he wasn’t making predictions as to how he would get on.
“After Paris-Nice I was pretty sick for three days, in bed with fever. So I only did two or three little rides before coming here,” he told VeloNation this evening. “I was incredibly bad for three days, one day pretty bad, and then for two or three days, just kind of coughing and with a blocked nose. I didn’t feel anything today, so hopefully over the next few days I will confirm that I have recovered from the flu.”
Roche had pinpointed Paris-Nice as one of his key early-season targets, but things didn’t work out as well as he had intended. Seventh on stage four to Rodez and fourteenth on the penultimate stage to Nice were his best results, as well as finishing twentieth overall.
It was a respectable performance, but not anything like he had hoped for.
He believes now that he might have overdone it prior to the event. “Before Paris-Nice, with the weather being good and all that, I tried training more instead of racing,” he said. “I think I misjudged my rest days. It is a bit of a mistake, but I can’t always get it right.
“I went into the race already tired, overtraining or something like that.” In that light, he believes that getting sick might have helped him a peculiar way. “Okay, I was sick for three days, but for those days I was lying in bed rather than overtraining,” he explained. “So ironically it has helped me recover as well.”
The Volta a Catalunya lacks a time trial this year, a discipline which doesn’t always work out in Roche’s favour. It also has plenty of climbing, an area which served him well when he finished seventh in the 2010 Vuelta a Espana.
He gives the route a tentative thumbs up, although much will depend on how he feels when he hits the mountains.
“The terrain is good, if the legs are there,” he said. “On Wednesday I will know more. That day is the really crazy mountain stage, so by then I’ll know how I’m going.
“It is a pain not being able to say I am feeling great, that I am going to have a great race. I am always repeating myself with the unknown at the moment. I’d like to be able to say that ‘yes, I am ready, I am going to go good race.’ But once again, I’m saying that I hope I’m going well, but I can’t guarantee it.”
He suggests that if Wednesday’s stage doesn’t work out for the general classification, that he will use the rest of the race to go on the attack. He won a stage of the Tour of Beijing last year by riding aggressively, and will follow the same tactic if the race plays out that way and he’s too far off the overall.
Further ahead, he has his programme mapped out towards the next three events. “After Catalunya, I will head off to my dad’s training camp in Majorca for week, as I can almost guarantee warm weather there. After that I will be riding Paris-Cammenbert, the Tour of Trentino and Liège.”
The latter is his next big goal. Before then, if things work out well due to his enforced rest after Paris-Nice, he’ll try to clock up some good results in Catalunya.