"He is hungry" - Team Jayco AlUla convinced Caleb Ewan can leave Giro d'Italia with a stage win
Cycling
With the first week done and dusted at the 2024 Giro d'Italia, it's been one without success for Team Jayco AlUla sprinter, Caleb Ewan. The best the Australian has managed was 6th place on stage 5 when the breakaway took the spoils through Benjamin Thomas.
“Last year he was second and third on stages of the Tour de France. That’s only eight, nine months ago. He’s not old. I know he is hungry. He has got good support here," Team Jayco AlUla's Matt White says in conversation with Velo about the level of his sprint star. “I think we will be happy with a stage win. Obviously everyone wants more, but with the depth of the field here I’d be surprised if any sprinter leaves here with a bag of wins.”
So far, Tim Merlier, Jonathan Milan and Olav Kooij have all won bunch sprint at the 2024 Giro d'Italia. Since his return to Team Jayco AlUla over the recent off-season, Ewan has added a single win to his palmares on the opening stage of the Tour of Oman.
“He hasn’t had the smoothest of runs. He got COVID just before the start of the Tour Down Under, which really did hamper him,” White explains, remaining optimistic about Ewan. “He worked really hard in the off-season, he wanted to hit the ground running in Australia and went positive for COVID about five days, six days out from the race and hardly rode his bike up into lead into Down Under.”
“When you look at the sprints here, for me, this is the most competitive sprints field I’ve ever seen. The only people who are not here are Philipsen and Groenewegen, as far as the world’s best sprinters go," White concludes. “That and combination with Olympic year, we’ve got a few track riders who are here who can’t ride the Tour. There’s going to be fireworks every sprint stage, I reckon.”
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- Exactly who, Joey, is "they"? Flimsy, illogical conspiracy theories aside, it is in no one's interest (financial or otherwise) to "drive away small local events." Major cultural and macroeconomic factors are reducing ridership, but there is no "they" in this context.verve82520-12-2024
- And our virtual platforms allow us to "ride" famous place that we can't get to in person, which is a pretty fabulous aspect of this weird weird sport.RidesHills19-12-2024
- Which off-season are you referring to? The one after he won the Tour of California? The one after he won 3 stages and was on the podium of the Vuelta? The one after TJV screwed up, never put him away, and lost the Tour on the time trial? We've seen the guy hit the wall, lose energy, nearly fail, and lose races ("I'm dead") more than once. He's got a visible threshold and his fueling regimen is a clear weak spot. You'll need more detail to make this more than under defined insinuations .RidesHills19-12-2024
- Interesting analysis. And yet, I'm in the US, and at a recent wedding reception as a group of us older folks had to stand at a certain place to keep track of a thing, we got to talking, and every single one of us had a favorite rider, a favorite circuit of races, a moment when we fell in love with the sport, and a joy in the complexities of it all. None of us knew about the other's fandom until that moment. It's wonderful that these are my brothers-in-law, and we now know to talk about this when the spouses aren't listening. Point being: there are fans all over, and for US folks, the loss of GCN+ has been huge. As so often, it's the media bottleneck that matters more than anything else. Look at F1 in the US before Netflix, as an example.RidesHills19-12-2024
- On the one hand, what he says is trivial. Of course it's genetics. It always is, in any sport. That's just obvious. Look at Mondo Duplantis, whose sprinting speed is key to his pole vaulting, for example - he's just plain faster than other vaulters and good at the rest of the event as well. In cycling, even when you take the most genetically weird group of people and give them amazing training, some will be better than others, as well. Distributions are distributions and there are outliers and that's just that. Pogacar's body is built for this kind of thing, it seems, with him only recently having had to pick up skills that others have used all along. I'm still inclined to believe that these folks are using entirely legal means to arrive at their shockingly good performance, given how more senior riders kinda complain about (or at least comment on) the regimens and control over the nutrition and exercise and all that. And in every population, there are edge cases of truly exceptional behavior.RidesHills19-12-2024
- And it’s likely going to get worse. They are going all-out to drive away small local events which are where a lot of new riders come from. They want fee income and Olympic medals. That’s all.JoeyB19-12-2024
- Oh Lordspock12319-12-2024
- Interesting suggestion, fo you think testing Tadej’s (or Bolts’ or so many others’) parents would have given us a preview of his potential then or what criteria do you have to pick parents with?Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- Even amateur teams suffer this sort. But this is also largely due to the precarious sponsorship, in very few sports do you find kit with so many sponsors having to be integrated and changing so regularly.Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- I think it’s pretty obvious what was responsible for destroying interest that used to be there.Mistermaumau19-12-2024