Greipel plans for usual Tour Down Under start to season
First race of 2014 will again be in Australia




168澳洲5最新开奖结果:André Greipel has discovered something new this year: he doesn't get claustrophobic in caves. But when it comes to racing, the Ger🥀man sprinter confirms that he will be doing exactly the same start to his year as usual, at the Tour Down Under. Further down the line, too, the Tour de France will once more be his big target of the season.
Greipel's discovery about caves came during a 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Lotto-Belisol team building exercise currently under way in the Belgian Ardennes, w꧋here the 31-year-old from R🐼ostock spent nearly an hour in a very dark and cramped hole in the ground.
Ther𒊎e's no denying that Greipel shone brightly in 2013, though: 13 wins,🔯 including the German national championships title, a fifth stage of the Tour de France, three wins in the Tour Down Under and the Paris-Brussels Classic made last year a very successful one. Hence his unwillingness, perhaps, to alter his early season program at least.
"It's good, we are all here as a team and in a different scenario to the usual ones," Greipel told Cyclingnews about the team building camp, which started on Monday. "I like doing the climbing we do here or whatever, and I've never been in a cave before and now I 💛know it doesn't make me claustrophobic, as there wasn't so much space inside.
"But the important thing about these camps is th✃at we are here to get to know each other away from racing."
Greipel is not w🍬orried, yet, about whether his base condition is the same, be🍸tter or worse than at this time last year. "I don't care about that yet, I'm just trying to do some good training on the bike and good workouts, and that’s as far as it goes."
The Tour Down Under, he said, has always worked for him as his first stage race of the year - and Greipel not only holds the record for stage wins there, with 14 wins, but also has two outright victories, in 2008 and 2010. Geographically, too, it makes sense to head to Adelaide, he reasoned. Lotto-Belisol will b🥀e training in Argentina this January, "so I said, 'why not head on to Australia from there?'"
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"For me, it's also quite important to get that early win and with a very similar team to last year, we'll sti𝔍ll b✤e focused on the sprints in Australia."
The Tour de France is not far from his thoughts, although he hasn't looked a𓃲t the route yet. "There are only 20 guys that can win a stage there each year, so to be one of them is always important," said Greipel, who took a sprint into Montpellier last year.
Although Lotto-Belisol's core group of riders around Greipel will not change too much in 2014 compared to this year – just 10 riders are leaving – Greipel believes that "there are a lot of changes, for example Maxim𒆙e Monfort and Tony Gallopin, who won the Clá🍸sica San Sebastian are both coming in [from RadioShack – ed.]"
He already knows Monfort from his time when they both rode for HTC. "He always knows what he can do, and he's always someone you can trust in," Greipeওl said.
The line-up in Greipel's sprint train will be one of the areas that alters the least. "There was no reason to change it," Greipel said. "We just can push ourselves to higher goals and everybody is fighting for that and trying their best in the trಞaining to do that. I'm pleased with that."
As for himself, Greipel expects the intensity of the challenges he will face will be unchanged in the bunch gallops in 2014, despite the steadily improving results pro𒅌duced by comparatively new sprinters on the block like Marcel Kittel and John Degenkolb. "You’re always ꦯgoing to get young guys coming through," he said guardedly.
Asked what impresses him most about Kittel, for example, Greipel said, "🧸I wouldn't say 'impress' is the right word, but something I like about himꦫ a lot is that he is always correct in the way he sprints."
As🔴 he moves towards becoming a veteran member of the peloton, Greipel brushes aside any credit for blazing a trail for modern German sprinting.
"This in an international sport and at the end, I don't care which nationality my rivals are: German, Australian, American, British.... And if personally I can be consistent, go on winning from January through ꧑to September, that's my big goal of the season."
Alasdair Fotheringham has been reporting on cycling since 1991. He has covered every Tour de France since 1992 bar one, as well as numerous other bike races of all shapes and sizes, ranging from the Olympic Games in 2008 to the now sadly defunct Subida a Urkiola hill climb in Spain. As well as working for Cyclingnews, he has also written for The Independent, The Guardian, ProCycling, The Express and Reuters.