| BAHRAIN VICTORIOUS READY FOR THE RACE TO THE SUN (PARIS – NICE) |
Following the success at Ruta del Sol, Wout Poels, Jack Haig and Domen Novak are pairing up again for Paris-Nice. Paris Roubaix winner Sonny Colbrelli will fight out the sprints, and the team will be supported by Luis Leon Sanchez and Fred Wright. Gino Mader makes his return to Paris-Nice, looking for redemption following last year’s stage 7.
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The 80th edition of the race will be held from 6th to 13th of March, leaving the French capital and heading south. This year’s route will see teams race on fairly flat (but often windy) terrain in the first 3 stages, in North and Central France, but upon reaching Massif Central and coming towards the Mediterranean coast, we’ll see more stages for climbers and eventually GC contenders. These include the finish of the penultimate stage at Col de Turini and the 6 km climb at Col d’Eze just 15km to the finish of the last stage. Those climbs will play a big part in determining the GC winner.
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| Neil Stephens: “Our leader for the GC will be Jack Haig, while a leader for sprints will be Sonny Colbrelli. Along with those two guys, we have Wout Poels, who is really good and just came out of the win at Ruta del Sol. There is also Gino Mader, who came from UAE. Both of them are in great shape, and they’ll have a lot to say in mountain stages. I think Jack will be well supported in the GC with those two climbers. Also in the lineup are Fred Wright, Luis Leon Sanchez and Domen Novak. They’ll be supporting riders in all terrains. We will have a few sprint stages, a lot of windy stages, so a lot of hard racing before we hit the mountains. We are also looking forward to the time trial in the middle of the race. |
| At the end of the day, we get a chance to pull a stage win with Sonny on the flat stages. Also, for climbers, whether it’s Jack, Wout or Gino, we can try to go for a stage win and also, we would really like to get someone on the podium in the final GC.” |
Jack Haig: “Personal goal at Paris – Nice is to try and do a good result. I’ve done the race twice before and I’ve been top 5 once and top 10 once, so if I could be top 5 GC it would be an amazing result. But more importantly is to get a team working well together, having a good performance, and staying safe and healthy during the race. We all know Paris – Nice can be split up into 3 parts. We have the first part of the race that is mostly flat and generally, you need to have a strong team around you to stay safe from crosswinds and all the road furniture, and then you break it up in the middle with Time Trial which I’m excited about. It will be a good test to see where we are in Time Trial. After that, we are moving more into the mountain stages. I’ve done Col de Turini before, I really like it, it’s a quite long and steady climb and we have a really good team for the support there. In the end, we have a hard but short stage to finish in Nice. I think the team can go there with really good goals for Sonny, especially stage 1, it’s a hard, sort of lumpy stage, and obviously, we have myself and Poels going quite well. Wout is coming back from winning Ruta del Sol, we know he’s in a good form.” |
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