The Coffee Ride #101, with Reece Homfray
“PRETTY buckled,” is how Luke Durbridge described the feeling on the morning after Paris-Roubaix.
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LUKE DURBRIDGE ON THAT MAGICAL DAY IN ROUBAIX
“PRETTY buckled,” is how Luke Durbridge described the feeling on the morning after Paris-Roubaix.
Less than 24 hours earlier he had not only produced one of the best performances of his life but helped and watched his Orica-GreenEDGE teammate Mathew Hayman on the ride of his life to win the race he had dreamt about for more than 15 years.
“We had a dinner which was always planned for the end of the Classics in Gent, and it pretty much doubled in size of people and we had a Belgium TV crew there,” Durbridge said.
“After Roubaix you only need 2-3 beers and you’re pretty much done.
“We got to the hotel about 2am last night and were on a flight early the next morning so it’s good to be back in Girona — I haven’t been home for three-and-a-half weeks.”
Where do you start when it comes to talking about Hayman’s triumph which came against all the odds on Sunday?
“It was one of the most special days I’ve been part of, I had goosebumps it was so crazy,” Durbridge said.
“In that race you’re always having your own battle, yeah OK you’ve got some sort of team plan but everyone is having their own fight whether you’re 120th or 1st everyone has a story on how they had a battle.”
For the record, 25-year-old Durbridge finished 18th — his best result in four attempts having started and finished three previous Paris-Roubaix’s in 102nd, 90th and 110th place.
For a while he thought he was looking at a top-10 finish but a late puncture meant when he got to the velodrome he didn’t even know Hayman had won.
“I crashed before the first sector but my teammate gave me a wheel and I got back into Sagan’s group tying to come across,” Durbridge said.
“When Cancellara crashed I was super close to crashing again ... then with 7km to go I punctured again and had to roll into the velodrome by myself.
“I had mixed emotions because I’d had such a good day and felt really good but had bad luck with crashes and two punctures.
“Then when I got to the velodrome I saw the interview being done and thought ‘Matty’s had a good ride’. I hadn’t heard anything on the radio, they must have been too excited to say it.
“When I rolled across the line I saw the team doctor jumping up and down and I thought ‘no way’, I just dropped my bike said ‘where is he?’
“I launched over the barricades and gave him a big hug and he said ‘I think I can retire now.’”
‘WATCH THE VIDEO HERE — ORICA-GREENEDGE BACKSTAGE PASS’
Hayman’s victory was met with widespread congratulations from the peloton.
“Bewley said it well — ‘no one deserves it more’. That saying gets thrown around pretty loosely but in all honesty no one is more passionate about the race, no one in the current peloton has done that many Roubaix’s — 15 and finished them all.
“Last year or the year before I can’t remember which one he was in the front for a top 10 and then punctured on Carrefour (de l’Arbre) and afterwards he was in tears on the bus, once again he’d had that opportunity and it escaped him.
“So I guess for us, what better example of persistence ... he doesn’t win at all but has so much passion for this one race and finally he wins it.”
At 187cm and 78kg, Durbridge is a big, strong classics rider in the making.
This year he moved himself to Belgium for three weeks so he could better prepare for the roads and conditions. He was 27th in Dwars door Vlaanderen, 37th in E3 Harelbeke, sixth overall in Three Days of De Panne, 71st in Tour of Flanders and 18th in Paris-Roubaix.
“I definitely think this year is a big step up for me in the Classics,” he said.
“I had an easier Aussie summer. I still did TDU and nationals but didn’t put as big an emphasis on it. Something you learn is you can only be good in certain periods, you can’t be good all year, you can fry yourself.
“I had always rocked up to the Classics and my form was going downhill and I was trying to hold on.
“But if you love these races you better give yourself the best shot at them, I have always had a huge passion for the Classics but I wasn’t necessarily putting the right focus on them.
“This year it was hard to back it off in January because I wanted to do the TT and do well at nationals and TDU.”
Durbridge said seeing what Hayman had achieved on the weekend only increased his desire to succeed in the Classics.
“Seeing what Hayman did and I saw what I can do at the front end, I put a bit more weight on this year to get some power back and I’m making a big step in the right direction in these races.
“Roubaix is epic but Flanders I love the fields and crowds and the people.
“It’s really special in Belgium when you’re there. Roubaix on a world scale is more known and more epic but in Flanders you go over the same roads for 260km and the passion in Belgium is huge.”
Durbridge is back on the bike this weekend for Amstel Gold Race then gets a good break as he is skipping the Giro d’Italia for the first time in four years.
HAMILTON ON ROAD TO RECOVERY
ONE of Australia’s most promising young cyclists, Chris Hamilton will tomorrow have surgery on a broken wrist after being hit by a car while training.
The 20-year-old suffered a fractured wrist, ribs and a lung contusion while riding home through Bendigo on March 31.
The reigning under-23 national road race champion will miss Grafton to Inverell with his Avanti-IsoWhey team next month but still plans to race the Tour of Japan starting on May 29.
“I’ve had a few near misses and I’ve heard of a lot of people who have had a run in, and I guess you never think it will happen to you but it does,” Hamilton told The Coffee Ride a week after the accident.
“It happened pretty quickly and I hardly had time to hit my brakes.
“I’m feeling a bit better ... it’s just my ribs that are the main issue but they’re getting better.
“At the start of the week I could hardly move around or anything like that but now they’re OK.
“It could have been a lot worse, I had no injuries to my legs, which is good.
“As far as the Tour of Japan goes I definitely won’t be in the form that I wanted to be in but I’ll still be able to go there and be in OK form.”
Hamilton had an outstanding Australian summer which started by winning the under-23 national road race championship in Buninyong.
Then riding with UniSA-Australia in the Tour Down Under he finished 14th overall, went to the Herald Sun Tour and finished eighth — winning the young rider classification — and rode the Tour de Taiwan, where he was seventh.
When he got home he decided to enter the mountain bike national championships because even though he is now pursuing a road career, he hasn’t lost his love for the mountain bike and it showed with a third-place finish.
Hamilton’s eventual goal is to turn professional with a WorldTour team and his decision not to nominate for a spot on Cycling Australia’s Jayco WorldTour Academy squad this year raised some eyebrows.
But he believes remaining with Avanti-IsoWhey — which this year is embarking on its first European campaign — is best for his development in the short term.
“I made the decision not to go (to the academy),” he said.
“Avanti had a pretty good race program lined out for me and with only just committing to road (full time) I felt like I wanted to get a bit more racing in Australia with a team that I know before I commit to something as big as that.
“And we’re going to do a European program which the team has never done before, so I’ll still get the exposure that I would have got with the WorldTour anyway.”
With Avanti’s track record of producing WorldTour riders, Hamilton knows he’s in the right spot.
“It’s a good team to be in,” he said.
TEAM PURSUIT SQUAD CUT TO EIGHT
AUSTRALIA’S world champion men’s track endurance squad will hold an open training session in Adelaide this Friday before they prepare to head overseas.
The squad, which has been trimmed to eight, will complete two 4km practice races from 11am under the watchful eye of coach Tim Decker.
“They’re two rehearsals,” Decker said.
“Just to go through the process with everybody in camp, obviously they’ve been in a very heavy training load and I don’t expect super-fast times.
“But it’s about mixing the teams together, seeing how people respond to different situations and when they’re given different roles.”
The eight riders vying for five spots at the Rio Olympics are Alex Edmondson, Jack Bobridge, Michael Hepburn, Alex Porter, Sam Welsford, Glenn O’Shea and brothers Callum and Miles Scotson.
Luke Davison was told after the world championships that he would not be considered for the Games after he didn’t finish the whole 4km race in the semi-final in London.
The squad will head to Europe in May for a block of racing and training with Bobridge (Trek-Segafredo) and Hepburn (Orica-GreenEDGE) expected to ride the Giro d’Italia with their WorldTour teams.
QUOTES OF THE WEEK ...
“If someone had told me this morning I would win Paris-Roubaix I wouldn’t have believed them, no way.”
- Mat Hayman after fulfilling a lifelong dream of winning Paris-Roubaix on Sunday.
“After going round in circles and discussing it with my family and my people I have come to the conclusion that I enjoy what I’m doing and I’ll put the idea of leaving cycling to one side.”
- Alberto Contador decides against an early retirement after winning the Tour of the Basque Country.
“Now I’ll reset for the next world cup event in the Netherlands, then it will be on to the world champs and before we know it we’ll be in Rio.”
- Caroline Buchanan after winning the BMX world cup in Manchester on the weekend.
TWEET, TWEET
— Orica-GreenEDGE’s camera man extraordinaire Dan Jones sums up the feeling inside the team after Mat Hayman’s triumph.
Originally published as The Coffee Ride #101, with Reece Homfray
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