Young sprinter Caleb Ewan joins Orica-GreenEDGE in Bright ahead of Australian summer

AUSTRALIAN team Orica-GreenEDGE has all but confirmed young sprinter Caleb Ewan will be unleashed in January’s Tour Down Under in Adelaide.

AUSTRALIAN team Orica-GreenEDGE has all but confirmed young sprinter Caleb Ewan will be unleashed in January’s Tour Down Under in Adelaide.

The 21-year-old will form a double-pronged attack with three-time champion Simon Gerrans for the season-opening WorldTour event.

Ewan won 10 races in his rookie professional season in 2015 including a stage of the Vuelta a Espana.

He rode the TDU as a teenager with UniSA-Australia in 2014 — and held his own against the likes of Marcel Kittel and Andre Greipel — before turning professional.

Orica-GreenEDGE held him back from the race last summer but after joining his teammates on their training camp in Bright Monday, team boss Matt White confirmed Ewan was part of the plan for the TDU.

And he is confident it won’t detract from the team’s bid to win the race overall with Gerrans.

“At the moment it looks like we’ll be going there (TDU) with him,” White said.

“I think we’ll be able to cover all bases.

“We’ve got a busy summer — Bay Crits, nationals, Down Under, Cadel’s Race and Sun Tour so when we finalise our plans for who goes where, I think we’ve got the guys to tick all those boxes.”

Unlike previous years when OGE has started as many as 17 riders in the road race at the national championships in Ballarat, the team expects to have only nine riders on the start line.

Among them will be Michael Hepburn and Alex Edmondson who are both part of the national track program gunning for Rio.

White said Gerrans would lead the team on the Buninyong circuit as he chases a third national crown.

“He’s certainly a reliable plan isn’t he? He's got a pretty good record on that course (but) we aren’t going to have the biggest team this year,” White said.

OGE is in the closing stages of a two-week training camp which began with testing at the AIS in Canberra and concludes in Bright this week.

White said Gerrans — who is rebounding from an injury-ruined 2015 — and veteran Mat Hayman were both in top condition for November.

“It’s no surprise that Gerrans is in good nick and so is Mat Hayman who both came off pretty good form at the end of the season,” White said.

“He (Hayman) hasn’t done the Tour of Spain for a long time (until this year) and it certainly makes a difference for the start of this season.”

Organisers of the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race announced Monday that Gerrans and BMC star Rohan Dennis would headline their one-day race on January 31, but the TDU is yet to announce any of its field for the January 16-24 event.

Superstar sprinter Mark Cavendish will skip the TDU with new team Dimension Data to instead race the track world cup in Hong Kong as he targets the Rio Olympics on the velodrome.

German sprinter Marcel Kittel may however return to Adelaide with new team Etixx-Quickstep and Dutchman Tom Dumoulin is still a chance to come back after starting this season with fourth place at the TDU and finishing it with sixth overall at the Vuelta a Espana.

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Originally published as Young sprinter Caleb Ewan joins Orica-GreenEDGE in Bright ahead of Australian summer