The First Race of the WorldTour

The first race of the UCI WorldTour was traditionally held in Australia, on January 17–22. The Santos Tour Down Under opens the season early, and accordingly most of the world peloton’s leaders are still in the preparation phase at this time. The Grand Tour favorites plan to peak only around May, and the Classics specialists by mid-March.

If you look closely at the team line-ups, it doesn’t take much analysis to discover that the race has a distinctly local, Australian character. It matters to the Australian teams and Australian riders, while everyone else treats it as one of the stages of their preparation.

This year’s race featured four sprint stages and two mountain stages, which two Australian stars shared between them.

 

In the sprints, Australia’s great hope Caleb Ewan gave nothing away to anyone.

 

 

In the mountains, Richie Porte shone, also winning the general classification of his home race for the first time in his career. Richie’s condition shows that he has a few races earmarked for himself at the start of the season.

 

 

Australia also welcomed the world champion Peter Sagan for the first time; until now he used to start his season in Argentina.

 

 

We can’t say that Peter, wearing the world champion’s rainbow jersey for the second year in a row, flew to Australia just for a stroll.

He was second in three of the four sprints — not a bad result at all for the start of the season against a super-motivated Ewan. So the long hours of flying were not entirely in vain for Peter. As he said himself, he is satisfied with the form he has shown at this stage. Peter had already visited Australia at the end of last year to make good use of the local summer, first for a holiday and then to begin his preparation.

 

 

On Sunday, the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race will be held in Australia, for the first time with WorldTour status, after which the WorldTour will resume almost a month later in Abu Dhabi.

 

 

 

Featured image: Yuzuru SUNADA/www.yuzurusunada.com

Inside post thumbnail image: Yuzuru SUNADA/www.yuzurusunada.com

 

Special thanks to the Japanese photographer Yuzuru SUNADA for permission to use his works in our publications.

 

 

 

 

Translated from Georgian with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic), reviewed by the Velorbola editors.