ROGER KLUGE
LOTTO-SOUDAL
Iwas excited to start the road season. I was competing on the track throughout the off-season, at World Cups and six days and my winter was quite busy with a lot of travel. But because of that
I knew how I would probably go once I got on the road. I had a feeling at the Rotterdam Six that I was good and recovering well, but most of the other guys, they are training for three months at the end of the season. For Caleb, for example, his very first race of the season was the Schwalbe Classic Criterium. He wants to go for the win but he doesn’t know yet how good he is. You have to find out in the race.
The day after the Six Days of Rotterdam I flew to Australia. We had a week or 10 days before the first road race. It gives us enough time to adapt to the time zone and the weather conditions, although this year it wasn’t too extreme. We had a few days over 30 but nothing in the high 30s or 40 degrees like we’ve had before. Then towards the race it even cooled down. Some nights it was just 15 degrees so we started to wear a jacket to go out in the morning which felt a bit strange. Luckily Adelaide and the region around it hadn’t been too heavily hit by the forest fires. There were a few but nothing compared to what was happening in Sydney and the area around the east coast. We still could smell the smoke and see the damage when we went out training and on one stage during the race, which was sad to see.
The race was great for the team, especially Caleb. On the first stage of Down Under we missed it a little, we had a lack of communication and like a domino effect in the last 10 kilometres we were not in a good position. But anyway, he turned it around on the next day and showed his class to win the second stage. That was a better start already than last year where he didn’t get his first win until the UAE Tour in February. We continued on the fourth stage with another win, and probably Caleb could have won on stage 5 but I made a little mistake and he made a little mistake. Still, we’re super happy to have won two stages in the sprints, and on Willunga Hill which was a big surprise.
We did get a bit of downtime in Australia because we’re there for a few weeks in the same hotel. We had three or four rest days before the race started; one day we went to the beach, one day we went into the city to have coffee and an ice cream, one afternoon I even went to the cinema to watch a movie. It’s nice to not have all the travel and transfers to the start and finish each day, but two and a half weeks of eating more or less the same food... we went out a couple of times just to make life a bit nicer!
Now I’m looking forward to a few days at home, six nights to recover from the whole trip before I fly to Girona for the next training camp.