A year ago this week, Joey Rosskopf was competing at the Redlands Bicycle Classic after coming off a Southern California training camp with Hincapie Racing. Fast forward 12 months from the Redlands victory, and Rosskopf is lining up this week at Vuelta al Pais Vasco, his first WorldTour race, to help support team leader Tejay van Garderen.
“We had just finished an awesome training camp,” Rosskopf recalled of last year's camp to Cyclingnews earlier this week. “We stayed in West Lake Village before Redlands, training on the ridge between West Lake Village and Malibu, just doing a bunch of climbing out there. That was really nice. That was a nice time of year for us. Everyone came into Redlands really fit after that.”
Rosskopf eventually won the National Racing Calendar event, stealing the win from Travis McCabe (Team SmartStop) in the final kilometres of the final day. He went on to impressive rides at the Tour of Utah and Tour of California, then signed with BMC Racing in the offseason.
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This year, after starting in Italy and France, then making a swing through Belgium that included starts at Three Days of West Flanders, Nokere Koerse, Handzame Classic and Three Days of De Panne, Rosskopf has 18 race days in his legs, compared with just a couple last year at this time. The increased workload is just one of the changes the 25-year-old from Georgia had to get used to.
“The Belgian races were a pretty big step for me,” Rosskopf said. “The first race I did in Belgium was pretty terrible. It was the Three Days of West Flanders. And then after that, I mean I didn’t get any results or anything, but they got easier and more manageable and I could actually be in the right place at the right time and pop out into the wind when I needed to and not feel like I was about to crash as often - not feeling like I was wasting as much energy constantly accelerating and then hitting the brakes.
“Just in the two or three weeks that I was there I got a lot more comfortable in those races,” Rosskopf said. “The first one was kind of miserable, but then when I actually started to finish a race and be able to smile and have kind of enjoyed the race, then that’s when I figured I was learning a little bit more and doing more things right -- they just got more enjoyable.”
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