Orica-GreenEdge will line up for the opening team time trial of the Tour of Alberta in Grande Prairie on Wednesday evening with two specific goals: to win the 19.6km event and to use it as their final preparation for the team time trial at the UCI Road World Championships later this month in Richmond, Virginia.
"We believe that anytime you can line up for a team time trial it’s good practice, and this one is really our last hit-out in that sense before Worlds," Svein Tuft told Cyclingnews. "Yes, we want to win the first stage of Alberta, but we really want to show how hard we’ve been working on team time trials."
The course will be flat and fast, but Tour of Alberta race organisers are only permitting bikes and equipment that are legal for UCI mass-start road races, which means no time trial bikes, clip-on aero handlebars or aero helmets.
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Orica-GreenEdge’s roster looks to be the strongest on paper for the stage, with a team that includes Tuft, Luke Durbridge, Jens Mouris, Michael Hepburn, Sam Bewley and their sprinter Michael Matthews, along with GC rider Adam Yates and support rider Christian Meier.
Tuft agreed that they are well prepared for the event, considering the team has arrived fresh off of an eight-day team-time-trial-specific training camp in Girona, Spain. "The camp was meant as a touch-up to see where everyone was at. We wanted to refresh our memory on how hard team time trials can be," he said.
"We rode the course here and it’s pretty straightforward, not super technical. It’s windy out there with big, long highway drags and then when you come into the city, it has a short technical part. Coming from Europe to here, though, the roads are wide open, and it will be super fast."
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