Tyler Farrar’s current status as road captain on Mark Cavendish’s team would have been unimaginable at the height of their sprint rivalry a few short years ago, but then such are the shifting sands of professional cycling.
Yet while Farrar’s own ambitions as a sprinter have more or less receded since joining Dimension Data (then MTN-Qhubeka) last season, his appetite for the Classics remains unabated.
Resident in Ghent for the past decade, Farrar is fluent in Flemish and has developed a keen understanding, too, of the obscure language of the cobbles. Edvald Boasson Hagen will be Dimension Data’s designated leader in April, but Farrar will be at the heart of anything the team achieves in Flanders.
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“The Spring Classics are a giant goal for our team and that was the one goal we didn’t really realise last season, a podium or a win in a big classic,” Farrar told Cyclingnews at the Tour of Qatar this week.
“That’s been in the forefront of my thinking since I started training for the season, to be ready for March and early April in Belgium, and just do everything I can to be there to support Edvald. Classics are crazy races and you never know how they’re going to unfold so you just need to have numbers as best you can in the finales and see how it plays out.”
Farrar has, by his own admission, been a professional bike rider “for a long time now” – so long, in fact, that it is easy to forget that the American is still only 31 years of age. In theory, at least, he ought to be reaching his peak as a Classics rider, and though he never made the breakthrough that seemed imminent in 2010 and 2011, he has shown sustained flashes of his quality on the pavé since, most notably in his final season at Garmin in 2014.
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