The first six months of his first full season with Australian Continental team Drapac has provided Brendan Canty with plenty of miles in legs and stamps in his passport. The 24-year-old, who impressed with 14th at the 2015 Abu Dhabi Tour while riding with the team as a stagiaire, has 27 race days in his legs thus far in 2016 ahead of a block of European racing starting with the UCI 1.1 Halle Ingooigem.
"It was part of the plan with Drapac this year to do a lot more racing in Europe, and for someone like me who hasn’t really done that before, it’s a great opportunity to see what it’s like and experience a different kind of racing. So far for me this year, I’ve learned a lot and taken a lot on board," Canty told Cyclingnews while enjoying a block of training in Boulder, Colorado.
Starting with 11th in the Australian national championships, Canty's first stage race of 2016 was the Tour de San Luis where a crash ended any aspirations of a top-ten finish. The 24-year-old was back on track at the Tour of Oman, finishing seventh overall and claiming the best young rider's jersey.
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A short break followed before contesting the Oceania Championships in his home state of Victoria. Canty then jetted off for his first European races of the season at the Route Adélie de Vitré and Paris-Camembert. The stint of racing also saw him line up two of Drapac's biggest races in Europe yet with De Brabantse Pijl-La Flèche Brabançonne and the Giro del Trentino.
Having pinned on racing numbers in Australia, South America and Europe, Canty's next continent to conquer was Asia with 19th in the Tour d'Azerbaïdjan. A block of training in Colorado before heading back to Europe for the second-half of the 2016 season.
"Getting that result in Tour of Oman is definitely the biggest thing I’ve had happen to me so far," he said of the season thus far. "I think it has given me the confidence that when I come into another big race like that, that I can potentially go well against some of the bet riders in the world. It was a little bit disappointing for me at Giro del Trentino where I got sick and wasn’t going well. I couldn’t get a good result and over there there was a lot of guys getting prepared for the Giro d’Italia so it would have been a really good test to see how I’d go there.
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