Heinrich Haussler may not have won a race since the start of 2015, and may be on the wrong side of 30, but he still feels his biggest results are ahead of him. He has joined the new Bahrain-Merida team in hope of finally landing that big Classics victory.
The Australian, a runner-up at Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix in 2009, was one of the riders on the market from the outgoing IAM Cycling team, and his hunger and ambition, fostered over the course of a season that was disappointing and encouraging in equal measures, led him to Bahrain.
“The thing was, I had the option of going to another team and working for a big captain for the Classics. I know I can also do that well, but with Bahrain they said ‘we want you as our leader for the Classics’," Haussler told Cyclingnews in Croatia last week, where he was getting to know his new teammates on an introductory camp.
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"I don’t want to stop cycling and say 'ah maybe in that year I could have taken that chance, or done this or that'. I’m 32 now, I’ve still got a few more years in me, but time does fly past. You can’t reset like when you’re 20; once it's done it's done. So I want to try and do everything I can – do the best training, make use of the support – while I can."
Haussler was seventh at Milan-San Remo and sixth at Paris-Roubaix this year. Those are good results on paper but he shrugs and describes his spring as “not great”. He fell and was unable to finish Gent-Wevelgem or the Tour of Flanders. His inability to train left him with the freshness to make the selection at Roubaix, but not the fitness to make it to the velodrome with a shot at victory.
His disappointment is indicative of heightened expectations, and he puts that down to the work he has done with new coach Daniel Healey over the last 12 months. It's the first time he has worked with a coach on a personal basis and he says it’s given him ‘a new set of wings’.
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