Three out of five ain’t bad. Tony Martin’s arrival at Etixx-QuickStep in 2012 coincided neatly the reintroduction of the team time trial to the UCI Road World Championships, and the German duly signed off on his fifth and final campaign at the squad in Doha on Sunday by helping them to a third victory in the event.
Winners in Valkenburg in 2012 and Florence in 2013, Etixx-QuickStep surrendered their crown to BMC in 2014 and were unable to wrest it back again in Richmond a year ago. From the outset, this had the feel of a two-horse race, and so it proved. Martin et al were three seconds ahead at the first time check, but slipped a fraction of a second behind BMC at the 26.4km mark, before definitively pushing ahead in the final 14 kilometres to win by 12 seconds.
"It’s a really emotional victory for me. It was the last race for the team, and it’s become a family in the last five years, with some great victories and great moments," said Martin, who will ride for Katusha in 2017. "It’s a dream that came through. It was the perfect final for me, the perfect moment to leave the team with a fantastic memory."
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Martin’s 2016 season saw him branch into a new direction as part of Etixx-QuickStep’s cobbled classics unit in the spring, but in other respects it was a trying year. His first victory did not arrive until the German time trial championship in June, he abandoned the Tour de France on the final stage in Paris and he was a disappointing 12th in the time trial at the Rio 2016 Olympics.
At that juncture, with his transfer to Katusha already confirmed, Martin might well have been tempted simply to run down the clock on his time at Etixx-QuickStep and start again in 2017, but time trial victory at the Tour of Britain last month suggested that there was life in his campaign yet. Doha offered a chance to put a different complexion on the year.
"I tried to prepare myself already in Europe for the heat here, so I was training on rollers in a heated room," Martin explained. "Maybe these are just small percentages, but we have to fight for the margins that we can, and that gave me a small indication of what to expect in Qatar, though I’ve never had particular problems with the heat."
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