Mark Renshaw has been a professional for over ten years at the top of the sport with some of the best teams in the business. The Australian has also been on his fair share of training and team camps since turning professional in 2004 with FDJ. Of those camps, the last two have been with Dimension Data in Cape Town, South Africa where the team via the Qhubeka charity donate bicycles to local school children.
"We spent an afternoon in a rural school handing over 260 bikes to kids which is going to completely change their and their families' lives. There are some kids who hadn’t been over the hill just beside the town. In Australia, it’s very different to over there," Renshaw told Cyclingnews of his experience at the team camp.
The team camp closed out a long season for Renshaw that started on January 10 with the Australian national championships and concluded on October 23 with the Abu Dhabi Tour, helping teammate Mark Cavendish to the stage win. In Renshaw's first season with the South African WorldTour team, he helped his teammates to numerous wins in his role as a lead-out man but for the 34-year-old it wasn't a vintage year as he explained.
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"It wasn’t the best year I had. We were successful in the Tour de France, which was big. I fell ill a couple of times which was a bit disappointing, especially at crucial moments like the Tour de France," Renshaw said of the race where Cavendish won four stages and Steve Cummings added a fifth to ensure a highly successful race. "It is always nice to get some results even though it is not an objective for me to win races. The start of the year with Tour Down Under and then RideLondon and in the mix in Hamburg, where I made a little mistake in the final is a shame, but I was happy to be in the mix for those few races."
In a change from previous years, Renshaw will be spending time on the track this off-season as he partners up with compatriot and sprint rival Caleb Ewan of Orica-BikeExchange for the national madison titles. Renshaw is a former national madison champion who has also won gold medals from the Track Worlds and Commonwealth Games in the team pursuit, while Ewan is a junior world champion in the velodrome. The December championships will be the first return to the track for both riders in several years.
"It is something we spoke about in training throughout the year," he said of the idea to team up and return to the track. "Watching the Olympics and all the track throughout the year we got a little but motivated and see it as a good opportunity to do something different in the off-season and it is something I really love. It will be pretty exciting to be back on the track.
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