Orica-Scott will line up at Sunday's Australian national championships with its smallest squad to date since debuting in the Buninyong decider back in 2012. The WorldTour team will enter with two main cards to play in two-time winner Simon Gerrans and 2015 runner-up Caleb Ewan with the peloton out to stop them for a third straight year.
The last two national championships have been won by solo riders, Heinrich Haussler (IAM Cycling) and Jack Bobridge (Trek-Segafredo), and a long list of individuals are looking to emulate the duo on the 10km hilly circuit race over 183.6km of racing.
With the merger of Cannondale and Drapac, the former Pro-Continental team that would regularly be one of the largest teams in the race, is down to a team of two and will be represented by Brendan Canty and Will Clarke. Fellow WorldTour team Dimension Data start with three riders, Nathan Haas, Lachlan Morton and Ben O'Connor, another small but power squad. Continental squads Drapac-Pat's Veg and IsoWhey Sports SwissWellness are likely to be called upon to work in lieu of the bigger teams as they both start with multiple riders.
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The list of the individual aspirations for the green and gold jersey includes the likes of Adam Hansen (Lotto Soudal), Chris Hamilton (Team Sunweb), Ben Dyball, Nathan Earle, Cam Meyer, Travis Meyer, Zak Dempster (Cycling Academy), and Calvin Watson (Aqua Blue Sports), which all leads to the question of can Orica-Scott be stopped for the third year running?
"I'm not sure if everyone out there is out there just to stop Orica-Scott winning. There might have been a few situations a little bit negative in the last couple of years. But looking at the field this year, everyone is lining up is hoping to win for themselves or their team. It's not so much everyone against us," two-time Australian champion Simon Gerrans said of the potential race tactics.
The lure of a place on the UniSA-Australia Tour Down Under wild card team for individual riders is an added incentive and for riders like Dyball who is currently without a team, a ride at the WorldTour race is crucial to his career ambitions.
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