"I need to start winning when I'm not going so well," is how British sprinter Dan McLay (Fortuneo-Oscaro) sums up his current attitude to the 2018 season. It will be his fourth as a pro, his first with Team EF-Drapac, and the one where he hopes for a notable step up in his strike rate – or, as he puts it, “to go from two wins a year to a handful."
McLay is part of a whole slab of new intakes at Jonathan Vaughters' squad, which will see nine riders join and 11 leave, out of an expected total 2018 roster of 25.
The British sprinter joked in his transfer communiqué from his new team that it was time for him "to perform before the grey hairs start to appear". At 25 going on 26, it may take a while yet for him to really get worried about being 'follicly challenged', but after the promise of four top-10 places at the 2016 Tour de France, his first ever Grand Tour, melded into the frustration of another four top-10s's but no wins in the same race in 2017, McLay is the first to recognise that he needs to convert a steady series of near misses into a steady series of hits.
ADVERTISEMENT
"It's taken a while to find my seat," McLay tells Cyclingnews. "I've got a few results here or there, but I haven't found my rhythm yet, winning or hitting an exact formula for doing so. It's about finding that consistency, because physically I've got the ability to win a lot more than I have been.
"Hopefully I can make it click. But that's easy to say and hard to do."
McLay said in the same press release that his victory in the Trofeo Palma this spring was his best to date, although some fans might say his most memorable was when he skillfully maneuvered at high speed past his rivals to triumph in the GP de Denain in 2016, his biggest victory so far. Either way, this season McLay had clearly hit the ground running in January in Mallorca, only for him to do so in a much more literal and painful sense when his victory salute in the Spanish one-day race was immediately followed by a head-on collision with a poorly positioned finish-line photographer.
New team, new races
You can read more at Cyclingnews.com
via Cyclingnews Latest News http://ift.tt/2zjluye
No comments:
Post a Comment