Over the past seven years or so, Stevie Williams has made a smooth progression from riding youthful 10-mile time trials with Ystwyth CC to signing on the dotted line with Bahrain-Merida for 2019. Season on season, the Welshman developed steadily, and, for the bulk of his short amateur career, even the most important decisions were self-evident.
At the end of 2015, for instance, it was clear that he had outgrown British domestic outfit Pedal Heaven, and so he moved on to the JLT Condor squad. After just a year under John Herety’s tutelage, it was already apparent that he needed a steady diet of Europe’s toughest espoir races to progress further, and Williams duly signed with SEG Racing Academy ahead of the 2017 campaign.
Williams reached a fork in the road, however, in April of 2018, a season he had pinpointed as presenting his final opportunity to make the final step up to WorldTour level. The Commonwealth Games in Australia in mid-April overlapped with a vital sequence of under-23 racing in Europe – the Tours of Normandy and Brittany, as well as Liège-Bastogne-Liège, part of his build-up to the prestigious Ronde de l’Isard.
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He chewed on the dilemma for some time. Williams had been on Welsh Cycling’s radar since joining the body’s talent programme as a junior, and Darren Tudor’s influence as a mentor remained long after he had ceased to be his coach.
On the one hand, Williams felt an obligation to wear the national jersey in what amounts to Welsh Cycling’s flagship event, though one that hardly registers beyond the competing countries. On the other, he owed it to his talent to prepare assiduously for the Ronde de l’Isard, where the WorldTour teams would certainly be sitting up and taking notice.
"My mindset was that Welsh Cycling had done so much for me, so it took ages to make a decision. I was going back and forth,” Williams tells Cyclingnews. “If it had come three years earlier, I could have done it, but this was really my last year at under-23. Fortunately, Welsh Cycling were so supportive. They just said it was my decision and that they would support me no matter what I did."
Giro
Dan Martin
You can read more at Cyclingnews.com
via Cyclingnews Latest Interviews and Features http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/the-next-dan-martin-stevie-williams-on-his-road-to-the-worldtour
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