"Like the boys are saying, it's like doing a Grand Tour in January," says EF Education First directeur sportif Tom Southam of the team's month spent in Australia, where the WorldTour team took on the Tour Down Under, the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race and the Herald Sun Tour, and came away with mixed results.
"We've all been away from home for over a month, and, if things go badly, and the wheels start falling off, then this week here at the Sun Tour at the end is just a really bad idea," Southam tells Cyclingnews ahead of the final stage of the race, on the team's last day of racing before heading back to Europe.
"But if things go well, it's completely different," he continues. "We put a lot of effort into ensuring that we came into this race mentally fresh this week, and up for racing.
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"If you come in with a different attitude and start getting a bit annoyed about this or that, then it's just going to be a shit week. You want to finish on a high note, and I think we have," he says of team leader Michael Woods' third place overall and his win on stage 2 – the day after the team's sprinter, Dan McLay, had won the opening stage.
Like Southam says, things could have gone either way, and there was perhaps a little of both – especially following the final stage of the Tour Down Under, where Woods had gone into the final stage to Willunga Hill on the same time overall as pre-race favourite Richie Porte (Trek-Segafredo), only for the race to play out in an almost carbon copy of the previous year's stage.
Porte put his rivals to the sword to win the stage – his sixth straight victory on Willunga Hill – while defending champion Daryl Impey (Mitchelton-Scott) did enough to retain the advantage he had over the climbers going into the stage and took a second overall win in a row.
Woods turns things around
'Yesterday was yesterday'
You can read more at Cyclingnews.com
via Cyclingnews Latest Interviews and Features http://www.cyclingnews.com/features/the-highs-and-lows-of-ef-education-firsts-australian-adventure
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