Impey claims seventh South African time trial titleTour Down Under winner Daryl Impey continued his run of good form, taking out a record seventh national championship time trial title at the South African championships in Oudtshoorn on Wednesday.
Impey topped Dimension Data's Ryan Gibbons by 2:17 over the 43.8km course, with the third-place finisher Rohan de Ploy a distant 6:49 behind. The region was in the midst of a heat wave, with temperatures soaring over 36°C, taxing even those acclimated to hot weather. Fortunately, cooler weather is due for Saturday's road races, which Impey hopes to finally claim for the first time in his career. "The road race is something I have never won, so there is always pressure from myself to try and win. It is important to try and win it eventually, but it is hard. I know the odds are stacked against me with all the teams and their numbers. "I am hoping to carry some form from Down Under and hopefully do something special on Saturday, we will see, it is always difficult to say what will happen."
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Persistence pays for Viviani and Quick-Step Floors in Dubai TourElia Viviani perhaps received one birthday present a few months early when his agent Giovanni Lombardi suggested last summer that he end his contract with Team Sky and move to Quick-Step Floors for 2018. With Marcel Kittel heading to Katusha-Alpecin, the Belgian team needed a second sprinter that would not clash with Fernando Gaviria's ambitions at the Tour de France.
Viviani is happy to ride the Giro d'Italia, while the road will decide who leads in Milan-San Remo and the other spring Classics. At Team Sky, Viviani often had to rely on his track skills to fight for his chances in the sprints. Now Quick-Step Floors lead him out with experience and precision, which he is discovering is invaluable. "When I lose, the day after I'm really hungry and motivated to do better. Cav (Cavendish) put me on the limit in the sprint but thanks to a great lead-out I could win," Viviani explained, savouring a television replay on his stage 2 sprint. "This year there's no excuse. I have a really strong team. Nine times out of ten they bring me in a good position with the open road ahead of me. I was scared of being trapped in like yesterday. I really wanted to do my sprint and so thought that if someone passed me, then good for him. But nobody arrived. "Cav was the only guy I could see close to me. He came up and I saw him coming closer and closer but I wasn't at my top speed. I saw there were 100 metres to go but I had something more to give. I saw Dylan [Groenewegen] come fast with 20m to go but fortunately, the line came before he passed me." Viviani combined racing on the road and the track until the 2016 Rio Olympic Games. He was rewarded with gold in the multi-event Omnium, beating Cavendish and Denmark's Lasse Norman Hansen but promised to focus 100 per cent on road racing going forward. He fit in well at Team Sky and was a personal favourite with Italian bike sponsor Pinarello. However, after being snubbed for a place at the 100th Giro d'Italia, he did not hesitate when Quick-Step Floors offered him a contract. It was a new challenge and new responsibility but offered huge opportunities. Miller has been with USA Cycling since 2001, helping the country to 15 Olympic medals and numerous world championship titles. He was promoted to Athletic Director in 2009 and later Vice President of Athletics. Most recently, Miller was named as Vice President of High Performance after Scott Schnitzspahn moved across from the US Olympic Committee to take up the role as VP of Elite Athletics in August. The changes came after the federation was forced to revisit its selection procedures following several high-profile arbitration cases over the women's road team for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games in Rio, amid accusations that Miller, who was a personal coach of eventual gold medal winner Kristin Armstrong, had favored her selection over others. In his new role, Miller was put in charge of high performance programmes for all of the federation's disciplines, but was further distanced from the selection process, with Schnitzspahn responsible for overseeing rider choices for the various world championships and Olympic Games. USA Cycling hired two new performance directors last year - Kristin Armstrong and Greg Henderson - in addition to bringing in Australian Gary Sutton as head track endurance coach. Sutton was the victim of a shake-up at Cycling Australia after the arrival of that federation's new high performance director Simon Jones. Sutton replaced Andy Sparks, the husband and coach of now-retired Olympic medalist Sarah Hammer. Sparks was let go under USA Cycling employment rules amid accusations that he had emotionally abused riders on the endurance track team. There have been similar upheavals at British Cycling, where Sutton's brother Shane was forced to step down in light of sexism and discrimination claims. Día por día. Not even Rigoberto Urán’s Latin American Spanish make interesting three of the most mundane words in professional cycling. Day by day. A phrase that has become so widespread in press conferences and mixed zones the world over, but one that says so little. You get the sense, however, that Urán actually means it. “For me, there is no past, there is no future, only the present,” he tells Procycling in a hotel meeting room in Japan. Urán drives his point home with a smile: “There is only today, right here, right now.” The words ‘día por día’ passed his lips countless times in July as he made his way to second place at the Tour de France. Having last graced a Grand Tour podium at the 2014 Giro, he flew into the race under the radar but claimed a thrilling victory on stage 9 in Chambéry, millimetres ahead of Warren Barguil. From then on, it was one pedal stroke at a time all the way to Paris. Urán’s approach to a Grand Tour mirrors his approach to life in general. “At the Tour, on the first day I’m not thinking about the final stage in the mountains – no, today is the first stage, tomorrow is the second. Día por día. That’s how I try to see things in life,” he explains. “The future, we don’t know about. The past has gone. There’s only today.” Urán’s outlook has been shaped by the extraordinary nature of the journey that led him from provincial Colombia to the upper echelons of European cycling. It has been a path marked by obstacles, setbacks and even tragedy. When he was just 14 years old, Urán lost his father, who was killed at the hands of paramilitary fighters in the midst of long-running conflict in Colombia. The innocence of childhood ended abruptly. “I had to take on all responsibility for the family,” says Urán, who went around on his bike selling lottery tickets to provide for his mother and sister. “At 14 I was, let’s say, the ‘papa’ of the family. I had to become a grown-up at 14.” It’s at this point that Urán’s vision fixes on what’s immediately in front of him. He quickly got on with his life and has never liked to dwell on the death of his father, or at least open up about it publicly. In our interview, he refers matter-of-factly to his childhood as “normal” and “without problems”. “Obviously I lost my father at a very young age, but I overcame it. Everything, everything, everything can be overcome. “We, as human beings, adapt when we have to. If there’s a need to do so, we learn and we adapt. So that period wasn’t difficult – not at all. Now I can say, ‘Oh, it was tough,’ but at the time, in the moment, no problem.” In the moment. No problem. Is it any wonder that Urán would want to live day by day? When the past is painful and irretrievable, and the future suddenly so unreliable, the present becomes the only solid ground. Urán had to grow up fast. He had been given a bike just before his father died and won his first race. He quickly made a name for himself on the local scene and at 17 he attracted the attention of the regional Orgullo Paisa team. Colombian rules state that riders can’t be salaried until they’re 18, but he somehow talked them into giving him a pay packet so that he could send money back to his mother. It wasn’t long before he was making the journey to Europe. An acquaintance arranged for him to join the Tenax team in Italy in 2006, and suddenly Urán was a professional cyclist at the age of 19. It was a rocky road to begin with. He suffered two bad crashes in his first two seasons, the first resulting in a broken collarbone on his introduction to Belgian cobbles, the second in two broken elbows and a broken wrist at the Deutschland Tour. “With that one, they told me it would be difficult to make a complete recovery. So I was worried I wouldn’t go back to being a cyclist – I’d barely started.” On top of the bumps and bruises came the alienation of being thrown into an entirely different culture and a language he didn’t understand. Did he ever worry that this life might not be for him after all? “I didn’t know. The future, you don’t know. You just get by.” |
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