Australian riders look set to dominate the season-opening UCI WorldTour race when this year’s Tour Down Under begins in South Australia today.
While most of the cyclists in the peloton will be riding their first event of the year, the powerful Australian contingent are race-fit, having already competed in their nationals earlier this month.
Defending champion Rohan Dennis, who stormed to his first major win when he beat Richie Porte and Cadel Evans last year, conceded his main competition would likely come from one of his fellow Australians.
“Simon Gerrans you can’t go past,” Dennis said. “Obviously Richie Porte — he’s always good, but he’s my teammate. There are always a couple more guys, Cameron Meyer and Nathan Haas. Australians in general are very strong. We’re fit and we’re used to the heat, being from Australia. That’s our biggest advantage.”
Orica-GreenEdge’s Gerrans, a three-time champion in 2006, 2012 and 2014, was injured last year and could not defend his title, but said his vast experience at the Tour Down Under would only help.
“It’s a WorldTour event, and there’s a world-class peloton here and everyone wants to make an impact on that first race of the season,” Gerrans said. “Probably the greatest asset I have is that I’ve prepared well for this event so many times — just to have the preparation to win it a few times is a big advantage — but regardless of what I’ve done in the past, it’s a blank canvas when you come here and everyone’s on [a] par.”
The six-day race gets under way today with a 130.8km stage from Prospect in the north of Adelaide to Lyndoch in the Barossa Valley.
The race this year features many of the stages that have become famous at the Tour Down Under, including the double climb up Willunga Hill on the penultimate day and tomorrow’s climb into the picturesque town of Stirling in the Adelaide Hills.
This year’s race also includes the spectacular climb up Corkscrew Road on Thursday, followed the next day by a testing 138km stage from Norwood to Victor Harbor on the Fleurieu Peninsula, where riders are regularly hit by strong crosswinds.
Race director Michael Turtur hailed the strength of the peloton, despite the absence of some big names.
While the tour has attracted a host of big names in past editions, current superstars such as Mark Cavendish, Chris Froome and Andre Greipel are notable absentees after electing to start their seasons elsewhere, but Turtur said he was delighted to have a start list that included Dennis, Gerrans, Porte and Team Sky’s Geraint Thomas.
Orica-Greenedge’s rising Australian star Caleb Ewan will lead the sprinters in the absence of Greipel, a multiple stage winner at the Tour Down Under.
“If any organizers throughout the world had our start list, they’d be pretty happy,” Turtur said. “The decision of riders and teams to send riders wherever they go is their decision, but as an organizer, I’m delighted with the field we have this year.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier