Twenty two year old Jayco Herald Sun Tour relishes Herald Sun Tour stage victory
Reinardt Janse van Rensburg (MTN-Qhubeka) is targeting future European racing after he outsprinted Baden Cooke (SaxoBank-SunGard) to win stage two of the Jayco Herald Sun Tour. The 22 year old recovered well from his efforts the previous day when he made a successful six-man break that stayed away till the end.
“It’s by far the biggest win of my career,” he told VeloNation. “I knew I was capable of something like this, but I haven’t had many opportunities so I had to make it count. It means a lot. I hope to get into the European leagues, this will prove to everybody that I am good enough.”
The South African recently competed in the under 23 world road race championships in Copenhagen where he finished in a very solid seventeenth place. He also won the individual time trial in the All Africa Games in September. Other international success includes a win on stage two of the Tour du Maroc earlier this year.
The uphill drag to the finish line in the Australian race suited Janse van Rensburg’s abilities. However he had to overcome the experienced leadout train of SaxoBank-SunGard to pick up what is his biggest victory to date.
“The finish was really good for me, the final kilometre kicked up to about 5-6%, making it hard for the big teams to keep control all the way to the finish. It suited my abilities as a power sprinter. In the final 15km the team did a good job keeping me towards the front and out of the wind.
“In the final kilometre I was a bit far down but had Dennis [van Niekerk] with me. Dennis did a super job to get me in the top ten with 250m to go and I kicked with 200m to go. At the time I was already going much faster than the SaxoBank leadout in the front. I just had to keep the speed up to the line and managed to win with a few bike lengths ahead of Baden Cooke.”
Janse van Rensburg lies in fourth position, 22 seconds down in the overall classification and with jet lag wearing off, has one eye set on a podium finish. MTN-Qhubeka headed to Australia off the back of seven straight domestic wins in South Africa but wanted to prove their capabilities on the international stage.
“The goal in Australia from the outset was to get a stage and everything else is just a bonus. We already achieved it, so now we got our eyes set on the cherry on top of the cake.”