Irish road race champion pleased with early impressions of Synergy Baku team, ambitious for 2014
Now 28 years old and thus entering what should be his best years as an athlete, Matt Brammeier has pledged to take a more ambitious outlook heading into the 2014 season. After years of riding for others, the British-born Irishman had more personal freedom when racing with the Champion System team and should once again have the scope for personal opportunity in 2014.
Having been frustrated by a long and ultimately fruitless search for a WorldTour contract, Brammeier wants to make a bigger impression in 2014 and thus avoid any more headaches over contracts and offers.
“Of course I need to win. I just need to win as many races as possible,” Brammeier said, when asked about his targets for the season ahead. “To just kind of turn those near misses this year into wins next year.”
Brammeier had a solid rather than spectacular season in 2013, netting a number of top fifteen finishes on stages of the Tour of California and the Tour of Qinghai Lake plus in Schaal Sels. However those results alone don’t give the full picture. He went close to the win on more than one occasion, with moves being hauled back close to the line.
One such near-miss occurred in the Tour of California, when he nipped clear in the closing kilometres of stage four but was reeled in with approximately six hundred metres remaining.
He’s been banging on the door for quite some time and knows that he needs just a little more oomph, or perhaps a dash of extra luck, to hit the line first in 2014.
Brammeier has however already shown what he can do against some WorldTour riders; he has beaten the likes of Nicolas Roche, Dan Martin and Philip Deignan in recent years to win the national road race championships a record four times.
If he can transfer those performances into international races, he will make his new Synergy Baku team very pleased with its signing.
“I am one of the older guys and more experienced guys on the team,” he said in a sit-down video interview carried out last week at the team’s training camp in Calpe, Spain. “There is certainly going to be a lot more pressure on me to perform next year. That is kind of a good thing, it is something I think I need and I am looking forward to it.”
That said, he knows that he must work hard to secure leadership status. “I am certainly not the standout strongest guy on the team. We have a lot of other younger guys as well who are flying fit,” he explained. “So it is going to be the same as always, really…the strongest guy on the day is going to be the leader. We will see who it is.”
Brammeier has been staying in Girona and doing a lot of training with Dan Martin. He’ll be based between there and Belgium in 2014, but will also do a lot of travelling to Baku’s international races.
First up is likely to be either the Tour of the Mediterranean or the Tour de Langkawi. After that, he suggests he could race in Croatia, then go on to doing the Tour of Normandy or the Settimana Coppi y Bartali.
Aside from taking another national championship gold, he doesn’t want to single out certain events as targets. Instead, a more general approach is what he envisages. “I want to reach the start of the season in the best shape I can, and just try and stay on a really good level all year, he explained. “To just try to race aggressively, race positively, try to pick something up.”
Watch the full Matt Brammeier above, and check out other videos from the Synergy Baku camp here:
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