Team RadioShack rider now thinking a good general classification finish might be possible
Having previously said that a stage win was his ambition at this year’s Santos Tour Down Under, Australian sprinter Robbie McEwen’s third place finish today appear to have boosted his self-belief. He is considering that he could fare well in the overall classification as well.
“I’m trying to win a stage. That’s the most important thing to me but if I pick up seconds along the way and we get to Willunga on Friday, get over that and have a good day, that could also be a decent classification,” he said after the stage.
McEwen is riding his second race as part of the RadioShack squad. The first was the Adelaide Cancer Council Classic on Sunday, where he was also third. He finished behind HTC-Highroad pairing Matt Goss and Mark Renshaw then, and today took the same podium position behind Goss and last year’s race winner André Greipel.
On both occasions, his finish has been made more complicated by coming from too far back before the sprint. Today’s effort was a big one, as he explained. “At a couple of kilometres to go HTC were on the front and Omega Pharma tried to pass them with Garmin on the other side,” he said.
“Everybody else was trying to get on the wheels of those trains, making for a messy battle. I lost position a little bit coming to the last kilometer but Robbie Hunter did a tremendous job to bring me back to the front. We had to cover a lot of ground up the steep part of that hill but he brought me all the way.
“We must have passed 50 guys from when we started moving but by the time we made it all the way back it took some reaction out of me so I ended up third.”
While he’s a little frustrated with two third places rather than a win, he knows that his form is very good at this point of the season. That bodes well for the rest of the race, and also for the season itself.
He has said that it will be his last season before retirement, but with the new Australian set-up GreenEdge pushing for a UCI ProTeam licence, he could yet decide to continue until the end of 2012.