Three-time Tour de France winner Chris Froome’s bid for a back-to-back Jayco Herald Sun Tour victory begins on Wednesday evening with the 64th edition of Australia’s oldest stage race set to get underway in the heart of Melbourne.
Three former winners of the ‘Sun Tour’ will be attempting to stop the Team Sky leader, including Simon Gerrans (ORICA-Scott), Cameron Meyer (KordaMentha Australian National Team), and Calvin Watson (Aqua Blue Sport).
Adding to the intrigue, 2016 Giro d’Italia runner-up Esteban Chaves gives ORICA-Scott a two-pronged attack with a battle royale on the Sun Tour’s climbs set to decide the 2017 winner.
Froome said that the five days ahead are not about ‘defending’ last year’s win.
“People ask me the same thing about the Tour de France – going there as defending champion,” he explained. “Personally I don’t like to look at it like that. It’s a clean slate each time you go in and you’ve got everything to gain as opposed to going in there with a defensive mindset. Every edition’s different and I’m here to race to the best of my ability.”
Team Sky had control of the yellow jersey from stage 1 through to the finale on Arthurs Seat in 2016, but Froome laughed off any suggestion that a repeat performance would be a fait accompli.
“It’s not easy at all,” Froome said. “This year’s going to be even more competitive with the likes of Chaves here. It looks like he’s in great shape after a good block of racing already. I think we’ve got a good team down here as well. Unfortunately we’re a rider short but what we lack there I think we make up with in the quality of the rest of the guys.
“Last year I saw that the level of racing here in Australia’s really high for the local level and I think that there are more and more guys who wouldn’t necessarily be on our radars who we’re racing against here,” Froome said of the local Australian Continental contingent lining up to take on Team Sky. “I’ve got no doubt they’ll be up there this week. It’s a good field and a good opportunity for them to test themselves against us and vice versa.”
Gerrans, who claimed back-to-back sun Tours in 2005-2006 is in top form off the back of his nail-bitingly-close runner-up finish at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race at the weekend. While ORICA-Scott will be aiming to have ‘Colombian Kangaroo’ Chaves in yellow on Sunday, Gerrans will be playing the role of team captain and hopefully be able to target stage wins in Beechworth and Kinglake.
“There are a couple of stages, possibly the one after Falls Creek that I think I can be a real contender for but the big objective this week is to win the overall,” he explained. “If stage 1 goes well and we’ve got Esteban right up there hopefully we’ll be defending a lead from there on.
“Esteban’s looking really good. We’ve seen him perform well already on courses which really don’t suit his capabilities down to the ground. Once we get up in the big mountains, up in the Victorian Alps we’ll see Esteban come into his own.”
While Froome and Chaves have held the spotlight in the lead up to the 2017 Jayco Herald Sun Tour, race director John Trevorrow said that a host of local riders will be right in the battle for overall hours, naming Ben Dyball (St. George Continental), Lucas Hamilton and Michael Storer (Korda Mentha Australian National Team) as men to watch. Trevorrow, a three-time Sun Tour winner, said that Filipino rider Marcelo Felipe from the visiting 7 Eleven – Sava RBP team is someone who could spring a surprise on the peloton.
“I don’t think it will be a two-horse race from the beginning. I think we’ll have a few more than that in it,” he said.
