- Matt with Johnny McEvoy (l) and Mark McNally
Sorry its been a long time since I checked in with you guys. It’s been a busy few weeks trying to get myself in good shape for the Tour of Britain and World Championships.
I had a bit of a mishap with my training and, to cut a long story short I overdid it and had to take a complete week off the bike and then a week of easy riding. Not ideal preparation for ToB, but it gave me chance to get some easy kms in on my TT bike. I did. A total of 20hrs in the last 2 weeks on it so at least I have something to smile about.
As expected, I’m not totally flying here in Britain but I’m in good enough shape to pull for the team and help set up our fast men for the finishes. Each day I’m getting better and better so I just have to hope I can pull up in good shape for my world championships next week.
It’s Wednesday today and we already have two stage wins from Cav and Renshaw, so we’re all pretty happy. It was great to see Renshaw win today in Exmouth. As you will all know, he wasn’t selected for the Aussie team for next week’s worlds, so it’s a good message to the selectors that they left a top guy in great shape out of the picture.
On a bit of a sadder note we lost a team mate today, Alex Rasmussen. [HTC-Highroad’s Rasmussen faces a potential two-year ban after he missed three out of competition doping controls – ed.] You will have all have read in the media what happened. I can say on the record that Alex is 100% clean and legitimate and did nothing wrong except make some mistakes with his whereabouts and quite simply mess up.
The whereabouts system is sometimes complicated and mistakes are easy to make. There are a fair few guys in the peloton that have some “strikes” for missed tests, Alex was just the unlucky one who had one too many.
I really feel for him, he’s such a nice guy and of course a super strong bike rider who in my eyes was Denmark’s biggest medal hope in their up-and-coming home worlds.
So I wish him all the luck in the world and hope he can be strong and come out of the other side of this difficult situation in as good a position as possible.
Good luck, Alex.
Matt
