Team bonding in Nice and our first race

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Changing teams and the first nervous encounters with new teammates, staff, and equipment  is like the first day of school.

I still remember sitting in the corner at kindergarten, aged five with my bucket hair cut, confused and wanting mum. Or my first day at college, surrounded by a thousand new faces and feeling like I didn’t know any of them. It’s daunting, overwhelming and all together scary.

Fortunately, when I walked into the team house my new Hitec Products team was renting for a training camp in Nice, France I didn’t want mum. Sure, I knew things were different. I mean, I had just walked into the perfect genetic gene pool that is Scandinavian women and was feeling a little inadequate. But I didn’t feel like I was surrounded by a thousand new faces. As my teammate, Emilia Fahlin, who also made the move with me from Specialized lululemon said, “When I walked in I felt like I already knew everyone. I felt so welcome.”

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And it was true. The 10 day training camp in Nice seemed to fly by and I didn’t want to kill any of my new teammates. After one training ride that turned from what was meant to be a leisurely three-hours into an almost-six-hour-epic, which I labelled ‘team bonding’ (read getting lost) I said to our director, “I don’t know if we just don’t know each other well enough yet to actually get angry or if we just get along so well, but usually you either crack it at each other or work together to get home and we did the latter, so I guess that’s a good thing!”

Already, the new team line-up has shown, just like on camp, that we’re ready and able to work together to achieve great results. With a stage win in Qatar and three days in the Golden jersey, second overall and the young rider's jersey, any nervous trepidation I may have had about the team change has disappeared.

Qatar was full of team highlights. When the race was being lit up with attacks on the third stage Elisa Longo Borghini, the bronze medalist in the women’s road race in Valkenburg last year, buried herself to drop me off onto former world champion, Georgia Bronzini’s wheel.