Hushovd wants to help Farrar take Tour de France green jersey

Thor Hushovd beat Mark Cavendish for the green jersey at the 2009 Tour de France, and now says he is looking forward to helping new teammate Tyler Farrar take the jersey in the future.

The newly-crowned world champion, who won the green jersey in 2005 and 2009, said that he will not look to win it again. He plans to ride the Tour in 2011, but will concentrate on stages, the Classics and other one-day races.

“Tyler Farrar is a good sprinter who has had great success over the last couple of years,” Hushovd told TV2sporten.dk. “He has beaten Cavendish two or three times, most recently in Spain. And even I have not beaten Cavendish on a flat course. Now I realized that it is better to help him beat Cavendish, to get the win for our team. It is a goal for myself too. I think he is the man to go for the green jersey."

Each year, the Norwegian had considered not riding the Tour so that he could focus on the fall Classics and world championship, but not in 2011. “Fortunately I managed this year to have a good Tour de France and then win the world championship. But there's nothing I want more than to be standing on the starting line next year in the Tour de France in the world champion jersey. That will be huge.”

In May of this year, the 32-year-old broke his collarbone in a training crash, and he now credits this accident with changing his focus to the one-day races. “I sprinted very little. It made me a better one-day rider with a better driving force. I had built up the capacity and I like that kind of cycling, riding in a slightly different way. I'm going to try and get more into it, to get a better driving force for the Classics and some of the tough finishes in, for example, the Tour de France.”