Jack Haig’s first race of the season, the Ruta del Sol has got off to an excellent start with the Bahrain-Victorious rider placing fourth on the steep lung-bursting ascent that concluded stage 2 on Thursday. The 28-year-old Australian now also sits fourth overall, after scooping up a solid 15th on the opening uphill finish stage.
Still, even with the first race of the season running smoothly, Haig recognised there was no getting away from the issue of COVID-19 and how widespread it is in the cycling peloton right now. Asked by Cyclingnews at the start of stage 2 if his team had been affected by the latest wave of COVID infections, Haig answered simply that it was far from just his squad that had experienced the pandemic first-hand.
“I think it’s like everyone, the race programs are changing because people are getting COVID,” Haig said.
Haig said, too, that the pandemic was something “to manage” in all aspects of life, not just cycling, so keeping a sense of perspective was important.
“It’s everywhere, and it exists, and people are getting it of course and it’s affecting race programmes. But it’s something we just need to manage.
Haig himself is a case in point of how race programmes can change because of the pandemic. He caught COVID-19 in January, and although now recovered, his planned start at the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana, a race he led briefly back in 2020, was cancelled. However, he played down the consequences.
“We thought it was better to wait a couple of weeks, which is not such a big deal. I enjoy racing in Spain whether it’s Valencia or the Ruta,” he told Cyclingnews.
“The idea is to get through here, have a good hard five days of racing, stay healthy and get back into a race rhythm. It’s not so much about targeting a specific result, more just getting the race kilometres in the legs before Paris-Nice.
“Yesterday (Wednesday) you could see everybody was a bit nervous, and it’s good to get that out of the way before the more important races.”
Summer races
As for what those more important races are in his case, Haig will be aiming for Paris-Nice, possibly Catalunya then some of the Ardennes Classics. An altitude block of training in the Canaries with the team will follow, with the idea of hitting the summer races in top form, starting with the Critérium du Dauphiné.
After that, it’s back to the Tour for Haig in what is, all round, a very similar race programme to other years. Given his excellent 2021 season and strong start to last July before crashing out injured on stage 3, he agreed it’s a case of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’
Looking at Bahrain-Victorious and how it could play the leadership cards in the Grand Tours, Haig said, “While we don’t have a [Tadej] Pogačar [UAE Team Emirates] or a [Egan] Bernal [Ineos Grenadiers] or a [Primož] Roglič [Jumbo-Visma], the squad has a lot of depth.”
Rather than enter in futile debates about whether he or any of the other strong GC racers in the team will be designated top contender for the Tour de France he points out, firstly, that it’s far too early in the season to decide and, secondly, the squad will be looking for “multiple options with multiple leaders.”
“If somebody’s in better condition in the team then I’m more than happy to work for them,” he said. “I prefer my legs to do the talking and you’ll find out during the season if somebody is going better than somebody else.
“It’s very hard to predict now at the end of February what a rider’s condition is going to be like in the Tour. So we’ll go step by step and we’ll see in the Dauphiné or Tour de Suisse who is going better. But that can still change between then and the Tour.”
Following the Tour, another crack at the Vuelta is potentially on the cards for Haig, meaning a repeat of two Grand Tour starts in 2022. Then, the rider who missed out on the Olympic Games in 2021 due to his Tour de France injury, said he’d hope to fly back home for the World Championships. As he put it, “it’d be super-nice to compete in Australia, for Australia.”
That is more than seven months away, though, and for now he’s looking to deliver the best ride possible at the Ruta del Sol in Spain.
“I was expecting the first stage to be a little bit harder, but the break got away early and the peloton rode relatively easy up the first climb of the day, I think we saw that when the break had over 14 minutes at the top, “ he said at the start of stage 2. “But from then on quite hard until the finish. The break stayed away but it only had 40 seconds at the finale.
“I expect there’ll be a lot of fighting in next couple of days, with all these quite hard uphill finishes, and specially as there are no time bonuses here.”
Haig’s prediction proved spot on, as the peloton engaged in a thrilling battle on the brutally-steep ascent of Alcala la Real. After an early move on the ascent by teammate Wout Poels helped to soften up the opposition, Haig then made his own move to finish within the top five and move up to fourth overall.
Although the next two stages will likely end in bunch sprints, Sunday’s very hilly stage through the sierras of north-east Andalucia and summit finish in Chiclana de Segura could well see the Australian climber back in the thick of the action again.
