Bora-Hansgrohe are aiming at a more aggressive racing strategy in 2022, Lennard Kämna told reporters at the Ruta del Sol on Sunday. The German's solo ride to the stage victory at Chiclana de Segura was surely the latest proof of their switch in tactics.
Already the winners of the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana with Aleksandr Vlasov two weeks ago, Bora-Hansgrohe in 2022 certainly looks and feels very different following the departure of longstanding leader Peter Sagan over the winter.
But while Kämna paid tribute to Sagan on Sunday after taking his solo win, the 25-year-old insisted that in 2022, too, Bora-Hansgrohe were trying to play a different kind of game.
"Without Sagan, we all have a little more freedom, but Peter was a great leader and always someone we could rely on," he pointed out. "But for sure, now we have a different riding style and personally I enjoy it."
As he explained earlier "We want to ride aggressively and win races, we are not there anymore for just going for eighth place on GC. We want to be in front and it's kind of a process now." They were, he agreed, "changing the chip" a little bit.
Kämna himself has always been a breakaway specialist in a class of his own, with stage victories in the Tour de France, the Volta a Catalunya and the Critérium du Dauphiné preceding his Ruta del Sol win.
All of them have been taken alone, too, although his four-second gap at the finish line over Lorenzo Fortunato (Eolo-Kometa) and six seconds over stage 2 winner and former race leader Alessandro Covi (UAE Team Emirates) was by far the narrowest to date.
However, there could be no questioning Kämna's motivation to win after his difficult second half of 2021 was wiped out by an infection that sparked a long spell away from racing.
Fourth in the Clasica Jaén one-day race in Úbeda, a town located just a couple of hours ride away from his win on Sunday, this time round in the Ruta, Kämna was present in both the opening break of the day and again in the second, far more successful one.
"It was a super hard stage, full attacking from the start on, and we were always active, always trying to follow the moves and we did a great job being with three guys in the last group," he explained. "Then it was just like playing the tactics games and I think we did it really well."
While teammate Frederik Wandahl had been with Kämna on both the first and second moves, both containing well over a dozen breakaways and Kämna said he kept as close an eye on the two previous Ruta stage winners present, Covi and Ineos Grenadiers youngster Magnus Sheffield.
Then when another Bora-Hansgrohe rider and top-five Tour de France finisher Emanuel Buchmann opened up the attacks on the final climb, Kämna finally went for it with 3.4 kilometres to go.
Kämna never looked to be struggling at first, but he said that in the last kilometre it had been touch and go, "so I knew it would be a fight to the last metre."
But even if his margin on Covi and the rest was shrinking steadily in the last part of the climb, Kämna held on nonetheless and his first win since the Volta a Catalunya stage last year was in the bag. And yet more evidence of Bora-Hansgrohe's successful switch in racing tactics in 2022 was on display, too.
