Lotto Belisol and Lampre-Merida squads also announced
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Yellow jersey Simon Gerrans and his Orica GreenEdge teammates on the podium(Image credit: Bettini Photo)
The Australian ProTeam Orica GreenEdge ready to start the team time trial on Stage 2(Image credit: Bettini Photo)
The Lotto Belisol team(Image credit: Bettini Photo)
The 2013 Lampre Merida team(Image credit: Bettini Photo)
Orica-GreenEdge is sending its big guns to the team time trial at the UCI Road World Championships this weekend in Florence, with three riders from the squad which won the team time trial at the Tour de France this summer. All seven riders, which includes the reserve rider, live in Girona, Spain, and thus have been training together for about two weeks.
Daryl Impey, Svein Tuft and Brett Lancaster were all members of the Tour team which won the team time trial in Nice by only three-quarters of a second ahead of Omega Pharma-QuickStep. hey will be joined by Luke Durbridge, Jens Mouris and Michael Hepburn. Sam Bewley is the reserve rider. Last year the team won the bronze medal at the Worlds team time trial.
Both Impey (South Africa) and Durbridge (Australia) are current national time trial champions, and Tuft is a former-eight time Canadian champion.
“We’ve had the team training together for nearly two weeks,” sport director Matt White said. “That’s the beauty of their set-up. All of the guys live in Girona, and they’ve been able to train together daily without going somewhere specifically for camp. They’ve built-up to this the Worlds together.”
Lotto-Belisol and Lampre-Merida squads
All six riders for Lotto-Belisol were also in the Tour de France, and the team is aiming for a top ten finish. Lars Bak, Bart De Clercq, André Greipel, Adam Hansen, Greg Henderson and Jürgen Roelandts will cover the 57.2 km for the Belgian team.
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"We aim for a place in top ten, the higher the better. Last year our result was disappointing, we only became 17th,” said sports director Herman Frison. “As a WorldTour team you can't be satisfied with that and we should aim higher. That should definitely be possible. In the Tour we have proven we can.
“Such a team time trial is suffering, go à bloc for more than an hour, go into the red. The guys understand one another well. The morale is good, the performance in the Tour has given them a boost. Tomorrow there is a training and Saturday we'll do a recon of the course. We will look at the positioning for Sunday and work on the automatisms."
Lampre-Merida had tow days of training on the Monza auto-race track to set up its optimal team for the discipline. Matteo Bono, David Comolai, Luca Dodi, Roberto Ferrari, Adriano Malori and Maximiliano Richeze will represent the Italian team.
Lampre's highest team trial finish at a Grand Tour this year was sixth in the Giro. At last year's Worlds it was 28th out of 32.
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