Henderson Opens Account for Team Sky
Santos Tour Down Under - Cancer Council Helpline Classic, 51km/32mi
By Cathy Mehl

Welcome to sunny Adelaide in South Australia and the start of the 2010 Pro Tour Cycling season! Including this race with its January position on the race calendar brings many untested legs to the peloton but provides a rare opportunity to participate in an early-season, form-testing racing format.  Lining up on the startline in red and gray kits, Lance Armstrong, Tomas Vaitkus, Daryl Impey, Jason McCartney, Yaroslav Popovych, Sébastien Rosseler and Gert Steegmans raced together for the first time, flying the colors of the new Team RadioShack.

 

A bit breezy but very nice weather for the start of the race.

The boys are presented to thousands of fans just prior to the start of
the Cancer Council Helpline Classic criterium.

Pretty stiff crosswinds 2 hrs before race time.

Sun, Jan 17
51km/32mi
11am local time

It is a dead, flat circuit race that is also a preview of part of Stage 6 in the TDU.  Held in Adelaide’s Rymill Park, the race is a hard 30 laps of 1.7km circuit.  The result of this race does not impact the overall standings of the TDU.

The guys answer questions from both the Twitter ride today and the race to come.

Greetings. It’s a new year, and that means the start of the 2010 professional cycling season, kicking off for Team RadioShack and the rest of the Pro Tour at the Santos Tour Down Under in Adelaide, Australia.  We’ll be bringing you daily updates from the race, but to get you prepared we’ve got this preview for you.  From December training camp in Tucson until the Giro di Lombardia in October in Italy, it’s going to be a great season and an awesome time to be a fan of The Shack!

Let’s cut right to the heart of the matter: Despite the TDU being the first official race of his 2009 comeback, I do not expect Lance Armstrong to win in Oz in 2010.  Heresy, you say? Hardly. The TDU is without a doubt a sprinter’s delight, plus add in that the winner will be someone, who is not only a sprinter, but also has already been training for months to peak early for a chance at stage/overall victory.  While Team RadioShack enters the race with a very strong squad, the primary reason for being here is early season training at a race pace.

For fans of Team RadioShack who have followed the teams of Johan Bruyneel for more than a decade now, many of the faces on the roster are very, very familiar.  But we have new, fresh faces, too, and one of them belongs to South African rider Daryl Impey. Coming to the team from Barloworld, Daryl has already ramped up his training in the off-season and joins the squad for the first race of the season.  Daryl gets started in his first blog of the season as he makes his way to the Tour Down Under.

The 2010 season has nearly started, and I am typing this as I travel to Kuala Lumpur, enjoying my first ever Business Class flight. Honestly, all these controls for a seat take some time to get used to, but it does make travelling a lot easier and has less impact on the body. I think it is just what I need though.  I had planned a nice chilled final week in South Africa, where I could just ride my bike and chill with my girlfriend Alexandra, family and friends. Instead, I ended up getting hit off my bike by an ignorant person driving, who did a “hit and run,” DESTROYING my new Trek, followed two days later by a guy in a TT ramming into the back of us at a red robot, while I was driving back from the police station!  It was just a week to forget, and I can thank my lucky stars no one was injured and so far things are going OK. Touch wood!

Sprint Stage – 90km/ 56mi
January 24, 2010 – starts 1:30 pm local /January 23, 2010 at 10:30 PM ET


Preview
We’re back home for the Adelaide City Council Street Circuit race, the final stage of the TDU.  By now, we should know who will win the overall title – barring of course any unforeseen drama – and the last stage will be flat, fast, and a mass finish.  It is 20 laps of a 4.5km route and a rousing end to the 2010 Tour Down Under.