Ben O’Connor and Michael Matthews will lead Team Jayco AlUla at Paris-Nice, which starts 9th March, as the Australian squad targets the overall classification and stage victories.
Following his debut for the team in February, O’Connor has been training at altitude recently alongside Matthews, who is a multiple stage and points classification winner at the eight-day race.
Joining the Aussie duo will be Swiss champion Mauro Schmid, who delivered the team a stunning win at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race last month.
Among the key stages that the team is targeting is the team time trial on day three, a discipline where they finished second in the 2024 race. With that in mind, there are some big TT engines completing the line-up in the form of Australian road race champion Luke Durbridge, Max Walscheid, Kell O’Brien, and Michael Hepburn.
Team Jayco AlUla
Luke Durbridge (AUS)
Michael Hepburn (AUS)
Michael Matthews (AUS)
Kell O’Brien (AUS)
Ben O’Connor (AUS)
Mauro Schmid (SWI)
Max Walscheid (GER)
Ben O’Connor
“Training has gone as well as it can for the last couple weeks. We’ve been working hard at altitude recently so we should be going into the race with expectations every day. Paris-Nice marks the start of the big one-week races in Europe. It’s always a tricky race that covers pretty much every discipline and the TTT, in particular, is a stage in the race we are all excited for.”
Mathew Hayman (Sport Director)
“It’s always an exciting race, the weather can have a big influence on the race and we’re looking forward to hitting the ground running. We have Ben O’Connor starting as our leader there along with Michael Matthews, with Ben focusing on GC and Michael preparing for the Classics that are coming up. It’s an interesting course, a fairly traditional Paris-Nice with a couple of stages around Paris that are more classics style terrain. Then there’s a team time trial, which we’re very excited about because we have a very strong team for the TTT, and then we go into the mountains for the final stages into Nice.”
Picture: Sprint Cycling
