{"id":49728,"date":"2025-03-07T10:21:41","date_gmt":"2025-03-07T10:21:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/greenedgecycling.com\/2024\/?p=49728"},"modified":"2025-03-11T17:15:11","modified_gmt":"2025-03-11T17:15:11","slug":"oconnor-and-matthews-lead-team-jayco-alula-at-paris-nice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greenedgecycling.com\/2026\/oconnor-and-matthews-lead-team-jayco-alula-at-paris-nice\/","title":{"rendered":"O&#8217;Connor and Matthews lead Team Jayco AlUla at Paris-Nice"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong>Ben O\u2019Connor<\/strong> and <strong>Michael Matthews<\/strong> will lead <strong>Team Jayco AlUla<\/strong> at Paris-Nice, which starts 9th March, as the Australian squad targets the overall classification and stage victories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Following his debut for the team in February, O\u2019Connor has been training at altitude recently alongside Matthews, who is a multiple stage and points classification winner at the eight-day race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Joining the Aussie duo will be Swiss champion <strong>Mauro Schmid<\/strong>, who delivered the team a stunning win at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race last month.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>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 <strong>Luke Durbridge<\/strong>, <strong>Max Walscheid<\/strong>, <strong>Kell O\u2019Brien<\/strong>, and <strong>Michael Hepburn<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">Team Jayco AlUla<\/span><br>Luke Durbridge (AUS)<br>Michael Hepburn (AUS)<br>Michael Matthews (AUS)<br>Kell O\u2019Brien (AUS)<br>Ben O\u2019Connor (AUS)<br>Mauro Schmid (SWI)<br>Max Walscheid (GER)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Ben O\u2019Connor<\/strong><\/span><br><em>&#8220;Training has gone as well as it can for the last couple weeks. We\u2019ve 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\u2019s 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.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>Mathew Hayman (Sport Director)<\/strong><\/span><br><em>&#8220;It\u2019s always an exciting race, the weather can have a big influence on the race and we\u2019re looking forward to hitting the ground running. We have Ben O\u2019Connor 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\u2019s an interesting course, a fairly traditional Paris-Nice with a couple of stages around Paris that are more classics style terrain. Then there\u2019s a team time trial, which we\u2019re 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.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Picture: Sprint Cycling<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ben O\u2019Connor 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&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":49729,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[296,386],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greenedgecycling.com\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49728"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greenedgecycling.com\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greenedgecycling.com\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greenedgecycling.com\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greenedgecycling.com\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49728"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greenedgecycling.com\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49728\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49748,"href":"https:\/\/greenedgecycling.com\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49728\/revisions\/49748"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greenedgecycling.com\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/49729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greenedgecycling.com\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greenedgecycling.com\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greenedgecycling.com\/2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}