Jack Haig breezes into the lobby of the Hilton Hotel in Adelaide, fresh from his training ride looking relaxed, at ease and happy to be back at the Tour Down Under, a race that helped launch him into a WorldTour professional cycling career. It’s been a long time between drinks, with the rider not having taken on his home WorldTour race since 2015, and this time he is walking back into it as a very different rider.
The 30-year-old followed a pathway into cycling that started when he embraced mountain biking as a teenager in Bendigo. He has never raced the Tour Down Under as a WorldTour rider. In his first appearance, he was racing for the national team and finished just over a minute behind victor Richie Porte on the crucial climb of Willunga Hill, stacking up credibly with a 21st place on that stage among the WorldTour peloton. He turned professional later that year with Orica-GreenEdge.
This year, he’s the GC leader for Bahrain Victorious at the Tour Down Under and is one of the nation’s top cycling talents as one of the very few riders from the nation who has stepped onto a Grand Tour overall podium. However, in the race run-up hype, his presence somehow seems low-key.
Maybe it’s down to the fact that the home team Jayco-AlUla draw the bulk of the attention, or maybe it is his calm, down-to-earth demeanour washing through. Or perhaps it’s that he’s not talking up his prospects in a race where the terrain and timing are not ideal. You get the sense he’s just happy to be here, and whatever comes next is a bonus.
“Trying to fit in Down Under is getting harder and harder but as an Australian, I love coming back here,” Haig told Cyclingnews. “It’s super nice to be in the summer and to see a lot of familiar faces. And then it’s also nice to say hello to the national team and see some of the new Australians coming up and try just, I don’t know, hang out with them and pass on some experience and help them.”
Results, of course, still matter, but in the early stages of the race, things weren’t exactly all running his way, with crashes hitting his team, which already had split objectives given sprinter Phil Bauhaus was also on the start list. But Haig – who was also quite happy to jump in the team line to work and try to set up the sprint – was holding firm in the GC through the early sprint-focused stages.
At the end of stage 3 Haig was among a big group of riders sitting, not right at the top of the results table before the crucial dual summit weekend, but at…
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