Fabio Jakobsen has traded the tried-and-trusted sprint trains of Soudal-Quickstep for lesser-known combinations at Team DSM-Firmenich-PostNL, but the Dutchman is optimistic as he prepares to overcome what he expects to be a bit of a learning curve.
Speaking to a small group of media from the team’s training camp in Spain, Jakobsen laid out his plans to build toward his main goal of winning stages at the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France.
“I will start to season in the Tour of Oman, then do a long block in the Middle East to connect the UAE Tour after that, then go to Paris-Nice and the one-day WorldTour race in De Panne and then build up towards the Giro with the Tour of Turkey,” Jakobsen said. “And after the Giro I’ll do the Tour of Belgium in preparation for the Tour de France.”
Jakobsen spent the first six seasons of his career with Quickstep, developing into a formidable Grand Tour sprint presence even after his life-threatening crash at the Tour de Pologne in 2020. After winning three stages and the points classification at the Vuelta a España in 2021, he made his Tour de France debut in 2022, winning stage 2 before suffering to make it through the mountains.
This year’s Tour went even worse, after a heavy crash on stage 4 he struggled through his injuries before finally dropping out winless on stage 12. This year, he has one goal above all else.
“I hope to stay on the bike,” he said. “If I didn’t crash on the racetrack, I would have been good to win a stage in the Tour last year. I had a good shape before and I had a good shape after it’s just when you go down like that top shape’s gone.
“So that’s the first goal of the Giro and the Tour – to stay on the bike. With this train, if we take all the experience from all the riders and start with the intention to make it better, especially in the first part of the season – I think by the time we get to Giro and Tour, we’ll do a few things right.”
Jakobsen pointed to a group of seven or eight potential lead-out train members including recruits Bram Welten from Groupama-FDJ and Timo Roosen from Jumbo-Visma. He will also be able to count on Julius van den Berg, along with an established group of fast men – Nils Eekhoff, John Degenkolb, Alex Edmondson, and Tobias Lund – in a competitive lead-out train.
“I don’t expect it to be successful from the first day we race but it could be that we are and then it’s a good start,” he said. “If it’s not, then we’re going to build from there on. Right now we are just training…
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