Dunbar’s team to have sprinter at “every Grand Tour” in seasons ahead

Team Jayco AlUla team boss, Matt White, has spoken of how the team will mix the talents of its current riders, Dylan Groenewegen and Michael Matthews, and its new signing Caleb Ewan. He believes the three riders have different talents and will not have to compete with each other.

However, he also confirmed the team will go with a sprinter – and, one assumes, some support riders for them – at every Grand Tour in the seasons ahead. That might diminish the support for the best climbing general classification riders in the team, namely Ireland’s Eddie Dunbar and Simon Yates.

Dunbar was the general classification leader of the team at the Giro d’Italia this year, and eventually finished 7th after being as well place as 4th in the final week. He did not go into the race with the complete and full backing of the team.

Nonetheless, he took the best result of his career and the fact the team will have Groenewegen or Ewan aiming for sprint stage wins at every Grand Tour in the next few seasons may mean Dunbar simply gets similar support as this year’s Giro.

White told GCN that Groenewegen was “really positive” about Ewan being signed by the team, from Lotto-Dstny where the Australian rider fell out very publicly with team management earlier this year after abandoning the Tour de France.

“We’re very, very clear with our athletes,” White said. “We won’t have Caleb competing against Dylan for spots. Dylan has his programme, Caleb has his. And they won’t be clashing at all. We’ll have one of them at every Grand Tour, it’s just who goes where.

“It’s exciting Caleb Ewan is coming back home. Things haven’t gone well with Lotto Dstny since the transition of management there. The main thing for us is we want to focus on getting Caleb Ewan back doing what we know he can do: winning bike races.

“We have a big history with Caleb in our development team, he turned professional with us and we’re turning back the clock looking to get him back on the top step of the podium.”