Ben Swift says Team Sky's squad is raring to go ahead of their debut race at the Tour Down Under.
Europeans adapting quickly to Adelaide heat
It's six days since Ben Swift swapped a British winter for an Australian summer but the 22-year old from Yorkshire says he's ready, fit and raring to go in the Tour Down Under, which starts next Tuesday.
Asked to sum up the difference between home in Rotherham and Adelaide , Swift, recovering from a three-hour training ride on Friday morning, replied: "About 50 degrees."
Which isn't as much of an exaggeration as it sounds, with the mercury in South Australia hitting 40 degrees at the start of the week.
"It was so hot it was hard to breathe," said Swift. "You felt it burning your throat, and we were all going about with croaky voices. But the last couple of days haven't been so hot and I'm feeling really good now and looking forward to the race."
Swift and his six Team Sky team-mates will make their competitive debut on Sunday, 48 hours before the Tour Down Under gets underway, with a circuit race in Adelaide city centre acting as curtain-raiser to the first ProTour event of the 2010 season.
All this week, under the supervision of sports director Sean Yates, the team has been incorporating race drills in their three-hour training rides, and Swift says the preparation has gone well. "It's been going really, really well," he said. "We've been following Rod [Ellingworth]'s training programme, focusing on practising our lead-outs.
Sky strategy
"We've got a strategy, but I think in the race itself we'll play it by ear," continued Swift. "We've all got a role, but in training you've got no one challenging you, so it's different to a race and it's a case of whether we can pull it off in the race. You never know what's going to happen on the road, and as the race goes on we'll tweak things a little bit.
As Swift noted, most of the world's top sprinters are in Adelaide . "Only Cav [Mark Cavendish], [Thor] Hushovd and [Tom] Boonen are missing," he said. "It'll be tough, but we've got a few days to have a go at cracking it. If we keep trying and trying and finally crack it on the last day that'll be a result for us.
"We'd love to have a stage win and we'll do our best for that, but if we can work well as a team it'll bode well for the year, I think.
"Greg Henderson, CJ [Chris Sutton] and Mathew Hayman are all going well and are really motivated for this race, but the rest of us [Russell Downing, Chris Froome and Davide Viganò] are going well too.
"The guys from Down Under were told to go easy with us, but they said they were surprised how well we were going considering the winter we've been having. But we've had a really good week and we're all super-motivated."
