Contracts for new professionals with UCI World Tour teams are like hen’s teeth, but the 21-year-old Welshman Owain Doull has confirmed to the Guardian that he has turned down a deal with the top French team Europcar in order to focus on his Olympic ambitions on the track. Doull is expected to line up for Great Britain in the team pursuit on Friday at the London World Cup, probably in the man four slot.
Europcar are led by the top Frenchmen Thomas Voeckler and Pierre Rolland, and already boast one leading track rider in Bryan Coquard. “It was going to happen but I made a decision myself,” said Doull. “I’m going somewhere else, and in terms of my future over the next few years it’s probably a better decision. I’m not going to step up [to the World Tour] this year. I really want to turn pro but maybe a team like that isn’t the best place to go if you’re not sure you are ready.”
Doull has yet to confirm his plans for 2015 but it seems likely that, in common with the bulk of the Great Britain men’s endurance squad, he will race for the new team being set up around Sir Bradley Wiggins. The Guardian understands that further details on “Team Wiggo”, as the venture is already nicknamed, should be revealed in the next couple of weeks, but the team pursuit duo Andy Tennant and Mark Christian have already been named for the team and Steven Burke – a London 2012 gold medallist – is also expected to figure. The team’s objective will be to combine racing primarily the British calendar with building the pursuit squad around Wiggins in the run-in to Rio.
Doull, a product of the Great Britain academy, rode for Wales at this year’s Commonwealth Games, having won gold in the team pursuit at last year’s European championships, and landed two further gold medals in World Cup rounds last winter. This year, on the road, he won the Triptyque des Monts et Châteaux, a top under-23 stage race in Belgium. He finished 19th in the under-23 race at the road world championships in Ponferrada, Spain; one advantage in turning down a World Tour contract is that he will be eligible for next year’s under-23 race in Richmond, USA.
In common with the rest of the Great Britain men’s endurance squad Doull received a dressing down from the team head, Shane Sutton, after this year’s track world championships in Colombia in late February. Sutton publicly questioned the squad’s collective talent, which hurt according to Doull. “At this level no one likes to be doubted. You take it to heart a bit but then you’ve got to crack on. There’s no greater challenge than when you’ve got a point to prove. It wasn’t very nice at the time but it’s changed me quite a lot and made me more determined if anything. I hadn’t had anything like that before. It was a bit of a shock. We all knew we weren’t in a great place, although we’d had a good year up to then. Come the worlds we got a few things wrong, tried some different stuff like altitude tents. Across the board we all underperformed.”
Doull accepts that with Wiggins returning to the squad competition for a place in Rio is likely to be intense, although if the four-times Olympic gold medallist does make the final squad – something Sutton keeps insisting is not a given – the team pursuit will become one of the most high-profile events in the Games. “It’s going to be a challenge but I’ll commit fully. You have to take the positives from what I’ve done before. I was in some doubt about whether to continue on the track or focus on the road but I had quite a good Commonwealth Games and that changed my mind.”
Wiggins has yet to confirm his plans for next year – his final deal with Team Sky is in the offing but has taken a long while to be thrashed out – but he seems likely to move to the Great Britain team from late next spring once he has ridden the Paris-Roubaix one-day Classic. A source close to Wiggins indicated that rumours he might attempt the Giro d’Italia next year could well prove unfounded.
Asked about the current state of play with his former protege, Sutton said: “Brad has already walked through the door. We don’t expect to see him until late spring, but we know he’s going to come in after the Classics and will be ready to dial into the track. There’s a lot of talk about him and the hour record and that will be good for us because he will be on the track.”
Sutton added that Wiggins will not be racing in London this weekend because he needed a break after the season, but “he’s back in training on the road and he will be ready to go. If you look at the way he trained for Roubaix last year, he virtually did it all himself, turned up and the performance was there for everyone to see.”
