It was six in the morning when Christophe Sercu’s phone rang. “Walter?” the LottoAdecco manager wearily queried from his bed in Belgium to his director Sportif Walter Planckaert. “Morning. Robbie won today.”
The same phone call repeated itself two days later. And the day after. Oh, and two days after that. Robbie McEwen’s first week riding with his new team had yielded a quartet of victories at the 2002 Tour Down Under in just six stages. “Walter rang me every morning from Australia saying that he won again,” Sercu says. “Every time it was so very early. So early. But he was having an impact already.”
ACHIEVEMENTS
Career palmarès
12x – Tour de France stages
3x – Tour de France green jerseys
12x – Giro d’Italia stages
12x – Tour Down Under stages
5x – Paris-Bruxelles
3x – Australian road race champion
8x – Ronde van Nederland stages
7x – Tour de Suisse stages
Indeed. Before McEwen raced in the red of the Belgian team with his new team-mates, he had already won four times: twice at the Geelong Bay Crits and in becoming Australian national road and criterium champion. “I hadn’t lost in the Lotto jersey before I raced with my new team. I was in red hot form. I felt so incredible,” he recalls.
This story is from the October 29, 2020 edition of CYCLING WEEKLY.
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This story is from the October 29, 2020 edition of CYCLING WEEKLY.
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