The Good Lieutenant

Jack Haig broke through in 2018, rising to prominence as Simon Yates’s key lieutenant. What now for ‘Australia’s next GC hope’?

- Giles Belbin

There is a certain irony that the race that did most to raise Jack Haig’s profile in 2018 started painfully for the Australian. Soon after he had rolled down the start ramp of the Giro d’Italia’s opening 9.7km time trial in Jerusalem, the Mitchelton-Scott rider crashed. He finished 174th and ended the day by posting dramatic images of his battered body on Instagram.

Haig may have had a WorldTour stage win already to his name (he claimed stage six of the Tour of Poland in 2017) but it was his work defending the pink jersey that Simon Yates held until the race’s famous 19th stage that really got people talking.

“I went into that Giro without the team expecting me to do as well as I did,” says Haig from his apartment in Andorra. “So I didn’t have a lot of pressure to be there deep in the mountains and to be Simon’s last man. As the race went on that expectation sort of slowly got put there but the team was never really putting a whole lot [on me] because I was already overachieving to what they had expected.”