The one-day race will be our final outing on Australian soil and our riders will look to be again among the protagonists and get another strong result before returning to Europe.
Quick-Step Floors' seven-man team for the fourth edition of the Cadel Evans Road Race (164 kilometers), an event that was born a couple of years after the Geelong World Championships and which last year become part of the World Tour calendar, will consist of the same riders who raced the Tour Down Under earlier this month: Eros Capecchi, Dries Devenyns, Enric Mas, Michael Mørkøv, Fabio Sabatini, Florian Sénéchal and Elia Viviani.
Most recently, they participated in the Towards Zero Melbourne Race, a 116.6km criterium held on the Albert Part Formula 1 circuit, where Elia came close to scoring his second victory in the Quick-Step Floors jersey. If Thursday's race took place over a pan flat course with few difficulties, the same can't be said of the World Tour one, which will revolve around the Challambra Crescent, a steep and technical climb that the peloton will tackle on four occasions, last time with under ten kilometers to go.
One kilometer in length and having a 10% average gradient, Challambra will really push the riders to their limit, as they'll try to win a double battle, with the pain and their opponents, who will look to make the race-winning move on the double-digit gradients that are expected to cause some serious splits in the peloton before the short and fast descent to Geelong, where Quick-Step Floors took the honors at the inaugural edition, in 2015.
Photo: ©Tim De Waele/ Getty Images
