Racing

The Tour Down Under is back!

“Everybody is motivated and looking forward to the race.”

January 16, 2023

It’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and Australia’s great bike race is back!

Alberto Bettiol, Mikkel Honoré, Jens Keukeleire, Sean Quinn, Jonas Rutsch, Tom Scully, and Łukasz Wiśniowski will kick off the 2023 WorldTour season for us at the Tour Down Under. It is the traditional start to the professional cycling season.

The race starts with a prologue at 6 p.m. Tuesday evening in Adelaide (that’s 8:30 a.m. CET, 2:30 a.m. EST, and 11:30 p.m. Monday PT). Five stages will follow, taking the peloton to the wine country and beaches surrounding South Australia’s coastal capital, before the crux on Mount Lofty at the finish of the final stage. Only then, will the race for overall winner’s ochre jersey be decided.

The locals are raring to go. It’s the height of the antipodean racing season, and the Aussies and New Zealanders have been looking forward to their home WorldTour race for months. So have their fans. After two years of cancellations due to the pandemic, tens of thousands of them are ready to jump on their bikes to ride out to the course to cheer on the racers or fire up their barbecues at home and turn the Tour Down Under into the awesome celebration of cycling that it always is.

It’s not going to be a party race for the bike racers. EF Education-EasyPost sports director Tom Southam expects this year’s Tour Down Under to be the toughest yet.

“It is the first clean run at a three-year World Tour cycle that we are going to get, so we are going to see different racing, potentially harder racing than there has ever been at the Tour Down Under,” he says. “We’ve got a different final stage to the one from before, and there are fewer formulaic stages for the sprinters. If the temperatures don’t get too high during the race, I could see it being a much more aggressive race than it has been in the past, which I think is what the race organisers are hoping for.”

EF Education-EasyPost is ready to set the tone for 2023 at the Tour Down Under. Mikkel Honoré is especially excited to start his first WorldTour race with us.

“I am feeling good and looking forward to getting started with the new team,” Mikkel says. “It is nice to be here with super nice guys in a super nice atmosphere, and I am just looking forward to getting started. It is early in the season. The winter has been going well, training has been going well, so I am confident that I will go well as well, but we will see after the first couple of days how the shape is compared to the other guys. I will take it a bit day by day, and then see for the GC.”

Tom Southam thinks that Mikkel might surprise some people. The teams with the strongest Australian contingents might be the favourites, but Tom has been quietly impressed by Mikkel’s form.

“We should be realistic with our goals, but I think we should be pushing towards a very high overall classification at the end of the week,” Tom says. “We saw that Mikkel is motivated for the season with the way he rode two nights ago, and he has done his homework. He is in very good shape. We have got a good balance in the team. No matter what happens in the stages, and there is potential for crosswinds to come into play during this race, we have got guys like Lukasz and Tom and Jonas. I am very comfortable with the guys we have. They have all had this as something to prepare for for several months now, so they are ready for it.”

We are optimistic. The riders have spent several days together, riding through the hills around Adelaide and being cheered by the local fans. They have really gelled.

“We did a lot of team building stuff, and the atmosphere is good,” says Jonas Rutsch. “It’s the first race, so everybody is in good condition. Everybody is motivated and looking forward to the race in a good way.”

The 2023 WorldTour season is about to get started. Tune in. The first test is Tuesday in Adelaide.

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Tour Down Under
Jan. 17, 2023 – Jan. 22, 2023
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Alberto Bettiol wins the Tour Down Under prologue

Mikkel Honoré

Mikkel Honoré loves to light up races in EF Education-EasyPost pink. The Dane is a very versatile rider. He has the horsepower and skill to shepherd our GC captains through a racing peloton during the hardest grand tour stages. A great climber with a strong finishing kick, who can hold his own on the cobbles, Mikkel has sprinted to stage victories at the Tour of the Basque Country and Settimana Internazionale Coppi e Bartali—two of the hilliest stage races on the calendar. He is consistently at the front of the biggest races and always ready to do his turn for his teammates. We count on Mikkel to be there for us at crucial moments in grand tours and attack the finales of the great one-day races. He’ll go for more victories himself.

Mikkel lives in Switzerland, near the shores of Lake Como. He loves to travel and always has a book with him on the bus. Reading takes him away from the bubble of racing and training. He enjoys philosophy and novels and will always read up on the places where we race to better understand the people who live in the countryside that we pass through.

Mikkel is a great basketball fan. He and his wife will go watch a game together whenever they get the chance.

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Sean Quinn

Los Angeles native Sean Quinn grew up watching the Tour de France with his mom and dad. Every morning in July, he would wake up early to watch the day’s stage. Soon, he was racing up California climbs and imagining they were the Alps. He progressed through the junior and U23 ranks, shining in stage races and hilly classics.

A strong climber who can hold his own in the peloton and has a fast finishing kick, he got his first pro win in 2023, when he took the prize on stage two of Coppi e Bartali. Sean trains hard, but likes to have fun too. He is a DJ and will always sprint for town signs.

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Alberto Bettiol

Alberto Bettiol has always been a winner. He started racing around the hills of Tuscany when he was five and won his second-ever race in his hometown of Castelfiorentino. He has been bringing home bouquets of flowers ever since.

His coaches and supporters always believed in his talent. Alberto was a strong junior and U23 rider, who signed his first professional contract with our team in 2014. But Alberto wanted to become a champion. He had grown up watching the classics and the Giro d’Italia with his father, a former footballer, and dreamed of winning the sport’s greatest races.

In 2019, he won his first Monument. Alberto’s victory in the Tour of Flanders that year changed his life. It gave him the confidence that he could beat the best riders in the world. He backed it up with an impressive string of results, including a stunning solo stage victory at the 2021 Giro d’Italia.

In 2022, Alberto earned podium places on stages of the Tour de France, Tour de Suisse, and Deutschland Tour.

He now splits his time between Lugano, Switzerland and Castelfiorentino. He enjoys all of the opportunities to travel that cycling now provides him, but is always happy to return to the Tuscan hills where he got started.

Alberto started 2023 with a prologue win at the Tour Down Under, but had a tough spring set back by injury and illness and had to miss his favorite classics. He made his return with a strong ride at the Giro d’Italia. He has great ambitions for the Tour de France.

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Jonas Rutsch

Jonas Rutsch loves the Classics and is always excited when he gets to race up the Muur-Kapelmuur. The lanky German won the U23 Gent-Wevelgem and finished 11th at the 2021 Paris-Roubaix. He is a very versatile rider, who is always ready to work for his teammates.

In 2022, he even impressed in the mountains at the Tour de Suisse.

This is already Jonas’s fifth season racing with the team. He says that racing in the WorldTour had been his goal since he was a little boy, when cycling’s historic races captured his imagination. He has now finished two Tours de France and even proposed to girlfriend on the Champs-Élysées after the 2022 Tour.

In addition to racing, Jonas also finished his exams at the German police academy. While he follows a training schedule, his favorite days are when he just gets to ride his bike. Whenever he has the chance, he goes mountain biking.

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