Heinrich Haussler (IAM Cycling) won the Australian national road championships in a sprint from Caleb Ewan (Orica-GreenEDGE) as Neil van der Ploeg (Avanti) won the sprint for third from a chasing group . Haussler’s infamous loss to Mark Cavendish in the Milan San Remo certainly served as motivation for Heinrich Haussler who beat one of the best young and upcoming sprinters to win the elite men’s Australian national road championship.
Haussler won the sprint despite a mechanical at the finish, when his chain came off, just as he was going to cross the line. In the last 100m where it was like edge to edge I thought, ‘no, this is not going to happen to me again. It just couldn’t. I was just trying to get everything out of my legs to get to that line first,” a jubilant 30-year-old Haussler said.
“It worked out perfectly in the last kilometre because Caleb Ewan followed an attack and I was on his wheel. It was a terrible headwind and I didn’t know if he was going to sprint early, but I kept thinking he will. When he did I just waited, waited, waited and in the last moment attacked and got around him. Haussler also proved that numbers aren’t always paramount. He only had one helper in sole IAM trade team-mate David Tanner against a field comprised of WorldTour and domestic teams that in some cases had up to 10 riders.
The major race favourites such as Cadel Evans or Richie Porte did not feature in the outcome of the gruelling event where only 57 riders, from 149 riders, finished.