CYCLING

Cooper ready to follow in fellow Avanti alums' footsteps to ProTour

By Aaron S Lee

Reigning national road race champion Joe Cooper leads Avanti at Tour de Korea and looks to get WorldTour aspirations back on track.

BUSAN, South Korea—What a difference a year makes. This time last year, Joseph Cooper (NZL) was sitting at home nursing a fractured pelvis suffered in a stage 4 crash while leading Tour of Toowoomba in the fourth round of Subaru National Road Series (NRS) in Queensland in May 2014.

Before the near career-ending injury, the now 29-year-old Cooper had high hopes to join the long list of accomplished Australian team alumnus to join the WorldTour ranks including Team Sky’s Richie Porte and Nathan Earle, Cannondale-Garmin’s Nathan Haas, BMC’s Campbell Flakemore, Orica-GreenEdge’s Jack Haig and former Garmin-Sharp rider Steele von Hoff (NFTO) and Argos rider Will Clarke (Drapac).

For Cooper, who returned three months after his injury and claimed the overall NRS crown, the road to recovery was not always a smooth one.



“There were certainly days where you question whether or not you want to carry on or give it away,” Cooper admitted to NZ Bike on Saturday. “It would’ve been pretty easy to pack it up and look for something less demanding on the body.

“But I’ve bounced back with a truckload of training and here I am now.”

Now fully recovered, the reigning national road race champion leads his New Zealand-registered Avanti Racing Team in the predominately sprinter-friendly eight-stage Tour de Korea which started on Sunday in Busan, South Korea.

“My role here for this tour is helping out the guys to get to the bunch kicks,” said Cooper at the pre-race press conference. “I don’t like to dabble in the bunch kicks, so I probably look to make my exit with about 2k to go on those stages.

“We will have a couple of team leaders for this race, such as Anthony Giacoppo (AUS), Neil van der Ploeg (AUS) and Patrick Bevin (NZL),” he continued. “We’ll roll the dice on different days with one being on the back of the other two riding in front.

“For me personally, I’ll probably want to go ride solo for 80k which could be fun.”
Cooper has raced very little since taking third overall at the Herald Sun Tour behind teammate Bevin and Aussie race winner Cameron Meyer (Orica-GreenEdge), but believes his opportunities to prove his ProTour worth will come again in 2015.

“I haven’t raced as much as I’ve wanted to do this season but there are a lot of people on the team and it’s always tough fighting for an actual starting position,” said Cooper, who last raced at Tour de Taiwan in late March. “I just need to work out what I’m going to offer a ProTour team.

“Even if I’m not winning races, I need to show I’m still capable of pulling some pretty big turns for whoever really, and if I can get our guys in a descent enough position, and showcase a bit of some of that driving ability.

“I am still hopeful that I can keep knocking on the door of getting a ProTour contract,” he concluded. “That’s still my number one goal really.”

Aaron S. Lee is a cycling and triathlon columnist for Eurosport and a guest contributor to NZ Bike Magazine