Morale 'good' at Orica

Matt White says his depleted Orica-GreenEdge team are keeping their spirits up despite having to reassess their Tour de France aims.

Orica started the 2015 Tour in disastrous fashion, losing team leader Simon Gerrans to a crash on Monday's costly third stage, breaking his wrist in the process.

South African Daryl Impey made it to the end of the stage despite being caught up in the same crash that took down his Australian teammate but he then discovered he had a broken collarbone and also had to quit the race.

Michael Matthews soldiered on despite being badly injured and has been struggling at the back of the peloton every day since, often losing contact and currently sits last overall.

Worse news was to follow, though, when Switzerland's Michael Albasini had to quit before Thursday's sixth stage after breaking his arm in a fall on Wednesday, although he too had fought on to the end.

Orica had been expecting to challenge for victory in Sunday's team timetrial but that's now gone out of the window.
"I don't think it's been too hard to reassess our goals with regards the team timetrial, especially now with Michael Albasini out," said White.

"We were taking it day by day but realistically now we haven't got a chance to win the timetrial with six riders and with some very key athletes out.

"It is what it is, we've got to move on and regroup and we've got to turn it around as well. Other teams have had bad luck as well; it seems to have hit us harder than anyone else but we've been in this situation before.

"We finished with two riders at the end of the Giro last year. We had a little more success at the start of the Giro but it's certainly not over for us and we're going to have a lot of opportunities in the future."

- spirits high -

Some might expect Orica's riders to be downbeat but White insisted spirits are still as high as could be expected.

"The morale is fine, it's disappointing to see your captains and teammates and roommates go home, all of these guys have worked incredibly hard to be in top condition for the biggest race in the world, so that's the disappointment.

"But you've got to move on, once you start dwelling on what's been happening in the past, that's a negative that no-one needs to feel.
"The morale in the team is good, they're not as chirpy as they were a couple of days ago but I think a few riders in other teams that haven't crashed aren't chirpy as well.

"It's been a stressful and very aggressive race so far but it's only just started."

One of the remaining riders, Luke Durbridge, certainly did not appear downbeat and wasn't completely ruling out a tilt at timetrial glory.

"With six guys and also one guy hurting, I think it's definitely going to be hard to compete against a team of nine," he said.

"We are good at team timetrials and we're definitely going to give it a go but I wouldn't put us in the favourites.

"It depends on the guys you've got. If you remember a couple of years ago Garmin had (Bradley) Wiggins, (Christian) Vande Velde, (Ryder) Hesjedal and five of the strongest timetrial guys (including David Miller and David Zabriskie) in the World Tour and they ran second with five guys.

"But we don't have those sort of calibre guys in timetrials so it's going to be hard for us to compete."
Source: AFP