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He’s a quiet achiever but Luke Roberts deserves a lot of credit for the successes of Team Sunweb in 2017. We find out about his planning for the green jersey competition on the first day Michael Matthews leads the Tour de France’s points classification…
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RIDE: I’m with Luke Roberts just on the morning of stage 18. The race is almost done and you’ve got a green jersey as well as the polka-dot jersey. You must feel like the cat that swallowed the canary…
Luke Roberts: “Yeah, exactly. We had the goal coming here to win a stage; hopefully a stage with Michael, hopefully a stage with Warren also. And now we’ve had two with Michael and one with Warren.
“We had our eye on the green jersey from the beginning and put up a fight for it, kept the pressure on. Even though it looked at one moment a week ago like it was completely out of reach, I encouraged the guys to keep on fighting for it… and now it’s paid off.
“Now we’re wearing green plus the polka-dot today.”
It was nice for Michael to give the “brains trust” – Luke Roberts – a little mention the other day in the press conference. He’s got a lot of respect and admiration for the way you manage the strategy. Do you literally dream it up each night or how does it work before the team meeting?
“No, it’s quite a long process. Already beginning in October and November last year we looked at our line-ups for the races, the goals. Then the particular race coach – or DS for each race – can actually start to think about what sort of a tactic they’ll need to come to the race with.
“Then, towards the green jersey, we actually calculated – crunched some numbers – and knew exactly what we had to do and where we had to make points on each stage and how many points to really challenge for it.
“It reshuffled a little bit with Sagan going out, with Kittel winning five stages – [that] changed the prediction we had. But we said to Michael we would try and target around 350 points and then the others just have to be better than him to keep him from taking it.”
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Matthews makes his first public appearance in the green jersey on race day…
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There’s still Salon de Provence and Paris to come. Do you think that Michael might have the speed to pick up another couple of wins? Or is that being a bit ambitious?
“Yeah, we probably don’t want to get too greedy here. We’re happy with three stage wins and perhaps tomorrow (to Salon de Provence) with such a long stage it’s a difficult one to control. Really, at the end of the race now, after a few hard mountain days, it can be quite difficult for a team to try and control a break tomorrow.
“I think there’s a lot of people who have interests in the breakaway and for a lot of teams it’s their last chance to make a result. So I think it’s quite a good chance for a break tomorrow.”
Just a quick one about Michael in the green jersey… he sent a photo to me last night of him sleeping with his little ‘martian’.
“His teddy bear.”
Is he the kind of guy who is going to be better because he has achieved these milestones along the way?
“Yeah. He sets really high expectations on himself and small things can disappoint him quite a lot so to come out of this Tour having achieved the goals he set out for, with two stage wins and – all things going well – also carry green into Paris, then it’ll be great for his confidence.
“Perhaps he can step up another level.”
– Interview by Rob Arnold
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