Urán targets Tour and world championships in reshaped 2020 season
EF Pro Cycling rider keeping options open for later in calendar, with Vuelta and classics both options.
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Rigoberto Urán will be heading up EF Pro Cycling’s Tour de France team this summer. The 33-year-old star will then target the world championships before making a late call about how to play the rest of his season.
“I will be riding the Tour de France again this year, which would be in August and September, then the world championship, and then I don’t know if the classics or the Vuelta a España,” Urán told Marca Saturday.
Having placed seventh in the 2019 Tour before crashing and picking up a list of fractures and other injuries at the Vuelta a España, Urán is just pleased to see racing on the horizon. Like countrymen and Tour rivals Egan Bernal and Nairo Quintana, Urán spent the spring in confinement in Colombia, and called the August 1 racing restart “a light at the end of the tunnel.”
After months spent months in lockdowns and a much-shortened racing block before the Tour, the peloton will be riding into the unknown when they roll out of Nice on August 29. While Urán is confident that he has time to hit peak form now that he is back training on open roads, he is forecasting an unpredictable Tour this summer.
“There are almost four months left to get to the Tour, that is the perfect time to arrive well in conditions,” he said. “[But] surely it will be a little more open because of the changed calendar, and without much riding in the legs. It will be an interesting Tour.”
Urán spoke frequently of the uncertainty shrouding the UCI’s new-look race schedule as the world cautiously begins to peek its head out of lockdown. One race still shrouded in speculation is this year’s world championships, with recent reports suggesting the event may shift the venue from a lumpy Swiss course to a sprinter-friendly race in Qatar. Should that be the case, presumably Urán will reconsider his schedule for the year.