News – Hammond wants title for his team

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Double British Road Race champion Roger Hammond wants another National crown with the help of his riders at Madison Genesis

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News – Hammond wants title for his team

Team manager Roger Hammond wants a third British title – and believes the young members of his Madison-Genesis are just the ones to land the British Road and Time Trial Championships Under-23 crown this June.

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First of the two titles in 2003 at Celtic Manor.

The major teams, like Team Sky, are likely to dominate the Elite Men’s Road Race, with their stars looking to wear the red, white and blue National jersey for the coming year. But Hammond knows just what it takes to tame a tough National Championships course because he has done it twice in successive seasons, the last being a decade ago this year.

In fact, 2004 was a massive year for Hammond, now 40 and Directeur Sportif at British domestic team Madison-Genesis. He not only retained the National Championships title over a course around South East Wales, including a horrible climb at the Celtic Manor which will be included in this year’s Elite Men’s Race, but he also won the National Cyclo-Cross Championship and was third in a trio of major one-day stage races, including the legendary Paris-Roubaix.

Hammond also rode for Britain in the Athens Olympic Games that year, finishing a highly-credible seventh in the Road Race. Now though, the Oxford-born star, who rode for a season on the ProTour with the massive Discovery Channel team, hopes he can mould his young squad into stars of the future.

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Another title in 2004 for Hammond.

Hammond said: “It is tough when there are top pro teams in the main race. But there is a pro category and an Under-23 category. So it is a realistic target for us to go for that Under-23 jersey. Ten years ago, when there was no Team Sky, and other Pro riders were scattered about other teams, it gave more of a chance to the domestic riders to win the National title. Now they are struggling.”

Which is why young Madison-Genesis riders like Alex Peters and Peter Hawkins, who were overall first and second respectively in this month’s first big domestic competition – the two-day Tour of the Reservoir, are being funneled through teams like Hammond’s to possible bigger things.

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Rising star Alex Peters racing for a team now managed by Roger Hammond, Madison Genesis

“Our aim is to get riders on teams like Sky and Omega Pharma-QuickStep,” he added. Hammond does not know who will be leading that charge for the Under-23 title within his squad yet. He said: “The race is quite a way off yet and we have a few months of racing to do before then when riders can come into form for three or four weeks at a time.”

“Anything can happen but Alex has just won the Tour of the Reservoir and Peter was second and we have some other talented Under-23s in the squad. Anyone of them can win it.”

Hammond knows one thing for sure. Even though the iconic Tumble Mountain climb, which featured in the 2009 Nationals held in Monmouthshire, won’t feature this June, any course devised by ‘2013 British Cycling Organiser of the Year’ Bill Owen will be anything but flat.

And just as it was when the double champion won the National jersey in 2003 and 2004, ten years on the riders will face a fearsome, long and almost vertical ascent up to the Celtic Manor, similar to that which Hammond endured.

Thus, he said: “All our riders can climb so that will be an advantage to us. It will also be an experience for our team to ride with people like (Sir) Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome if they are in the field.”

Hammond is also among a unique group of just three riders to have won the Elite Men’s National Road Championships in successive years as a professional since 1959. Torquay’s Colin Lewis managed it in 1967 and 1968 while John Tanner, from Yorkshire, took the crown in 1999 and 2000.

The Oxfordshire man said: “I was quite lucky when I won that it was over the same circuit in Wales two years in a row. It’s a little like (Team) Sky trying out the Tour de France one year and then having the ideas on how to attacking it the next year. I just went through the same racing and training programme the following year as I did for the first year I won it.”

And Hammond says it’s fantastic for Wales – and Monmouthshire – to be staging the Championships again. “Wales, and that part of it, is beautiful with great riding and scenery. It always seems there are a lot of cycling fans down there.

“You get the feeling that the Welsh love having us down there and want us to race.”

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