Haig was caught up in the early maelstrom of calamity and crashes at the Tour de France, breaking his collarbone during the twisting finish to Stage 3 and having to abandon the race. His main objective of the season gone, he then had complications from the break that had to be corrected with surgery that saw him sit out the Olympics as well.
Some may have packed in the 2021 season there, but Haig reset his sights on the Vuelta a España and finishing the season on a positive note, as he explained in an interview with SBS Cycling Central.
“Yeah, it was definitely hard,” said Haig of his enforced lay-off. “It was hard to keep motivated while the Tour de France was on, then watching the Olympics on TV and hearing a lot of my friends that had gone to the Olympics talking about it, while I was sat at home on the sofa with a broken collarbone. It was hard to refocus after that.
“I came into the Vuelta after breaking my collarbone at the Tour de France and I wasn’t sure what to expect from myself. I didn’t have too many weeks to train before coming into this race and the team was taking Mikel Landa who has experience making the podium of Grand Tours, he was the GC leader.
“I was coming along to see how my form was and mainly looking ahead to next year and making sure I had legs for the year after, not expecting too much from this year. It’s been a positive outcome, I’m sitting here on the rest day fourth on GC, it’s been a lot better than I expected.”
A large part of the motivation for the performance is centred on Haig’s role within the team as a general classification leader. There’s a strong belief from the 27-year-old from Bendigo of his own identity as a leader, modelling his own professionalism to the rest of the squad that he’s asking to work for him and build confidence in management.
“I wanted to leave a good impression on the team,” said Haig. “I’m here for two more years and I wanted to make sure I was doing my first year in the team in the right direction, that I’m a super motivated athlete, professional, and that I can come back from injury and do a good performance.
“Not only the management and the staff, but my teammates too. That I’m committed to this team and I want to perform really well and show by example what I expect from them, that I expect their best as well. Whether they’re riding for me or anyone else in the team.
“I have quite high standards in this. To be a leader you have to have those personality traits to be able to motivate the guys around you, so they can sacrifice themselves for you.”
Haig is a laconic character, always ready with a laugh and a joke where there’s one to be had, but you sense that there are two modes to the Victorian, and the man with a look of steely eyed determination at the conclusion of a mountain stage appears a very different one from the easy-going Aussie in interviews. The more laidback version of Haig said he was very happy with what he’s done so far, but the competitive side would surely love to make the most of the opportunity that he has at present.
“I didn’t expect to be in this situation when we started, so everything from here on is sort of a bonus,” said Haig. “I’d love to keep progressing on GC and really fight for a podium position, but if I lost everything tomorrow, I’d still be happy with how things have gone in this Vuelta. I obviously would love to get the most out of it, if I could finish Top 5 or Top 10 on GC that would be great.”
Haig has long been one of the ‘next’ generation of Australia’s talented climbers, but now he has fully arrived and is taking on leadership roles at every race that he’s a part of. He performed very well in the early season stage races, what is new for Haig is coming into the role in a Grand Tour off a less than ideal preparation from his Tour crash.
“It’s obviously difficult because the body adapts differently every time,” said Haig. “I was nervous in the weeks training between the fracture and the Vuelta, whether my body was going to adapt to the training as it had done in the past because the body is also healing at the same time and maybe has a little less energy to out into the training adaptations.
“I don’t really know, but from the last nine days of the Vuelta, everything seems to be going in the right direction and I hope that the weeks off the bike will make me a little bit fresher going into the final week of the Vuelta.”
Looking ahead for the rest of the Spanish Grand Tour, the second week is filled with medium mountains days before the final week looks to be filled with decisive mountain battles as well as the final time trial. For Haig, he’s not looking at the summit finishes to Lagos de Covadonga and Altu d’el Gamoniteiru with trepidation, rather the stages of concern are the ones where things are less within Haig’s personal control.
“To be honest the climbing stages and the super-hard mountain-top finishes aren’t the ones that concern me most,” said Haig. “It’s the terrain that I’m good at and we also have a team that’s good at that terrain.
“It’s more the in-between, transition stages, where you can unexpectedly lose time through some crosswinds or a crash, those sort of things that are out of your control. Those are the stages that I’m more worried about, I’m looking forward to those hard stages and hopefully having some warm weather up in the north of Spain. I’m excited for the final two weeks.”
The Vuelta a España continues on SBS VICELAND and SBS OnDemand from 2300 AEST tonight with Stage 10 mostly flat, with a steep but short ascent in the finale set to test the climbers and attackers.
