Dan Martin: Confident and hopeful ahead of his first Tour de France
On the eve of his first Tour de France, Dan Martin tells Brian Canty he is itching to get going in Liege tomorrow and hopeful of being able to show what he can do when the race takes to the mountains.
Dan Martin could have chosen a different road in life; a less gruelling one. But tomorrow he starts out on the most gruelling one of all, the Tour de France. And he can barely sit still thinking about it.
“I’m trying not to get too excited because it's just a bike race and you can get overtaken by the magnitude of the event,” he reasons.
“Your head starts to wander a bit but I’m here to do a job. I’m here to impress our new sponsor (Sharp came on board during the week) too. So it’s a mixture of anticipation and nerves.”
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Martin is a breath of fresh air in many ways; there’s no monosyllabic tones and he speaks free of cliché.
His points are well articulated and for a 25-year-old about to embark on his maiden Tour, he’s remarkably confident.
“I’m really lucky to be in the situation I’m in. But on the other side I always believed that I’d get to this stage. I never had any doubt in my mind that I was going to get to this level. You train that little bit harder and you know you make all the sacrifices in life. You can hardly say I lived a normal life as a young 25-year-old lad.”
“It’s a very abnormal lifestyle but it’s always been like that. It’s a way of life. I’ve definitely been brought up in that lifestyle and that’s also something that I’ve been lucky in. The lifestyle of a professional cyclist has pretty much been built into me since I was two-years old. It’s just normal for me.”
His father, U23 Ireland team manager Neill Martin, was a very talented professional rider and Dan was barely a one-year-old when his uncle Stephen Roche churned his way to the top of the world in 1987.
But cycling really only truly entered the younger Martin’s domain when he saw Miguel Indurain smash his rivals into submission during the 1993 Tour. The seed had been sown.
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“I did everything I could in school to help me be a cyclist, even down to the subjects I chose; it was all geared to being a professional cyclist. I took the maximum number of languages I could. People always thought I was crazy because there was no question of me going to University even though I did pretty well at school.”
“I was pretty good at history, like in the A levels I got in the top half a per cent in the country or something. I was actually really, really good and people were like, ‘you’re flipping crazy’!”
Though he was slated to start the 2009 Tour, injury scuppered that plan and it was almost a case of déjà vu this time around again after he crashed heavily in the week-long Criterium du Dauphine at the start of the month. But he says he’s now “back on track”.
“I’ve been getting better and better. It was pretty rough getting over the crash. It was a pretty big tumble I had and I’ve just been getting physio on my shoulder and hip to get myself back right, and just resting really. We’re definitely back on track. I feel really good on my bike at the moment. I’m still a bit tired but we should be ready to go.”
That crash and the fact it’s his first voyage into the world’s most famed race has taken the pressure off him somewhat. But he’s determined to repay those who’ve invested faith in him as well as his team-mates.
“I’m looking around at the dinner table at the class of rider, and we’ve got a hell of a lot of horsepower in the team. We’re not coming here just to ride around; we’ve got opportunities to win on every single stage and to be part of a stage-winning team at the Tour de France, for myself, would be huge.”
“I showed in the Vuelta last year that I can perform well over three weeks and be consistent and that’s part of the pressure as well but I do really deserve to be here and that gives me confidence because the team really believes in me.”
As for the chances of Ireland’s first stage win in 20 years?
“I think I definitely have the form to be able to contend for stage wins right on the climbs, especially with the relative lack of pure climbers at the race this year. (If I) expend less energy on the flat stages than the GC guys and be that little bit more fresh on the climbs I can really show what I can do.”
Paris is 3,500 kilometres away from where the race starts in Liege tomorrow and though it’s the end of one journey, it’s the beginning of another.
“It’s the Tour de France; when anyone discovers you’re a bike rider the first thing they’ll say is ‘Do you do the Tour de France?’ So hopefully I can say after this July I can say ‘Yes, I do’.
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