With the first Team Camps and some successful racing on home soil already in the books, Matt Dinham sat down to take you through his first official month with the team.
Hi everyone,
I am Matt Dinham and I just joined Team DSM at the beginning of this year. This month I want to take you a bit through the first weeks of my time with the team.
So far, I am really enjoying my time here and the new environment. It was obviously a big step up for me from a continental team. Now it is a lot more professional, and I really had a good start here. All riders and staff are really friendly and helpful and I think everyone here on the team just wants to get the best out of each other and win races. It’s been a really good start to the races as well, I think. All the boys are 100 percent committed to the team’s goals. We had a little bit of bad luck in the beginning, but we could already show what we are capable of doing when we go into a race with a good plan, and I am confident more good results will follow.
Chris and I started our campaign with the Australian nationals. We knew Jayco would be at the start line with quite some riders and with it being my first race as a WorldTour rider, I wasn’t quite sure how it would go. Midway through I felt my legs were not the best that day, so I fully committed to helping Chris. I brought back a couple of moves to bring him into the best position I could. I was able to do some turns in the end as well after coming back and trying to bring his group across to the leaders. He had a great day and a good sprint as well and I think fifth was a good result to start the season.
Next up was the Tour Down Under. Every Australian likes starting their season at home and I was really hoping that I could start my season there as well and was really happy that I could do so. I raced the non-WorldTour version last year quite well so some of the roads were quite familiar. I think that helped my transition into the WorldTour a little bit but doing it in the Team DSM jersey was completely different. I really enjoyed it, even if the race was as hard as I was expecting but I was also performing slightly better than I expected so I think it was a good start for me personally.