PRO DIARIES
DAN MARTIN
ISRAEL START-UP NATION
Illustration: David Despau.
It’s crazy to say, but it was nine years since I had raced the Tour du Haut Var, now called the Tour des Alpes-Maritimes et du Var. Bizarrely I got 14th in 2012 and 15th in 2021. The name may have changed but the character of the race is intact. I was not scheduled to attend this year, preferring to head even further south in February like other years and race Valencia and Ruta del Sol, but the covid cancellations brought me back to France.
Racing on French roads is nervy and stressful. The structure of the races in Spain is more simple, the roads are usually bigger and stages more defined. Haut Var is similar to many of the French amateur races, and I spent my formative years in the area racing on the very same roads with VC La Pomme Marseille. By this I mean they are hard roads. Twisting and turning, up and down, a lot of road furniture demanding a high level of concentration. Only on stage 2 was it really clear how tactics would play out, as it was a short steep climb to the finish at Fayence. The other stages were too hard for sprinters but with stage 1 having a long steady climb to the finish and stage 3 having a 25km descent and flat section from the last climb, there was no true mountaintop finish for the climbers to really get their teeth into. It was far from the ease into the season that many want.