Rider diary with… Matt Dinham

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.

After the race, the organisation set up surfing lessons for the people that were staying for the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race with one of the local surf companies. They taught us how to surf on the sand first and then we tried it on the water. We saw some pretty decent nose dives from some of the guys, but it was really fun. The day after we then celebrated the birthday of our coach Luke and just had a pre-Australia day BBQ, so we gave the boys the full Aussie experience the last days.

The trip to Australia couldn’t find a better ending. At the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race we showed some nice racing as a team and took home the victory with Marius, while the guys in Argentina also won two stages. This was a super nice start to the season for the team, but also in my time with the team and I am super proud that we finished off the campaign with style.

Looking ahead, I would like to keep developing as a GC rider and specifically work on my TT this year. Having a TT bike over there in Europe and a real home base will definitely help with that. In general though, the main goal is learning as much as possible from the team: the way they race, how everyone interacts with each other, and really help our leaders at the races to get the results we can.

I’m super excited for the year and what’s next!

Cheers,

Matt