BMC are looking to continue their good spring season with a win at Amstel Gold where they will back their sole leader and defending champion, Philippe Gilbert, who was second at Brabantse Pijl in midweek.

“With BMC we have a lot of specialists for the one-day races. We saw it in the last weeks and I think I can be confident with a team like this. This helps me to be more relaxed at the start. When you know your team is strong and you can trust them as a leader it’s already a big win,” Gilbert said during a press conference in Belgium on Friday afternoon.

Gilbert is the undisputed King of the Cauberg; the 1.2km climb that summits just 1km from the finish of Amstel Gold. Gilbert has three wins in Amstel and a win at the 2012 Worlds, which used the same course.

“I just like this kind of effort, short and intense. If you look at the percentage of my victories that came on climbs like this it’s a lot. I’ve won a lot of races where it is an uphill finish like this,” he explained. “One of my trainers was saying that the hardest thing in sport is to do this kind of effort. You have to go very deep, physically and mentally, and this takes a lot of energy out of you. This is something hard to do and I don’t think a lot of people can do it.”

Gilbert explained what it takes to be able to launch a move on the Cauberg like he has done in the past. He says he has trained for weeks to replicate his effort on the Cauberg each year.

“It’s a very nervous approach because the descent, depending on the wind, you are going something like 70 kilometres an hour and it’s not straight so it’s very dangerous,” said Gilbert. “When you turn you just have to see where your position is and only after that can you focus on the effort. You don’t really have time to think about it, you just have to be ready in the days before. It’s not starting on that descent; it’s something you have to work on sometimes weeks before.”

He has plenty of competiton this year in the form of the ever-present Alejandro Valverde and Michal Kwiatkowski, a resurgent Joaquim Rodriguez and first-time Amstel team leader Michael Matthews. But he knows the strongest will always win the race.

“In the end it is always the same, the strongest always win. I just have to manage to be the strongest.”