Robbie McEwen is currently in the USA to work in his new position as a "global ambassador” in the InfoCrank booth at the Sea Otter Classic. It’s a new power meter offered by Verve Cycling.

"Training with power is something I've always been interested in," said McEwen, 42, before an autograph session. "The left-and-right balance is super important and I've always had an imbalance due to injuries, especially in the past few years.

"I broke my leg in 2009, so my left leg has always been the problem child. A product like this gives you such accurate information of what the imbalance is and with some of the new tweaks it's going to have, it's going to give you even more information about the imbalances you may have. You can know what's going wrong and go about fixing it so you can improve."

The three-time Green Jersey in the Tour de France has been giving some words of advice on recovery to BMC rider Taylor Phinney, who broke his leg last June at the US National Championships. As McEwen mentioned earlier, he knows what he is talking about when it comes to recovery after he suffered his own leg break.

"I'm friendly with him and I've sort of been keeping an eye on his progress with social media updates quite often," said McEwen. "It's something I am really familiar with after breaking my leg. I know he's going to have a long, tough road to come back and realistically he will probably never be the same as he was."

"But if he can get within a few percentage points, that can still be good enough. If he was fully fit with zero injuries and he could win races when he was 80 per cent, now he's going to have to be 95 to 100 per cent. It's possible and he has a lot of specialists looking after him. But before we start talking about winning stuff, we're just going to have to talk about him just being back."