Bauke Mollema is back on his bike. The Dutch rider is already training in order to improve his shape for next season. The Trek rider, who finished in the top 10 at the Tour de France for the third consecutive times,  again has the French race as his main goal.

"It has been about four weeks since my last race and that is always the moment to start training again", he said in a short audio diary on the Trek Factory Racing site. "The off-season for me went very fast this year. Normally I go on the bike a couple of times but this year I haven’t touched my bike for almost four weeks so that’s a lot."

He confirmed his schedule for next year. He will ride the Tour de France and he hopes to be present in Brazil for the Olympic road race. "The intensity will not be as high in the next weeks, you have to start training easy and then from December on the intensity will be increased. In the winter I do a lot of training, core stability exercises, mostly twice a week to get some strength in the legs and also to train the rest of the body. I think it is important to train the core and the rest of the muscles."