Bradley Wiggins won this Thursday the individuel time trial at Driedaagse De Panne. The British rider led Stefan Küng (BMC Racing Team) by 10 seconds heading into the final stage 3b 14.2km. He is still in the process of refining his physical preparation in order to be at the top at Tour fo Flanders and Paris-Roubaix, his last race on road.

Rod Ellingworth, who joined the Team Sky’s staff for classics, believes that his team will be very competitive and the Geraint Thomas’s win at E3 Harelbeke gave some confident for everyone. But he knows that these races are very unpredictable.

"At these races you’ve really got to take it race by race. Look at what has happened with Boonen, Cancellara and Van Avermaet. You can make all the plans in the world but we’ll stick to our game and take the best eight riders we’ve got," he explained according to Cyclingnews. "We’ll have a clear plan for both Flanders and Roubaix and we’ve kept our energy and outlook up throughout the last few weeks. We’re in the best place we’ve ever been as a Classics team and who knows where that will take it."

But Ellinworth does not make a clarification about the Wiggins's role on these races. "He was poorly and didn’t do E3 and then on Sunday it’s difficult to say how he was going. Eisel pointed out to us on the bus that most of the top ten in Gent-Wevelgem crashed at least once so it’s hard to tell how people are going," Ellingworth told Cyclingnews. "There’s an ideal programme for everyone but how often do you get to take the ideal path all the way through? You almost always have to divert off but he’s been riding coming into this race but only 39 riders finished Gent-Wevelgem but he’s wanted to race De Panne and keep this week as busy as possible."

Rod Ellingworth told also about the training according to Velonews. “It’s different training, but you can do things to replicate what you’ll find in Paris-Roubaix. It’s pretty simple: what time are you spending and what intensity, and the intervals between the sectors, what [the watts] look like on the cobbles, what it looks like the rest of the time.”

The 34-year-old rider made Paris-Roubaix his last major goal before the hour record and 2016 Olympics. He explained that he has been timing all the sectors : Quiévy to Saint-Python which takes about “five minutes”. The sector at Carrefour de l’Arbre, usually the most important in the race, takes “about 3min 20sec”.