The young Welsh rider is part of Team Wiggins and talked about the emotions of sharing a room with his team captain during the Tour of Britain in his latest blog on Skysports.com.
Doull is currently in Tenerife for a Great Britain training camp and revealed that Mark Cavendish is also with the squad as they prepare for the winter season and especially the track World Championships in London in March. Cavendish is keen to fight for a place in the Great Britain team pursuit squad and perhaps ride the multi-discipline Omnium event in Rio.
Doull said that Cavendish had “blended in seamlessly and is just one of the lads. The team bond is really strong and he has only added to it.”
“The first phase of the 2015/16 track cycling season is now over and it’s fair to say we’ve had a couple of ups and downs in the men’s team pursuit,” Doull said.
“There's no escaping it: finishing fifth was a disappointment. However, if you look closely at our performances and results, it's easy to see where we went wrong and realise that, despite the outcome, we were possibly the fastest team there,” he explained.
“In the qualifying round we decided to take it steady and that backfired a bit. Lesson learnt. Then in the first round, we went out really hard and were flying, but we weren't able to keep up that pace and cracked in the last couple of laps. Again, lesson learnt. That left us in the race for fifth place and, this time, we got it absolutely spot on. We rode so well that we were on world-record pace for the first 2km and ended up catching our opponents, Germany, in the last 1km. If we hadn't caught them - and consequently completed the full 4km - our time would almost certainly have been faster than any of the four teams who contested the medal finals, so that was a massive positive.”
Get The Leadout Newsletter
The latest race content, interviews, features, reviews and expert buying guides, direct to your inbox!
Great Britain set a new world record of 3:51.659 at the London 2012 Olympics and know that they need to go below 3:50 to win gold in Rio next summer.
“We're aiming to break the world record at next summer's Olympics and the World Cup proved to us that we have it in us to do that, even nine months out from the Games,” he said.
Sharing a room with Wiggins
Doull is a key part of the Great Britain team pursuit squad alongside Bradley Wiggins. He explained how he grew up admiring his success and so finds it strange sharing a room with him.
“I'm not sharing a room with Sir Bradley Wiggins this time, but I did at the Tour of Britain in September. That was a surreal experience,” Doull noted.
“I watched him winning gold medals at the Beijing Olympics back in 2008 when I was just a kid, so to be sharing with him seven years later is bizarre. He's very meticulous, as you would probably imagine. All of his stuff is neatly folded away and in its place and nothing is a mess, whereas I'm much more a floordrobe kind of kind of guy.”
The 22-year-old Doull is set to start with Team Wiggins for the 2016 season but has confirmed to Cyclingnews that he has already secured as contract on the road with a WorldTour team for 2017. He finished fifth in the under-23 time trial at the World Championships in Richmond.
“We're all now building towards the UCI Track Cycling World Championships in London in March, which will be our next race,” he said.
“There are two more World Cups before then, in New Zealand in December and Hong Kong in January, but we won't be going to either of them due to the fact that they are such long-haul trips. It's in our best interests to stay at home and train instead. London is a big target, though, and we'll be working hard over the next few months to make sure we're back among the medals in front of a home crowd.”
