It’s a new course and a new season, but the defending Tour Down Under champion and her teammates are ready for the three stages at this year’s race.

We caught up with Noemi to chat about returning to Adelaide and her expectations for the race.

It feels amazing. I’m so happy to be back here. It's just nice to be back. All the memories are coming up again. It feels very familiar to be back here. I recognize everything: the race village and the roads we were training on, and just the vibe is so nice. Just relaxed and I’m super happy to be back.

All the memories from the race last year, from the win. They’re using a lot of my winning pictures around, so I get reminded of this every time I walk into the hotel, which is nice. But also just the whole time that we had around the race. We experienced so much together as a team. It was such a good time, so all of these memories but also of course the race. It was such a special win for me. To think back makes me really happy. 

We have a bit of a different team than last year but we still have a very strong squad with our two new ones [Alice Towers and Stina Kagevi] and I’m really excited. I think we have a really strong team. It’s very diverse so we have a lot of different qualities and strengths within the team and I’m sure that together we are super strong. Every individual is strong and we can play different cards and use our own strengths and we’ll do the best that we can.

The stages look really nice. They are different from last year as well. I think it makes it a bit more diverse, the whole race. Obviously, we don’t have Willunga Hill anymore, which was very decisive last year so I think this year it will be more stage 3 that will decide the GC. Stage 1 and stage 2 are a bit more open and could end in a sprint finish with a smaller group, so for our team, the stages are really good. I’m excited.

Pretty similar to last year. I spend a lot of time indoors on the trainer because the weather turned quite cold and it’s full winter in Switzerland. I did a lot of indoor training which I think is not worse, it makes you really strong as well. I did heat training as well. We did a lot of heat sessions over the past few months. I’m feeling ready to beat the heat.

It’s very exciting that everything comes quite quickly. It can be tiring, of course, but I think it makes our lifestyle very exciting because there’s always something coming up and you don’t have a lot of time to think about what’s passed. You just have to refocus and prepare for the next thing, which can be really nice but sometimes can also be really stressful. You kind of miss really enjoying the moment or to have time to let something sink in and reflect on it. I think I mostly enjoy it because once one thing is done, you just go on to the next. You have a lot of opportunities coming, and if you go through a bad situation or a bad moment, you know there’s always something coming up that will be better.

I think it’s the first time I will actually wear bib number one, so that’s really special. To defend something will be a new situation for me, but I'll try to take it as I did last year, with as little pressure as possible and just try to enjoy being back here, just to take this as a motivation that I’m the defending champion. I’m not putting too much pressure on myself because I know I work better if I’m relaxed and just enjoy the race. I’ll just try to enjoy it and do the same as I did last year. In the end, I cannot do more than just race my bike and we have a super strong team that I can trust. It will be good.

I feel really good coming into this race. I know I did quite a similar preparation as I did last year with the winter, and it worked out really well for the whole season afterwards, so I’m pretty confident that I’m on the right path as well now. Of course, I also have a lot of thoughts. Is it going to be the same as last year? Can I defend the title? Can I prove what I did last year? And for the whole season, I had such a good season last year that I think this win at Tour Down Under gave me a lot of confidence for the whole season, so I think it was quite an important win for me so I hope I can do it again. What if I can’t do it again? Does it mean maybe the whole season goes differently as well? There’s a lot that I think about, but I can only trust that if I’m doing the things I did last year, it should work as well this year. For sure, I hope that it’s going to end in the same way.