Owain Doull is setting his sights on riding cycling’s biggest one-day Classics in his first season with Team Sky.
The 23-year-old Welshman, who was crowned Olympic team pursuit champion in Rio in August, is currently racing with the British squad as a trainee but will turn professional on January 1 on a two-year contract.
Doull finished third at the 2015 Tour of Britain stage race while riding for WIGGINS, but he sees himself as a one-day specialist and wants to waste no time in establishing himself in Team Sky's Classics line-up.
Speaking at the Abu Dhabi Tour, where he was racing last week, he told Sky Sports: "My goal is to be involved in the Classics group and make the starting team for races like the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix.
"Sky have got such a strong team so that is going to be difficult, but those are the races I want to do well in further in the future, so the first stage is to ride those races. That's the goal for next year."
The Abu Dhabi Tour was Doull's second race for Team Sky, having made his debut as the Paris-Tours one-day sprinters' Classic earlier this month.
He had hoped to support Mark Cavendish at the UCI Road World Championships in Qatar, but he was not selected and now admits getting back in race shape after his Olympic success was harder than expected.
He added: "In my head, I was going to do Rio, have a week out there afterwards, and then get back and knuckle down and have a good Tour of Britain.
"But the reality of winning the Olympics is completely different. I'll be honest, for two or three weeks I didn't want to ride my bike at all. It was quite a chore. You have achieved this massive thing and all you want to do are the things you haven't been able to do before.
"But then I took a massive battering at the Tour of Britain and that was a wake-up call. I knuckled down for the past five or six weeks and it's gone a lot better. I haven't got much form, but I can still do a job."