Kaden Hopkins will continue his cycling career in the Caribbean after signing for a team in Guadeloupe.

Hopkins has already arrived on the island after making the decision to leave Europe and join Unisportlamentinois, the biggest team in Guadeloupe, on a year contract and he is delighted that his short-term future has been secured.

“I am actually really excited,” Hopkins said.

“The people in Guadaloupe are really passionate about cycling. The team situation is pretty great, I’ve been put up in a house here and they are going to support me throughout the whole season.

“It’s definitely a big change from Europe but it’s not one that I’m unhappy about. For me this year, no matter what team I got on, the big objectives were going to be the Pan American Championships.

“That will still be my main goal but being here just means I get to keep the racing in my legs and the team that I am riding for race the Tour of Guadeloupe. In the last couple of seasons that has been one of my most important events and this team will have full support for me in that, so I’m really looking forward to it.”

It has been a difficult few months for Hopkins as pressure started to build in the hunt for a new team and he is relieved that he can now focus his attention on what he does best.

“It is a weight off the shoulders,” Hopkins said.

“Teams will always talk and say that they are interested but a lot of the time it will fall through and for a while it was looking like this season I wasn’t going to have anything.

“It looked as if I was just going to be travelling around Europe doing really small races and then competing for Bermuda. But having more of a set structure for racing is definitely a mental relief, not having to worry about logistics and being in one place and having a team to organise things is good.”

So for the next year Hopkins will be plying his trade around the Caribbean, where he knows what it takes to win after finishing in the green jersey at the Tour of Guadeloupe last year. Familiar with the level of competitors on the island, he insists that there is not much of a drop in the standard of riding.

“When I’ve come here the last couple of years to race, the level of the local guys has been super high,” Hopkins said.

“It will still be hard racing and racing is only as hard as you make it, so it will just mean that in more races instead of hanging on and letting other teams almost dictate the race it will be more on me to make the racing hard, which I don’t think is a bad thing.

“Before making the decision to come here, I was talking to my agent and he said that it is still European-level racing and they do have UCI races. It won’t be as deep but the top guys in Guadeloupe are of a high level.”

Hopkins is unsure whether he will be in the Caribbean for longer than his year commitment to Unisportlamentinois but is hopeful that racing in the Caribbean will lead to a better performance for Bermuda in the Pan American Championships, which will be held in Uruguay at the end of next month.

“This is a one-year plan to keep the racing in my legs and give me some more freedom to have proper preparation for races such as the Pan American Championships,” Hopkins said.

“The Pan Ams is a very big event and worth a lot of UCI points but the last couple of years I’ve almost had to squeeze it into the calendar.

“The last couple of years I’ve been prepping for Circuit des Ardennes and almost as soon as I’d finished I was travelling to Pan Ams. For preparing for events like that, this is actually a better situation for me because I have a specific build up and I don’t have to deal with as big of a time change.

“Going from Europe you almost need a week to get over the time difference but there is only a two-hour difference to Guadeloupe, so there will probably be no effects at all. It gives me more freedom to prepare for events that I haven’t been able to specifically prepare for before.”

Hopkins is happy that he is now able to look forward to racing again just a couple of months after he was injured by a motorbike while training on the streets of Bermuda.

“It took a while to get back, especially with the ribs and neck,” he said.

“They definitely took a couple of weeks even after I was back in Spain for the pain to go away. Now I’m feeling no effects. I’ve gone through the chiropractors and the masseuse to get over it and I fell back to 100 per cent and looking forward to start racing as this has been the longest break that I’ve had in a long time.”

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