World Championships Recap

This will be brief as I have dropped the ball on coverage of the spectacle.

Road Race:

The men’s road race was an insane war from the moment the peloton hit the circuit in Glasgow with about 150km remaining in the race. Denmark put in an epic shift on the front to try to set up Mads Pedersen on a course that suited him. This proved to be a wise decision. Attacks would fly endlessly for hours until the cream of the crop rose to the top, and the victory would be fought for by Tadej Pogacar, Matthieu van der Poel, Wout van Aert, and Pedersen. From the brutality emerged the Dutchman, who took a famous solo victory despite a late crash. It will go down in history as a truly legendary race, and MVDP is a more than worthy winner. Eternal bridesmaid Wout took second, and Pogi surprisingly outsprinted Danish strongman Mads to take the bronze medal.

Time Trial:

A long, mostly flat, non-technical course provided an opportunity for the watts/CdA monsters, the true specialists of the discipline, to shine. Of these men, Wout, Filippo Ganna, and Remco Evenepoel generally rank as the three best in the world. Wout had a strange off-day despite flying the in the Road Race, while Ganna and Remco would battle each other all the way to the end, with Remco taking a narrow victory of 12 seconds to become only the second man to win the World TT and RR in his career, and in consecutive years to boot. 19-year-old Brit Josh Tarling finished a spectacular third, and Brandon McNulty, our American engine, shockingly took fourth.

The Worlds was a tremendous event. I was fortunate enough to watch the Road Race from start to finish. It was well worth the six-plus hours of my life I’ll never get back!

Some thoughts on my immediate future with this blog as I attempt to grow it…:

I’ll be hemming and hawing about some smaller races in the late summer, though precisely which ones will hinge on whether I have the opportunity to watch the majority of the race in question. The following races are potentially on the docket, with Anglican translations for ease of understanding: Tour of Denmark, Tour of Burgos (a city in Central Spain), Arctic Race of Norway, Renewi Tour, Tour of Britain, Brittany Classic, Maryland Cycling Classic, and Grand Prix(s) of Quebec City & Montreal.

More importantly, I will have a big Vuelta preview out next week, and will normally write a recap of the prior week of racing on each rest day. That is shaping up to be a fantastic race. I love the Vuelta for its underrated ability to deliver huge performances from top riders. The startlist is absolutely stacked this time around, and a fifth or sixth final GC position from a “Big Six” rider is not out of the question, because his competition will be so strong.

I was also slated to watch the Canadian Classics in early September in person, but I have nixed that trip in favor of a weekend jaunt to NYC *shrugs*… With hardly anybody of note confirmed on the startlists, it did not seem worth it to make the effort, timewise and financially, on a couple races that have to be viewed as a few tiers below the Monuments. That being said, going to Montreal last year to watch Pogi outsprint Wout was thrilling.

I’ll be back soon.

Jamie