An Introduction to the World Road Race Championships
You know, the other big races
Apologies for being about nine hours late with this edition of the newsletter, but I spent the entire weekend at a music festival. It’s a bit out of character, but Bruce Springsteen and Gaslight Anthem were playing the same bill in Asbury Park, and I had a patriotic duty as a New Jerseyan to be there. Then I was busy putting together a huge feature for FanGraphs that’ll run tomorrow morning, so I hope you’ll forgive the delay.
It’s a bit of a quiet period in the cycling calendar, after bouncing from classics to grand tours to Olympics back to more grand tours, but it won’t stay quiet for long. The UCI World Road Championships start on Saturday, and run for the next week. World championships are not unlike a music festival themselves, as the same city hosts more than a dozen high-level cycling and paracycling races, all on mostly the same roads. Lucky for fans, these roads tend to include circuits around urban centers, which makes this event substantially more spectator-friendly than the Tour de France, which might fly past you in a matter of seconds if you haul your camper van up the right hill and sit there waiting all day.
And while trade teams certainly have their influence on individual riders, worlds are unusual1 in that it’s a competition among national teams. Friends become enemies, enemies become lovers, etc.
There are 11 events at world championships: a road race and time trial for men’s and women’s senior riders, men’s and women’s junior riders, and men’s U23 riders. Why no women’s U23 classification? Sexism. There’s also a mixed time trial relay, which replaced the old team trial. The TTT was contested on trade teams, and I think on balance I liked it better, but I never really cared much about either.
The junior events are fun because, well, if you read my baseball writing at all, you know I’m a big college baseball fan. That’s because I love having one up on everyone else—i.e., by the time a rookie comes up to the majors, I can talk about how I saw him play in college and be just the world’s biggest know-it-all.
I guess it’s a coin flip as to whether the world junior champions amount to anything in the pros, but I’ll give you a sampling of junior world champs over the past decade. In 2015, Chloe Dygert burst onto the scene by winning the road race-ITT double on home soil in Richmond. A year later, Elisa Balsamo won the women’s road race, while Brandon McNulty won the men’s junior ITT. In 2018, Remco Evenepoel won the road race and ITT, both by more than 80 seconds, and if you’ve got a better harbinger of things to come I’m all ears. Josh Tarling won the men’s junior ITT as recently as 2022, and he’s now a top time trialist in the senior ranks.2
You can find the full calendar of events here, including the paracycling events, but I’ll lay out the schedule for road bicycling, just so you know what’s coming when:
Sunday, Sept. 22
Men’s elite individual time trial
Women’s elite individual time trial
Monday, Sept. 23
Men’s junior individual time trial
Men’s U23 individual time trial
Tuesday, Sept. 24
Women’s junior individual time trial
Wednesday, Sept. 25
Mixed team time trial relay
Thursday, Sept. 26
Women’s junior road race
Men’s junior road race
Friday, Sept. 27
Men’s U23 road race
Saturday, Sept. 28
Women’s elite road race
Sunday, Sept. 29
Men’s elite road race
The bad news is that while NBC/Peacock held the rights to the world championships for a long time, FloBikes holds the rights to this year’s event. So it’s no good to keep riding out that Peacock subscription you never canceled after the Olympics.3
I’ll have previews and analysis of the various races as they come, starting with the senior time trials in Friday’s newsletter. But I want to share two things you ought to expect generally about the coming week.
First: It’s Switzerland, so there are going to be hills. This is going to be one of the most climbing-intensive parcours in the recent history of the world championships—the elite men men are going to climb 10 marked hills with gradients between 4.8 percent and 6.2 percent in their road race.4 Even the time trials have significant climbing in the middle of the race. But there are no mountains as such.
Generally, world championships—as I’ve said—end up being contested in and around urban centers for the ease of the fans and organizers. This is the biggest cycling event on the calendar that isn’t fixed to a geographical location, so while the Tour de France organizers might feel some obligation to visit remote Alpine ski resorts or climb giant peaks in the middle of nowhere, the world championship organizers just want to put on an even that people will come to watch, and sponsors will pay to endorse.
As much as I love some of the more austere, remote locations among cycling’s iconic climbs, I do get the logic here. A circuit race is more fan-friendly, and an urban location can bring out some seriously raucous crowds. This is part of the draw of cyclocross as a spectator sport, after all.
As a general rule, we—i.e. humans—don’t build major cities on the side of mountains that rate as outside-category climbs. It’s expensive and inconvenient. Not only that, races with big mountains can be a little too selective. We just saw at the grand tours how few riders are capable of getting up a 2,000-meter climb with the best in the world. These punchier races are a little more open.
With that said, if there’s a steep hill or a cobbled street to be found in the host city, you’d better believe the organizers are going to find it. Races over flat ground end up in a bunch sprint, rendering the first six hours of the day moot—and with a world championship on the line, nobody’s letting a breakaway slip. The last time we had a proper sprinter’s world road race championship was in Doha in 2016. Before that, Copenhagen in 2011.
With those exceptions, the UCI has picked parcours that favor either puncheurs or cobbled classics specialists—ideally, with an eye toward a route that’s accessible to both. Something in the Strade Bianche-Amstel Gold range. Last year, Mathieu van der Poel soloed to victory on a course that included moderately punchy hills and cobbles, but Tadej Pogačar was able to hang on for a spot on the podium. That’s the ideal.
This parcours, especially with as much climbing as the men are going to have to do, is probably a little too Liège–Bastogne–Liège-y for MVDP. It’s as climbing-intensive as a world championship course gets. Which is good news for Pogačar, but that’s an issue for next week.
The other thing to know about worlds—and I admit this is going to make me sound like a crank—is that you are going to have no idea who’s who. The national kits can be confusing, for a start. Here are the top five finishers in the men’s road race at the Tokyo Olympics:
Richard Carapaz, Ecuador
Wout van Aert, Belgium
Tadej Pogačar, Slovenia
Bauke Mollema, Netherlands
Michael Woods, Canada
What did those five riders have in common on that day? None of their national team kits came in a color that matched their respective national flags. Carapaz wore white, van Aert blue, Pogačar green, Mollema orange, and Woods blue. Brandon McNulty, who finished in sixth place, wore red and blue, because America stands for truth.
To be honest, that’s not too big an obstacle. If you’ve watched the Olympics, you’re used to seeing Dutch athletes in orange, Italians in blue, Australians in green and gold, New Zelanders in black and white, and so on. The real killer is the race numbers.
At professional races, teams are issued numbers in groups of 10. The first team on the list gives no. 1 to its leader, then the other riders on the team5 get no. 2 through no. 8 in alphabetical order, depending on how many riders there are on each team. Then the next team starts with no. 11. So at the most recent Tour de France, Jonas Vingegaard got race no. 1 by virtue of being the defending champion. His first teammate in alphabetical order, Tiesj Benoot, got no. 2, and so on down the line to van Aert as no. 8.
Then, instead of picking up with no. 9, UAE Team Emirates’ block of numbers started with 11, which went to the leader, Pogačar. No. 12 was João Almeida, then down the line to Adam Yates, who got no. 18. Higher-numbered blocks tend to go to less prestigious teams, down to TotalEnergies in the 210s, and their alphabetical lanterne rouge, Mattéo Vercher, no. 218.
In a World Tour race, you can glance at the screen, identify the rider by his or her team, and if there’s a number ending in a one on their butt, you know that’s the team leader. If the number is anything else, you can guess who it is based on alphabetical order. Not like you’re ever going to confuse van Aert with Sepp Kuss, who’s half his size, even from behind, but you know that generally van Aert will have the higher number.
That’s not how it works at worlds. At worlds, numbers are given out sequentially.
At last year’s men’s world road race championship, the defending gold medalist, Evenepoel, wore no. 1. The rest of his Belgium team wore no. 2 through no. 9. So far, so good. Except those numbers were handed out in no order that’s obvious to me. Did defending silver medalist Christophe Laporte get no. 11, with his France teammates ordered behind? No. The next team on the line was Denmark, who got numbers 10 through 17, again, in no particular order. Then France, with 18 through 25.
Not only does taking the no. 1 (or at least the no. 1 in the ones’ column) off the leader’s back make it harder to identify the riders on the road, the team leader doesn’t even get the lowest number assigned to his national squad. Pogačar was seventh numerically out of eight Slovenian riders, while van der Poel was fourth on the Dutch team.
I hate it. I don’t care how crazy I sound. But take it from me, especially if you’re going to watch the race on tape delay because it starts at 4:30 a.m. on the East Coast and by God you’re not going to wake up that early on a Sunday, you should print out the startlist and have it handy so you can tell Mads Pedersen from Frederik Wandahl.
And even then, make sure your startlist is up-to-date, because Ecuador is bringing both Jefferson A. Cepedas.
But not unique, thanks to the Olympics. Words still mean something, dammit
Ben Wiggins, son of 2012 Tour de France winner and multiple Olympic champion Bradley Wiggins, won silver in the junior ITT last year. Just put me in the ground already.
It’s a pity Hell isn’t real, because there is no other appropriate disposition for media C-suite types of the past 30 years.
Well, four of them, including the Witkion seven times.
Usually, but not always