The 2024 Olympic Road Race Preview
Who can tame the bumps?
As a rule of thumb, when Tadej Pogačar shows up for a race, you expect him to win it. Somewhat surprisingly, the man who’s already done the Giro-Tour double and won six monuments in the past four years—to say nothing of a road race bronze in Tokyo—is sitting this one out. Partially because after racing two grand tours in three months he’s completely bushed. But also because the Slovenian cycling federation screwed over his partner, five-time national champion Urška Žigart. Despite winning both the road race and time trial national championships earlier this summer, Žigart found herself off the Olympic roster altogether.
Even if it wasn’t the main reason he skipped the Olympics—and I’m sorry for sounding like a Zoomer here—this is king shit from Pogačar. We have no choice but to stan. As much as he might not have the legs after such a hard few months, even a remote chance at Olympic gold is something most athletes would strangle their own grandma for. And he’s giving it up to support his girlfriend. World’s greatest cyclist, but also an All-Star caliber Wife Guy.
So with Pogačar back home, who’s going to win the road race? And also, who’s going to win the women’s road race, which Pogačar was obviously not going to compete in to being with?
The men and women don’t race on the exact same course—the men are doing 275 kilometers, the women 158, but the business end of the race is the same for both. That’s the final, oh, let’s call it 70 kilometers. First, an ascent of the Cote des Gardes, which finishes with the steepest pitch of the race: 600 meters at a 10 percent gradient. Then a descent, a flat section of about 20 kilometers, and then three times around a circuit in Paris proper.
The big feature of the circuit is the Cote de la Butte Montmatre, which—I checked, I’ve already made this observation but it bears repeating—was the thing Rufus Wainwright was singing about on the Moulin Rouge! soundtrack. It’s a 1.1 kilometers, 5.3 percent cobbled climb, and as far as I’m aware, this is the only cobbled section of the course. The last time out of the loop, the riders go off on an eight kilometer flat run-in toward the Trocadero.
So yeah, this course should be pretty interesting. Neither the men’s nor women’s course is flat for more than a couple dozen kilometers at a time, but I’m having a hard time figuring out who’s going to get ridden off the back of the lead group. All the cobbles are on one climb, and the climbing is neither long enough nor steep enough to shake off the sprinters and northern classics riders.
Basically, this course is somewhere between Tour of Flanders/Amstel Gold levels of hilliness and Liège-Bastogne-Liège levels of hilliness. Except the Olympic road race for both men and women is slightly longer than the corresponding Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
If the right breakaway forms, we could see the winning attack come from a long, long way out. And the art of controlling a breakaway—which is fairly straightforward on the World Tour—is very, very different in the Olympics for two reasons.
First, the teams are smaller. For a monument, men’s teams bring seven riders and women’s teams bring six. No country has more than four entrants in either road race, and even some riders who might have a shot at a medal, like Biniam Girmay of Eritrea and Jhonatan Narváez of Ecuador, are going stag.
If you have the max of four riders and an undisputed, no-doubt-about-it leader, that leaves three domestiques to control the tempo for 275 kilometers. If there’s a split strategy, the leader is going to have to share the pacemaking duty. These teams aren’t big enough for multi-pronged attacks and satellite riders, and that’s even assuming you can keep everyone pulling on the same end of the rope. The Dutch women’s team, for instance, has three riders with a legitimate shot at gold: Marianne Vos, Demi Vollering and Lorena Wiebes. And each of the three would need the race run in a different manner to maximize her chances.
For that reason, and because the initial breakaway tends to be made up of no-hopers from small countries, the break could end up dragging out a massive lead. I think in the men’s race in Tokyo it got to 20 minutes at one point.
The other complicating factor: No race radios. If the team car wants to talk to the riders, they have to do it in person. You’ll get more riders dropping back for instructions—which, again, can be perilous on small teams. Otherwise, the riders only learn about the time gaps the old-fashioned way: A guy on the back of a motorcycle writes it on a chalkboard. This led to a hilarious mishap in the women’s road race in Tokyo, where Annemiek van Vleuten crossed the line second, completely unaware that there had been a breakaway rider ahead of her the whole time.
All that being said, I can see this race—both men’s and women’s—panning out in one of four ways. I don’t know which one is going to happen, so instead of predicting a podium I’ll give you my favorites for each scenario.
Scenario 1: FROM DOWWWWWNTOWWWWWWN
I look at the Cote des Gardes, with its steep final pitch, and think it’d be a great place to attack—particularly for a smaller rider to attack—if not for the 20 kilometer valley immediately afterward. But it’s possible that one lone rider could go from that far out, open up a gap on the descent, and build up a lead of 30 seconds by the time the rest of the peloton got reorganized.
And even then, it’d be hard to hold them off for the next 20 kilometers. But once you get past that valley, you’re onto the up-and-down urban circuit, where drafting and pacing and teamwork will be helpful, but not as much as they would be on a flat second. More than that, with actual tangible medals on the line for second and third, cooperation might be harder to come by.
Plus, there are a couple riders who could keep the field behind for 20 kilometers. On the women’s side, Kristen Faulkner of the United States, who’s become something of a specialist in long-range attacks. Plus, in a two-person team with only Chloe Dygert for company, this is probably the best American hope for a medal in the road race. Grace Brown of Australia has shown her prowess this season both on puncheur’s terrain, winning Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and in Paris so far, as she took the gold medal in the women’s time trial. And Lizzie Deignan of Great Britain won Paris-Roubaix with a ludicrously long solo attack in 2021. She hasn’t been the same rider since, but she’s got a history and one of the few teams big enough to be able to invest resources in a split strategy.
On the men’s side, this is one of about six was Mathieu van der Poel could win this race, but I doubt that Belgium or Denmark or Great Britain would let him off the leash. Remco Evenepoel, on the other hand, could attack here and make it stick. Not only is he the newly crowned Olympic time trial champion1 but he’s done this at Liège-Bastogne-Liège and at the 2022 World Road Race Championship.
Any team that drags the peloton back to Evenepoel is going to drag Wout van Aert back as well, and weaken itself in the process, which could give the little guy a few more crucial seconds to build up a lead. Plus, just as a heuristic, if Pogačar is the favorite in any race he starts, Evenepoel is probably next in line if Pogačar drops out.
Scenario 2: Group Two Syndrome
This scenario involves a decent-sized group of favorites reaching the loop together. From that group, one second-tier rider attacks and nobody responds, out of fear of bringing back a powerful sprinter like van Aert, van der Poel, or Lotte Kopecky. By the time the favorites’ group realizes it’s in trouble, it’s too late to chase the escapee down.
I’m fascinated to see how Team USA approaches the men’s road race tactically. Any of the three American entrants—Matteo Jorgenson, Brandon McNulty, Magnus Sheffield—could theoretically win on this terrain. All three can climb and all three have big engines on flat ground. I don’t know how much Jorgenson has left in the tank after the Tour de France, but McNulty should be pretty fresh and he just finished fifth in the time trial. He wouldn’t be a terrible candidate to do the extreme long-rage attack, for what it’s worth, because he’s punchy enough to get over the top of a steep pitch but also strong enough to time trial away from a group.
I could see these three rolling attacks from a select group, like Visma-Lease a Bike did at Omloop back in February. All it takes is for one of them to get loose.
Aleksey Lutsenko of Kazakhstan, Christophe Laporte of France, Matej Mohorič of Slovenia, Derek Gee of Canada…mayyyyyybe Alberto Bettiol, though I should probably stop picking him to win big races. On the women’s side, I think this is Kasia Niewiadoma territory. The French, Belgian, and British riders are all going to be staring each other down once they reach the finishing circuit, and she could probably get a gap pretty quickly while they all look at each other.
Scenario 3: Attritional Cardiovascular Nightmare
This is a situation where the favorites’ group gets into the finishing circuit and, rather than a cagey tactical battle where an underdog could force the action, it turns into a wheat-from-chaff moment as the big dogs drill the pace up and down the Cote de la Butte. Either the big teams roll attacks or the strongest riders just ride weaker ones off the back of the group.
This is the scenario most likely to send the actual strongest rider home with gold. Especially because there are hills and cobbles in this decisive section, but—once again—not enough of either to really count anyone out.
Those favorites: van der Poel, the Belgian duo of van Aert and Evenepoel, Ben Healy of Ireland, Tom Pidcock of Great Britain, maybe Michael Matthews of Australia, and mayyyybe Jorgenson if he’s got the legs. On the women’s side: This is Vollering vs. Kopecky territory if ever I’ve seen it.
Scenario 4: Everyone Survives
This is what happened at Milan-San Remo this year.
The superstars went nuts on the Poggio, dropped everyone, and then about a dozen riders came back and caught them. At that point, the tactical situation changed, and van der Poel adjusted from seeking the win for himself to setting up his teammate, Jasper Philipsen, the fastest man to survive the climb. And sure enough, Philipsen won the sprint and his first monument.
These guys and girls are really good at their jobs. It’s not easy to drop them on a kilometer-long climb, especially not with teams that max out at four riders per. We could end up with 10, maybe 20 survivors of the third trip through the circuit, at which point it turns into a bunch sprint-in-miniature.
And due respect to Italy and Elisa Balsamo, I think that sets up for a showdown between Kopecky and her trade teammate, Lorena Wiebes. Kopecky is by far the stronger climber of the two, so she should suffer less on the Cote de la Butte. But Wiebes is not only the faster sprinter, she has the stronger team around her. Belgium will count on Kopecky to cover both the final climbs and a potential bunch sprint, while Wiebes would only need to expend energy on the latter.
On the men’s side, depending on the size of the final group, this again sets up well for van der Poel and van Aert. But if this happens I really, really like Mads Pedersen’s chances.2 The Denmark men’s team is probably the best-balanced on either side of the ledger. They’ve got a world-class sprinter/cobbled classics leader in Pedersen, a flat-ground time trial monster in Mikkel Bjerg, who can set the pace throughout the race. Mattias Skjelmose can follow attacks on the finishing circuit, and if it comes down to a sprint, Michael Mørkøv is a legendary leadout man.
I think the path to victory for Denmark is pretty narrow—it has to be Pedersen, and probably in a sprint, unless Skjelmose has something fall into his lap in the preceding 20 or 30 kilometers.
Or it could come down to van der Poel beating van Aert in a heads-up sprint again. Wouldn’t that be novel.
Evenepoel is the second man to win the world road race and time trial championships in his career, after Abraham Olano. No male rider has won both events at the Olympics, let alone in the same year, but it’s only since 1996 that the road race and time trial have both been contested at the same time.
Assuming he’s back top 100 percent after his crash early in the Tour de France.