The opening Sunday of the 2022 UCI Road World Championships plays host to the elite time trials, with a mouth-watering battle in store in the elite men’s race.
The contest will take place in Wollongong, Australia, on over a distance that’s slightly shorter than usual at 34.2km, with the men’s and women’s field sharing a course for the first time.
The 17km circuit, covered twice, is a varied affair, with nearly 20 fast corners mostly packed into the opening half, a short climb that peaks at 53m and then a flatter, straighter 5km final section along the coast.
Wout van Aert (Belgium) is a major absentee, having finished runner-up at the past two editions of Worlds, but in two-time reigning champion Filippo Ganna (Italy) and Vuelta a España winner Remco Evenepoel (Belgium), Tadej Pogacar (Slovenia) plus a host of outsiders, an exciting battle is ensured.
Here, Cyclingnews highlights the riders to watch for the elite men’s time trial.
Filippo Ganna has worn the rainbow skinsuit for two years straight, and is the current standard bearer in the world of time trialling. He has also won six races against the clock this season alone, so he heads into Worlds as the rider to beat.
And yet, there’s a sense of vulnerability about the Italian – a sense that his dominance isn’t quite as total as it had seemed. Despite winning six times, he has also tasted defeat this year.
He was pipped by Stefan Bissegger at the UAE Tour at the start of the year, could only manage fifth and sixth in the two time trials at the Tour de France, and was third at the European Championship. There were mitigating circumstances at the Tour, the first being a possible slow puncture on the opening TT in Copenhagen, and the latter being the fatigue of 19 days of racing, which gave an edge to the endurance engines and motivation of the GC favourites.
The Worlds, of course, is a different proposition, and while the gloss may have been taken off ever so slightly, Ganna is still a firm favourite to join Tony Martin, Fabian Cancellara, and Michael Rogers as three-time winners.
He possesses crushing power and can produce his best performances when it matters most. If you’re worried about this summer’s results, take last year as an example. He was runner-up to Stefan Küng at the European Championship before putting more than a minute into him – and third-placed Remco Evenepoel – at Worlds.
Ganna will…
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