Ethan Hayter has had a tumultuous World Championships campaign so far. Things started off going to plan, with a storming opening half to his individual time trial which meant the Brit was fastest going through the first time checkpoint of the day. Hayter was riding well and looked calm, like he was pacing his effort perfectly to potentially take the first elite rainbow jersey of his career on the road. Things went south, very quickly, though, with just under 20 kilometres of the time trial remaining.
It was with 18.6 kilometres to go that TV cameras showed Hayter’s chain coming off on the inside of his chainring, and the 24-year-old frantically trying to pedal it back on. These efforts were hopeless, though, forcing Hayter to change bikes and with that, losing around 40 seconds to his rivals and any chance of taking home the gold medal.
Afterwards, it was reported that Hayter blamed his groupset supplier, Shimano, for the mishap. “I was being quoted but it wasn’t all in quotation marks because it’s not what I said for a lot of things, Cyclingnews and stuff just said I straight up blamed Shimano which wasn’t really the case,” Hayter tells Rouleur a few days after the incident.
“We’ve got these new bikes and the shifters just have one button because of the disc brakes [due to a lack of space in the shifters due to the disc brake reservoir]. What most people do is they then put on extra sprint shifters to change chainring but because I got the bike quite late, I didn’t have time to do that because you have to drill it in,” Hayter days.
“This meant I was using Shimano SynchroShift, where it changes the chainring for you. I never wanted to be in the little ring at all, but it happened because I pressed down to change one gear on the back and then it changed into the little ring all of a sudden.” With the torque Hayter was putting through the bike at the time of the shift, this caused the chain to come off.
Image: Zac Williams/SWpix
Hayter is quick to confirm that this was his own error, and he doesn’t blame Shimano for the mechanical failure. “It was my mistake for pressing it one too many times, because you can set it to which gear it changes the chainring and I knew where that was. I wanted to stay in the big ring.”
“I then tried to put it back on but I was pedalling really fast, because I was in the small ring,” he continues. “But it happened and it was a mix of those things, it was kind of annoying but I…