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For a man who professed to be riding the mixed relay team time trial at the World Championships in order to get to know the course for Sunday’s elite road race, Michael Matthews did a good impression of someone who really cared about Wednesday’s event.
The 33-year-old squatted after the finish line, waiting for the final nations to finish their ride, waiting to find out if he was to claim an elite rainbow jersey for the first time.
“It’s massive,” he explained after he’d got his hands on his gold medal. “For us, we don’t get many opportunities to represent Australia, and to do it as a team… I won this event when it was the trade teams, with Sunweb, but we didn’t get a rainbow jersey, so to be here, with my national teammates [is good]. I think we did well with the men, and then the women just brought it home. Today was the perfect day, it couldn’t have been much better.
“I didn’t really prepare for a time trial, that’s why I suffered a lot today. To see the [road race] course at full pace, and with full lactate [was my goal]. It showed the course in a different way, rather than riding it in a recon. Doing it full gas today will be an advantage for Sunday.”
It had been a nail-biter. Along with his male teammates Jay Vine and Ben O’Connor, he had put his nation in a good place at halfway in the mixed relay TTT, seven seconds ahead of Italy. It was then out of his hands, an unnatural feeling as a cyclist, as Grace Brown, Brodie Chapman and Ruby Roseman-Gannon set out on their ride.
The female trio were shorn of Roseman-Gannon after one of the tough circuit’s many hard climbs, but Brown and Chapman clung onto their lead, beating Germany at the finish by just 0.85 of a second. Italy were only a further 8.4 seconds behind that.
“I’m feeling a bit greedy, I need a few more rainbow jerseys in my closet,” Brown joked afterwards, with this gold adding to the individual time trial crown she won last Sunday. “But this one’s really got a nice vibe, to do it with the whole Aussie crew. It’s really exciting.”
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“We knew it would be a really hard start to the time trial, and that we’d be on the limit,” she continued. “It’s difficult to really know how to pace it on the sweet spot, and unfortunately we went a little bit over on the first steep climb, we put Ruby [Roseman-Gannon] into the read too early, and once you’re there, we eventually had to cut our losses and accept that we had to go down to two.
“Which is not how we wanted it to go, we wanted Ruby to be with us over the top of the climbs so we could use her in the fast sections, but in the end it worked with the two of us. It wasn’t ideal.”
It was, admittedly, an incredibly difficult race, with 894 metres of climbing over the 53.6km, split into two laps of just under 27km.
(Image credit: SWPix.com/Zac Williams)
The race was seen as prep for the weekend by some – as Matthews alluded to – but it was also a difficult race in itself, with teams struggling to stick together on the constant climbs and technical descents. The road races already promise to be fascinating on this circuit.
“It’s hard to lean into the team aspect on a course like that,” Derek Gee of Canada explained. “If you do a pull and swap off, you’re still going uphill. There’s little recovery, there’s little time to get into a rhythm and have a more efficient time trial. It was a brute strength course. It’s interesting, it’s our first time doing it as Canada, a tough one to start one, but I like that it’s a different course every year.”
“It was too hard,” Christina Schweinberger of Austria, who finished third in the ITT at the World Championships last year, argued. “It was crazy, one of us, Carina [Schrempf], really put a lot of effort into the climb, and for me and my sister [Kathrin], it was just about surviving. It was really, really hard.
“It’s really difficult to make a plan with the team, to pace it. It was also a lot of fun actually. The descents were fun, I liked that. It was fast, technical, and if it’s going to rain on Saturday it will be interesting.”
Fun for some, then. “If it’s only for yourself and you have a bad day… when it’s TTT you want to give everything,” she added. “It’s also fun doing it with the guys, and the preparation.”
“We had the goal to be in the top 10, and we had a bet that if we got top 10 one of the guys would have a tattoo that I would decide. It’s going to be a QR code for a song, but I haven’t worked out the song yet.” Austria finished 10th comfortably, so the ink will be used.
“This was a really difficult course for a TTT I think,” Brown, the world champion, said. “Just because there was literally no flat sections. It’s hard to find three riders that are equal over a course like this. It could be good to have more than three riders, it’s a very different thing to what we usually do in Grand Tours and stuff.
“The event can probably be a bit tweaked to be a bit more exciting. a lot of nations also aren’t entering teams because of crashes in past years, and riders not wanting to risk their other events. Overall, I like the concept of doing something with the men and coming together as a team.”
The mixed relay TTT might feel like a weird bolt-on in the middle of the World Championships, but it clearly matters to some, and there’s a germ of an idea there. For Australia, it’s a second elite gold medal of these Worlds, and for others, it’s a crucial full-speed recon of the road race. Most importantly, though, for one lucky Austrian man, it’s a new tattoo.
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