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2021-07-28
Spoilers ahead!
The women and men both did their Olympic time trials yesterday on a course around the Fuji International Speedway. One lap for the women and two laps for the men, with a solid climb in the middle and a lumpy finish that would seem to favor the all-rounders over the pure power time trialists.
Time trials aren't always the most fun to watch, but they are a real pure form of the sport: the tactics that plagued the Olympic road races aren't present. It's just the strongest rider against the clock.
Given the drama of the women's road race, the time trial was relatively tame. The two real questions going into it were: who would be on the podium with the two Dutch riders, and could anyone manage to pull out a gold over van Vleuten and van der Breggen? The answers: Marlen Reusser and no. Van Vleuten was clearly on a mission to avenge her loss in the road race and stormed away with the win. Reusser managed to overtake van der Breggen for second, and van der Breggen managed to hold off a great ride from Australia's Grace Brown for third.
The men's race was a little more open, with a combination of pure TT specialists (Ganna, Dennis, Küng), GC contenders (Uran, Vlasov, Roglič) and classics riders (Van Aert, Asgreen, Bettiol), any of whom might be expected to do well on this course. One open question was how well the riders just coming off the Tour de France would do against the riders with a lot more rest. An early quickest time was set by the Canadian Hugo Houle, who was really blazing through the first lap. Rigoberto Uran took the hot seat shortly thereafter, and it was a bit of a wait until the last ten or so riders, which held most of the real favorites.
At the first time split, the top 7 riders were separated by only 10 seconds. By the end of the first lap, it had opened up a bit, with Roglič now maintaining about 30 seconds over 7th placed Rémi Cavagna. On the final lap, however, Roglič completely blew everyone out of the water, riding into the finish one minute over his closest rival, a resurgent Tom Dumoulin. Roglič really was on fire. Less than five seconds separated 2nd through 5th place. Rohan Dennis settled into third place just four tenths of a second ahead of Stefan Küng.
Roglič may have had a bit of help, though. He caught Kasper Asgreen and then kind of hung around Asgreen, sometimes getting ahead of him, sometimes getting passed by the Dane. Then both of them caught João Almeida. Was Roglič's dominant performance because of the aerodynamic advantage provided by the slipstreams of these two other riders? It's hard not to think that he got some added speed from the other riders on the course, but Roglič was clearly on amazing form and already clearly ahead by the end of the first lap, well before he caught Asgreen.