Sometimes all it takes to win or lose a bike race is a glance.
Any bike race, across the sprawl of its hours-long duration, is the accumulation of moments: choices here or there that play a role in determining an outcome. Sometimes these are insignificant to the point of irrelevance, and sometimes they decide everything; a puncture, a bump, a missed feed. Or there was today, in the men’s Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race, where a misread glance at a sign in the final few hundred metres of the race was the difference for one rider between winning and not.
For Visma-Lease a Bike’s Matthew Brennan, who launched his sprint at 300 metres to go, thinking it was 200 metres, a likely win faded into second place. For one of the other form riders of the Australian summer, Decathlon-CMA CGM’s new signee Tobias Lund Andresen, it was a slip-up that played perfectly to his favour: the likeable Dane continued his impressive start to the year with another win – his second after stage 1 of the Tour Down Under, and his fifth podium from eight race days.
[race_result id=1172 stage_id=0 count=10 gc=0 year=2026]
Brady Gilmore, a neo-pro from NSN Cycling Team, rounded out the podium and was the best-placed Australian finisher, paying tribute to his retiring mentor Simon Clarke, who was riding his last race today. “[He] taught me mostly everything I know,” said Gilmore. “I’m going to miss him … I’m happy to pay off all of the hard teamwork today with this result.”
Sentiment aside, for those on the first two steps of the podium, it was clear that the final result hinged mostly on a little number on a little sign blurring from a three to a two. Brennan was a little prickly in the aftermath, keen to take off for the hotel – a combination of fatigue, after 182 hard-fought kilometres at the end of several weeks in a different hemisphere, paired with disappointment. He began one answer with an audible sigh, before saying that “we tried, and just missed out. It is what it is.”
Only 20 years old but already one of the sport’s revelations in just his second pro season, Brennan has a deep-seeded competitive drive. “I mean, second place is never good enough for myself,” he admitted. “I feel like I could have done one place better today but [there was] a mistake on my behalf – I thought the finish line was 100 metres closer. I thought it was 200 to go, but when I read it, it was 300. But once you go, you just have to commit at that point.” If the finish line had been a hundred metres closer, the win would have been Brennan’s, but results sheets don’t list hypotheticals. “I felt like I had really good legs there. So I’m gonna get my eyes tested – let’s say that.”
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