The Slovenian will start as the red-hot favourite and, all things being equal, should win a second-straight title. But will he?
More of this on Sunday?
Kristof Ramon
The first ever Road World Championships on the African continent will soon be over, but not before Sunday’s elite men’s road race. As per tradition, this is the final event of the championships with the world’s best men’s pro road racers converging on Kigali, Rwanda to race on the toughest Worlds course in almost half a century.
To get you up to speed, we’ve pulled together everything you need to know about the race, including a breakdown of the course, the riders to watch, and the storylines that are worth considering. Not least: can anyone stop Tadej Pogačar from winning a second-straight rainbow jersey?
Looking for the women’s road race preview? Abby Mickey has you covered, of course.
Preview: The Women’s World Championship road race is wide open
A challenging course and the absence of the two-time defending champion will make for an unpredictable race at the first Worlds held in Africa.
The favourites
We’ll go into more detail on the contenders in a moment, but here’s a little sneak-peek for you:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐: Tadej Pogačar
⭐⭐⭐⭐: Remco Evenepoel, Isaac del Toro
⭐⭐⭐: Tom Pidcock, Ben Healy
⭐⭐: Egan Bernal, Jay Vine, Mattias Skjelmose, Oscar Onley, Thymen Arensmen, Juan Ayuso, Richard Carapaz
⭐: Quinn Simmons, Julian Alaphilippe, Valentin Paret-Peintre
The weather
Sunday is shaping up to be a warm one with the forecast suggesting a top temperature of 27 ºC (80 ºF). At this stage there’s very little chance of any rain or thunderstorms, and wind is unlikely to play any sort of role in the race.
How to watch
Here’s who will have live coverage of Sunday’s race:
USA and Canada: FloBikes, with coverage starting at 12:30am PDT
UK: BBC iPlayer and BBC Two, with coverage from 2pm BST
Australia: Stan Sport, from 5:35pm AEST
Europe: Eurosport/Discovery+, plus coverage from various local broadcasters (details at the UCI website).
Note that the UCI will also have live coverage via its YouTube channel, but this will be geoblocked in markets where a broadcast deal is in place.
And finally, a quick heads-up if you’re trying to work out when to tune in. The race will start at 9:45am local time and end around 4:45pm. Conveniently for those in cycling’s European heartland, there’s no time difference between the Central Africa Time used in Rwanda and Central European Summer Time.
The course
If you want a short summary of the course, here it is: it’s hard. Really hard. Covering a lengthy 267.5 km on the roads in and around Kigali, the riders will climb a total of 5,475 vertical metres. That’s more climbing than the epic 2018 Worlds in Innsbruck, Austria which had just over 5,000 metres; more than the roughly 5,300 metres in Duitama, Colombia in 1995; more too than the 5,200 m in Prague, Czechia in 1981.
In fact, based on our research, you have to go back as far as 1980, to Sallanches, France, for a hillier Worlds than this year’s edition. Bernard Hinault won that day on a course that included roughly 6,000 metres of climbing. It took Hinault more than 7.5 hours to finish that race, and only 15 of the roughly 110 starters ended up finishing.
Sunday’s race probably won’t be as brutal as that, but it will be incredibly hard on a course that is practically up and down all day long.
This post is for paying subscribers only
Subscribe now
Already have an account? Sign in
Did we do a good job with this story?
👍Yep
👎Nope