European Championships 2016

The road

At the start

The first elite European title

Plumelec, and a race that has never been run before: the European Championship road race is open to elite professionals for the first time, and the winner wears a blue-and-white jersey all next season. The course is 233 kilometres — seventeen laps of a circuit ending every time on the Côte de Cadoudal — and each nation brings six riders, twice what it gets at the Worlds. The world champion is here, a month from Doha.

How it was won

1. 1229 km to go

   Four go, and nobody objects

   Lindeman, Lang, Bratashchuk and Raid slip away in the opening kilometres of the first elite European championship, and the eight big nations are content to watch them go.

2. 2155 km to go

   Eleven minutes forty

   A third of the way through the 233 kilometres the four have their maximum: 11:40, on a circuit that will be ridden seventeen times and never lets a gap sit still for long.

3. 313 km to go

   Caught as the bell rings

   Italy, France and Belgium have spent the last hour closing everything down, and the final escape — Fabio Aru in it — is swallowed over the Cadoudal with one lap left. From here it is a bunch of the fastest survivors and one more climb.

4. 410 km to go

   Moser tries it alone

   Ten kilometres out Moreno Moser jumps away on his own to deny the sprinters. Sagan, who has done nothing all day but sit in the right wheel, is the man who sits on his.

5. 52 km to go

   Villella, the last to try

   Davide Villella throws the final attack of the afternoon into the foot of the Cadoudal, the last chance anybody has to stop this ending in a sprint. It lasts a few hundred metres.

6. 6At the line

   Sagan up the Cadoudal

   Out of the last curve, in front of a Breton crowd, five come for the line: Sagan, Alaphilippe, Moreno, Dumoulin and Vakoč. Uphill and after 233 kilometres it is no contest — the world champion adds the first elite European title to the rainbow bands, with six Slovak teammates rather than the usual three behind it.

The result