UCI Road World Championships 2010

The road

At the start

A first rainbow jersey decided Down Under

The first Worlds in Australia: Melbourne to Geelong, then eleven laps over Challambra Crescent and Queens Park Road, 260 kilometres asking who can climb a wall a dozen times and still sprint. Cadel Evans defends his rainbow on home roads with Gerrans, Davis and Goss beside him. Gilbert comes off Vuelta stage wins as the man to watch, Cancellara chases a double, Cavendish means to prove the circuit cannot drop him.

How it was won

1. 1174 km to go

   Onto the Geelong circuit, 23 minutes down

   Five riders have been up the road since Melbourne and the peloton has let them have twenty-three and a half minutes of it. By the time the bunch swings onto the finishing circuit the escape is within fifty seconds of lapping them — close enough that the commissaires have started doing arithmetic nobody wants to do.

2. 2100 km to go

   The circuit starts eating riders

   A hundred kilometres left, the gap down to ten minutes, and thirty-one riders come off the front of the peloton on the hills: Evans, O'Grady and Gerrans for Australia, Gilbert, Pozzato, Nibali, Tosatto, Visconti. Most of them get back on. Each lap, fewer of them manage it.

3. 340 km to go

   Nibali goes too early

   Midway round lap nine Vincenzo Nibali attacks properly and the race finally breaks. He begins lap ten twenty-two seconds up on Evans, Gilbert and Pozzato, with the bunch another half-minute back and Fabian Cancellara driving it. Two laps is too many: by the bell it is all together again.

4. 49 km to go

   Gilbert attacks up Challambra

   Last lap, eleventh time up the wall at Highton, and Philippe Gilbert finally plays the card everyone has been waiting for. Cadel Evans reacts instantly; nobody else can. Over the top the Belgian has fourteen seconds.

5. 56 km to go

   Twenty-two seconds and a bad chase

   Up Queens Park Road for the last time the lead is out to twenty-two seconds. Behind him Evans, Martens, Kolobnev, Moerenhout and Fränk Schleck are chasing without agreeing on anything — every one of them waiting for the world champion to do the work on his own roads.

6. 63 km to go

   Swallowed inside the last two kilometres

   A group of twenty comes up to the chasers, and with the flamme rouge in sight Gilbert's afternoon ends. Gusev and Brajkovic counter immediately, Terpstra goes with them, and the three of them are hauled back on the final corner.

7. 7At the line

   Moorabool Street, and rainbow

   Twenty-five riders sweep round the last bend into five hundred metres of rising road, and this is precisely the finish the course was always going to give: not a climber's, not a pure sprinter's, but a hard man's. Thor Hushovd finds clean air down the left-hand barrier, opens up with a hundred and fifty metres left and simply does not come back — Matti Breschel second, Allan Davis third and a bronze for the host nation. A rider made of iron gets his year in the rainbow jersey.

The result