UCI Road World Championships 2013

The road

At the start

Florence, and a race nobody owns

Tuscany hosts the world championships for the first time, and the elite men close the week with ten laps of a circuit through Florence — Fiesole and the Via Salviati on every one of them. Italy have the tifosi, Paolo Bettini and all of the pressure. Spain bring Valverde, Rodríguez and Contador. Cancellara wants this jersey more than another against the clock. The sky over the city is already leaden.

How it was won

1. 1162 km to go

   Italy attack the first descent

   The break has eight minutes when the race reaches a Florence hidden under leaden cloud and sheets of rain. On the very first descent from Fiesole the azzurri come to the front as a team and string the field out — and the day's tone is set. Dan Martin, Cadel Evans and Chris Horner have already crashed out of it; Sagan has needed a new bike.

2. 294 km to go

   Steady up, dangerous down

   Italy are content to ride the climbs of Fiesole and Via Salviati at a tempo and then ask questions every single time the road tips downhill. By halfway Cancellara has shed two teammates, Chris Froome has been distanced — not one British rider will finish — and Alberto Contador keeps ending up on the wrong side of the splits.

3. 382 km to go

   Sixty riders, and a pause

   Five laps and eighty-two kilometres left, and the bunch is still sixty strong: Sagan, Cancellara, Rodríguez, Valverde, Contador and every one of Philippe Gilbert's Belgians. The Italians ease, and think about what to do next.

4. 434 km to go

   Visconti bridges, Nibali falls

   Giovanni Visconti joins a counter-attack and then drops it, setting off after Bartosz Huzarski, the last survivor of the morning. He catches the Pole with a shade over two laps left and they still have a minute on a Belgian-led peloton — and then Italy's plan comes apart, because Vincenzo Nibali goes down on a greasy descent and has to chase back through the convoy on his own.

5. 511 km to go

   Rodríguez punches on the last Fiesole

   Forty-two riders take the bell, more than anybody expected after a sodden afternoon. Then, a kilometre from the summit of Fiesole for the tenth and final time, Joaquim Rodríguez throws himself at the steepest section of it — and finds an ally of circumstance in Nibali, of all people. The pair shatter the race behind them: Gilbert nowhere, Cancellara nowhere, the best climbers left scrambling to get across.

6. 65 km to go

   Four, then three, then four again

   Valverde, Rui Costa and Rigoberto Urán make the junction on the descent, and moments later the Colombian's wheels slide from under him. Rodríguez slips away from a Nibali who wants no more risks on wet roads — and it is Nibali who then hauls himself back on the Via Salviati, dragging Costa and Valverde with him. Spain still have two men against two.

7. 7At the line

   Costa takes the rainbow jersey

   It looks inevitable. Then Valverde makes the one mistake available to him: he watches Nibali, and only Nibali. His Movistar teammate Rui Costa slips past both of them, picks off Joaquim Rodríguez in a tense two-up sprint, and Portugal has its first elite men's world champion.

The result