CHASING RAINBOWS
CyclingPlus buckles up at the UCI Gran Fondo World Championships in Perth, Australia
Being crowned a UCI World Champion and pulling on the rainbow jersey… It’s happened in all our dreams but in reality it’s only been professionals in the running. That changed in 2011 when the UCI helped launch the World Cycling Tour, later rebranded the UCI Gran Fondo World Series. This 30-event extravaganza closes with a season-ending World Championship (in Vancouver for 2020), featuring the top 20 per ent of riders in age and gender categories from each qualifier event. For me that had been at the Tour of Cambridgeshire gran fondo earlier in the year, where I’d squeaked through to the finals in Perth, Australia on account of a lack of take-up from the people who'd qualified, legitimately ahead of me. Something of a lucky loser, my fate had been decided before I spun round in my seat to speak to German Christian Mueller at the opening ceremony, two days prior to the race. Me, a cycling World Champion, is the stuff of fantasy; the moment the ceremony’s compere embarrassingly called the race the “gran fondue world championships” was suggestive of an event better suited to my talents at that moment. Just the sight of Mueller, a youthful, lean specimen in the German national team tracksuit, forced me to recalibrate my ambitions from being able to at least mix it, mid-pack, to simply finishing ahead of the sag wagon.
“So I’m guessing we’ll be racing together at the weekend?” I asked. “Maybe, I’m in the 19-34s,” he said.
“Yes, me too. Did you race the time trial?” The Championships had
It was compulsory for riders to wear colours of their country and I’d opted for a retro blue and red number from Prendas
opened a day earlier with a 19.4km TT around Rottnest Island, just over the water from Perth.
“Yes, I won it,” he said, with an unflinching seriousness that could only make him a German.
He’d pummelled the highly technical and blustery course into submission with the fastest time across the board, 25:01.5, at a speed of 46.5kph.
“I also won the road race in Denmark [2015’s World Championships] so it’s nice to have both now.”
“You’ve won both? Wow, congratulations. Are you here racing on your own or with a team?”
“On my own, but I race with the national team in Germany.”
“The national team? Right, okay, yeah, good luck for Sunday, then. I guess I’ll see you on the start line, but probably not much after that!” I offered, nervously, my head spinning with thoughts of just how I’d ended up sitting here.
The quirk of gran fondos is that while many view them as steppingstones to category road racing, they can be so much harder. Without a separation in abilities, there can be a gulf in talent and experience. For one young Briton I spoke to, the Tour of Cambridgeshire was his first race and this his second. Yet here we were, up against the likes of Mueller and 27-year-old Belgian Gerard Hophra, a recent former pro. The 154.5km course would be tough, heading out of the Elizabeth Quay waterfront on flat freeways towards the town of Kalamunda in the Perth Hills, where we’d do two laps of a hilly circuit. Just before the circuit, climbing would begin in earnest with the popular Zig Zag climb and not relent until the finish, over 100km and 2000m of elevation later.
Without any real clue of how fast this race would be, my initial goal was to reach the first of the three ascents of the Zig Zag clinging onto the bunch’s coattails. No easy feat, as the bunch kept tabs on a doomed breakaway and the pace erratically ebbed and flowed. With home advantage the Aussies dominated but I spotted jerseys from Japan, South Africa, Germany, Slovakia, Sweden, Switzerland, Brazil, Holland, Poland, New Zealand and my fellow Brits, the best represented nation aside from the hosts. It was compulsory for riders to wear colours of their country and I’d opted for a retro blue and red number from Prendas, in the style of the national jersey from the 1980s and resurrected by Team Wiggins before its recent demise.
The pace was searing, clocking up 43km in the first hour, and got worse as we approached the Zig Zag for the first time. Preceded by a sharper drag, which saw me lose touch with the back of the bunch, I sprinted back on for the start of the climb, but as the bunch, now strung out all down the Zig Zag, got stuck into the climb, I drifted further back. It actually felt like a success – a very minor one, granted – to make it there in the group. From this point, this was a personal race and one that I was determined to finish as best I could.
I passed under the finish line for the first of two laps of the 49km Kalamunda course in all kinds of strife. I’d come close to being wiped out by an errant mountain biker who had shot across the road between trails, run out of food (feed stations were bizarrely only stocked with electrolyte drinks), been engulfed by several of the other age categories behind me (the races were staggered at seven-minute intervals) and latched onto all manner of small groups before losing the wheels as quickly as I’d joined them.
There was some rather timely encouragement over the PA from race ambassador and Tour de France green jersey winner Robbie McEwen, who’d been displaying his razor sharp wit all morning. He whipped the crowd up to cheer on the likes of me who’d been dropped from their groups. “This race is as much about finishing as it is about winning.”
I felt myself getting stronger as the race went on. I was the first to be dropped out of the bunch on that first time up the Zig Zag but I passed several white bibs in the final 50km, guys who’d started with me. Finishing in 5:02, 76th out of 92, wasn’t catastrophic, and allayed my fear of being some sort of Eric the Eel comedy figure [the swimmer from Equatorial Guinea, who competed in the Sydney Olympics], pitching up at a world class event and getting attention for the wrong reasons. Seventeen new World Champions were crowned in Kalamunda, although the rainbow jerseys were slightly disappointing – the bands were thin, rather than the chunky sort the pros get. Winners included Australian Paul Miller in the men’s 55-59, winning a sprint against his breakaway companion. It was a neat way to end a career, as he suggested he might afterwards: Miller raced three times for his country in the pro road Worlds.
For Christian Mueller, the double wasn’t to be. He had to settle for bronze behind the former pro Hophra. Having got what he came for in the TT, he was still a happy man to be walking away with two medals. Two riders – Hophra, Matej Lovse (Slovakia) – broke clear with 100km to go and got two minutes on the bunch. On the final lap Hophra rode ahead of Lovse on the final climb to solo to victory.
“Last year I got third in Denmark and was really frustrated, so this makes me happy,” Hophra said. “I’ve won international races [as a professional] but it’s an achievement to win here.”
Whether you were one of the 17 riders who went home with a rainbow jersey, one of a further 34 who bagged bronze and silver medals, or, like me, a humble finisher, the Gran Fondo Worlds road races were an exhilarating test of endurance and ability and, for many, a once-in-a-lifetime trip to race their bike in Australia.
The 2020 UCI Gran Fondo World Championships will take place in Vancouver/Whistler, Canada, from 9 to 13 September. The only qualifying event in the UK is the Tour of Cambridgeshire (6/7 June 2020), with the top 20 per cent in each age group qualifying for the finals in Vancouver
The pace was searing, clocking up 43km in the first hour, and got worse as we approached the first climb