WELCOME TO HÖLL
Gramartboden, aka the Höll climb, the 28 per cent piéce de rèsistance of the men’s elite road race, was open the day before the pros arrived for an amateurs’ hill climb. At the same time, national teams undertook their final recon. It set up the mildly slapstick scene of Julian Alaphilippe and others pinballing through the nodders on a slope that was, for once, really as bad as the marketing claimed. Where the gradient started to bite, ‘Welcome at the Highway to Hell’ had been stencilled onto the road. Bad grammar on the Gramartboden can be forgiven – nobody could think straight on a road like this. Even further up, where some riders simply keeled over, doddered cycling’s most institutionalised fan, Didi the Devil. He always has company, but today he had kin too – krampusses, the hairy horned monsters that parents in Mittel Europe use to terrify children into good behaviour at Christmas time also loitered.
The foot of the climb is a 90-degree right-hander around a bar. On race day, while they waited, beered-up fans got a Mexican wave going. Holding court, right on the corner, was a flat-capped eccentric who wheeled a drip trolley about for comedy value. He shouted greetings to all – the locals, the Slovaks, the Poles and the Italians who had come en masse over the Brenner Pass that morning. When the race arrived – being a circuit there wasn’t much of a cavalcade – the Danish rider Michael Valgren came around the corner first and the cheering bounced off the close, high walls. It was a convivial scene. Sam Oomen, the young Dutch climber who had agitated and attacked on behalf of Tom Dumoulin, was close to the front of the favourites’ group. Later, he explained the difference between the 7km Olympia climb which had monopolised the circuit, the fierce Gramartboden and the collective 4,600m of vertical ascent which made it, according to the UCI, the 10th hardest Worlds in history. “It’s a six and a half, seven-hour race and it slowly kills you,” Oomen said. “The climb on the local lap was not extremely hard. It was a 20-minute effort seven times in a row, and you start to feel it and then the attacking starts. And then there’s this crazy hell of a climb at the end, which was everything I imagined and more. I thought it was going to be a challenge reaching the top on my bike, and it was – I was pretty close to coming off.”
“It was harder than I expected,” Valgren agreed after his seventh-place finish. He had been caught on its upper slopes by a quintet of riders. “I needed one minute more, but at least I tried and I died with my shoes on. I also needed a 32 [tooth sprocket] in the back but it’s too late now.”
All week, the Gramartboden’s potential effect on the race had been evaluated, and in the preliminary analysis many said it would chill the race simply because it was so hard. Yet it played the role that was hoped by drawing the best into the winning move. “It was an honest race,” Oomen said.
Innsbruck had also got what it wanted: a star piece of geography which would serve as a practical cycling attraction and memorial to its first hosting of the road Worlds.