A brutal day that was stuff of nightmares

Thomas crashes out

Motorbike pilots are a much maligned bunch these days, but they do tend to know what they’re talking about. When a bunch of them, all veterans of dozens of editions of races like Paris-roubaix and LiègeBastogne-liège, say that a race is the hardest one-day course they have ever seen, you know there’s some truth to what they are saying.

Having been able to recce the course last year during a test event and this year under police escort through Rio’s notorious traffic, the riders knew what was coming. But just how hard last Saturday’s Rio Olympic men’s road race course turned out to be took them all by surprise.

The descents — 11 in total over 237.5km — were fast, narrow and highly technical. With concrete kerbs and exposed gutters lining the narrow road, mistakes would be costly.

A two-kilometre section of cobbles tackled four times required team mechanics to zip-tie the spare bikes to the roof racks to stop them rattling off the Nissan Livinas they’d been loaned for the race. Turkey’s Ahmet Orken made it all of five metres on the cobbles before crashing, and Richie Porte had to chase back on twice after dropping his chain on two occasions. Bottles were sent flying; many riders were using the bidons provided by the organisers to avoid any branding infringements, and these appeared just slightly too small to remain clasped in standard bottle cages.

There were crosswinds as the road headed west of the city centre and skirted the surf being whipped in from the South Atlantic Ocean. Then there were the climbs: 16 in total, with sections of road in the tropical greenhouse of a climb up to Canoas and Vista Chinesa in the forested hills of Rio nudging 20 per cent and reducing riders to a sweaty crawl.

“There’s no race in the Worldtour that has three nine-kilometre climbs in the last 50km, so we were always gonna have our work cut out,” said Simon Clarke, Australia’s sole finisher after Porte crashed out with a broken collarbone on the final descent.

Organisational chaos

Riders also had Rio’s warm, humid climate to contend with, not to mention the idiosyncrasies of its Olympic organisation. It was touch and go for the riders who were travelling to the start from the athletes’ village, a 45-minute drive away, as the buses left late and got caught in traffic, leaving some members of the organising committee seriously thinking they wouldn’t make it in time. Great Britain’s decision to relocate riders and staff to a beachfront hotel on Copacabana the night before the race suddenly seemed to make perfect sense.

“I’ve been to badly organised races before, in the Philippines and Ukraine and places, and the race always goes ahead because the managers always make sure the riders get to the line,” said former British pro Jeremy Hunt, managing Azerbaijan’s one rider, Maksim Averin, at the race. “Races can be organised and well planned on paper, but not in reality.”

US Secretary of State John Kerry — a man who is into his cycling and who made the headlines last summer for breaking his leg while riding the Col de la Colombiere when he was supposed to be in Geneva at nuclear talks with Iran — came to see the riders off in the morning. It might have been the world’s biggest sporting event, able to draw this kind of crowd, but the Olympics appeared at times to mirror an amateur race. Chris Froome reportedly had to be reminded to sign on by a member of the press.

“I just went to a portaloo, and was like, ‘ah, the pinnacle of the sport’,” grinned Dan Craven, the sole representative for Namibia who caused a bit of a social media stir when it appeared he was tweeting from the race (it was actually his partner).

“That was really funny because when I started getting into racing in Cape Town, at all the local races you’d

August 6, Men’s Road Race, 237.5km, Fort Copacabana

Van Avermaet won the war of attrition

always queue up in a portaloo queue. And here I am, at the Olympics, and what am I doing? I’m queuing up in a portaloo queue. It’s like, ‘yeah, I’ve made it!’”

The basic conditions, a frisson of exoticism and a dose of disorganisation, can’t have made life easy for the more mollycoddled riders of the Worldtour. There was even a controlled explosion of an abandoned bag right on the finish line, but since it happened during the race, the riders were oblivious to it.

“Yes, the conditions here make a difference, but I don’t think it will be much,” Craven added. “Unless the riders are prima donnas, and I don’t know how many of them are prima donnas. The Italians might be.”

Nibali nullified

Prima donnas they may be, but it was the Italians who lit up the race and almost stole the show. On the end of the penultimate lap of the brutal circuit around the Canoas and Vista Chinesa climbs, Vincenzo Nibali and Fabio Aru dragged a group of favourites up to an early counter attack to form a group from which the race was decided.

Nibali could have won the race, attacking alone over the top of the final climb. But it’s never over until the line is crossed and, despite the climb being named after a local viewpoint, the visibility down the narrow, twisty road down to the city was anything but clear.

Nibali, arguably the world’s best descender and with a gold medal in his sights, crashed and Columbia’s Sergio Henao piled into the back of him. As riders flew past, their medal hopes were over.

Thwarted Thomas

On that final descent, which led to a nine-kilometre flat run in to the finish, riders could almost smell the gold medals wafting amongst the salty spray and city drains on Copacabana beach. It made a hard race even harder — everyone fought for a place in the top three.

“That’s one thing about the Olympics that’s different to other races; top 10 in the Worldtour is a great result, but in the Olympics, you want medals,” said New Zealand’s George Bennett, who tried to bridge up to the lead group on the penultimate lap over Vista Chinesa before blowing up spectacularly.

“That’s what everyone is talking about, and maybe that changed the way I raced... maybe that influenced me a bit.”

Geraint Thomas came as close as he is likely to get to an Olympic road race medal when he made the lead group over the final crest. He and Great Britain rode a tactically perfect race — Steve Cummings and Ian Stannard had marshalled the group in the opening three hours, Thomas was in the lead group, Adam Yates was behind and Chris Froome was in the main bunch behind him. It looked promising.

But on that final climb it all went wrong: Yates was dropped, Froome didn’t have the speed or time to catch the leaders with a solo attack, and Thomas crashed on the descent.

“I came down and saw Nibali had crashed and somebody else and I thought, ‘yeah it really is on now.’ And then it was just trying not to take too many risks and still go down fast but steady,” Thomas said.

“Next thing you know I came into that corner a little too fast and the back wheel skipped out on the bumps and that was it. I was down before I knew it and it was all over. It was devastating, really.”

There were few words spoken after Greg Van Avermaet had outsprinted Jakob Fuglsang (Denmark) and Rafal Majka (Poland) on the beach front, not least because only 65 of the 144 starters made it to the finish and most of them decided not to ride through the press area. Those that did hardly needed many words to describe the hardest race of their careers.

“It was just a brutal, brutal day,” said Ireland’s Dan Martin.

The Rio sufferfest begins