CYCLING: The Australian Cycling Team have had their first opportunity to get a taste of the challenging and picturesque road race course during the Rio test event on the weekend.
The Australians have maximised the opportunity over several days to test the course, the conditions, equipment, capture vision and data. It is on these roads that Australian riders will work to bring home gold at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games.
Grand Tour rider Simon Clarke and a development team took to the Rio course with head coach and four-time Olympian Brad McGee, Rio 2016 hopeful Tiffany Cromwell and Chef de Mission Kitty Chiller following closely in the team car.
“It is going to very challenging,” said Cromwell who is looking to make her first Olympic Games in 2016.
“It is going to be a strategy game of conservation and having the right equipment because we’ve seen a lot of mechanicals with plenty of punctures and crashes.
“There are cobbles and steep climbs which will make for an interesting first part of the race.
“You’ll have to survive through that so you can be in the best shape possible for the back part of the race.”
McGee and his team filmed the entire event and will now return to Australia to analyse the course and give the Australian Team an edge when they return for the race on the opening two days of the 2016 Games.
His first thoughts on the course mirrored those of Cromwell.
“It’s been really like a spring classic in Europe the way he intensity, the incidents, the mechanicals, and the crashes have been,” said McGee midway through the course.
“We’ve done 90km so far, and for the Olympic event we will have done an extra 25km to get to this point and still the steepest climb is yet to come.
“It is going to be a big, big day come the Olympic road race.”
With the majority of the race hugging the spectacular Rio coastline, the road race events are set to kick off the Games of the XXXI Olympiad in style. The men’s race is scheduled to start the morning of day one of the Games on Saturday 6 August, and the women on day two.
The start and finish will be at the southern tip of Copacabana Beach, at Fort Copacabana. The total race distance is 256.4km for men and 130.3km for women.
2016 Cycling Team Leader Kevin Tabotta said the time in Rio was valuable for helping select the best riders for Australia.
“We’ve learnt about the conditions and the temperatures and how the bike riders are going to deal with that,” Tabotta said.
“There’s a couple of tough climbs in two circuits that’s going to be really interesting on how we select our team from that point of view. I think we’ve learnt enough to select our riders and also prepare our team for the Games.
“The whole point of the visit was reconnaissance. We now have GPS, we have profiles, videos for every section of the time trial and road race, so it’s been really productive.”
Australia will be looking to win their first road race medal since Sara Carrigan won gold in the women’s road race on the streets of Athens in 2004. Before that it was Kathy Watt with a surprise gold at Barcelona 1992.
The time trial races will be held on day five of the Games (10 August). Starting and finishing within the Barra Zone near where the Olympic Park is located.
The men’s race will complete two laps of the course (totalling 54.5km) while the women’s race will complete one lap (29.8km) of the same course. There is a 1.2km hill climb in the course.
olympics.com.au
