A Brutal Day That Was Stuff Of Nightmares

Wind, climbs, descents, cobbles and organisational chaos conspired  to make the men’s road race one of the toughest tests in cycling.

- Richard Abraham

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 Liege- Bastogne-Liege, 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 gold 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.