The UCI Road World Championship is the third most important event of the season, after the Tour de France and the Girod'Italia, although the Belgians would probably disagree, placing the WC's over the Giro.
The WC's are all road events, and it includes a team time trial, an individual time trial, and the marquee event, the men's Road Race. The categories include women, U-23 and the men. It used to be that the TTT was raced by riders belonging to the same nationality but the past two years, it was raced between trade teams. It's only in the ITT and the road race that riders ride for flag and country.
The WC is held in Europe annually for three years with the fourth year outside of it. The course varies and it could be flat like in 2002 when Mario Cipollini won or it could be hilly, like in this year's course. So, if you're a climber, you'd stay away from the WC this year.
One thing that's great with the World Champion is that you get to wear a special jersey, called the rainbow jersey, and you can wear it in all races the whole year. It has great commercial value that's why the battle for the jersey is fierce.
These days, it's unusual for a Tour de France champ to win the WC. Since 1989, only Greg Lemond and Cadel Evans had won both Tour and Worlds, with Lemond wearing the "arc en ciel" in the 1990 Tour in which he won.
The favorites for this year are the usual strongmen for one day races like Fabian Cancellara, defending champion Philippe Gilbert and young phenom Peter Sagan. But there is a question mark about how they can manage this hilly course and for that reason, you can throw in the climbers like Chris Horner, Vincenzo Nibali, Chris Froome and the slew of Colombians led by RigobertoUran. How this race will play out will be exciting and entertaining. However, I think Cancellara has the better chance to wear rainbow tonight.
New UCI Prez
One event though upstaged the road race, and it was the bitter election of the UCI presidency. On one corner was Pat McQuaid, the two time UCI president, who was considered as corrupt, dictator and associated with high-handed treatment of cyclists. He was the president at the time of Lance Armstrong and Operation Puerto. His adversary was Brian Cookson, the Federation head of British Cycling, and one of the architects of Britain rise in the cycling universe.
Reading the pre-election reports, it reminded me of the local elections, with one camp accusing the other of bribery and the other camp accusing the other of harassment.
Anyway, acrimonious as it was, UCI now has a new president on Cookson, and one of his promise was to open a truth and reconciliation committee to finally put the cycling's dark past behind.
The work is not easy but Cookson has the backing of the people who wanted changes done in cycling.