Primoz Roglic ends nightmare run with Olympic time trial gold as Annemiek van Vleuten wins women’s race

Getty Images

Slovenia’s Primoz Roglic upset Filippo Ganna of Italy to end a nightmare few months with Olympic time trial gold as Britain’s riders missed out on the medals.

Time trial specialist and world champion Ganna had been the red-hot favourite but could only finish fifth as Roglic took gold by more than a minute ahead of Netherlands’ Tom Doumoulin, who was also returning to form after a difficult year, and Australia’s Rohan Dennis.

Roglic, a two-time winner of the Vuelta a Espana, came second to countryman Tadej Pogacar in last year’s Tour de France but was forced to abandon this year’s race after several heavy falls in the early stages.

He had still looked short of his best form when cracking late in Saturday’s road race but was right back to his best at the Fuji International Speedway, leading by eight seconds at the halfway stage before destroying the field over the second half of the 44.2km course.

British pair Geraint Thomas and Tao Geoghegan Hart had both crashed in the road race, Thomas eventually being forced to retire, but both were back on the bike here, the Welshman finishing 12th with Geoghegan Hart down in 29th.

Tokyo 2020 Olympics: Awesome Images

Athletics - Olympics: Day 7
1/47

Earlier, in the women’s time trial, the Netherlands’ Annemiek van Vleuten had finally ended her quest for a first Olympic title.

The Dutch rider had suffered a horrific crash while leading the road race in Rio five years ago and thought she had righted that wrong with gold in the same event in Tokyo on Sunday, only to find at the finish that Austria’s Anna Kiesenhofer had already crossed the line without the peloton realising she had broken away.

“I knew after the road race that I was in super, super shape and everyone was talking about everything else and what happened in the road,” Van Vleuten said after taking gold by almost a minute, ahead of Switzerland’s Marlen Reusser and Dutch teammate Anna van den Breggen.

“Almost no one was talking about the performance that I had there in the road. If that performance had won me the gold medal then they would have been saying I’d had an amazing race but I closed myself from social media and we had an evaluation in the team. The message that I kept remembering in my head after the road race was that I was in super shape and that I was better than ever.”

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in