World class podium there, as you'd want from a World Championships, and Annemiek does manage that one truly big win that she had been arguably without - I had feared after the Rio near-miss in the most dramatic of circumstances that she was destined to the same fate as Emma Johansson. She's had a truly great season and this is a great way to cap it even before the Road Race. It was also overall a triumph for the World Tour regulars, hopefully signifying an end to the mayfly era. Although Annemiek wasn't quite so destructive today as she was in the Giro Rosa chrono... anyway, a great 1-2 for the Dutch, even if the early start benefited van der Breggen as against Garfoot who has rode a more selective calendar to target these Worlds. Lisa Brennauer was also offered the rain as an explanation for comparative underperformance, but she refused it on the basis that Garfoot raced in suboptimal conditions late in the day too, and was simply better on the day. Even if Kristin Armstrong may be retired (although will she try to do her return-from-retirement trick a third time for the Olympics? I don't think she will and expect she won't, but given her favourable position with her coach in the selection committee and how well it has worked on prior occasions, piggybacking the points scored by her team for the invites she needs to get up to race speed, and with the team having been renamed Twenty20, never say never) and Neben is also into her 40s, with the opportunities for time trialists in the US calendar compared to the rest of the world, they do keep churning out the talents. Stephens was good as expected, they've got some other big talents in the making, but today we should be talking about Chloe Dygert. Just 20 years old, she's already a historic talent on the boards, and now converting it to the road with some serious power. She's done very little road racing - just the Tour of California last year, primarily to help Armstrong place well through the TTT due to a really ridiculous route, and the Aussie mini-season in January this year, and then some standalone TTs - so the transferability of her skills against the clock to racing in a pack will be the biggest question mark about her, but she's laid to rest the ghosts of Doha, where the Twenty16 team was stripped down to the minimum number of riders when Chloe exploded spectacularly in a combination of exhaustion, dehydration and vomit in the final kilometre. Another year on, and the TTT is of little relevance to her, when she can be more than competitive in the individual event.
Another result to point to is the continued development of Hannah Barnes, who is significantly more versatile than you would have said at the start of the season. She's got over a lot more obstacles than you'd have anticipated en route to her victories and top World Tour placements this season, and she then caps it with a top 10 in the Worlds TT, despite a course you wouldn't have thought favourable to her. Received wisdom has suggested that Alice is the more gifted of the Barnes girls, but Hannah is doing her utmost to prove that perception wrong... and if it remains right, if Hannah continues to perform like this, look out world because Alice is headed straight to the top. Although she'll have to go some to beat the best of her 1995 contemporaries, since Cille continued her year of greatness with a Worlds top 10 too...
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