Tuscany Road World Championships kick off with team time trials

Sunday marks the beginning of the UCI Road World Championships, held in Tuscany, Italy for the first time. The eight days of racing start with the team time trials, contested not by national teams, but by trade teams.

Last year the format was introduced, resurrecting what the Eindhoven Team Trial of 2005 to 2007 meant to do for men’s teams: determine what was the best-drilled professional squad in the world against the clock. CSC took the final two editions before the race was scrapped.

At the 2012 Worlds in Limburg, the Netherlands, Omega Pharma-Quick Step took the prize for the men and Specialized-lululemon took the women’s spoils. Orica-GreenEdge placed third, meaning that Canada’s Svein Tuft won a bronze to keep his 2008 Worlds individual chrono silver company.

This year, Orica-GreenEdge is hoping to replicate its exciting team time trial win at Nice in the Tour de France when the Australian squad nipped Omega Pharma by three-quarters of a second. Tuft will be joined by two other members of that Nice nine; all six teammates heading to Tuscany live in Girona, Spain and have been drilling for two weeks. Both Orica and Omega will be wary of strong RadioShack, Astana, BMC and Sky sextets.

The men will be tackling a 56.8 kilometre course while the women face 42.79 kilometres. The course is flat and dead straight between Pistoia and Florence, with corners only at the start and in Florence itself. It’ll be one for the powerful and disciplined.

Specialized-lululemon is the squad to beat on the women’s side, with notable stars like Ellen van Dijk of the Netherlands and American Evelyn Stevens. The team finished faster than the UCI’s top-ranked Rabobank-Liv Giant outfit and Orica-AIS on August 16th at the Open de Suede Vargarda in Sweden and also took top honours at the Lotto-Belisol Belgium Tour and the Boels Rental Ladies Tour.