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Canuel and Kirchmann medal in world TTT championships but Canyon-SRAM win rainbows

German team sets blistering fast time on the 54.7 km course to win final trade team world championship title in the TTT

World TTT championships
September 23, 2018
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Canyon-SRAM

The battle for the world team time trial title had been billed a battle between Leah Kirchmann’s Team Sunweb and the Boels-Dolmans squad of Karol-Ann Canuel. Instead, it was German team Canyon-SRAM who earned the first medal of the 2018 UCI World Road Championships in Innsbruck, Austria. 2018 is the last year trade teams will contest the TTT at the world championships. Next year mix-gender national squads of three men and three women will contest the event.

The powerful team of Alena Amialiusik, Alice Barnes, Hannah Barnes, Elena Cecchini, Lisa Klein and Trixi Worrack stormed over the 54.7 km course in 1:01:47, over 22 seconds faster than Boels-Dolmans who had to settle for silver. The team made an impression on the rolling course each rider with a brightly coloured disc wheel. The team worked cohesively together, all six riders crossing the finish line while other squads struggled to do so.

The fast-starting Wiggle High5 set the fastest time to the 22.8 km checkpoint but the squad didn’t hold anything together for the final half of the race and slipped to fourth.

Leah Kirchmann’s Sunweb team did a valiant job defending the title and a late charge to the line saw them close the gap to Canuel’s Boels-Dolmans to just seven seconds.

“We are disappointed with third but we executed our plan just like we did last year. We didn’t start too hard and tried to make up time in the end, but this was a different course,” said Sunweb’s Ellen van Dijk. “We had a really good second part but couldn’t make up the time we lost in the first half – it’s really hard to know if you’re going fast enough and it feels fast because you’re going 55km/h, but the other teams were obviously going faster.”