Nicolas Roche will be back in the green of Ireland tomorrow, this time at the UCI Gravel World Championships, and the former World Tour rider has expressed his dissatisfaction with the starting arrangements.
The UCI has based the gridding - the starting positions - on a combination of points, including from road and MTB races. That means the gravel riders, and those like Roche new to the discipline but who have qualified by riding gravel races, have been disadvantaged.
Not only have the current World Tour road riders been parachuted into the gridding ahead of them, but the start of the race is such that being gridded near the front is a huge advantage. On the flip side, those gridded at or close to the back are very unlikely to see the front.
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Roche initially took to Twitter to point out his dissatisfaction with the starting arrangements and then expanded on his points speaking to stickybottle.
He said when Tom Pidcock rode the MTB Worlds he had to start close to the back of the gridding as he had not amassed enough points in MTB races to gain a better position. Yet for the gravel Worlds tomorrow the UCI was using road and MTB ranking points to base the gridding off.
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"Why are things now different in gravel (Worlds)? It's OK that (road and MTB) riders have a free pass to race. But at least let the riders who go through the effort of riding gravel, and qualifying, start in the front. Or don’t put a single track after 500m."
Roche told stickybottle the nature of the start tomorrow - both the very start of the race and then most of the opening 20km - meant the gridding was going to have a huge impact on the race.
"People might say 'it's a 200k race, what does it matter?' But the problem is that the first 16k are through gateways and there's a single track descent after 1.5km. Even if you're Van der Poel, if you start at the back you'd never make it to the front, it's proper carnage," "Roche said.
"Starting at the back is ridiculous. If it was any other race, where you started on normal course and then it gets narrow a bit later, like in mountain biking, it would be different. But for a course that starts like this, with 600 metres into the first section and then 15k of single track, it's absolutely ridiculous."
Roche is riding the race alongside his brother Alexis in the Irish team, with the race set to unfold on the white gravel roads in Italy’s Veneto region. Starting in the UNESCO world heritage site of Vicenza, the route also passes close to Padua city before the big finish in the walled city of Cittadella.
About three-quarters of both the men’s and women’s courses are comprised of the Italian white gravel sections and some cobbled sections. The opening 20km includes two climbs totaling 3km – one on gravel and one paved and with gradients of about 10 per cent.
