(Photo: UCI World Championship)
The ten-day inaugural UCI world championships in Glasgow were a festival of all things bike in one place: mountain bike world titles, track cycling, road racing, BMX, para-racing, and even indoor artistic synchronized cycling.
Mountain Biking: French phenom Pauline Ferrand-Prévot won her ninth individual mountain bike world title. Whoa. (She wants to ride road now. We say go for it.)
Road Race: After two track titles earlier in the week, Lotte Kopecky won the road race to cap an amazing season.
The Lotte Kopecky Effect is real: 4x more U18 women are registering for cycling in Belgium
Time Trial: Chloe Dygert is back. She last won the world title in 2019, but then had a truly gruesome crash during the world championships in 2020. It was supposed to be her crowning glory in the build to Tokyo Olympics. Instead, it was a long (long) road back to here.
48-year-old Amber Neben also surprised everyone with her 7th place finish.
One of the favorites going into the time trial race, Marlen Reusser, however, stopped just past halfway and sat down in the grass. Although she had crashed in the final turn of the team time trial mixed relay (which her Swiss team won), she said after that wasn't the problem. She was just mentally exhausted.
Here's what she said:
"I feel I need time to breathe and rediscover my desire to go out and win ... But instead, I feel like I'm caught up in a never-ending downward spiral ... I just had to keep going. That's why I came to the Worlds, even though I knew it wasn't going to work out."
On a much much lighter note: Have you seen the world champion artistic cyclists?!
3. Yes, the World Cup is still going
If you thought the World Cup ended when the U.S. got pushed out, you're missing some the craziest game of the tournament: Australia-France went to 10 rounds of penalty kicks. TEN! The most ever in any World Cup match.
It was the game that stopped a nation. Way (way!) more people now follow the Matildas than the Socceroos. (Yes, those are the Australian men's and women's teams' names.) Viewership records all over the country are being broken.
Welcome to the Matildas bandwagon!
And then, early this morning, we got our first finalist, in a game that saw three goals swing back and forth in the last nine minutes of play. When the dust settled it was Spain - 2, Sweden - 1. What's left?
WATCH:
- Australia v. England: Wednesday at 6 a.m. ET
- FINAL (Spain v. TBD): Sunday at 6 a.m. ET
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