That’s quite a feast for the eye, and the 32.4 km course is also a feast for the time trial specialists who prefer racing over flat ground rather than hills. There is not a single hill on the route, just a few bumps in the road, amounting to about 150 m of altitude gained – if you can call that altitude. So this is a race for the fast men and women who will be riding the same course and distance for the first time.
This means that there are quite a number of riders with a chance to win, starting with the world’s champion in the discipline, Remco Evenepoel. The 24-year-old Belgian should be delighted with the course, after finishing only third – behind Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard – in the final-stage ITT of the recent Tour de France on a course that had some serious uphill ramps. The operative word in the last sentence is recent because that race was run last Sunday, just six days before he will race in Paris.
Evenepoel had an excellent Tour finishing third in the GC, winning the white jersey for the best young rider and winning the stage 7 ITT, which was run on a relatively flat course. The Paris ITT is even flatter. But how much did the Tour, with its 52,320 m of climbing, take out of his legs? That’s probably the key question about the race since Evenepoel’s main rivals did not ride the Tour.
For example, the runner-up by 12 seconds to Evenepoel in last year’s world championship ITT, Filippo Ganna of Italy, has not raced since the Tour of Austria in the first week of July. He will be considerably fresher, of course. And since he has also trained for the Olympic track competition, he will have a lot of speed in his legs. Plus, he beat Giro-Tour winner Pogačar in a flat ITT in this year’s Giro d’Italia by 28 seconds. The 28-year-old Ganna should be even faster now. Barring an incident, he should win the gold.
The silver medal should be between Evenepoel and the 20-year-old British speedster Joshua Tarling who finished third in the 2023 world championship ITT, 48 seconds behind Evenepoel. Tarling last raced more than a month ago, in the British road race and ITT championships. He won that ITT easily and will be much stronger than he was in last year’s Worlds, if only because he is so young and therefore has so much room left for improvement. Look for him to take the silver, by a hair, just because of his youth and freshness.
There are several other riders capable of winning a medal, including Wout van Aert, the great Belgian all-rounder. He finished 120th in the Tour stage 21 ITT, which only means he was saving himself for Paris and so has his eyes set on a medal. This has been a bad year for the 2022 Tour de France green jersey winner who crashed hard in late March in the Dwars door Vlaanderen and has not been the same since.
Van Aert used to be a premier time trial rider, finishing second in the 2021 Worlds, 6 seconds behind Ganna and 44 seconds ahead of Evenepoel, and winning two Tour de France ITTs. He will be especially motivated and could take a medal if one of the top three falters. The same goes for the two Swiss ITT specialists, Stefan Küng and Stefan Bissegger. The Olympics ITT gold medal winner from 2021, Primož Roglič, will not be racing in Paris after crashing out of the Tour de France with what has been diagnosed as a lower back fracture.
A final word about the course. It’s very flat but potentially treacherous, with lots of twists and turns in the Bois de Vincennes and lots of manhole covers in the city streets, which would be especially dangerous if it rains.
