When you’re a city with 246km of coastline, spread out majestically between beaches and islands and blue lagoons, sweeping up to bold mountains of dense green forests, and yes built around some spectacularly crowded favelas and the most recognisable statue on earth, you’d like to show off as much of it as possible, especially when the whole world is watching.
And when it comes to the Olympics, there’s no better way of doing that than on a bicycle. No wonder the men’s road race is one of the opening events, many worldwide TV viewers tuning in on Saturday morning – just hours after the Opening Ceremony – to a kaleidoscope of images of the international peloton winding its way around that coastline and into those mountains, over the course of a naturally and quite brutally testing 237.5km.
Starting at Fort Copacabana at 9:30am Rio time (1.30pm Irish time), Saturday’s race includes a total elevation gain of around 3.6km.
Most demanding
That’s a long way up, in other words, not as much as the typical Alpine stage in the
Tour de France
and yet surely the most demanding road race circuit in Olympic history.
No way then will the race for the gold medal come down to a bunch sprint, with all of the peloton still intact, and no one knows this better than Dan Martin.
As soon as the Rio road race circuit was presented, it was immediately clear it would favour the climbers such as Martin, even more so for the one-day specialists such as himself. After all he is a former winner of Liege-Bastogne-Liege, a race circuit not entirely dissimilar to what’s been laid out in Rio.
At age 29, and competing in his second Olympics, Martin is not long off the three-week Tour de France, where he finished ninth – his best ever placing: Martin took five top-10 stage finishes, including second, fourth and fifth, and certainly left Paris last month with the sort of confidence needed to challenge for a medal on Saturday.
“It is the opportunity of a lifetime,” he said. “It’s definitely a good course for me. I have won Liège, I have won Lombardia. They are the only 250 kilometre hilly classics on the calendar. So, on those courses, over those sort of distances, I am good. So I have got a chance. A really big chance.”
As well as the most testing, it's also likely to be the most competitive – now three-time Tour de France winner Chris Froome also arriving in Rio this week looking to equal former Sky team-mate Bradley Wiggins, who in 2012 won both the Tour and Olympic gold.
“It’s more of a gamble,” is how Froome describes the race. “Being a one-day race and having such small teams, it’s going to be an extremely hard race to judge tactically. You can’t just put eight guys on the front and hold it back for the last climb and make it as selective as possible. But to have a result here would be phenomenal.”
Severe climbs
After starting at Fort Copacabana, the race heads west along the Brazilian coast line, and after 37km, begins four laps of the “Grumari Circuit”, a 25km loop which features two severe climbs.
From there, it heads back along the beach towards Rio, hitting the start of the harder “Vista Chinesa” circuit, after 162km. Here, the riders complete two-and-a-half laps, tackling the tough Vista Chinesa climb three times, which include sections with average ascent of 10 per cent. The gold medal may not be won on this stretch of road, but it can almost certainly be lost.
After the final descent, there is a flat run 10km back to the finish line at Fort Copacabana. While an early breakaway may well survive, it’s more likely the gold medal will be won by a late, solo move on one of the final three climbs.
Limited to 144 riders, only five countries (Belgium, Spain, Italy, Great Britain and Colombia) have the full quota of five, while Martin is joined by his cousin Nicolas Roche, who didn't ride this year's Tour and may well sacrifice his chances here to ensure Martin stays close to the leaders for as long as possible.
Indeed Olympic road races have a history of riders sharing their trade teams as much as their national ones, so Martin may well end up getting some help from elsewhere. What is certain is that Martin admits he’s one of those targeted as gold medal challengers, also certain the race winner will also have competed in last month’s Tour.
After all, one of the best ways to prepare for an Olympic road race of this physical magnitude this is a three-week stage Tour through some very mountainous terrain.
The only big-name absentee is Tour de France podium finisher Nairo Quintana from Colombia, although team-mate Rigoberto Uran, second in London, is riding, along with the two top Italians Vincenzo Nibali and Fabio Aru.
