MADRID, 1 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Spanish cyclist David Valero finished seventeenth in the World Cross Country Championship (XCO), held in Andorra, where South African Alan Hatherly was crowned champion, while the other two Spaniards in the competition, David Campos and Jofre Cullell, finished in 22nd and 31st position.
In a race marked by a reduction in the number of laps (6) due to the forecast of storms, the Granada native, who was competing in his eleventh World Championship, fought in the last laps to be among the top ten. Both Valero and Campos saw their race conditioned by the start, in which they were unable to advance positions and settled around 30th place.
The Baza native managed to recover lap by lap and was twelfth with one lap to go, close to the top ten, but he could not maintain his great final pace and finished seventeenth. Campos, meanwhile, finished twenty-second after a solid race, and Cullell, who suffered from a virus during the week prior to the World Championships, was thirty-first.
In the women’s race, in which the elite and U-23 cyclists were brought together due to the forecast of storms, Estíbaliz Sagardoy and Nuria Bosch showed a very similar pace throughout the race to finish in 54th and 55th places. The victory went to the Dutchwoman Puck Pieterse.