Lourdes Oyarbide will be the other national representative on the first day of Wollongong 2022
MADRID, 17 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Newcomers Sandra Alonso and Oier Lazkano, and Lourdes Oyarbide, recently renewed by the Movistar Team, will be the representatives of the Spanish team in the elite time trials of the Road Cycling World Championship in Wollongong (Australia), which will open the program this Sunday of the competition.
After a long journey of almost 30 hours from Spain to Sydney, all the representatives of the Spanish team in the World Cup time trials are already in Australia. Some of them have taken the opportunity to carry out a first inspection of the track before the organization gives them the opportunity to enjoy it with closed traffic this Saturday.
“The route is mainly characterized by the absence of important straights. The longest is about a kilometer and there is only one of that length. There are many curves and it will be quite entertaining, although the road is quite wide and the turns are not very closed and can be coupled. I like it a lot, it’s a playful route, it’s not about going full throttle constantly”, commented Sandra Alonso.
Alonso faces the World Cup “with great enthusiasm” because he believes that it is a discipline in which he has improved “a lot” in a short time. “This year I have run all the time trials that I have been able to. I think that is important, since it is a discipline in which to improve you have to run it, not just train it, and I take it as one more opportunity to continue progressing, to give everything and apply the lessons learned from previous time trials. It’s a discipline to which I think I can adapt well in the future and for which I want to work hard”, concluded the cyclist from Alicante.
These Wollongong World Championships will be the first in which the elite men’s and women’s categories will compete for the world title in the time trial specialty over an identical distance, 34.2 kilometers after two laps of a 17-kilometre circuit inside Wollongong and that in its final section it will run parallel to the North Wollongong beach.
Sandra Alonso and Oier Lazkano arrive after defending the national team’s jersey in the European Championship time trial, in which Lazkano, runner-up in Spain in the specialty, achieved fifteenth position and Alonso, third in the Spanish Championship, concluded the 22 .
For Lourdes Oyarbide, this will be her fifth world time trial as an elite, and the 34th place she obtained in Ponferrada was her best result.
A priori, this route looks favorable for pure specialists such as Wout Van Aert, Filippo Ganna, Remco Evenepoel and Tadej Pogacar. In the women’s category, the main candidates include Ellen Van Dijk, Lotte Kopecky, Marlen Reusser and the Dutch Annemiek Van Vleuten, from the Movistar Team.