We haven’t recovered yet from the World Championship the European Championship already starts on Friday in Slovenia.
The same 22-km circuit, which comprises a steep 2-km climb, is used for everything: all mass start events, as well as all Time Trials.
There’s no warm up, the mass start races precede the TTs, and the program is condensed:
- Friday 2:
- 9:00, women U23
- 13:30, men U23
- Saturday 3:
- 9:00, men junior
- 13:30, women
- Sunday 4:
- 9:00, women junior
- 12:30, men
- Tuesday 6:
- 11:00, mixed relay junior
- 15:30, mixed relay
- Wednesday 7:
- 9:15, ITT women junior
- 10:10, ITT men junior
- 11:30, ITT women U23
- 12:20, ITT men U23
- 14:30, ITT women
- 16:15, ITT men
All TTs are a single 22-km lap.
Here is the circuit:
Junior men and women, U23 women mass start races only take place on the circuit. In other 3 races, there is a pretty flat section coming from the small capital Ljubljana which varies a bit but generally looks like this:
The number of circuit laps varies (in a non-intuitive way, because of the presence/absence of the flat section before) : 2 for elite women, 3 for U23 men and junior women, 4 for U23 women, 5 for junior men and elite men.
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22 km for 5 days? I can walk faster. On my four. Being drunk. Without taking holidays at work!
If Pogačar joins, it will certainly make it more unpredictable.
More unwatchable, at least that’s my opinion.
That’d depend on hist current shape. But yes, if he’s in good one, then it’d make it boring. Though according to latest reports, he won’t be joining.
Even on 80% he’d demolish everyone else. I think the WC has reminded us all what watching cycling used to be like, how much fun it was.
I can only agree with you.
Day 1
After bringing climbers to a WC race that turned out to be for punchers/hard-classicmen, France🇫🇷 brought punchers to the EC U23 race that was mostly dominated by climbers. 😏 Keep up the good selection work 👍 😆
Day 2 Elite women race
France: launches a pre-planned attack, crashes after 50 yards! 🤡 🇫🇷 🤡
At least 2 other teams (Italy and Poland) copied our tactic later! They’ve got no respect for creativity and innovation 😄
I don’t know what can happen with tomorrow’s race and its 5 laps, but so far the races on this circuit were rather uninteresting. Today, the riders entered the circuit fresh as daisies since the inline section is devoid of any difficulty (some had a difficult wake up after 2 hours of strolling). There is only one climb per lap, therefore a single style of climb too, so options are limited. There is the plateau after the climb, but of course it you were dropped in the climb, you can’t use it to try anything (but attempt to join back the front rider(s)). No wind is expected tomorrow, so the flat sections will just be flat sections; a bit of tactic is possible there, but it all depends on available manpower for teams: if others do have manpower, a single or a few riders cannot hope to create much of a gap before next climb.
Basically, my feeling is that the circuit was designed so that Pogatchar could win it without needing to tire himself out.
Day 6 (last) individual time trials
Women:
The two favourites came 1st and 2nd, but Reusser🇨🇭 dominated Vollering🇳🇱 everywhere, even in the climb. It looked (I haven’t checked) like the Dutchwoman’s final section was also worse than for a couple of other riders: she was cooked.
Labous🇫🇷 took a nice Bronze medal (after the team Gold the day before), just ahead of the Italian rider Longo Borghini🇮🇹.
Men:
In the absence of top guys, France becomes a nation of TT specialists 😊, but Roglitch🇸🇮’s 2026 revival continues! The Slovenian was faster on the climb, and not much slower on the other sections.
Decomble🇫🇷 was very happy to get his Bronze medal, a few seconds ahead of Van Wilder🇧🇪 and Küng🇨🇭 who lost too much time in the climb.
Armirail🇫🇷 was very disappointed with his Silver medal. I think he was a bit cooked in the last mile, as the rider he overtook (Schmidt🇨🇭) was then trying hard to… not overtake him again in the last hectometres, while already in a relaxed position while the Frenchman was still in a pure TT position.
I just noted something funny about Roglitch🇸🇮. In terms of PCS points, 2026 is his worst season in 10 years. Yet I, and I suppose most people, would say thus year is better.
I reckon two things happened: last year, his best performance was very early in the year, while this year he woke up late in the season, so that make a huge hole in between; and then we probably got lower and lower expectations about him along the last few years, so each new performance stands out more and more.
Well, another thing is the PCS points scale, of course, that may not reflect exactly what each persons considers a better performance.
As the courses were the same for men and women, and the men race took place immediately after the women race, we can a make a few little comparisons.
Reusser’s winning time would have put her beyond 30th place, if men and women had been riding together.
Strangely, the U23 men performance (the race happened earlier) was very dense, close to elite men: the first 4 U23 would have made it into elite top-10! Perhaps the weather was significantly different.
Day 5 15:30, mixed relay
I hope that there won’t be accidents in the descent. It was spectacular, borderline scary, on the U23 men mass start race.
This downhill is a rare case of being at the same time very fast and very winding. So if you make a single mistake, there is no second chance and the consequences can be disastrous.
TT bikes are both faster and harder to handle. So are teams…
Either it always falls on advertisement breaks, or they decided not to show the descent any more. Anyway, I haven’t heard of crashes.
France🇫🇷 dominated a weak field, as Belgium was absent, as well as Britain who didn’t take part in the EC at all, and Italy didn’t bring Ganna or any of its mass start top performers.
Its women team was very strong and homogenous. All 3 were climbers of a sort. Squiban is not categorised as a climber yet she won two consecutive stages in Tour de France 2025 by attacking in mountain passes… A pity others didn’t wait for her after the downhill section (she was frightened by the descent), as she did the last 8 km flat section, alone, as fast her two teammates and finished just a few seconds behind them.
On the men side… pff… I am going to rant again about the coach. He was set up on Armirail and Cavagna. OK, why not, 1 TT & all-terrain, 1 TT specialist. Cavagna was expected to be a weak point in the climb, but could do it if they were careful. But then, I would have thought he would select a climber as 3rd man (climber-climber, climber-puncher, climber-rouleur, climber-whatever): the climber would have given a couple of relays in the beginning, lead the climb under the command of the other two (possibly dropping Cavagna if needed), arrived fresh as a daisy on the top and therefor able to pull on the hilly plateau, then rested in the descent, and perhaps given a last big relay at the start of the flat section.
Instead, the men’s coach picked yet another TT-specialist, even more limited in climbs than Cavagna (by far) and who’s been crap all along 2026 (even in his discipline, he was beaten by an amateur in the National Championship ITT…). So the guy completely blew up after 6 or 7 km, and left the other two at the mercy of any sort of problems: Cavagna blowing up, a puncture, a big or small crash.
The coach is still dead set or underestimating the climb after seeing it ridden 20 times, that’s amazing.
Poland🇵🇱 lost their medal on the women side, after an honest performance by the men (Kwiatkowski was present).
There too, they had brought, among the 3 gals, a TT specialist who blew up as soon as the climb started, and a kid the third one had to always wait during the climb, arrived cooked on the top, and therefore had to be waited again on the hilly plateau as soon as there was 2% of slope as she never recovered.
They were taken over by the French team, who had started 4 minutes later…
Day 3 Elite men race
It was far from being uninteresting as I feared. The race was ran much more dynamically, even though this dynamic was seen more at the front of the peloton then through successful attacks.
Of course, Evenepoel’s choice to look behind him while (not) preparing for a tight curve allowed the interest to be kept until the last 2 mm of the race. Otherwise it may very well have been another 35 km solo win.
Contrarily to the World Championship where the pace was irregular and the last 3 laps raced at glacial pace; here the speed went up which each lap (I admit that I didn’t check the last one).
It was lucky that France🇫🇷 didn’t repeat a monospecific team as in Canada, and brought a more varied team with a couple of second-rate climbers (Rondel, Bisiaux, and perhaps Braz) because, of course, its top punchers were easily dropped. The two climbers are the only French riders who made it into the final first/second group. When I think, that France’s national coach declared, in the beginning of the race, that Pedersen was the main favourite today… that’s because of that vision that I said we can be lucky he didn’t bring a 100% punchers team here like he brought a climbers team to Canada.
Even like that, the result was not great, barely scratching top-10: 9th, 11th, 12th, 14th, 17th and 18th! 😆 Wrongly placed density 🤣
But at least we could entertain for a while some hope that Rondel could get a medal; a small hope because we know that he cannot compete on flat sections, even though the climb was exactly the type of effort he is good at (but even with finishes-on-top he never wins, there is always 1 or 2 guys better than him in the last hundred metres, and by the way that’s what happened again today with Scaroni).
Italy🇮🇹 was both active and efficient.
Continuing my rant about the French coach. He also told he didn’t bring to Canada Grégoire or any other potential co-leader / backup leader, “because there shall only be one leader”. We saw how it harmed the USA (and Great-Britain to a lesser degree) to have several strong guys 😬 If you don’t bring several leaders, you must bring someone as strong as a leader, whom you don’t call a leader because he has no sprint, but has a similar level, so that he can support your leader until very far in the race. And perhaps that in the end he will find himself in a situation were he can bear a moustache and win without needing to sprint 🤣
And today he brought Grégoire on a race the climbs of which haven’t suited him in a year or two, while the repeated shorter efforts of Montréal fitted him. I mean the guy is on the television motorbike for the Tour de France and several other races, he must have noticed that climbs that long are too long for Grégoire-2026?
I’ve learned more about the photo finish technology in the last 24 hours than I have in my entire lifetime. Good on Remco though, he did most of the work while Ciccone drafted and so the win is at least deserved.
To your comment about leadership, I tend to agree, but I think it’s worth it to point out that McNulty won worlds because he WASN’T a leader. He made his move and the chasing group didn’t tag him as important enough to chase him down until it was too late (and maybe some extra indifference from Del Toro).
So there could be some strategic gamesmanship my intentionally not labelling someone as your leader, it takes the spotlight off of them slightly.
To your comment about leadership, I tend to agree, but I think it’s worth it to point out that McNulty won worlds because he WASN’T a leader. He made his move and the chasing group didn’t tag him as important enough to chase him down until it was too late (and maybe some extra indifference from Del Toro).
So there could be some strategic gamesmanship my intentionally not labelling someone as your leader, it takes the spotlight off of them slightly.
Slightly, yes, but I think that the major part of the effect is that all main riders know the qualities and flaws of other main riders. In that respect, both McNulty and Jorgenson meet my “strong guy without a sprint” category. Those guys who can help one leader/co-leader/second-leader until very far in a race, but in normal conditions cannot expect to win.
What’s funny is that other riders do not consider them dangerous because they don’t have a sprint, yet let them go in the only way by which they can win without a sprint.
I can’t find the race, but I think I remember a day when they let S. Küng go in the final miles. Just quietly on the other side of the road, and no one cared. The guy has absolutely zero sprint, so they don’t ‘register’ him a threat, but that doesn’t mean that this TT specialist is not fast, on a regular pace, alone. And he won. (At least in my memory 😁.)
Back to our national coach, I saw a glimpse of an interview today where he said he wanted Cosnefroy for Slovenia. Again, this confirms a double mistake, a complete inversion of the riders needed for Canada and for Slovenia. It had to be the rider himself who refused because he rightfully though the Slovenian climb was too hard for him. How could the coach not know that? And how couldn’t he see that the Montreal profile fitted him (even though he never had great results there, but that dates back a bit and he was in shape this year)?
Add to this that Lenny Martinez also refused to come. Ou coach would have selected him otherwise, while he is completely out of shape at the moment (4 withdrawals out of 6 Italian races…)?
That means that if those 2 riders hadn’t refused, we would have started the European Championship with extra 2 riders unfit for the race (1 extra puncher, and 1 out of shape guy), therefore 2 potentially useful riders would have been left at home, perhaps the 2 of the 3 climbers which did well (compared to the rest of the team), since the coach wrongly saw that race as more suitable for punchers than climbers.
Finally, about Canada, “we may have seen ourselves better than we were”. “We”, and “may”… This goes the way of what I was saying on the race day, that it looked like the French team believed they only had one opponent to beat on this race, and the rest of the field was peanuts.
By the way, if I am so pissed about the guy, it is because people praised him and his ‘ideas of genius’ so much after the 2 Alaphilippe victories (and Laporte’s) that he started believing them. Even though he himself confessed by then, that 2 of them happened without following his orders and even against the plan, he then forgot that and started believing he was an actual genius, and not just someone who likes to voluntary mess things and got lucky doing that.
I was of the mind that he should have quitted after those good years, to leave with a good (brilliant even!) image. But nope, he stayed. And his discourse is less and less light-hearted, becomes more and more defensive, he starts denying things anyone can see. And the winds of public image have finally started to turn. And when those things turns, they tend to erase the good things that were done in the past. It seems he will stick to his position at least one more year. Probably counting on a Seixas miracle. I heard that after next WC, the profiles may get flatter and not suit Seixas very well, so 2027 would be his only chance in a while.
