Primoz Roglic of Slovenia has put his Tour de France disappointment behind him to take a convincing victory in the men’s individual time trial at Tokyo 2020 today. Behind, there was the tightest of battles for Olympic silver and gold, Tom Dumoulin of the Netherlands runner-up for the second Games in a row and Rohan Dennis of Australia third.
The fastest time from the second of the three groups of riders out on the road came from Colombia’s Rigoberto Uran, beating the previous best time set by Belgium’s Remco Evenepoel by 2.58 seconds, as he came home in a time of 57:18:69.
By then, the final group containing the main favourites were heading out onto the course, which covered two laps of the Fuji Speedway Circuit, and six riders were within a quarter of a minute of each other after crossing the finishing line for the first time, with the fastest time posted by Roglic.
It was former world champion Dumoulin who set the benchmark time for those aiming for the podium to beat, the Dutch rider going 1 minute 13 second faster than Uran, but that was smashed by more than a minute by Roglic shortly afterwards as the rider, whose Tour de France hopes were wrecked due to an early crash, rode to gold.
The Slovenian put in a storming second lap to take a convincing victory, his time of 55:04.19 just over a minute faster than his closest rider. Team GB’s Geraint Thomas and Tao Geoghegan Hart both finished well down the field, in 12th and 29th place respectively.