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Mathieu van der Poel has delivered a triumph for the ages at the world cycling championships, picking himself off the ground after a crash to solo to victory in the men's road race in Glasgow.
The flying Dutchman was just over half a minute ahead of a super-elite group with 16.5km of the 271km race left on a damp Sunday afternoon when he failed to negotiate a tight right-hand corner and slid across into a streetside barrier.
For a moment, van der Poel later admitted, he felt his race might be over and it looked as if the pursuers, including double Tour de France winner Tadej Pogačar and Belgian superstar Wout van Aert, might cash in.
Yet despite being bloodied, with a ripped shirt and a damaged, loose right shoe, van der Poel picked himself up and continued to power on, fuelled seemingly by anger, to take victory by an astonishing 1 minute and 37 seconds.
"If that had cost me the world title, I wouldn't have been able to sleep for a couple of days," said van der Poel of the crash.
"This means everything, one of the biggest goals I had left and to win it is amazing. It almost completes my career in my opinion — I can't imagine riding in the rainbow (stripes as world champion) for the year."
His great perennial rival van Aert was runner-up after more than six gruelling hours in the saddle, with Pogačar outsprinting Denmark's former world champion Mads Pedersen for bronze.
In a dramatic race, interrupted for 55 minutes after 80km of riding when protesters from climate activism group This Is Rigged blocked the road, there was also a spectacular performance from Australian Matthew Dinham.
Only brought in as a late replacement for Caleb Ewan just two days before the race, the 23-year-old Sydney prospect finished a remarkable seventh after also being part of the early nine-man breakaway which led for a long while even after the interruption.
"It was a really crazy day. I was probably meant to be the first rider to work for the team and went on the offensive in that early move, which ended up paying off towards the end of the race," said Dinham.
"I just kept trying to put myself in a good position and fortunately had the legs in the end. I'm pretty ecstatic, still pinching myself a little bit."
Dinham's veteran teammate Simon Clarke finished an impressive 21st but there was disappointment for Michael Matthews, whose recent shoulder injury, suffered on his comeback race in Spain, proved too much, forcing him to pull out.
The victory marked van der Poel's ascension to cycling greatness after he became the first man to win both the world cyclocross title and elite road race, having achieved the triumphs in the same year.
The 28-year-old van der Poel, grandson of the late French legend Raymond Poulidor and now the first Dutchman to win the rainbow jersey on the road since Joop Zoetemelk in 1985, also took the Paris-Roubaix and Milan-San Remo monument classics this year as he's stamped himself as one of the all-time greats.
He had made his kick for home with 22.5km left with one of his familiar extraordinary surges, racing away from the rest of his super-elite quartet and shooting past the Italian leader Alberto Bettiol, who'd made his own break with 55km left.
A heavy downpour provided more problems for the riders, but it caused no problem for van der Poel, who could shoot for a world championship treble in next week's mountain bike race.
AAP
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