Two Olympic road races blighted by crashes but thrillers nonetheless in Rio

If the two road races in Rio were not a good advertisement for road cycling to the world, then I don't know what is. Especially the men's race which many are calling the race of the season; a race expected to be contested by the climbers but which was won by a man of the cobbles in Greg Van Avermaet. The woman's race ended in dramatic fashion itself when American Mara Abbott was caught within metres of the line by a group of three from which Anna Van Der Breggen of the Netherlands took the gold medal.

It was a brutal course that incorporated its own sectors of cobbles but also some savage hills but because of what was at stake as well as the reduced team sizes and a ban on race radios, the action came thick and fast and it was hard for the climbing type to control it. UCI, World Tour, Tour de France etc., take note! They didn't know when to react and when to let a move go and come the finish I was left wondering whether Peter Sagan might have regretted his decision to skip it?

But Sagan or not, perhaps nobody was beating Van Avermaet on a day like this. He could soak up the cobble sections, conserve on some of the earlier climbs and then get in moves that other climbers might not have been given the freedom for.

That said there was a little bit of luck too, but you make your own luck and you have to be in a position to capatilise when the opportunity arises. For a short time near the end it looked as though Vincenzo Nibali might win out in a race he had been targeting since the Giro, but on a tricky descent near the finish as he tried to split up his lead group, he crashed along with fellow escapee Sergio Henao, leaving Rafal Majka on his own to try and hold off a chasing pack. It looked like the perfect opportunity for Poland to seel a superb days racing that had seen Michal Kwiatkowski go up the road for the majority of the day, giving Majka the chance to rest while the rest led the chase. Majka couldn't hang on however and was swept up on the road back into Rio by Van Avermaet and Jakob Fuglsang of Denmark leaving Van Avermaet as the strongest in a sprint along the Copa Cabana. Fuglsang settled for silver while Majka still took bronze.

The woman's race had a similar finish, yet even more dramatic. The pair of Abbott and Annemiek Van Vleuten crested the final climb together and when Van Vleuten accelerated on that tricky descent, made more so by falling rain, it looked like the move to win. That was until a horrific crash seen her flip over her bars and onto a curb, knocking herself unconscious. She would be rushed to hospital with three small fractures to her spine, but would ultimately be ok. The upshot to the race itself was that Abbott was now on her own with a chasing group of three behind, so someone would miss a medal. For a while it looked like the American might hold them off, right into the final 500m in fact, when she finally blew and got swept up with 200m left. Chasing her down had been Elisa Longo Borghini of Italy, who must have realised she was the weakest of the three in the sprint and so by not pushing after Abbott would have missed a medal entirely. As it was her chase got her onto the podium for bronze as Van Der Breggen took the gold medal for the Netherlands ahead of Emma Johannsson of Sweden.

Missing from all this is, of course, Lizzie Armistead. She finished 5th, but her head was clearly not in the race. It's been a turbulent few weeks for the reigning world champion when it emerged she had missed three random doping tests that would normally result in a ban, but had one of them struck off in an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) because the tester had not been able to reach her in her hotel room when the hotel refused to give the tester her room number. It seemed fair enough but the fact that she had even gotten to two missed tests was a worry.

Naturally it put her under a lot of heat, within the press, on social media and even amongst some of her fellow competitors. Armistead later released a letter explaining her position on the matter and it did seem to clear things up a little but there is no doubt going forward she will need to be far more cautious and certainly better with his administration. There is also no doubt that it had an affect on her mental state. She denied this after the race and said that once on the bike it wasn't in her head, and while this is true there is no doubt the whole saga had an affect on her preparation...so much so that in itself it might have been the 20sec difference that she found herself away from a gold medal come the finish.

Next up will come the individual time-trials were certain riders like Chris Froome who must have fancied his chances in this race only to miss one of the decisive moves, will look to redeem himself and repeat what Bradley Wiggins achieved in 2012 when he added the Olympic time-trial to his Tour de France victory. Speaking of Wiggins, a little later in the week the track cycling begins and Wiggins will look to bookend his fabulous career with another gold in the velodrome.

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Rider of the week:

Danny Van Poppel won two stages of the Vuelta a Burgos while Alberto Contador took the overall win, and Lachlan Morton won two stages and the overall classification of the Tour of Utah, but how can you not go for Greg Van Avermaet for completely upsetting the odds and spoiling a course supposed to be built for climbers by winning Olympic gold for Belgium?