Paula Finlay repeated her surprise win from the 2022 Canadian Road Cycling Championships last Friday with another in the test against the clock and the race of truth!
Last year with all due respect Findlay faced a somewhat diminished field, but this year, it was a much more deep and competitive race field and Findlay still came out on top - beating handily the likes of Women’s World Tour riders like, Paris Roubaix winner and EF Education’s Alison Jackson, and UAE Team’s Olivia Baril - who was first “discovered” a few years ago early in the pandemic, absolutely crushing races on Zwift and will be UAE’s protected rider next month in the Tour France Femme Avec Zwift - ironically!
There are rumors and rumblings that Findlay may be interested in having a go at the ITT at the UCI World Championships later this year, in Glasgow and possibly the Olympic Games next summer. This was somewhat confirmed in my post race interview with her saying she would be really interested to a return to the Olympics in the ITT!
I’ve been here in Edmonton, Alberta, Announcing at the Canadian Road Cycling Championships for the past 4 days!
Whenever I’m suffering during a bike interval and want to quit I always think of Paula’s power output and use it for motivation. Sounds silly but she’s so strong on the bike and she just suffers. I was hoping to see her power on Strava after the event but it was missing. One of the latest TTL videos she was suffering during intervals and she said, ‘It’s impossible to feel good. If you feel good you’re not going hard enough.’ She wasn’t trying to sound like a coach or anything. She was in the emotion of mentally suffering when she said it.
While they are two separate events; Canada, like the United States, stipulates that “athletes competing in the time trial must also compete in the road race”. This was the case in Tokyo and will probably be the case in Paris.
Paula Finlay repeated her surprise win from the 2022 Canadian Road Cycling Championships last Friday with another in the test against the clock and the race of truth!Here are the results, if the “chatter” is not enough. An emphatic win. Perhaps PTN will cease its jocular taking the piss of Canadian TT cycling, or maybe not. Either way, Findlay gave the ‘proper cyclists’ a good seeing to. https://zone4.ca/…-23/b6817d74/results
Jackson was 4th 1:22 down on Findlay.
Jackson was over 3 minutes down on Thomas (USA) in the World Champs ITT 2022.
Knibb almost beat Thomas last Thursday.
At St George last October Knibb beat Findlay by >6 minutes (over 90km).
It will be good to see Findlay Knibb and Oct 2018/May 2022/June 2023 model Ryf racing in Milwaukee in August, but I fear/assume Knibb won’t as too close to the Paris test event (and AQ chance there).
I looked up the Canadian Qualifying standards and did not find that stipulation.
They are correct. It’s a UCI/IOC thing though and not up to each country/NGB. It’s worded a bit differently now but it used to say explicitly that only riders entered in the road race were eligible to race the TT. It’s essentially the same now since countries only gain spots for the TT through the road race quota places which means in reality you have to be part of a UCI pro team and qualify for the road race in order to race the TT(with a few exceptions). Getting a spot in the Olympic TT is not as straight forward as “just” winning nationals and maybe dabbling in a few TT’s a long the way.
I looked up the Canadian Qualifying standards and did not find that stipulation.
They are correct. It’s a UCI/IOC thing though and not up to each country/NGB. It’s worded a bit differently now but it used to say explicitly that only riders entered in the road race were eligible to race the TT. It’s essentially the same now since countries only gain spots for the TT through the road race quota places which means in reality you have to be part of a UCI pro team and qualify for the road race in order to race the TT(with a few exceptions). Getting a spot in the Olympic TT is not as straight forward as “just” winning nationals and maybe dabbling in a few TT’s a long the way.
The Knibb situation does raise the question, then, as to whether Paula could potentially sign with a UCI team in order to open the possibility of qualifying for the olympics. A few problems: this is obviously in Team Canada’s interest, but not really in a pro team’s interest. But I guess there is the possibility that a sponsor kicks in some dough to sweeten the deal for a team if they see value in that move. I do wonder about the whole Knibb to Trek thing and what the arrangement/goals of that are. The other problem is she’s on Specialized, so could only go to SD Worx, AG/Soudal/Quickstep and L3gion, as far as I know. Realistically you could really only see L3gion doing it if, say, Specialized said they’d throw some extra money their way.
I pulled that from page 6 of the 2021 Tokyo Policy. See page five (5) in the 2024 Olympic Policy.
“The ITT starter(s) and any alternate(s) will be named from among athletes selected to the Road Race at the discretion of the Nomination Panel based on international performances in the 12 months prior to the nomination deadline and Section C, Clause 3.”
It looks like Canada has 2 possible strategies, a road race priority and an ITT priority. In Tokyo, Canada got 3 spots in the womens RR (I believe the 3rd spot was after re-allocation) and 2 in the womens TT, and they could have selected a maximum of 4 riders per gender total between those 2 events. I could see them leaning towards the RR priority with Alison’s P-R result…unless Paula shows up to Glasgow and gets an amazing result.
Perhaps if …
1 hour Canadian record holder Lionel Sanders had tried, he like her would have had a shot, but he was entered in a different race this week.
But then there’s always someone who can’t stand success.
Perhaps if …
1 hour Canadian record holder Lionel Sanders had tried, he like her would have had a shot, but he was entered in a different race this week.
But then there’s always someone who can’t stand success.