2022 World Championships RR Race Preview
The details of this year's 2022 World Championships RR are falling into place. Find the latest route profiles and maps below, followed by our strategic preview of the race.
The road to Wollongong winds through some of the most punishing terrain Australian racing has to offer, and the course designers have made absolutely certain that the 2022 UCI Road World Championships will not be decided by a bunch sprint. The circuit around the New South Wales coastal city features the infamous Piccadilly Hill climb, a short but savage ascent with gradients that will shatter any peloton that dares stay together for too long. Combined with the iterated nature of the finishing circuit, the accumulated fatigue promises to reduce the race to its most tenacious and powerful climbers.
The start in Helensburgh and the journey south toward Wollongong sets the tone early, with challenging roads ensuring that no team can afford to sleepwalk into the finale. The riders will tackle the local circuits multiple times, and each passage over Piccadilly Hill will further thin a peloton that begins the day numbering in the hundreds. By the closing laps, only the strongest and most tactically astute will remain in contention.
Tadej Pogacar arrives as one of the most formidable favorites the sport has seen in years. The Slovenian has spent the entire season reminding the world that he operates on a different plane from almost everyone else, winning monuments and stage races with a ferocity that borders on the overwhelming. His ability to accelerate on steep gradients and his willingness to race aggressively from a long way out make him ideally suited to a course like this. Slovenia, however, is a small nation and the burden of protecting him will fall on relatively few shoulders.
Remco Evenepoel represents perhaps the most intriguing subplot of the entire event. The Belgian has transformed himself into one of the most complete riders in the professional peloton and arrives in Australia on the back of a victory at the Vuelta a Espana, a result that announced to the world that his talent had finally been forged into something capable of bending the grand tour landscape. Belgium has a deep squad and will be able to race with options, potentially using riders like Wout van Aert as both a threat in his own right and as a powerful instrument in service of the team's broader ambitions.
Van Aert himself cannot be overlooked. His season has been a relentless demonstration of versatility and power, and while Piccadilly Hill may not be the kind of grinding Alpine ascent that suits the purest climbers, its punchy and explosive character could work beautifully in his favor. A rider who can produce extraordinary watts for sustained periods on short brutal climbs is precisely what a finish like this rewards, and Van Aert fits that profile as well as anyone in the race.
Defending champion Julian Alaphilippe will be desperate to show that last year's coronation in Leuven was not a singular moment. The Frenchman has endured a difficult season marked by injury and inconsistency, but when he arrives at a finish that suits his explosive and attacking style, he has repeatedly proven capable of producing performances that defy expectations. France will ride in service of his ambitions, and a motivated Alaphilippe on a circuit featuring punchy climbs is always a dangerous proposition.
The Australians themselves will carry the weight of a home crowd that has waited years for a world championship on native soil. Michael Matthews has the experience and the tactical intelligence to be involved in a reduced group late in the race, and the collective motivation of riding in front of a home crowd on roads they know intimately could prove to be a factor in the closing kilometers.
The weather in Wollongong in late September can be unpredictable, and conditions may yet play a decisive role in how the race unfolds. A hot and humid day would punish those who have traveled farthest and arrived least acclimatized. A cooler day might encourage more aggressive early racing and a harder pace over the climbs from an earlier moment.
Regardless of conditions, the expectation is that Piccadilly Hill will serve as the anvil on which the race is forged. Teams with single leaders will need to conserve their protected riders carefully, while nations with multiple threats can afford to send riders up the road and apply pressure from different angles. The complexity of that tactical calculus, played out across a long and demanding day in the Southern Hemisphere spring, is what makes this edition of the world championships feel like one of the most genuinely open and compelling in recent memory.
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