2024 World Championships Women RR Race Preview
The details of this year's 2024 World Championships Women RR are falling into place. Find the latest route profiles and maps below, followed by our strategic preview of the race.
The world championships road race heads to Zurich this year, a city that last hosted the event back in 1923, making this a remarkable return for Swiss cycling. The course is a demanding one that should suit the punchy, technically capable riders rather than the pure climbers or the sprinters who survive in large bunches.
The route features multiple ascents of the Zurichberg and the Witikon climb, short but steep enough to split the peloton repeatedly over a race that covers around 156 kilometres. The repeated nature of those climbs means fatigue will become a critical factor in the later stages, and positioning through the technical descents back into the city will be just as important as raw climbing ability.
Defending champion Lorena Wiebes will find this course considerably less to her liking than last year's flat finish in Glasgow, and the Dutch team, while deep with talent, will need to reassess how they approach a parcours that does not obviously favour their fastest finisher. Nevertheless the Netherlands arrive as they almost always do with options throughout the race, and dismissing them entirely would be foolish given their strength in numbers and tactical intelligence.
Marianne Vos, ageless and endlessly resourceful, remains a threat on terrain like this, capable of reading a race better than almost anyone in the peloton. Her ability to produce a telling acceleration on a short steep climb while conserving energy through the earlier circuits could make her a genuine contender deep into the afternoon.
Demi Vollering comes into this race as arguably the best stage racer in the women's peloton right now following her performances through the season, and a course with repeated climbing suits her capacity to sustain high power outputs over time. She will be one of the most closely marked riders in the race.
Italy will be looking to Elisa Longo Borghini, who has spent years knocking on the door of a world title and carries both the experience and the palmarès to suggest she can finally take it on home roads, or at least as close to home as this Swiss city represents. Her aggressive racing style suits an event where momentum and decisive attacking on the climbs will likely determine the outcome.
Kasia Niewiadoma has shown throughout her career that she excels on exactly this kind of punchy, repetitive terrain, and her win at the Tour de France Femmes this year underlined that she can now close out big races as well as animate them. She will be dangerous.
The American squad, led by Kristen Faulkner following her Olympic road race victory in Paris, arrives with genuine confidence. Faulkner proved in France that she can execute perfectly in a chaotic high-stakes race, and she will be supported by a team capable of working hard to set up a late move.
Expect a race that fragments steadily through the repeated climbs, with a small and exhausted group reaching the final circuits and the winner likely emerging from a late attack rather than a bunch sprint. The course rewards courage and timing above all else.
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