Getting a world championships medal five years after winning her first would be the cherry on the cake of her best-ever season, according to Elisa Longo Borghini. The dual Italian time trial and road race champion is one of the pre-race favourites in the road race and says she’s ready to go all in for another bit of hardware to add to her trophy cabinet.
“I think my season has been one of the best of my career,” Longo Borghini told Cyclingnews from her home after returning from the Madrid Challenge last weekend. “It would mean the world, it would be the cherry on the cake for the season, but I don’t know. I will fight for it so hard, and I will try my best. But at the end of the day, if I go home with a medal or with a 10th place, what will matter is that I gave my 100 per cent.”
Following the European Championships, Longo Borghini completed an altitude training camp before heading to the Boels Rentals Tour. She was sat comfortably in the top 10 before she pulled out on stage 6 to avoid going too deep after her training block. The Madrid Challenge, which was won by her teammate Jolien D’hoore, was added to her calendar to split up the gap between the two-week run from her last racing until the Worlds and to provide an opportunity to get “some speed” into her legs.
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The next few days will be about spinning the legs and keeping herself fresh, but she believes that she’s on the right track. “I feel that I need a bit more recovery from the past weeks and training at altitude, and then I will be ready to go to Norway.”
The road race course in Bergen is one of her best opportunities to get onto the rostrum since she took bronze at the Valkenburg Worlds in 2012. The single climb of Salmon Hill will likely prove to be a major factor in the selection process. Longo Borghini’s third place in La Course is cast iron proof that she can hang with, and beat, the best at the climbs, but her sprint has never been among the top riders. She thinks that the flat run to the finish could be her undoing if it comes to a small group.
“Yes and no,” Longo Borghini said when asked if the course suited her. “The TT course is of course very hard. It’s something that is very nice for me. The road race looks like it would be too fast in the last kilometres. There is this Salmon Hill, which is quite hard if you have to do it eight times, but then it’s very fast into the final. Maybe it will be a small group coming into a sprint. You never know, because the weather will be very challenging, so you never know what will happen. I will be there.”
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