How Good Was That?

There aren't too many reasons I can think of for sitting in front of a television screen on a Sunday morning for close on six hours but today was the day to do it.

Mark Cavendish has become Britain's first world road race champion for 46 years as his team rode a near-perfect race in Copenhagen. Apparently there were plenty of people using various social networks to attack the teams tactics but the truth was that the eight-man GB line-up ignored all breakaways to control the peloton over the 266km course, delivering Cavendish to the finish in ideal fashion.

This wasn't like the Grand Tours where Cav could rely on Mark Renshaw for the lead out after breaking the field apart, today all the leading riders were in there at the end and when the peloton took the right hand turn to begin the climb towards the finishing line for the last time Cav was boxed in with seemingly no room to manoeuvre. But he did what he always does found  the gap and the rest was history.

The teamwork was outstanding throughout the day, Steve Cummings and Chris Froome took the race to the opposition early on and then when a group of seven riders tried a breakaway Bradley Wiggins chased the leaders down from the front of the peloton. What was really astonishing was that everybody knew what the GB plan was, three years in the planning, swix hours in the executing it was fantastic to watch.

"It was incredible, we took it on from start to finish," said Cavendish afterwards to a Eurosport reporter at the finish line, "I can't believe it. We knew three years ago when this course was announced - we put a plan together to put these best guys together. It's been three years in the making and you just saw they rode incredibly. I'm just so proud. The biggest goal next year [is the Olympics] and I hope we can make it a world and Olympic double."

Cav became the first British rider to win the World Road Race title since Tom Simpson won gold in 1965. He also became the first rider in thirty years, since Belgium's Freddy Maertens,  to win both this race and the Tour de France green jersey in the same year.

Fantastic.

It's been a great week for GB with three medals and a team that was competitive throughout the events, a reward for all the hard work and the lottery funding that has been given. It also shows the benefit of planning, this has been a co-ordinated race plan since the day Copenhagen was announced as the venue for the 2011 race and at least twelve riders have contributed during the intervening three years accumulating points so that GB could put out the strongest possible team in the best possible condition.