Olympic Cycling: Chris Froome says road race course is 'savage'
Thursday 4 August 2016 18:32, UK
Chris Froome described the Olympic Games road race course as “savage” during a reconnaissance ride on Thursday.
The Tour de France winner rode sections of the 237km route along with Great Britain team-mates Geraint Thomas, Ian Stannard, Adam Yates and Steve Cummings ahead of Saturday's race.
Froome paid particularly close attention to the the 8.9km climb to Vista Chinesa, which has a maximum gradient of 20 per cent and will be tackled three times.
Speaking to Sky Sports News HQ at the summit, he said: "I'm definitely a bit nervous as we get closer to race day now. This is a pretty savage course.
"I'm looking forward to it, though. I think we have got a great team and, hopefully, we are in with a good shot."
The last ascent to Vista Chinesa will be followed by a descent and then a flat run to the finish beside Copacabana beach.
Cummings said: "This climb is really hard. It's a real climbers' climb. The favourites are probably the climbers, but having said that, everyone knows that and not everyone is a climber, so it is going make the race interesting and people are really going to have to try early on. We have to be aware that we have the race in our hands when we arrive here."
All five members of Great Britain's team rode at the Tour de France last month and coach Rod Ellingworth revealed they all appear to have maintained top form.
He said: "All the guys are good. There is always that thing coming out the back of the Tour: how do they recover? But all of them raced at the weekend and they all felt pretty good, so fingers crossed, we should be good."
The Olympic men's road race starts at 1.30pm BST on Saturday and is scheduled to finish at 7.26pm. Follow the whole race with our live blog from 1pm.
