By Sports Reporter/Doha

The first day of action at the UCI Road World Championships will see the men’s Team Time Trials (TTT) follow the women’s, and the competition is expected to be fierce.
The trials will start at 15:20 hours today. Few cycling races are as spectacular, when the most powerful riders of the world tag along to ride as fast as possible for an hour. But it is not a matter of legs alone—skills are also crucial in order to be as efficient as possible and gain time that may prove essential later on.
The Doha 2016 course is divided in two main sections. For starters, the teams will encounter the flat, straight road between Lusail and Doha city, ideal for the squads to work as genuine trains.
Later on, in The Pearl, harmony will be based on bike-handling abilities and gradual acceleration efforts to avoid wearing out its elements. After all, teams here are formed by six riders and it’s the fourth one who clocks the squad’s time on the standings. Disbanding too early is devastating for a squad’s chances of succeeding.
The outcome of this event is always tight and breathtaking. Take the Firenze 2013 race, for instance, where the winning team claimed the title by a mere second!
BMC Racing Team, the defending champions, set the UCI RWC TTT as a real goal three years ago, commissioning its then-rider Marco Pinotti to become a coach with the sole task of making the team excel in this type of race.
This Swiss-American outfit delivered its first title at Ponferrada 2014, and went on to win again at Richmond 2015. Claiming its third straight victory is a feasible challenge for the team, as proven by the two World Tour TTTs it has won this year thanks to gifted athletes such as Australia’s Rohan Dennis, Switzerland’s Stefan Küng and Italy’s Daniel Oss.
The women’s Team Time Trials shall kick off at 14:10 hours, a race where technical skills and team spirit count more than power alone.
Working as a unit is essential to efficiently cope with the wind along the road between Lusail Sport Complex and Doha city, while bike-handling will be key in the curvy circuit of The Pearl.
The six women that form each team will have to duly coordinate their effort. Since the fourth rider is the one to clock the team’s time, the squad can only drop two elements before reaching the finish line.
Canyon–SRAM are the defending champions. The TTT is a relatively new addition to the UCI Road World Championships programme; it was only included in 2012. Its four women’s editions have been won by the team run by Velocio Sports S.L.U. in its different incarnations: Specialized-lululemon (2012-2014) and Velocio-SRAM (2015).
Velocio folded its professional cycling team last winter. Its sporting director Ronny Lauke set up a new squad named Canyon-SRAM that has on its roster several of the riders that conquered the TTT Road World Championships in previous years, such as Germany’s Lisa Brennauer or Belarus’ Alena Amialiusik.

Who to look out for:
After placing in the runner-up spot last year at the UCI RWC Richmond 2015, Boels-Dolmans has excelled this season in the art of team time trialling. The Dutch team has won three of the four TTT races it has taken part in this year, taking advantage of the huge engines of riders like Ellen Van Dijk, Evelyn Stevens and current Road Race UCI world champion Lizzie Deignan.
The only team that has beaten Boels-Dolmans is the American outfit Twenty16-Ridebiker, which defeated the Dutch squad back in May at the Amgen Tour of California TTT. Led by Kristian Armstrong, who claimed the gold medal at the Olympic Games ITT this summer, the team also features on its roster Chloé Dygert, the promising 19-year-old rider who netted both women’s Junior UCI Road World Championships last year and a silver medal in a track cycling event at Rio 2016.
The Dutch Rabo-Liv team is also set to be a contender after winning the TTT at Giro del Trentino. It also obtained one silver medal and a bronze one in the previous UCI RWC. Road Race Olympic champion Anna Van der Breggen is the main powerhouse of the team, along with female cycling legend Marianne Vos.