THE Australian road cycling team hopes tomorrow will be a day of redemption with its medal hopes hingeing on the time trials.
After the sixth-place finish by Michael Rogers in the men's road race and 29th place by Oenone Wood in the women's event, the time trials are the final chance to win medals.
With Rogers and Cadel Evans in the 47-kilometre men's time trial, and Wood in the women's 23.8-kilometre time trial, confidence is high that the team won't leave empty handed.
"You can safely say that Rogers and Evans are a medal possibility given their past history and the form they showed in the road race," Australian head coach Shayne Bannan said. "[For Wood] it is going to be a tough challenge. If Oenone can get into the top eight, that would be a pretty reasonable result."
How did the Australian road team's campaign get to rely on a last roll of the dice after so much expectation, given Australia's increasing role as a road-racing power broker?
Unlike the time trial, the road race has near limitless permutations. The winner is not always the strongest rider.
The conditions, tactics and potential for sudden turnabouts of individual form must be taken into account. Still, in the aftermath there is always the fall-out. What went wrong? "Apart from having better legs, I am not too sure what could have been done," Bannan said.
If a report card was handed down on the men's road-race team, Rogers would win praise for his ride after a year of personal and professional woes, as would Tour de France runner-up Evans for getting his teammate into the box seat for the win with his last-lap aggression.
So what could the Australian men's team, which also included Stuart O'Grady, Simon Gerrans and Matt Lloyd, have done differently to get a rider placed better than sixth? There was nothing more that could be asked of Gerrans or Lloyd. The former spent most of the race in the day-long breakaway. Had it survived, he would have had a crack at winning. Lloyd was tireless in his teamwork with Gerrans near the end.
The fact is that of the final breakaways, Rogers was the least qualified for a sprint. So what else could he have done? When he started to feel the pinch on the descent, should he have eased up, waited for Evans (who was not far away) and got him up to the leaders?
That would have helped bring key riders such as favourite Alejandro Valverde and world champion Paolo Bettini into the race. "Cadel versus Bettini and Valverde as opposed to Rogers and the others, I think we had better percentages with him [Rogers]," Bannan said.
What of O'Grady, who declared his goal was to win gold? The race was panning out perfectly for him until, with two laps to go, he was hit by fatigue, the heat, mild dehydration and severe headaches as the race exploded. Had O'Grady survived, he may have made the lead break - possibly with Rogers.
Bannan concedes the women's team could have been better prepared for the cold conditions that left Wood and Sara Carrigan with severe chills. Teams have long known there would be a 10-kilometre climb. And it is well known that descending at high speed can cause chills around the chest, especially when it rains. Returning to team cars to get jackets would have risked losing touch. A simpler solution was placing a newspaper page down the front of the jersey.
But, unlike in the men's race, Wood and Carrigan were less suited on a course with a long uphill drag. "While they would normally be up there on a normal course, they were just out a bit on the last climb when the pressure was really on," Bannan said.
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