Rohan Dennis and Grace Brown take Australian time trial titles
2022 road season starts in the southern hemisphere with Australian road national championships.
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Rohan Dennis (Jumbo-Visma) and Grace Brown (FDJ-Nouvelle Aquitaine Futuroscope) won the 2022 Australian national time trial championships.
Dennis won the 38.7km test against the clock with a time of 45:34 (49.3kph) to earn his fourth victory in the discipline.
Also read: Jumbo-Visma shuts down training camp in Spain following COVID case
Luke Durbridge (Team BikeExchange-Jayco) and Conor Leahy (Inform TMX Make) finished in second and third, respectively. Durbridge is also a four-time winner of the Australian time trial championships.
Prior to the start, defending champion Luke Plapp (Ineos-Grenadiers) withdrew as he was isolating in Tasmania after being exposed to COVID-19.
This is Jumbo-Visma’s first men’s win on the road in the 2022 calendar year and Dennis’ first win in his new team’s colors.
“They put a lot of faith in me,” said Dennis. “To come in and show respect to that and put all my effort in – not that I haven’t every other year – but to really knuckle down on every little detail to perform for them straight away was really important.”
Dennis moved to Jumbo-Visma for the 2022 season, joining time trial aces and grand tour GC contenders Primož Roglič and Tom Dumoulin.
The threesome went one-two-three in the individual time trial at the Tokyo Olympics.
In a recorded message prior to the Jumbo-Visma team camp in Spain that Dennis previously declined to attend, he said that his former team was duplicating much of the innovations in the sport that were coming from the Jumbo-Visma squad.
“There’s a lot of things that [Jumbo-Visma] is doing really well,” said Dennis. “I noticed when I was with Ineos that they were copying Jumbo with a lot of stuff. I thought, ‘Well, why would I want to be in a team that is copying a team on the other side of the fence?’”
2022 Australian Cycling road national championships elite men’s individual time trial results
- Rohan Dennis (Jumbo-Visma), 45:34
- Luke Durbridge (Team BikeExchange-Jayco), at 1:13
- Conor Leahy (Inform TMX Make), at 1:48
Grace Brown takes back Australian individual time trial title
Grace Brown reclaimed the national champion’s jersey in the “chrono” event, ahead of Amber Pate (InForm TMX MAKE) and Lisa Jacob (Knights of Suburbia).
Sarah Gigante (Team Movistar Women) did not defend her time trial title.
Brown covered the 28.6km course, in windy conditions, in a time of 41:29 at an average speed of 41.3kph.
The 29-year-old also debuted new team colors, after moving to the French squad from the Australian-registered Team BikeExchange-Jayco, where she raced from 2019-2021.
“I really wanted to get this for FDJ so it’s nice to have that done now,” Brown said. “It was a pretty hard race actually, it didn’t come easy, but I’m proud of the effort and happy to have the jersey for the year.”
Brown won the 2018 Oceania Continental Road Championships in the same discipline and was the 2019 Australian time trial champion.
She was fourth at the Tokyo Olympics in the time trial.
2022 Australian Cycling road national championships elite women’s individual time trial results
- Grace Brown (FDJ-Nouvelle Aquitaine Futuroscope), 41:29
- Amber Pate (Inform TMX Make), at 1:01
- Lisa Jacob (Knights of Suburbia), at 1:12