Cuban Arlenis Sierra is already in the venue of the 90th World Road Championships in Glasgow 2023, Scotland.
Arlenis, who in June won gold medals in the time trial and road race at the XXIV Central American and Caribbean Games of San Salvador 2023, will be present in the long-distance race that will close the event next Sunday.
The race will have a difficult 154.1 kilometer route between Loch Lomond and Glasgow. Forty-one teams have entered, including some of the world’s most outstanding female riders.
The Dutch squad stands out, led by Demi Vollering, Lorena Wiebes and Annemiek Van Vleuten, leaders in that order of the International Cycling Union (UCI) road world ranking.
Van Vleuten, Sierra’s teammate at Spanish club Movistar, will try to keep the rainbow jersey conquered in 2019 and 2022. She also won two in the individual time trial in 2017 and 2018.
However, her compatriots are the strongest favorites to prevail, not forgetting Italy’s Elisa Balsamo, a starter in 2021 and with good seasons in elite women’s races.
Rounding out the formidable Dutch team are multi-time world champion Marianne Vos, Riejanne Markus, Mischa Bredewold, Shirin van Anrooij and Loes Adeheest.
Arlenis will race alone in a long event with mountainous sections that are very tiring. However, in those same conditions she has been able to beat herself to place fifth in 2021 and sixth last year, truly phenomenal performances.
“This year I have much less preparation, as I participated in several races earlier, but we’ll see how we do. We will always strive for the best performance,” Sierra told JIT.
This Saturday Carlos Montes de Oca made his debut in the junior road race, a great experience for the matancero, bronze medalist in the Pan-American road race of the category held in Panama. He will return to the asphalt on August 10 in the individual time trial.
This city not only organizes the long-distance competitions, but also the track, BMX and mountain bike, although the highlight will be the road in both genders.
By the way, in the men’s event, the Dutchman Mathiev van der Poel won the title after more than six hours of pedaling. He devoured 271.1 kilometers with climbs to match and gave his country its first victory after a 38-year drought in this genre.
Two other stars were unable to catch him despite crashing in the final stretch, Belgium’s Wout van Aert and Slovenia’s Tadej Pogacar, who won his first world medal.
Paracyclists are also competing in Glasgow. Cuba is represented by Jorge Luis González, who traveled with his coach Jorge Luis Báez and mechanic Yoani Pérez.
They arrived in the early morning of August 4 and after the paperwork to update the documentation they went to the velodrome, where Gonzalez tested the track.
“This Sunday he participated in the scrath, he managed to do 15 laps, but with a lot of intensity. He had not trained for three days and had been traveling for many hours. He had to abandon,” said Baez.
