Switzerland successfully defended their team time trial mixed relay title in dramatic fashion at the Cycling World Championships in Glasgow.
Elise Chabbey and Marlen Reusser sprinted over the line to clinch victory for the Swiss by seven seconds from France, with Germany in third.
Swiss success came despite Reusser, their strongest female rider, crashing 13km from the end of the twisting and technical 40.3km course.
Great Britain finished in fourth.
A British team containing Pfeiffer Georgi, Elynor Backstedt, Anna Shackley, Dan Bigham, Ethan Vernon and Josh Charlton – a late replacement for Ben Turner – finished more than a minute adrift of Switzerland’s time.
They were also around 12 seconds off a bronze medal, while Italy, who had also been strongly fancied to contend for a medal, ended up fifth after Silvia Persico lost time with a mechanical issue.
“It’s another one of those ‘what if’ moments,” said Bigham, who was narrowly beaten into second in the individual pursuit on the track on Sunday night.”Losing Ben Turner was not the best thing, he’s a really good rider, incredibly talented and very good at going around corners which was probably the primary thing today.”Ten seconds in the grand scheme of things isn’t a huge amount but reflecting back on the prep we’ve been able to do and what we weren’t able to do, I think we can be very content with the performance we did.”
A compelling race saw a strong Swiss team also containing Mauro Schmid and world-tour time trial specialists Stefan Bissegger and Stefan Kung claim a healthy lead of around 20 seconds at the first split.
But they were eventually reliant upon Reusser managing to quickly regain contact with Chabbey and Nicole Koller to ensure they retained their title.
