European Championships Men's ITT: Josh Tarling takes stunning victory

Josh Tarling (Great Britain) continued his meteoric rise by becoming the European time trial champion on Wednesday, beating the likes of Wout van Aert (Belgium) and Stefan Bissegger (Switzerland) to take his first major elite title at just 19 years of age.

Tarling skipped the U23 ranks to turn professional with Ineos Grenadiers at the start of 2023 and while his shock bronze medal at the World Championships last month was one thing, this victory was something else. It wasn’t just a step forward, but a leap. Over the course of a flat 29.6km course in the Netherlands, Tarling won by a mammoth 42-second margin.

Defending champion Bissegger was the rider to finish runner-up, producing a big negative split to edge out Van Aert by a fraction of a second. There may have been another rider in contention for that silver medal, but former champion Stefan Küng (Switzerland) suffered a horrific crash as he failed to spot a set of barriers in the closing kilometres, and finished with his helmet smashed and skinsuit covered in blood.

“It was hard. I felt weaker today than I did at Worlds, and the wind made it really hard,” Tarling said.

“Originally it was a lot of over and under with the wind but it changed to more of a steady crosswind so it was just about holding a high power all day. It was really hard.”

Van Aert himself had anointed Tarling as the favourite, noting that the pan-flat, non-technical course in Essen, which was regularly exposed to some stiff winds, suited the bigger rouleurs who can lay down sustained raw power. In the end, Van Aert was beaten by a smaller, nippier time triallist in Bissegger, but his tipping of Tarling proved bang on the money.

Tarling, the British champion, was the last of the 32 starters and raced with the confidence of his first WorldTour victory in the time trial at the Renewi Tour last month. At the first intermediate checkpoint, he was four seconds up on Van Aert, and three seconds up on Küng, and at this point Bissegger wasn’t really in the equation.

Bissegger was riding a negative split, but so was Tarling, who got better and better as the course went on. By the time he’d reached the second checkpoint, he was half a minute to the good on Van Aert, at which point he could see the Belgian and his support car up the road in front of him.

The sight of the shy 19-year-old hunting down one of the sport’s biggest stars - a Tour de France TT winner and twice a runner-up at Worlds - was remarkable. In the end, having started a minute behind, he crossed the line just 17 seconds after Van Aert had done so.

By that point, Van Aert was fighting for silver, and he just missed out. Bissegger, who looked to be off the pace after completing the Vuelta a España on Sunday, had ridden a storming latter section of the course, and Van Aert would miss his time by less than a quarter of a second.

Mikkel Bjerg (Denmark), three times an U23 TT world champion - the first of those titles coming when he was Tarling’s age - was fourth at 1:09, while Mattias Cattaneo (Italy) rounded out the top five at 1:13. Küng finished the race and only slipped to 11th place, so well was he going, but concussion checks and other injury tests were of more immediate concern to the Swiss rider.