The World Championships road races are joyously anarchic, that’s why we love them

Imagine the pitch meeting for the Road World Championships. Once a year, we get the best bike riders to come to a city somewhere in the world, one they may never have been to before – let alone to ride a bike in anger – and we get them to race over an extraordinarily long distance. They won’t be riding for their normal trade teams , of course, that would be silly. They’ll race in national teams, creating some odd mashups and squads with wildly different strengths. The peloton is huge, too, with different countries allowed different numbers of riders. Oh, and of course, there are no race radios, because any kind of organisation would be too normal.

It creates a kind of anarchy wherever the Worlds lands. This year, it’s the turn of Montréal in Canada, which is perhaps a bit more familiar due to the men’s WorldTour race the Grand Prix de Montréal, which takes place on a similar circuit. But nothing can be assumed when the UCI’s flagship event rolls into town. The route this year is hard, but not the extreme brutality of Rwanda last season; as a result, the ‘riders that could win it’ category is pretty wide open, from Isaac del Toro to Wout van Aert for the men, Demi Vollering to Cédrine Kerbaol for the women. There could also be someone no-one has thought of yet in the rainbows by the end.