Australia’s Brown adds world title to Olympic time trial gold

ZURICH: Australian Grace Brown added the world time trial title to her Olympic gold on Sunday becoming the first woman to complete the double in the same year.

Dutch rider Demi Vollering had to settle for silver again after her heartbreak second spot in the Women´s Tour de France, finishing 16sec off the pace over the rolling 29.9km course that ended along Lake Zurich.

Defending champion Chloe Dygert of the United States took bronze 56sec behind the winner. The 32-year-old Brown insisted she will still retire at the end of this season after becoming the first Australian woman to win the world time trial gold.

“I´m still finishing after the end of this season,” she insisted, thereby declining to race 2025 wearing the rainbow world title jersey and Olympic gold helmet. “The experience of the Olympics gave me confidence and I said to myself ´I can be world champion´.

“I was relaxed and confident.” Brown had been trailing Vollering at the final time check after the 27-year-old Swiss-based rider shot up the final climb and flew down at breakneck speed. “Demi is a very good climber and took more risks in the descent than I would, but on the flat I knew I was likely stronger,” said Brown.

Brown won the Olympic gold on the opening day of the Paris Games over a rain lashed course slightly longer than in Zurich. “I feel lucky just to be finishing like this,” she said having also won the national time-trial championships and the Liege-Bastogne-Liege this year.

Vollering was also beaten at the Tour de France by just four seconds, but managed a sheepish smile on the podium. Dygert, 27, was world time trial champion in 2019 and 2023 but a fall deprived her of the gold in Paris in July where she came third. Seventy riders went down the ramp at Gossau for the 29.9km race, 9km of which were hilly and much of it through open fields.