As the clock ticks down on Grace Brown's final months as a professional cyclist, she is hoping for the ultimate swan song: gold for Australia, or at least her first ever medal in the Paris Olympic women's time trial. The 32-year-old from Melbourne finished fourth in the ITT at the Tokyo Olympics and has been steadily improving ever since, winning silver medals at the 2022 and 2023 World Championships, 12 seconds ahead of Ellen van Dijk (Netherlands) and six seconds ahead of Chloe Dygert (USA) in the first event She won.

“It would be hard to aim really high if I hadn't come so close twice at the World Championships. I realize that winning is possible,” Brown said in a news release from AusCycling earlier this week. I'm very proud of the team,” Brown said in a news release issued by AusCycling earlier this week. [But having been so close twice, I was able to say to myself, 'Okay, I'm going to grind out five more seconds.'”

The three athletes who won medals ahead of Braun in COVID-19 were not at the starting line: first- and third-place finishers Annemieke van Vleuten and Anna van der Breggen of the Netherlands retired, and second-place finisher Marlen Reusser of Switzerland was out with illness. But there will be no shortage of competitors. The goal is to win,” said Bergen. There are maybe four time trialists who can win, including me. It will be a bit of a surprise to see who wins and who misses the podium. It's hard to know who to bet on.

“I'm going for the gold medal, and if I don't reach it and I end up on the podium, that would be really nice, but I don't want to finish fourth if possible,” Brown laughed. [With Reusser's absence, the two most recent World Championships competitors in the discipline, Dygert and van Dijk, are the favorites to win alongside Braun. Dygert quickly regained her excellent form after the birth of her first child, but had to recover from a broken ankle.

And then there is Elisa Longo Borghini (ITA), who recently made a name for herself in this discipline by defeating Brown in the opening time trial of the Giro d'Italia. Demi Vollering's strength as a GC rider is obvious, but there is no doubt that this Dutch rider, a Tour de France femmes winner, knows how to compete on the big stage.

In addition, road world champion Lotte Kopecky (Belgium), last year's World Championships third-place finisher Christina Schweinberger (Switzerland), and European Championships second-place finisher Anna Henderson (UK) will all battle for the top five places in the 32.4 km flat time trial.

Still, going into his second Olympics, Braun, despite a host of rivals, is confident that he has already won the coveted Liège-Bastogne-Liège, benefited from a smooth early race in preparation, and has much more experience than in the first event We will go into this tournament with a lot more experience than we had in the first one.

“I've learned a lot about time trials since then, and I've fine-tuned my race process,” Brown said. Brown said. But will it be a magical swan song for Brown, who plans to retire at the end of 2024?

Look for Brown to run off the start line at 15:19:30 (23:19:30 AEST) on Saturday, July 28, as the second last rider in front of Daitgart.

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