Christiane Soeder (Austria) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Charlotte Goldsmith (Great Britain.) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Nicole Cooke on the big screen (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Veronika Sharametsyeva (Belarus) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Bogumila Matusiak (Poland) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Think it's hard parking one of these at the top of l'Alpe d'Huez? (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Did someone say that this course was going to be flat? (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
U23 riders Aliaksei Polushkin (Belarus) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Ukrainian riders animated the U23 race (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Australia's James Meadley (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
The gradual climb up Avenida de Austurias (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Italy's Tiziano Dall'Antonia (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Dmytro Grabovskyy (Ukraine) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Will Walker (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Lucas Persson (Sweden) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
The U23 boys (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
The 'official' Holland House... (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Ahh, the Dutch! (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Il Diablo fancied a trip to Madrid (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Spanish pride at home (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
The Iberian good life: (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Saul Raisin (US) and Dmitriy Muravyev (Kazakhstan) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Mathew Hayman (Australia) next to Switzerland's Grégory Rast (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Four hours into the race (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Saeiditanha Abbas (Iran) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Tom Southam (Great Britain) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Paolo Bettini (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Paolo Bettini (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Ireland's David McCann (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
The man know how to spectate: (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
It wasn't to be Alessandro Petacchi's day (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Paolo Bettini and Alexandre Vinokourov (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
The lethally level-headed Belgian Tom Boonen (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Guido Trenti (USA) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Robbie McEwen and Alessandro Petacchi (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
John Lieswyn (USA) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Simon Gerrans (Asutralia) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Cédric Vasseur (France) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Markus Fothen and Matthias Kessler (Germany) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Igor Astarloa (Spain) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Marc Wauters and Peter Van Petegem (Belgium) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Thor Hushovd (Norway) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Jimmy Casper (France) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Rolf Aldag (Germany) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Rodney Green (South Africa) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Björn Leukemans (Belgium) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
The Boonen fan club (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
They didn't get their man to the line first (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Koos Moerenhout (Netherlands) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Nick Nuyens (Belgium) (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Tom Boonen fans having a serious post-race rage (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
Proudly celebrating Boonen's win (Image credit: Mark Johnson)
World Championships pictorial special, October 6, 2005
This year's World Championships in Madrid was touted as the perfect sprinter's course - flat, fast with enough challenges to weed out the pretenders before the big guns hit out for the win. Or so it seemed. The parcours proved far more challenging than first thought, providing the perfect opportunity for a big classics specialist to power away after riding a tactical race. Two stars of the present (and certainly for the future), Tom Boonen and Alejandro Valverde, fought it out after pre-race favourites such as Petacchi and McEwen fell by the wayside.
In the women's and U23 races the story was a similar one; a tough parcours meant only the strongest riders made it through with any chance of the win. The form rider in the women's peloton, Germany's Regina Schleicher, took the win in a bunch gallop, holding off quality riders such as Nicole Cooke and Oenone Wood. In the U23 men's race it was survival of the fittest, and young Ukrainian rider Dmytro Grabovskyy was the strongest on the day, winning by a sizeable margin from Australia's Will Walker and Russian Evgeny Popov. There were some surprises, but at day's end it was arguably the rider of the year in 2005 that took home the major prize, and nobody was disputing that. The following pictures display the challenges and the colour that Madrid provided for riders and fans alike, courtesy of Mark Johnson.
