The death of Swiss junior rider Muriel Furrer has cast a sense of sadness and mourning over the World Championships in Zurich but local authorities have decided the racing will go on and the UCI held its annual Congress on Friday.
As well as approving budgets, race calendars and minor rule changes, the UCI awarded 16 World Championships, including the 2029 and 2030 Road Worlds to Denmark and Belgium respectively.
The UCI announced that the 2030 Track World Championships will be held in Brisbane, Australia and the 2030 World Cyclo-Cross Championships in Namur, Belgium on the famously tough hilly citadel circuit.
Other World Championships have already been awarded, with Rwanda hosting the event in 2025 for the first time in Africa. The 2026 championships will be held in Montreal, Canada in 2026, while the Haute-Savoie department of France, that includes the Alps, will host the 'Super World Championships' that bring together road, track and mountain biking.
Denmark won the bid for the 2029 Road World Championships, with local officials announcing that some road races will start in Roskilde and Helsingør and end in the Danish capital Copenhagen as they did in 2011 when Britain's Mark Cavendish won the elite men's title.
The 2030 championships will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the creation of Belgium, when a revolution sparked the secession from the Netherlands.
Flanders Classics, who organise many of the spring Classics, will be responsible for the technical aspects of the event. Belgium last hosted the Road World Championships in Leuven in 2021.
"We do know more or less what the city circuit could look like and where the finish could be, but that still needs to be approved. We will be able to reveal some of the details in the coming months," Flanders Classics CEO Tomas Van Den Spiegel told Sporza.
"Brussels will be the epicentre with the city circuit but there are also time trials and other events, we're now putting the puzzle together."
"The intention is to show the beauty of our country and to make selective courses."
"There's a Brussels native who recently twice became Olympic champion and who has already won a world title in Zurich. I think he's a fan of selective circuits and so he can be a logical ambassador," Van Den Spiegel said of Remco Evenepoel.
Get unlimited access to all of our coverage of the 2024 UCI Road World Championships - including breaking news and analysis reported by our journalists on the ground from the junior, under-23, and elite time trials and road races as it happens and more. Find out more.
