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.
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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.
The 2028 Road World Championships will be hosted in Abu Dhabi, with the Middle Eastern country also organising the Track World Championships in 2029.
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 time trials, which now open the week of World Championships racing, will be held in Aarhus, 300km away from the capital on the Jutland peninsula.
After three hilly World Championships in Rwanda, Montreal and France, the flat and possibly windswept of Abu Dhabi and Denmark should mean the 2028 and 2029 races are suited to the sprinters and Classics riders.
The 2030 World Championships will be on more rolling terrain around the capital of Brussels, with organisers promising to visit both Flanders and the Wallonie regions in a sign of national unity.
The 2030 championships will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the creation of Belgium, when a revolution sparked the secession from the Netherlands.
It will be the eleventh time that Belgium has hosted the Road World Championships but the first time the events finish in the capital. Brussels has already budgeted 10 million Euro, much of that going to the UCI in a fee to secure the rights to host the World Championships.
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.
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