The jury is still out then it comes to deciding whether this year’s very demanding edition of the Tour of Britain served as a good preparation event towards the World Championships. While Bradley Wiggins (Team Sky) has won the time trial on the final day to ride impressively against the clock on Wednesday and strip Tony Martin (Omega Pharma – Quick Step) of his title, the British event has worn Alex Dowsett too much to let him perform accordingly to his expectations.

Dowsett enjoyed a stint in the yellow jersey following his gutsy ride in a breakaway, and even though he didn’t impress in the time trial held on the ultimate day of the British stage race, a top ten result in the World Championship ITT event still seemed to be within his reach.

The Movistar rider failed to live up to such expectations, though, and eventually finished 2:35.10 down on the rainbow jersey winner Bradley Wiggins after he suffered on the lumpy finale to the 47.1km course around Ponferrada.

Eventually finishing 20th, the 25-year old Briton revealed that he hasn’t managed to recover from the Tour of Britain efforts enough to be able to generate enough power on a difficult course around Ponferrada.

“It felt like I had one pace, I just couldn’t dig really deep when I wanted to,” he explained CyclingWeekly. “I feel like I haven’t really recovered properly from the Tour of Britain, I’ve just been sort of fighting to get back on top of things since. Which is not what I wanted.”

“I think the wind changed direction today; the first 12km we expected to be real easy, or just really fast, but it was a headwind, so it wasn’t quite as easy as I thought it was going to be,” he added.

“At the end you had to be able to lift the Watts, drop them, lift the Watts and drop them.”

“I was looking at my power meter all the time. Unfortunately I was looking at it hoping it would say a bit more than it did.”