Having missed out on a gold medal by just 0.8 seconds in 2013, Orica-GreenEDGE aimed at the win in today’s World Team Time Trial Championships. In the end, it ended with another silver medal after the team had started their race too slowly.

Orica-GreenEDGE have already won team time trials in the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France and so only one thing is really missing from their TTT palmares. The team is still without a win in the World Championships after having finished on the podium in their first two attempts.

Today the team had carefully planned another assault at the title but again they came up short. They got the race off to a slow start and were already 24 seconds back at the first check. Between the two first intermediate checks, they were faster than anyone else but in the end they again started to lose time.

In the end, they had to settle for second, having been beaten by more than 30 seconds by BMC.

“I have mixed emotions," sports director Matthew White told CyclingQuotes after the race. “We certainly came here to win the race today. The boys rode well but we just didn’t start fast enough. We were very, very strong coming home but you just can’t give away 20 seconds to another team at that speed.

“You saw Sky and Omega Pharma went out really fast and imploded. We went out a little bit more conservatively and came home but BMC went out really fast and held it. That went really well for them.”

The team finished the race with 4 riders after Brett Lancaster and Jens Mouris had been dropped.

“It was in the last 2-3km before the climb so that was planned,” White said. “The boys needed to do a few extra turns. At that point, it was only 1 or 2 seconds between us, Sky and Omega. They took a few extra turns and then fell off.”

While BMC had dry conditions for their race, the other pre-race favourites all had to deal with rain in the finale. However, White refuses that it had any impact on the outcome.

“It didn’t make any difference compared to BMC and it didn’t make any difference between us, Sky and Omega before we were within 8 minutes. We all had the same conditions,” he said.

BMC finished second two years ago but last year they were far off the mark. White admitted that he hadn’t expected the Americans to be his strongest rivals.

“I thought they would be third or fourth. I didn’t expect them to win. They had a very good ride.”