Joaquim Rodriguez was the most disappointed man standing on the World Championship road race podium twelve months ago, as he was convinced that he missed out on the rainbow jersey only due to lack of cooperation from his renowned countryman, Alejandro Valverde (Movistar). Even though a conflict between two Spaniards has been exaggerated by cycling media before this year’s event held in Ponferrada, the former agreed to forget about his personal ambitions work in a support of the latter and certainly lived up to his promises.

After crossing the finish line, Rodriguez himself confirmed that he obediently implemented team tactics decided before the start, forgetting about his own ambitions.

The Katusha leader also revealed that the course turned out to be less demanding that they expected, and so they were pleased with relatively bad weather conditions as they needed to make the race as hard as possible.

“I was almost glad that it rained, because that toughened things up. The circuit wasn’t as hard as we’d anticipated, it was getting very complicated to break the race up and we needed it to be tougher to try and change things.”

“We did what we had discussed, I had to go for it a little further out than planned but that was the only difference.”

“Alejandro had commented that he wanted to attack more or less where he did in the Spanish nationals this June and to do anything before than wouldn’t make sense. But that’s what the rest of us were there for.”

“The work Dani Moreno did to pull back the break, plus what Jonathan Castroviejo did too, all the team in fact, it was all to the good. Then I attacked to allow Alejandro to go over the top of my move.”

“It was a very complicated circuit for us, so we can’t be unhappy about how it went. Above all, I’m very pleased with how we raced.”