As surprise World Championships winners go, there can be few more eyebrow-raising than Canada’s new elite champion, Magdeleine Vallieres. The 24-year-old won in Kigali on Saturday after attacking on the final climb and holding off Niamh Fisher-Black and Mavi García to win by 23 seconds.
The longest pre-race odds on Vallieres stretched to 400-1, giving some indication of the strength of her outsider status. Not since part-time racer Anna Kiesenhofer won the road race at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 has a rider so unknown won such a famous event.
Mads Pedersen (Den)
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Harrogate, UK | 2022
These days we know Mads Pedersen well as a sprinter-rouleur who can win everything from early-season Classics to Tour de France bunch sprints. But back in 2019, a 23-year-old Pedersen was a rider very much on the periphery of the WorldTour elite.
His palmarès was far from empty – he had already notched up 11 victories, many of them using what we now understand is his seriously big engine to break away and win solo, or in time trials.
But few had him pinned as the winner on that wet day in Yorkshire at the end of the 2019 season.
After what was described by Cycling Weekly as a “shock victory”, the 23-year-old said: “I’m finished with being the underdog.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Amalie Dideriksen (Den)
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Doha, Qatar | 2016
As she lined up for the World Championships at Doha 2016, the then-20-year-old Amalie Dideriksen already knew what it was to be a champion. She had won the Danish national road champs twice already – the first time just a month after turning 18.
The nationals is one thing – but the step up to World Championships level from there is huge. Nobody expected her to run out the victor, seeing off former and future world champions Marianne Vos and Chantal Van den Broek-Blaak and outgunning race favourite Kirsten Wild in the sprint.
Contrary to her compatriot Pedersen though, Dideriksen’s victory did not launch a world-beating career, and although she has won a number of races since including the WorldTour Ronde van Drenthe, her results generally continued a similar low-key vein to those pre-rainbow jersey.
Tatiana Guderzo (Ita)
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Mendrisio, Switzerland | 2009
Another Marianne Vos-beating outsider was Tatiana Guderzo in 2009. Her outsider status was tempered by the fact she’d won a bronze medal at the previous year’s Olympic road race in Beijing, but in 2009 she had only finished higher than fifth in a pro race on one occasion pre-Worlds – a stage win in the Giro della Toscane. The year before, she had scored a single victory, in her national time trial championships.
But Guderzo put her racing nous and climbing ability into action against the world’s best, including Vos who, incredibly, had already been world champ once – back in 2006.
Guderzo attacked on the second last climb of the 124km course, and despite Vos’s best efforts, hung on for a 19-sec win.
The Italian did not trouble the Worlds podium again for nearly 10 years and it remains the biggest win of her career by some distance. However, in an impressive resurgence she managed two further Worlds bronze medals in 2018 and 2020. She retired at the end of 2022.
Romāns Vainšteins (Lat)
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Plouay, France | 2000
If you were looking for a textbook example of the notorious ‘curse of the rainbow jersey’, you need look no further than Latvia’s Romāns Vainšteins. He won the World Championships road race back in 2000, at Plouay, France.
At the end of a 269km course that featured an eye-watering 38 classified climbs, Vainsteins outsprinted the rest of the field, including third-placed defending champion Oscar Freire of Spain, who would go on to win again the following year.
So far so good for Vainsteins. But the bare facts were that the majority of his career wins were already behind him.
The following year he came close in both Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix, but his only victories came on stages of Tirreno-Adriatico and the Volta Catalunya. His next win was two years later – a stage in the Giro della Provincia di Lucca. It was the final one of his career.
Mandy Jones (GBR)
Goodwood, UK | 1982
Britain’s Mandy Bishop (née Jones) is often referred to as the ‘accidental’ world champion. Which is entirely unfair of course, as there was absolutely nothing accidental about her victory at Goodwood in 1982.
She might have been up against a handful of world-class favourites for the win, but Jones herself was no stranger to crossing the line first. She had won the British National Championships road race the year before and only days after her World Championships win at Goodwood went on to win the National Championships time trial.
But with Coors Classic champion – also a four-time US road champ – and future Tour de France Féminin winner Maria Canins of Italy both in tow, Jones was not at the top of most people’s contenders lists.
Which is perhaps in part how she managed to escape the front runners with a relatively soft attack as the race crested the final climb and began descending.
However, as her rivals found out, Jones was a handy time triallist as well as a fine climber. Once she was away nobody could catch her.
Lance Armstrong (USA)
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Oslo, Norway | 1993
Perhaps there is something in the Belgian water, because of the top 10 youngest riders ever to have won the men’s World Championships road race, seven of them have come from this small cycling heartland in northern Europe. Two of them, though, happen to be a pair of rather well known American bike riders.
Greg Lemond is one of them – a surprise enough himself when he won in 1983, although he was already building a useful palmarès.
The other is Lance Armstrong who, at 21 years at 345 days, was the youngest rider in 23 years and the third youngest ever to win the World Championships when he triumphed in a wringing-wet Oslo, Norway in 1993.
His win, in what was his first full season at pro level, was also a bolt from the blue. It’s also worth stating that it is one of the few major victories that he has not been stripped of for doping offences.
On the hilly 257km course, Armstrong outgunned a host of well-established stars of the Grand Tours and Classics, including then-triple Tour de France winner Miguel Induráin, soon-to-be Classics legend Johan Museeuw and former world champion Maurizio Fondriest (who incidentally is the final rider in that top-10 youngest winners list).
Armstrong escaped in the driving rain to win solo by 19 seconds. Back then it was just the start of a career that is now very much history.
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