Defending champion Filippo Ganna of Italy shattered home fans’ hopes of a 1-2 for their riders and retained the men’s time trial title on Sunday to secure back-to-back gold medals at the road world championships. On the opening day of the week-long event in Belgium, Ganna won with a small margin of just over five seconds to beat Wout van Aert for the second year running. Remco Evenepoel, another Belgian rider, claimed the bronze medal, 43.34 seconds behind Ganna.

The flat course taking competitors through the cycling-mad Flanders region did not feature any technical difficulty and was perfectly suited to Ganna, a pure specialist of the race against the clock. As the defending champion, Ganna was the last down the starting ramp.