Filippo Ganna (Italy), the time trial world champion in 2020 and 2021, appears to have met his match in Remco Evenepoel (Belgium), who blitzed the 47.8-kilometre UCI Road World Championships time trial course in Stirling, Scotland to claim the rainbow jersey by 12 seconds.
It isn't that the 27-year-old was off the pace, but that Evenepoel has shown that he is the rider of the moment.
"I've never done a performance like today - I need to find a solution to try to compare with Remco," Ganna said. "At the moment I think everyone knows he is the man. I need to fight for a long time because he is the future - he has a lot of time to win the jersey and he is here with the jersey."
Ganna won the Individual Pursuit on the track and helped power his Team Pursuit squad to silver, and admitted it's been a long, combined World Championships.
"I'm a little bit tired. I've been in Glasgow for around two weeks for the track and this time trial. At the track, I won two medals, today another one. I can be happy with the result. Obviously, the goal is to do better than silver but I am happy with my performance."
With the Paris Olympics coming closer on the horizon, Ganna now has a puzzle to work out in how to beat Evenepoel - he only mentioned aerodynamics as the only possible area to improve upon.
"In performance, it would be hard, the numbers are really high," he said. "I think we will try to find new equipment or try to train myself to roll the shoulders because if you see [Remco] from the front you see a big difference."
Ganna now has two weeks of recovery before the Vuelta a España, where he hopes to be a key member of the Ineos Grenadiers team behind Geraint Thomas. The race opens with a 14.6-kilometre team time trial in Barcelona and has a 25km individual time trial in Valladolid.
Other than that, protecting Thomas is his one job against Evenepoel's title defence and the Jumbo-Visma combination of Primož Roglič and Tour de France champion Jonas Vingegaard going for the Grand Tour 'grand slam'.
"I will try to stay close to the leader - if you want to ask 'G' maybe it's better. For sure I will try to defend and we will see what Jumbo can do."
