ANALYSIS | Can Dygert, Vollering, or Reusser take Grace Brown’s world championship time trial title?

The Elite women’s individual time trial opens the UCI Road World Championships, launching cycling’s first Worlds on African soil with a race against the clock that is anything but straightforward. It takes place this Sunday, September 21st, in Kigali, Rwanda, and the stakes could scarcely be higher: the rainbow jersey last worn by a now-retired champion will pass to new shoulders. The riders will embark on a 31.2-kilometre examination that begins at altitude, teases with a flat opening, and then punishes with climbs, cobbles, and an uphill run-in to the finish at the Kigali Convention Centre. It isn’t a mountain TT and it isn’t a drag strip; it’s a thinking rider’s course where form and clean execution will decide everything.

The course demands a precise balance between aggression and restraint. It sits entirely around 1,500 metres above sea level and includes roughly 500 metres of climbing, spread across four ascents, one of them cobbled, which together ensure that pacing matters more than holding a single number on the power meter. The start is flat, but calm quickly gives way to the Côte de Nyanza, 2.4 kilometres at 6%, which arrives at the first intermediate check 10.5 kilometres into the ride.

A descent follows, and then the same hill returns from its gentler side, 6.6 kilometres at 3.5%, a stretch that will expose anyone who opened too hot and is searching for rhythm they no longer have. Where the men’s course adds another climb, the women skip it and surge instead toward the Flandrien-flavoured Côte de Kimihurura, 1.3 kilometres at 5.9% over African cobbles, and then keep climbing to the line. The finish rises all the way to the Kigali Convention Centre, so the winning ride will be the one that leaves enough in reserve for the last minutes when small margins become decisive.

Last year in Zurich, Grace Brown closed her career in fairytale fashion, backing up Olympic gold in Paris with the world title to complete an unprecedented time-trial double in the same season. “I just feel really, really lucky to end my career like this,” she said, the line of a lifetime from a rider who had spent years grinding toward perfection and found it in her final season.

Brown’s Worlds victory completed the double after she had already taken the Paris 2024 Olympic TT, where she beat Anna Henderson and Chloé Dygert to the medals. Brown has since retired and will not defend her title, which transforms Kigali from a test of supremacy into an open audition for a new queen of the discipline.

Marlen Reusser one of the obvious favourites in a field without its reigning champion. The Swiss ace is again national time-trial champion in 2025, and few riders have lived as high and as long at the sharp end of this discipline without yet wearing the rainbow bands. Reusser owns a World Championships haul of two silvers and a bronze in the ITT, a stack of European titles, and the sort of engine that usually underwrites world titles.

Anna Henderson arrives with medal metal already in the bank and the sort of season arc that points toward a peak. In Paris last year she took Olympic silver behind Brown, beating Dygert by less than a second, on a course that blended flat speed with awkward changes in rhythm, a useful analogue for what Kigali will demand.

If that was the global coming-of-age, then 2025 has seen her go to the next level. The 26 year old from Hemel Hempstead won stage 2 of the Giro d’Italia in July, and was second in British national TT, and 8th in the Amstel Gold Race in the spring. She could be one of the favourites for a medal on Sunday.

Demi Vollering is better known for dismantling mountain stages and blowing GC rivals away than for dominating stopwatches, but the calendar keeps producing reminders that her time-trial ceiling is higher than the old scouting reports allowed. Rotterdam in 2024 was a watershed: she won the Tour de France Femmes time trial in front of home fans and took the yellow, a display built on pacing restraint early and pure torque late.

Kigali invites the same reading. The altitude, the non-linear effort, the long false-flat drag to the line, these are places where the pure specialists can fade and the climber-rouleur can keep adding seconds. Vollering’s storyline here is twofold. First, she’s riding for a rainbow she has never worn. Second, she lines up as the emblem of a team that has changed shape in 2025 thanks to a famous comeback further down this start list; that dynamic can energize a leader chasing a personal first. If she threads the early checkpoints within touching distance and then treats the cobbles as a launch pad, Vollering will have licence to empty the tank with the finish in sight.

Chloé Dygert’s relationship with the time trial is a complicated one to say the least. She is a two-time world champion against the clock, 2019 and 2023, with a palmarès that straddles road and track in a way few can match. The brutal crash that shredded her 2020 season and the interruptions that followed never extinguished the top-end speed; Paris 2024 brought Olympic bronze in the road TT and gold in the team pursuit, confirmation that on her best days she still bends the clock.

Kigali is not necessarily the classic Dygert course, there is altitude, there are climbs stacked on climbs, and the decisive sector may be a cobbled ramp rather than a wind-blasted boulevard, but writing her out would be reckless. She can put minutes into a field when the bike is arrow-straight; the project here is to make sure the medium hills don’t erode that advantage.

Then there is the most intriguing name on the sheet: Anna van der Breggen. She retired at the end of 2021, moved straight into the team car as a directeur sportif, and then announced a full comeback for 2025 with SD Worx-Protime. The legendary rider has had an up and down comeback season, she finished 11th in the GC at the Tour de France Femmes, 6th at the Giro, and 3rd with a stage win at the Vuelta. Strong results, but not the wins she became used to before retiring. Still, if Van der Breggen is genuinely within a handful of seconds at the final time check, there is no rider in this field more likely to wring everything from the last kilometre on Sunday.

This is not a start list that invites lazy labels. Without Brown, there is no default favourite, no status quo to uphold. Reusser’s season suggests a steady reconvergence with the form that made her the sport’s most consistent TT medal collector; Henderson’s Olympic silver and consistent 2025 results point to a rider with the flow to go one better; Vollering’s Rotterdam proof-point and her appetite for uphill finishes give her a profile built for Kigali; Dygert’s medalling in Paris and enduring world-class power keep her on every shortlist; and Van der Breggen’s renaissance adds the intangible that data can’t price. Who will come out on top on Sunday?