Tokyo Olympics: Primoz Roglic keeps racing long after reaching finishing line; Watch

After the disappointment of withdrawing during the Tour de France to now winning gold at the individual time trial cycling event in the Tokyo Olympics, Primoz Roglic from Slovenia has completed his comeback. The 31-year-old finished the 44.2km course in a time of 55:04, having set the fastest times at all but the first time check at 9.7km.

Roglic paced himself perfectly over the climbs to push for a large lead over his rivals at the Tokyo course and astonishingly not a single rider was able to come within a minute of him with the closest being Netherlands' Tom Dumoulin taking the silver medal after clocking in 1:01 minutes after Roglic and Australian Rohan Dennis coming 1:03 down on the winner to take the bronze medal.

In an interesting view, Roglic cycled past the finishing line and he did not stop after that speeding down as one Twitter user said that even the finish line could not stop him today.

There was no doubting Roglic and his performance all though, the two-time Vuelta a Espana winner came into this race after having crashed out of the Tour de France and finishing out of contention in the men’s road race on Saturday. 

How the race played out

At the first checkpoint, Roglic was less than half a second down, the top six riders were all separated by less than 10 seconds but as the course unfolded the time difference began to increase. At 15 km, Roglic was less than a tenth of a second up on Belgian Wout Van Aert with Italy's Filippo Ganna, Swiss Stefan Kung, Rohan Dennis from Australia, and Dumoulin just a few seconds further behind. At the end of the first lap, the Slovenian had pulled over eight seconds clear of his closest rival.

At 37.1 km, Dumoulin was the closest to Roglic being 42 seconds behind him while Van Aert had drifted out to a minute back.

Both Küng and Ganna were less than two seconds out of the bronze medal time. However, the Slovenes won the day, as they won their first-ever gold medal in cycling and their second medal of the Tokyo Games after Tadej Pogačar's bronze in the road race.

(Image Credits: @Tokyo2020 - Twitter)