An epic day of racing was given a fitting sountrack for its denouement. As a select group of riders ascended the Höttinger Höll climb – with a fearsome maximum gradient of 28% – the organisers of the 2018 UCI Road World Championships blared AC/DC’s Highway to Hell throughout Innsbruck. Almost seven hours after the men’s road race began on Sunday only a handful of contenders remained.

Ultimately it was the veteran Alejandro Valverde who found heaven. The Spaniard has contested the world championships 11 times since his debut in 2003. Twice he had secured silver medals, four times he claimed bronze. On his 12th attempt the 38-year-old gained the illustrious rainbow stripes. Valverde outsprinted France’s Romain Bardet, the Canadian Michael Woods and the Dutchman Tom Dumoulin into Innsbruck. His primal screams of celebration said it all.

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“This is the victory I have been longing for,” an emotional Valverde said afterwards, clad in the rainbow jersey with a dazzling gold medallion around his neck. “It was my biggest dream to become a world champion. I have been chasing this win forever. I had six medals but none were gold.”

On a sunny morning in western Austria 188 riders departed Kufstein to confront the toughest world championships course in more than two decades. A large banner in the historic centre of nearby Innsbruck declared: “A good day for a ride.” The peloton might have disagreed, with 258.5km to traverse and 4,670 vertical metres of climbing ahead.

After some initial tussling an exuberant 11-strong breakaway began working together to establish an advantage. The lead stretched out to almost 20 minutes on the opening climb, before Austria and Great Britain upped the ante in the peloton. But the lead did not narrow as much as the bunch would have liked and, for a time, there were legitimate fears that the break could stay away. It was not until the kilometre marker dipped towards double digits that the gap narrowed.

When the pace quickened there were notable casualties within the brightly coloured peloton. The newly crowned world time trial champion, Rohan Dennis, and defending world road race champion, Peter Sagan, were both dropped with the finish still 90km away, the exertion on many laps of the Igls ascent proving too much.

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As the gap slimmed to five minutes with 60km remaining, the well-represented nations began shadow boxing in the peloton. Italy had a go, Spain responded. The 2014 victor Michal Kwiatkowski of Poland joined the fun as, a little later, did Belgium’s Greg Van Avermaet. The 2016 Olympic champion briefly led a group away from the peloton and, although it amounted to nothing, Van Avermaet’s attack did serve to drop Kwiatkowski and Britain’s Simon Yates from the accelerating peloton.

With the pace high, the day-long lead group continued to thin. Soon Norway’s Vegard Stake Laengen and the Dane Kasper Asgreen were the last men standing, ultimately caught on the penultimate climb. And so it came down to the Höttinger Höll ascent, truly hell for the decimated peloton after so many painful hours in the saddle.

Only an elite selection remained to contest the last climb. The grimaces were unmistakable – a fearsome ascent taming some of the sport’s best climbers, in a crowd-filled cauldron of atmosphere on the outskirts of Innsbruck. Only four survived for the final sprint. A decade and a half after first seeking the rainbow jersey, it would finally belong to Valverde.