RUBY Roseman-Gannon has made clear her Paris Olympics dream after a landmark win at the Australian road cycling championships.<\/p>\n
The Victorian 25-year-old beat four previous winners on Sunday to take out the elite women’s road race at Buninyong.<\/p>\n
Roseman-Gannon also won the criterium championship for the second time on Friday afternoon on Sturt Street, dominating the race and finishing by herself.<\/p>\n
Once Sunday’s contest ignited at halfway, Roseman-Gannon was in every key move and scored the biggest win of her emerging career.<\/p>\n
The pulsating race came down to a select 11-rider front group featuring all the big names, including defending champion Brodie Chapman, previous winners Amanda Spratt, Nicole Frain and Sarah Gigante, and three-time time trial champion Grace Brown.<\/p>\n
“It’s super-special. It means a lot more when everyone is there,” Roseman-Gannon said.<\/p>\n
Roseman-Gannon was in shock after winning the bunch sprint as she consigned last year’s run of near-misses – she called it “the curse of fourths” – to history.<\/p>\n
She knows it is way too early to think too much about Paris – her mission now is to perform well at the cobbled classics in the European spring.<\/p>\n
“I think about Paris a lot, but one step at a time,” she said.<\/p>\n
“The course and the way Paris will be ridden is a completely different race [to the nationals], with the narrow streets and cobbles.<\/p>\n
“So I’d say putting up my hand in the cobbled classics would probably be the best way to say that.”<\/p>\n
An expression from her partner Andrew Christie-Johnson, who competed on Sunday in the men’s road race, motivated Roseman-Gannon.<\/p>\n
“I kept saying ‘diamonds in the legs’ to myself, which is what my partner says a lot, and I felt like I had diamonds in the legs,” she said.<\/p>\n
Roseman-Gannon capitalised on superb teamwork by Jayco Alula, as Alex Manly finished third behind Lidl-Trek’s Lauretta Hanson.<\/p>\n
“We had a team meeting and everyone was 100 per cent in… we really wanted this, we had tears in the meeting about how much it meant to us,” Roseman-Gannon said.<\/p>\n
More broadly, it has also been an emotionally wrenching week for the sport after the death last week of Melissa Hoskins, who once rode for a predecessor of the Jayco Alula team.<\/p>\n
A minute’s silence honoured Hoskins before the start of the women’s road race on Sunday morning and riders wore black armbands.<\/p>\n
Hanson also had her best result at the nationals by taking second and she, like Roseman-Gannon, was prominent at the front of the race.<\/p>\n
Hanson and her Lidl-Trek teammates Spratt and Chapman duelled with the Jayco AlUla riders throughout the closing kilometres.<\/p>\n
“Obviously Ruby was just faster and I’m still very proud of second,” Hanson said.<\/p>\n