Niamh Fisher-Black leads youthful New Zealand women's team for Road Worlds

Niamh Fisher-Black on the podium at the 2023 Road World Championships in Wollongong after winning the U23 title in the road race (Image credit: Getty Images Sport)

After delivering a skeleton team to the Road World Championships in Wollongong in 2022 amid a costs squeeze, New Zealand is once again back in force in the chase for the rainbow jersey in 2023.

The nation will be sending a six strong men's elite team to contest the 271km road race on August 6 at the Glasgow World Championships – compared to its lone competitor in the category last year – and will be backing the 2022 U23 world title holder, Niamh Fisher-Black, with a six rider road squad for the combined elite and U23 women's road race.

On top of that an additional two riders have been added to the tally for the 36.2km U23/elite women's time trial on Thursday August 10 and for the 47.8km men's elite time trial on Friday August 11.

The 2023 event, a multidiscipline edition which wraps in 13 UCI Cycling World Championships, will also see George Bennett donning the silver fern again for the first time since 2020. The UAE Team Emirates climber will be lining up alongside Patrick Bevin, Ryan Christensen, New Zealand champion James Oram, the 21-year-old Cholet-Pays-de-la-Loire winner Laurence Pithie and Corbin Strong, who will be joining the team after taking on his first Tour de France.

The combined elite and U23 women’s road race, with the U23 rainbow jersey awarded to the first under 23 rider over the line, will again be an event where New Zealand enters with strong prospects. The 2022 U23 winner, Fisher-Black, has aged out of the category where she won a world title but to secure that rainbow jersey she came over the line 12th overall in the combined race anyway. Her Women’s WorldTour results, which include a stage victory at the Tour de Suisse in June, have also long made it clear how competitive she is in the top tier.

Simone is a degree-qualified journalist that has accumulated decades of wide-ranging experience while working across a variety of leading media organisations. She joined Cyclingnews as a Production Editor at the start of the 2021 season and has now moved into the role of Australia Editor. Previously she worked as a freelance writer, Australian Editor at Ella CyclingTips and as a correspondent for Reuters and Bloomberg. Cycling was initially purely a leisure pursuit for Simone, who started out as a business journalist, but in 2015 her career focus also shifted to the sport.