The first day of competition at the 2024 UCI Indoor Cycling World Championships in Bremen, Germany, saw Switzerland take the win in the ACT 4 artistic cycling.
Qualifications in the Single Women artistic cycling and in the Men’s and Women’s cycle-ball gave a taste of further intense competition to come over the next two days.
ACT 4: Swiss newcomers take the rainbow
UCI World Championships newcomers from Switzerland Stefanie Haas, Valerie Unternährer, Selina Niedermann and Sarah Manser (Uzwil) performed a flawless ACT 4 freestyle, setting the bar at 225.95 points for the top-seeded women from Germany to try to beat.
But a crucial mistake from Mainz-Ebersheim in the very first exercise saw Svenja Kraus, Stella Rosenbach, Tijem Karatas and Milena Schwarz on the floor. With an otherwise perfect freestyle, they scored 215.54 points to secure the silver medal for the second time in a row.
Austria repeated their third place from 2023.
Single Women: Hotz tops preliminary round
The Single Women artistic cycling saw some tense moments for the host nation’s two representatives Lara Füller (Poppenweiler) and Jana Pfann (Bruckmühl). Both Füller, silver medallist last year, and Pfann, UCI World Champion in 2022, made uncharacteristic mistakes but finally made the final four.
The winner of the preliminary round with 170.27 points was two-time UCI World Championships bronze medalist Alessa Hotz (SUI), ahead of Austria’s Lorena Schneider (168.25 points), who has also won the UCI Worlds bronze medal twice previously
Cycle-ball Women: Swiss top the table
The tournament kicked off perfectly for the German cycle-ball women. Judith Wolf and Danielle Holzer beat the team from Austria (Vanessa Trinkl and Veronika Hagen) 8-0 in the opening match. They followed this up with a 2-0 win against Veronika Kripnerova and Blanka Adamova of Czechia.
It’s the women from Switzerland, however, who lead the table. Sava Baumann and Chiara Dotoli scored the most goals on the opening night with their victories against Japan (7-1) and Austria (11-0). Czechia are in third place going into the second day of the tournament with three points from two matches.
Cycle-ball Men: favourites on form
In the men's cycle-ball, hosts Germany had the perfect start. The two UCI World Champions Bernd Mlady and Raphael Kopp, who have only been playing together this season, won their first match against Japan late on Friday evening, 13-2.
Former UCI World Champions from Austria, Patrick Schnetzer and Stefan Feuerstein, registered a 2-0 win over Czechia (Radek Adam and Tomas Horak) who were making their UCI World Championships debut.
Meanwhile, Switzerland won the third A group match of the preliminary round. Severin Waibel had to do without his injured brother Benjamin, but together with substitute Jon Müller beat the brothers Mathias and Quentin Seyfried from France, 4-2.