Just 0.00028 seconds decided it; why Ciccone seemed to ride a child's bike in the European Championships photo finish

Evenepoel and Ciccone had gone clear together more than 35 kilometres from the finish, La DH reports, and arrived at the line almost side by side. The Belgian came back level with the Italian at the very end of a long sprint and won thanks to a far more effective bike throw, according to RTBF. He had to wait several long seconds before the organisers confirmed the result.

That was the question Sporza put to itself after many fans looked at the image with raised eyebrows. On the photo, Ciccone's bike looks much smaller than Evenepoel's and his wheel spokes are curved, which led some to suggest the picture was inaccurate or even doctored, La DH writes.

The key point is that a photo finish is not taken by an ordinary camera. It is produced by a scanner that records a single vertical strip exactly on the finish line, over and over again, and then places those strips side by side. The sources differ on the rate: Sporza and La DH describe one strip every millisecond, RTBF says several thousand times per second, and Italian outlet tuttoBICI reports it can reach up to 15,000 images per second depending on the equipment.

The result looks like a two-dimensional snapshot, but the horizontal axis does not show distance. It shows time. That is why, as both Sporza and RTBF point out, athletics photo finishes show almost every sprinter apparently diving at the line, even though most of them had not yet reached it when the winner crossed.

Sporza had already asked physics expert Lieven Scheire to explain the phenomenon after the Olympic 100 metres final between Noah Lyles and Kishane Thompson, which was decided by barely five thousandths of a second. His explanation applies just as well to Sunday's finish.

"In cycling you can see it best," Scheire added. "Then the spokes are bent or the bikes are completely distorted." tuttoBICI offers a further reason for the warped wheels: the bottom of the wheel, in contact with the road, moves more slowly than the top. That distortion does not affect the result, the Italian outlet stresses, because the leading edge of the front wheel, the point that decides a sprint, is recorded with absolute precision.

tuttoBICI puts the margin at three millimetres, compared with the six that separated Wout van Aert and Tom Pidcock at the 2021 Amstel Gold Race, another finish that triggered endless debate. Italy's team manager Elia Viviani wanted to see the evidence with his own eyes on Sunday. He saw a sliver of light between Ciccone's wheel and the line while Evenepoel's had already reached it, then applauded the Belgian and Ciccone alike, accepting the verdict with a smile.

So the image may look unfair, but La DH calls it "implacably correct", and RTBF concludes there was no malfunction whatsoever. With the win, the 26-year-old Evenepoel became the first rider in history to have won all the major international titles, both on the road and against the clock, according to RTBF. The conspiracy theories about Ciccone's child's bike, as Sporza put it, can go in the bin.