Moritz Augenstein made quite a splash at the UCI Track World Championships in Santiago de Chile. He stayed realistic and focused, delivered in his first-ever World Championships – and impressively justified his late nomination.
Emotion? Excitement? Surprise? Not really.
Those who know him well know what he’s capable of. And he himself knows it, too.
His celebration after winning the scratch race on the second day of the Track World Championships was big — and deservedly so. He had ridden powerfully all the way to the end, from the front, even completing one lap more than the race was supposed to cover. “I was really happy,” Moritz said afterwards. “It felt like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.”
He knew exactly what he had to do in Chile. And in his very first race, he delivered the ride of his life.
On his World Championships debut, Moritz delivered — taking the title and becoming UCI Men’s Scratch Race World Champion.
Held as a mass start over 10 kilometres, it was immediately clear in this scratch race: the pace was brutal from the very beginning.
Moritz rode a tactically smart race, spending much of his time sheltered in the slipstream and keeping himself well-positioned in the front group.
With eight laps to go, he launched his first attack — moving to the front to test the field. Then, three laps from the finish, the decisive move: Moritz took the lead again and never gave it up. He had to sprint long and hard, at first with Jules Hesters still right on his wheel.
And then, chaos — the bell rang a lap too late. “I’d been counting. I timed my sprint so it would last for two more laps,” Moritz said afterwards.
Riding from the front all the way to the line, he crossed as the first German scratch race world champion since Lucas Liss in 2015.
On social media, the verdict is unanimous: A machine. So deserved. Insane. World-class.
His gold medal would remain the only gold for German Cycling — alongside silver for the women’s team pursuit.
Scratch, tempo, elimination, and points — the omnium combines four demanding disciplines into one grueling competition.
After a day’s rest, Moritz showed his strength again — now under the spotlight as the reigning Scratch World Champion. In the tempo race, he was the only rider to gain a lap, entering the final 100-lap points race in third place overall, six points behind the gold medal position.
Early in the race, he secured a win in an intermediate sprint and added the valuable lap gain. By the end of the race, he was in fourth place. Before the decisive final sprint, he made one last attempt to close the gap, going all out. “Look at what Moritz Augenstein is doing — I think he’s going full throttle for the third or fourth time here,” commented the Eurosport announcer just before the bell.
In the end, he didn’t collect enough points in the final sprint and slipped off the podium. After all four disciplines, Moritz finished with 127 points, while overall winner Albert Torres took 133 points.
“I think I just made the wrong decisions during the race,” he said later. “Physically, I had the legs to finish at the front. I just couldn’t make it happen. Not succeeding was disappointing for me.”
On the final evening of the UCI Track World Championships, Moritz and Roger Kluge were among the strongest teams in the Madison. By the second half of the race, they were firmly on medal pace, gaining two laps and celebrating what they thought was a third-place finish at the line.
However, after discovering that incorrect points had been displayed on the scoreboard during the race, and following the official result correction, the pair ended up in fourth place — behind Madison world champions Fabio van den Bossche and Lindsay De Vylder, Great Britain (Mark Stewart and Joshua Tarling), and Denmark (Niklas Larsen and Lasse Leth).
“The misconduct of the UCI commissaires clearly influenced and distorted the race. This is simply unacceptable and must not go unchallenged at a World Championship,” the 39-year-old wrote on Instagram.
For Kluge and Moritz, the moment they lost the medal can be traced back to the race itself — because the scoreboard did not accurately display the teams’ points. The Danish team pulled away at the front while the British and German teams moved up, at a time when Kluge and Augenstein believed Denmark was 32 points behind. About 75 laps, or 18 minutes, earlier, the Danes had completed their second lap, which had not yet been added to the commissaires’ points tally.
“If we — and certainly Team GB as well — had known that Denmark actually had around 60 points, we wouldn’t have let them get away with 12 laps to go, and the final two sprint points would have played out differently,” Kluge concluded.
What is the focus after this World Championships?
“As a track cyclist, the Olympics is the biggest goal you can aim for,” he says. And so Los Angeles in the summer of 2028 is Moritz’s major target. Scratch, however, is not an Olympic discipline.
“I’m mainly focusing on the Madison and the team pursuit. With Tim Torn Teutenberg, the German national team has a very strong candidate in the Omnium,” he adds.
Back to the World Championships. For many, the big question remains: what gear did he ride?
“It depends on the race,” Moritz said on the Besenwagen podcast. In the scratch race, he used 68/15 — which, according to the gear conversion chart, corresponds to a 51/11.
“I’m potentially always the one with the biggest gear,” he adds.
Photos — by Arne Mill (colour) and Maximilian Doernbach (b/w)