All eyes had been on Slovakia’s world road race champion Peter Sagan at the start after his surprise decision to contest the mountain bike event rather than go for gold on tarmac.
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Kulhavy finished 50 seconds behind the Swiss rider while Spaniard Carlos Coloma joined them on the podium with a bronze medal.
Rwanda will have to wait for another four years to seek for her first ever Olympic medal after all her seven athletes that featured in the 2016 Rio Olympic Games that concluded on Sunday, returned empty handed.
“I had the ideal race, I had a good start and I was always under control”, Schurter, who also came third in Beijing in 2008, said. Schurter, the bronze medal victor from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, took the silver, but it was a heart-breaking loss. “Just from the start, just got swamped at the start, I tried to get myself back had a flat tyre on the first lap, got back on and the gears just stopped working”.
“After seven years, I am back on the mountain bike, and I was happy to try”, said the former world junior champion, who said he would now concentrate his mind back on the road and the world championships coming up in Doha. On various occasions some were forced to dismount and push their bikes over a few particularly slick climbs, slipping and sliding as if they were on ice.
Sagan’s chances ultimately were ruined when his front tire went flat at the start of the second lap.
Hardly the only rider to puncture on the stone-strewn course, Sagan finished in 35th place.
The race began to string out by the third of seventh laps.
For much of the race, Schurter and Kulhavy were never more than a few feet apart, way out ahead of the rest of the competition.
Absalon was two minutes down by the sixth lap, his chances of another gold medal gone.
It was about that point that Schurter finally shook Kulhavy from his rear wheel, dropping the Czech champion with some daring riding on the tricky descents.
By the final straightaway, Schurter was all alone.
Unlike in 2012, when the late Burry Stander was in the top five for most of a closely fought race, the two South Africans in Rio were well out of the medals race.
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“I’m just really happy”, he said.
