GLASGOW said au revoir, auf wiedersehen and arrivederci to the European Championships yesterday in the most masochistic manner imaginable. It is the one-day stage race between Paris and Roubaix which is known in the cycling world as Hell of the North but road races around Scotland’s biggest city are starting to give it a run for its money as the sport’s most gruelling one-day challenge. Four years after only 11 men finished the Commonwealth Games road race, won by recent Tour de France champion Geraint Thomas, the city was back to its brutal best yesterday over the same course and pretty much identical conditions.

The rain had just about relented by the time the first finishers came in at 4pm but my word the 50 riders of the 136 who actually made it to the finish line cut a maukit, drookit bunch. With rain sheeting it down, and road surfaces a combination of cobbles, smooth pedestrian walkways, asphalt, and everything in between, so many riders experienced punctures and mechanical problems on the gritty, uneven roads of Glasgow that we seemed in danger of running out of spare wheels and bikes. At the end of five hours 50 minutes covering 16 laps of this testing city centre circuit, during which they had climbed as much as a Tour de France mountain stage, the finishers’ faces were soot black, as if they had down a shift down the mines.

We were barely out of the 10.30am depart when the first attack of the day came from an Irishman, Robert-Jon McCarthy. He would form part of a six-strong breakaway which at one point had five minutes on the rest of the field, but whatever slim hopes they ever had of staying away crashed to earth, literally, when Polychronis Tzortzakis of Greece smacked into the tarmac and the barriers on the right-hander at the foot of Buchanan Street, taking Matthias Krisek of Austria and Roland Thalman of Switzerland with him.

Proximity the calendar to the Tour de France and the Vuelta had cost the likes of Geraint Thomas and Chris Froome, with Mark Cavendish pulling out of the GB team on the eve of the event. But there were still plenty of world class performers here. Not least of these was Peter Sagan, the swaggering Slovak who has taken the sprinters’ green jersey on six of the last seven editions of the Tour de France and will go into next month’s World Championships in Innsbruck looking to win a remarkable fourth road race title in a row.

Unmistakeable in his rainbow jersey, let’s just say it ended the day somewhat soiled. Still dogged by a back problem from a crash at the Tour de France, and having sustained a back-wheel puncture and required assistance to get back on the bunch, with 85.9km to go even he decided this wasn’t for him, skulking off to Team Slovakia’s motorhome to be put back together, before emerging to be greeted by an 100-strong group of fans and well-wishers like a hero.

“It was a very technical course and it was really hard,” said Sagan. “I was not in good shape and I still have a lot of pain from my crash at the Tour De France a few weeks ago In the end, I still felt a lot of pain in my back and in my hip. I think I really needed more time to recover for this race.”

Licking his chops at that news – not to mention the travails of reigning champion Alexander Kristoff of Norway - were the likes of Greg van Avermaet of Belgium, a man who had the yellow jersey for seven days in France this year. But the Belgians had some other cards to play too. A high-powered delegation took off as soon as this leading group had been gobbled up, with Jelle Wallays then Xandro Meurisse attacking off the front on the slope of Great George Street.

The end result was the formation another breakaway, this time an elite grouping of eleven. With two riders from Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands involved, plus one from France, that left no-one willing or able to force the pace on the main field to catch them up. Great Britain, effectively, had missed the bus.

“It was a relentless circuit, especially with the weather we had,” admitted a crestfallen Ben Swift, the former Team Sky rider, who flew out to Belgium last night to start the BinckBank tour today. “Once you hit the limit, when you start to have a really bad patch, it is so hard to recover.

“We had a couple of options, we knew we had to be ready for when it kicked off, but it just didn’t go plan. When it all started to kick off, I just didn’t have the legs today.”

The winner was now sure to be one of eleven men. But that eleven men didn’t stay eleven for long. Maurits Lammertink of Netherlands lost control as the race turned into Kelvin Way for the last time, causing chaos which brought Germany’s Nico Denz crashing to the ground too.

Now there were five, two of which happened to be Italian. And it worked like a dream as Davide Cimolai led Matteo Trentin of Italy perfectly for the win, the seasoned Italian sprinter taking the win by inches on the line by Netherlands’ Mathieu van der Poel and Belgium’s Wout van Aert. It completed a one-two for the Azzurri in the road races, after Marta Bastianelli’s win in midweek. The two Italians were locked in exuberant embrace afterwards - no nation buy more into the team ethic required for this type of event.

As the mobile homes and team cars hit the road last night, this city started to go back to normality and assessments could be made about this inaugural multi-sports continental shindig. It is wrong to judge these European Championships by the standards of the Commonwealth Games four years ago.

The fact the athletics was in Germany was always going to take a bit of getting your head around, while the public - perhaps fatigued or distracted by the Gold Coast or the World Cup - were slow to cotton on to the fact all this was happening on their doorstep.

But tournament organisers have created something new here and most of it might stand the test of time. Billed with the hashtag #themoment, there have been plenty to live long in the memory - not least Duncan Scott’s 200m freestyle victory at Tollcross.

Scotland’s relationship with Europe might be complicated than ever right now but with a little bit of help from Glasgow, the European Championships has started to become more than the sum of its parts.