Mathieu van der Poel and Remco Evenepoel among the favorites for the Olympic road race this weekend

PARIS (AP) — Remco Evenepoel and his Belgian teammates, along with most of the big names in the road race at the Paris Olympics, pedaled softly within a caravan earlier this week as the cyclists did a slow recon ride of the course they will face on Saturday.

The finishing circuit through the bustling tourist area of Montmartre, where the basilica of Sacre Coeur rises high above the city, was supposed to be closed for the ride. But with too many pedestrians and far too much traffic to control, the riders had to be content with a controlled 30 kph (18 mph) look at what could be the decisive spot on the course.

The biggest favorite in the men's race decided it wasn't worth it.

Instead, Mathieu van der Poel headed into the countryside for a training ride of his own. He later explained to Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad that it wasn't worth “sacrificing an entire afternoon to cycle around at a tourist pace.”

“I don't find that very useful,” he said. “There are plenty of videos of the course.”

You can bet van der Poel and the rest of the riders will be going decidedly faster than “tourist pace” with medals on the line.

The men's and women's road races traditionally open the cycling program at the Summer Games, but the schedule was altered for Paris. The men and women instead contested a rainy, treacherous time trial last Saturday — Evenepoel survived the slickness to win the men's gold medal, and Grace Brown of Australia took gold in the women's race — before mountain bike, BMX freestyle and BMX racing took center stage at venues scattered around the region.

Now, after a full week of Olympic competition, the focus of cycling shifts back to the road.

The men will ride 273 kilometers (170 miles) on Saturday and the women 158 kilometers (98 miles) on Sunday. Both will depart from the Pont d'Iena, the bridge at the base of the Eiffel Tower crossing the Seine, and head west into the French countryside on identical routes. They diverge there before the men and women contest the same run-in to the finish.

That is what they reconned Thursday, and where both of the races could be decided this weekend.

Riders first pass the Louvre on the way to the finishing circuit at Montmartre, which they will do three times. It includes a steep, kilometer-long climb to the final summit and difficult stretches of cobbles that could throw open the entire race.

"I found the finishing circuit tougher than expected,” said Lorena Wiebes, the leader of a powerful Dutch team that includes Tour de France winner Demi Vollering and former world champions Marianne Vos and Ellen van Dijk. “That last climb at Montmartre is 10 kilometers from the finish, but the peloton will be stretched. It’s all up and down, and a lot of corners.”

It's a course similar to some of the spring one-day Classics such as Paris-Nice, and those tend to favor riders with big power and bike-handling ability — like van der Poel, for example, or any of the riders on the Belgian squad.

Among them is Evenepoel, who followed his third-place finish at the Tour de France by winning the Olympic time trial. He is part of a strong contingent from Belgium that includes time trial bronze medalist Wout van Aert, Jasper Stuyven and Tiesj Benoot.

“Luckily, I’m not the lonely leader in my team, so we have multiple cards to play,” Evenepoel said. “Wout is in very good shape. Jasper as well. Tiesj is also always good in Classics races. We have a very strong team. Unfortunately, there are some other strong riders from other teams as well that are participating.”

The top five nations in the UCI standings get four riders apiece, giving them a big advantage in the smaller Olympic fields.

On the men's side, those teams include France, led by Julian Alaphilippe; the British team of Tom Pidcock, who won a second straight mountain bike gold medal last weekend; the Danish team led by versatile Mads Pedersen; and Slovenia, which Matej Mohoric will lead in place of Tour winner Tadej Pogacar, who withdrew from the Olympics due to fatigue.

The U.S. has three in the men's race, with Matteo Jorgenson joining Brandon McNulty and Magnus Sheffield.

In the women's race, the biggest competition for the Dutch could come from Italy, whose four-rider lineup features Elisa Longo Borghini. Other top teams include the British squad of Lizzie Deignan, the Belgian team of Lotte Kopecky and the Danish bunch of Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig, who hopes to be fully recovered from her crash in the rainy time trial.

Kristen Faulkner will join time trial bronze medalist Chloe Dygert to represent the Americans in the women's road race.

AP Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games

Grace Brown, of Australia, competes in the women's cycling time trial event, at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Saturday, July 27, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan)

Grace Brown, of Australia, centre, shows the gold medal of the women's cycling time trial event, flanked by silver medallist Anna Henderson, of Britain, left, and bronze medallist Chloe Dygert, of United States, at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Saturday, July 27, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan)

Remco Evenepoel, of Belgium, left, reacts after winning the men's cycling time trial event, at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Saturday, July 27, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan)

Remco Evenepoel, of Belgium, wins the men's cycling time trial event, at the 2024 Summer Olympics, Saturday, July 27, 2024, in Paris, France. (AP Photo/Ricardo Mazalan)

Netherlands' Mathieu van der Poel reacts after crossing the finish line of the twenty-first stage of the Tour de France cycling race, an individual time trial over 33.7 kilometers (20.9 miles) with start in Monaco and finish in Nice, France, Sunday, July 21, 2024. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole)

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A South Korean commission found evidence that women were pressured into giving away their infants for foreign adoptions after giving birth at government-funded facilities where thousands of people were confined and enslaved from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Monday came years after The Associated Press revealed adoptions from the biggest facility for so-called vagrants, Brothers Home, which shipped children abroad as part of a huge, profit-seeking enterprise that exploited thousands of people trapped within the compound in the port city of Busan. Thousands of children and adults — many of them grabbed off the streets — were enslaved in such facilities and often raped, beaten or killed in the 1970s and 1980s.

The commission was launched in December 2020 to review human rights violations linked to the country’s past military governments. It had previously found the country’s past military governments responsible for atrocities committed at Brothers. Its latest report is focused on four similar facilities in the cities of Seoul and Daegu and the provinces of South Chungcheong and Gyeonggi. Like Brothers, these facilities were operated to accommodate government roundups aimed at beautifying the streets.

Ha Kum Chul, one of the commission’s investigators, said inmate records show at least 20 adoptions occurred from Daegu’s Huimangwon and South Chungcheong province’s Cheonseongwon in 1985 and 1986. South Korea sent more than 17,500 children abroad in those two years as its foreign adoption program peaked.

Ha said children taken from inmates at Huimangwon and Cheonseongwon were mostly newborns, who were transferred to two adoption agencies, Holt Children’s Services and Eastern Social Welfare Society, which placed them with families in the United States, Denmark, Norway and Australia. Most of the infants were transferred to the agencies on the day of their birth or the day after, Ha said, indicating that their adoptions were determined pre-birth.

While the facilities’ records say some of the women submitted memos expressing their consent to give away their children, other records indicate women were being pressured to do so, Ha said. A 1985 inmate record from Huimangwon flags a 42-year-old inmate with supposed mental health issues for “causing problems” by refusing to relinquish her child. Officials later note that she eventually did.

“It’s difficult to accurately determine how many more adopted children there might have been in other years,” Ha said, citing the commission’s limitations in staff. For Huimangwon, Ha said, the commission was only able to look through its inmate records from 1985 and 1986 and still found 14 adoptions. A further six adoptions were linked to inmates at Cheonseongwon.

At their peak, Huimangwon had about 1,400 inmates and Cheonseongwon 1,200. That was still smaller than the population at Brothers, which exceeded 3,000.

Holt and Eastern did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the commission’s findings.

Through documents obtained from officials, lawmakers or through public information requests, the AP in 2019 found direct evidence that 19 children were adopted out of Brothers between 1979 and 1986, and indirect evidence suggesting at least 51 more adoptions.

About 200,000 South Koreans were adopted to the United States, Europe and Australia in the past six decades, creating what’s believed to be the world’s largest diaspora of adoptees. Most of the adoptions occurred during the 1970s and ’80s, when South Korea’s then-military leaders were focused on economic growth and saw adoptions as a tool to reduce the number of mouths to feed, erase the “social problem” of unwed mothers and deepen ties with the democratic West.

The commission has also been conducting a separate investigation into the cases of 367 Korean adoptees in Europe, the United States and Australia, who suspect their biological origins were manipulated to facilitate their adoptions. It’s expected to release an interim report on that later this year.

The commission also identified other human rights problems at the four facilities it highlighted on Monday, which also included Gaengsaengwon in Seoul and Seonghyewon in Gyeonggi province. The facilities’ death tolls were high — the 262 inmates who were reported as dead from Gaengsaengwon in 1980 accounted for more than 25% of the facility’s population that year, Ha said.

Nearly 120 bodies of Cheonseongwon inmates were provided to a local medical school for anatomy practice from 1982 to 1992, the commission said. Most of the bodies were transferred to the school on the day the inmates were declared dead or the day after, and there are no indications that the facility made efforts to transfer the bodies to relatives, according to the commission, which didn't identify the school.

Huimangwon, Seonghyewon and Cheonseongwon also regularly received inmates transferred from Brothers, suggesting a “revolving-door” labor-sharing scheme between facilities that likely increased profit and prolonged the inmates’ confinements, the commission said.

The population at South Korea’s vagrant facilities peaked in the 1980s as the then-military government intensified roundups to beautify streets ahead of the 1986 Asian Games and the 1988 Olympic Games held in Seoul. South Korea transitioned to a democracy in the late 1980s and has long stopped its practice of grabbing homeless people, the disabled and children off the streets and confining them.

Brothers closed in 1988, months after a prosecutor exposed its horrors. Seonghyewon now runs welfare programs for homeless people in the city of Hwaseong, while the three other facilities have changed their names and the services they provide. None of those facilities immediately released comments following the commission's report.

“The four confinement facilities had been allowed to continue their operations without receiving any public investigations even after 1987,” when Brothers was exposed, said Lee Sang Hoon, one of the commission’s standing commissioners. “It’s significant that we have comprehensively revealed the details of the human rights violations at (other) vagrant facilities across the country that had been concealed for 37 years.”

Ha Kum Chul, one of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's investigators, speaks to the media during a news conference at the commission in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Sept. 9, 2024. (Im Hwa-young/Yonhap via AP)

Lee Sang Hoon, a standing commissioner, speaks to the media during a news conference at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Seoul, South Korea, Monday, Sept. 9, 2024. (Im Hwa-young/Yonhap via AP)