Great Britain’s Zoe Backstedt produced a superb ride to claim silver in the women’s time trial at the UCI World Road Championships in Montreal.

The 21-year-old Welsh rider could have opted to defend the under-23 title she won last year.

But instead she stepped up to elite level and finished 40.11 seconds behind defending champion Marlen Reusser of Switzerland, who retained her crown on her 35th birthday with a winning time of 50 minutes 24.44 seconds.

Backstedt, who started third from last, set the time to beat as she came home 5.43 secs quicker than Germany’s Franziska Koch, who eventually finished third.

She told reporters that she started to dream of winning after making a storming start: “In the first half, when I heard the first time check, I was thinking ‘OK, maybe it’s possible’.

“But I knew also that Marlen was super strong and that she has a very big engine.

“So I knew that it was possible that she would bring a lot of time back on me and she did, so massive respect to her.”

Reusser, the final rider to start, was more than 10 seconds behind Backstedt at the first checkpoint but paced her effort brilliantly on the 39.2km course, which was almost double the usual length, to claim a second time-trial gold medal to add to last year’s victory in Rwanda.

The Swiss star, who has also won two world silvers and a bronze in the discipline, was the form rider going into the championships.

The four-time European champion had been virtually unbeatable at the discipline this year, having won time-trial stages at the Tour de France Femmes and Giro d’Italia Women.

But Backstedt made her battle hard on a long, winding, technical course to secure just the third British medal in the discipline, with Emma Pooley taking gold in 2010 and bronze a year later.

She added: “My main thing was ‘don’t go out too hard, don’t go out like it was a 22km time trial, go out like it was a 40km time trial and if you have got anything left in the final then give it everything that you have got’.”

The Briton, a former world junior and under-23 time trial champion, won both the women’s road race and time trial at this year’s British Championships.

“Zoe proved today that she deserves to be up there racing with the elites,” British rider Hayley Simmonds told BBC Sport.

“She really put her mark on this race. She was leading for the first two intermediate checkpoints and still finished in second.

“It’s not like she went out too hard and died, she just had a very mature race and I am excited to see what she can do in the next few years.”

Backstedt will ride again in the women’s elite road race at the World Championships on Saturday, 26 September.

Elsewhere, reigning European road race champion Demi Vollering was eighth, while Backstedt’s British team-mate Anna Morris finished 16th.