I'm Sorry, I Can't Think of a Clever Headline for the Tour Down Under Without Referencing Men at Work
Everything you need to know about climbing tactics, smashed into 12 minutes of racing
This photo is obviously not from the Tour Down Under,1 but it’s the best action shot ASO had of 23-year-old Noemi Rüegg. Which isn’t that outrageous; Rüegg came into this season with just two professional wins, one of them a Swiss national road race championship.2
Her team, EF-Oatly-Cannondale, is also not particularly notable. This is technically only Year Two for the corporate structure of this team, but its main sponsor and a big chunk of the roster raced in 2023 as Team EF Education-Tibco-SVB3, a team with a lineage dating back to 2007. After all that time, EF-whatever-it-was entered this past week with just seven World Tour wins.
It now has nine, because Rüegg won the queen stage of the Tour Down Under, such as it is, and parlayed that into a GC victory—the team’s first overall victory ever at a World Tour-level stage race.
There was a lot to like about this year’s Tour Down Under.4 Chloé Dygert is back and she’s hungry for brains; she animated the climb up Willunga Hill on Stage 2, then gapped the field in a reduced bunch sprint to take victory in Stage 3. This was one of the weaker startlists you’re likely to see on the Women’s World Tour, so take that for what it’s worth. But it’s a good sign for the most powerful American on two wheels.
Most of all, on just the second day of top-level racing in 2025, we saw a perfect object lesson in climbing tactics. As much as I turn on the TV hoping to see something unusual, it is comforting to see a race play out with complete adherence to tactical orthodoxy. The world is the largest classroom, or whatever the saying is.
Anyway, Willunga Hill. This is the iconic climb of the Tour Down Under, and on Stage 2, the women did it twice. The first ascent culled the field to a couple dozen riders; the second decided the winner. Willunga Hill is not actually that big: 3.4 kilometers at an average gradient of 7.4 percent. Apparently Australia, despite being a continent, just doesn’t have any big mountains.5
So Willunga, which is far short of being a climbers’ climb but juuust a little too big to be a puncheurs’ climb, is what we get.
Dygert’s attack at the foot of the hill strung the peloton out, but she’s much too big to outclimb the notable GC riders in the field behind, and sure enough, Niamh Fisher-Black of Lidl-Trek countered and quickly swallowed Dygert up.
Five riders followed:
Neve Bradbury of Canyon-SRAM, for my money the strongest GC rider in the race
Silke Smulders6 of Liv-Alula-Jayco, who latched onto Bradbury. But after that, there was a gap
Rüegg, and following her were
Dominika Włodarczyk of UAE Team ADQ, the Polish national road race champion and
Elise Chabbey, in her first race for FDJ-Suez
That left a group of four, from left to right: Fisher-Black in the blue and yellow, Rüegg in the red Swiss national champ’s jersey, followed by Bradbury and then Smulders in the purple.
Within this group of four, Fisher-Black and Bradbury are the favorites, and they’ll be watching each other. Rüegg and Smulders are just there for the ride. As the rider who animated the move, it’s on Fisher-Black to set a pace that’s strong enough to 1) gas her opponents and 2) keep Chabbey and Włodarczyk from catching up, to say nothing of about a dozen riders behind them. But if she goes too hard, she’ll run out of steam herself and someone (likely Bradbury) would waltz to an easy stage win and the leader’s ochre7 jersey.
Bradbury’s choice in that situation is whether to take her turn at the front of the group and pick up a share of the slack, or to sandbag and let Fisher-Black do all the work. She chose option no. 2, and after about half a kilometer of pulling her three competitors up the hill, Fisher-Black looked over her shoulder and called their bluff by slowing down.
Nobody picked up the tempo, and within 100 meters, Chabbey and Włodarczyk had almost caught back up. Fisher-Black almost did a double-take and pegged the tempo again, hoping to drop her malingering companions for a calmly managed solo effort to victory, but they all caught up within another hundred meters.
So Fisher-Black let her foot off the gas again, and while Rüegg rolled through, she didn’t actually do much work, and within seconds, the group of four was once again a group of six. Not too long after that, back came the riders this sextet had left at the foot of the hill.
So Chabbey, swinging off the back of the lead group, attacked. The pattern continues: Ride fast and if nobody cooperates, you’ll get beat at the line. Ride too slow and the rest of the field catches up. Whenever the latter happened, someone—first Fisher-Black and then Chabbey—panic-attacked to prevent the race from coming back together.
Only after Chabbey’s attack, which got closed down by Rüegg, Fisher-Black did something different: she came over the top with a counter-move. Again, closed down instantly by Bradbury, followed by Smulders, Włodarczyk, Rüegg, and eventually Chabbey, who looked out on her feet by this point.
Again, Fisher-Black set a hard tempo to try to ride Chabbey off the back wheel and put the pursuit group down for good. And again, with no cooperation, Fisher-Black eased off, and Rüegg came to the front and soft-pedaled. And again, Group 2 started creeping back into the picture.
And again, there was an attack just as the group came together—this time by Bradbury—and again Rüegg closed it down. This was enough to get rid of Chabbey for good, along with Włodarczyk and the rest. And the instant Bradbury seemed to relax, Smulders took her turn to attack
Yet again, Rüegg (second in the group of three on the right side of the frame/left side of the road) snapped into action, but this time she was the only one who could follow.
By this point, there were two riders at the head of the race and maybe 600 meters left in the stage: Close enough to the finish that Rüegg no longer had to worry about tactics—she could just stamp out as hard a tempo as she could and see if Smulders could hold on.
She couldn’t. The gap stretched to a couple bike lengths, and then by, oh, the 400 meter mark, the tether snapped and Rüegg was all alone.
Rüegg was incredibly strong on the day; she was able to close all those attacks and then put 10 seconds into Smulders in the space of about 500 meters. But she was also incredibly patient. One of the basic tactical principles of cycling is the concept of “burning matches.” Each rider has a finite number of sharp accelerations in their legs—the kind of explosive effort required to open up a gap instantly and get a pursuer off your wheel. Fisher-Black made three of those moves on the way up Willunga Hill; Bradbury, Chabbey, and Smulders each made one.
Rüegg never actually attacked in this stage. Her decisive move on Smulders, if you want to call it that, was high-power but consistent, enough to rider Smulders off her wheel gradually. It was that kind of effort that allowed her to bridge each gap quickly but calmly. I don’t think she really came out of the saddle much at all.
Rüegg was proactive enough not to get dropped, but she never exerted herself aggressively. Even when she rolled through to the front of the lead group, she never put in any real effort while her nose was in the wind.
That’s a hell of a tricky balance to strike, at the end of three hours of hard racing while the body is in dire need of rest, food and water. Rüegg just did enough to stay in the game while the big names—Fisher-Black, Bradbury and Chabbey—punched each other out. She might not have been the strongest on paper, but she was the only one with gas in the tank when the time came for the decisive move.
Willunga Hill isn’t big like the grand tour mountains; about 12 minutes passed from Dygert’s move at the foot of the climb to Rüegg crossing the finish line. But tactically, this was a mountain stage-in-miniature. This is how races are won.
Unless we’re living in a really fucked up Hearts of Iron IV save and that’s the flag they’re flying in Australia now
Which only counts as a “professional” win depending on who you ask. I’m not sure why.
I’m probably in the minority in that I learned what Silicon Valley Bank was from women’s cycling, and not from this generation’s object lesson that if you have rich people’s money the government will undo all your bad decisions and/or crime
🎵 “You better run / you better take cover” 🎵
The biggest mountain anywhere in Australia is Mount Kosciuszko, which tops out at 7,310 feet. That’s 2,000 feet shy of the highest peak traversed in the Tour de France. And yes, it’s named after Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Polish hero of the American Revolutionary War.
Like I said, this race had everything, including a ridiculous Dutch name
I think I’ve made this joke before but the Tour Down Under picked this color because it sounds funniest in an Australian accent
“Where women glow and men plunder”