The 40 Most Interesting Riders in Cycling, Year 2, Part 1
This time, with at least a token effort toward self-editing
When I started this newsletter a year ago, my first big project was a ranking of the 41 riders I was most interested in following in 2024. Here’s a summary of the general methodology, if you want to call it that, taken from Part 1 last year.
From now until the end of the year, I’ll be releasing part of a list of riders I’m interested in following in 2024. This doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the most exciting riders in the peloton, though that’s obviously a consideration. It’s also not a list of the most famous and successful riders in the peloton. I can tell you this list will be disproportionately heavy on Americans.
Many of the riders on that original list ended up being major points of focus throughout the season—even apart from the sport’s biggest stars, Matteo Jorgenson, Brandon McNulty, Kasia Niewiadoma, Mark Cavendish. But there were quite a few busts. Neilson Powless had a down year, Zoe Bäckstedt didn’t turn into a classics monster, and I learned how to spell Cian Uijtdebroeks’ name for nothing. To say nothing of riders who had big years that I didn’t see coming. Feels like I was writing about Grace Brown and Kristen Faulkner every week for a while there, and they were nowhere near this list.
Last year, I was getting my eye in on how to run a newsletter, and writing for an audience that I expected to know basically nothing about cycling other than the number of wheels on the bike. So every capsule on a rider turned into its own mini-article. Sometimes a not-so-mini article. My plan this time is to keep each section to a couple hundred words, maximum, because you all know who Mathieu van der Poel is by this point, and why he’s supposed to be interesting.
This year, I’m working from a longlist of 40 riders, of which fewer than half made the cut last year.1 So don’t worry, there’ll be plenty of new material.
40. Simon Yates, 32, Visma-Lease a Bike, United Kingdom, Climber
I’ve never been a huge fan of the Yates twins—not for any specific reason, they just never resonated with me—but you can’t deny what they’ve accomplished. Back-to-back white jerseys at the Tour de France while riding for the team that’s now Jayco-Alula.2 Simon won the GC at the Vuelta in 2018, at a point where Sky/Ineos seemed at its most implacable, then won two stages at the Tour in 2019.
That 2019 run, where Simon went stage-hunting, convinced me that he was the superior Yates brother. But in 2021, Adam left for Ineos, and two years after that he moved to UAE, and since then he’s beaten the brakes off his brother—all while serving as Tadej Pogačar’s most valuable mountain domestique and occasional strategic foil.
Simon took one stage and the GC at the Alula Tour this past February, then got shut out the rest of the year. And now he’s following his brother’s figurative path. Simon is moving to Visma-Lease a Bike, where he’ll presumably be to Jonas Vingegaard what his brother is to Pogačar. And they need him. It was just 15 months ago that Visma-Lease a Bike had more grand tour winners than it had room for. But Primož Roglič and Tobias Foss left, Nathan van Hooydonck and Rohan Dennis retired, Wilco Kelderman and Steven Kurijswijk got old, and and all of a sudden the cupboard was real bare.
At the Tour de France, I’m not sure if anything could’ve saved Vingegaard, but his bench wasn’t good enough for us to find out Sepp Kuss got COVID and Wout van Aert didn’t look 100 percent after his Dwars Door Vlaanderen crash, and as great as Jorgenson was, it was often him against three or four UAE domestiques, including Adam Yates.
I think it’s an interesting late-mid-career move for Simon, and a hilariously obvious one for Visma-LAB. Can’t beat Adam Yates? Good news—he’s the only elite rider there’s more than one of.3
39. Laurence Pithie, 22, Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, New Zealand, Classics Specialist
My interest in Pithie is pretty succinct. In 2024, at age 21, racing for a pretty lackluster Groupama-FDJ squad, Pithie was on the verge of a bunch of really impressive results. Second in two bunch sprints in Paris-Nice, seventh at Paris-Roubaix, in the break up to the Mortiolo in the Giro, his first career grand tour start. Plus he won the Great Ocean Road Race, which is technically a World Tour event.
Now, he’s a year older and joining a Red Bull team that, while being built around Roglič for the grand tours, has put together a pretty interesting little classics unit. Joining the team this year, in addition to Pithie: Jan Tratnik, Oier Lazkano and Gianni Moscon.4 Would not surprise me in the slightest if Pithie has a breakout season in 2025.
38. Fem van Empel, 22, Visma Lease a Bike, Netherlands, Classics Specialist
No idea how much she’ll race on the road, and what role she’ll play, but what’s the fun in having a hot take if you’re not going to double and triple down on it?
37. Charlotte Kool, 25, Team Picnic PostNL, Netherlands, Sprinter
That’s the first time I had to write “Picnic PostNL” like it was a normal team name, and man it felt weird. That’s gonna take a while to get used to.
Last season, Kool went up against the best sprinter in the world, Lorena Wiebes, 34 times. Not all of those were sprint stages, and those 34 races double-count a few general classifications and their component stages. Generally, it wasn’t close. Wiebes won 10 races before Kool took her first head-to-head win.
And in general, Wiebes is pretty unbeatable. She had 20 racedays come down to a bunch sprint in 2020, and she won 14 of them. Which is just stupid, to be honest.
Anyway, Kool beat Wiebes three times in 2024. No other sprinter beat her more than once. One of those victories came in Stage 1 of the Tour de France, when her DSM leadout train pulled off a creative long-range move from almost 700 meters out. As Kool sprinted to victory, Wiebes’ chain slipped and she freewheeled all the way back to 41st.
Well, the following day, everyone’s equipment was in working order and Kool, wearing the yellow jersey, won again. Dominance can be boring. Upsetting dominance is cool. Or, you might say, Kool.5
36. Luke Plapp, 23, Jayco Alula, Australia, Time Trialist
Plapp’s 2024 was a season of a lost opportunity; he followed up a national championship double with some exciting—if ultimately fruitless—work at the Tour Down Under. He showed continued stage racing promise with sixth place at Paris-Nice, including an impressive second place on Stage 4, a legitimate multi-mountain torture chamber won by the dust mite-sized Santiago Buitrago.
And he was in the hunt for an Olympic medal in the time trial until he binned it in the wet conditions—it’s OK, he was far from the only one—suffering internal injuries that kept him out of action for two months. Plapp’s been popping up for so long I forgot how young he is; he turns 24 on Christmas. I think he’ll be good for a grand tour stage this year, maybe with some fun results in one-week stage racing, and if I were calling the shots at Jayco, I’d have Plapp playing the Wout van Aert role for new GC leader Ben O’Connor in the grand tours. All he needs to do is stay upright.
35. Skylar Schneider, 26, SD Worx-Protime, United States, Sprinter
This one’s going to take more than a couple paragraphs to explain.
Of the two riders SD Worx is bringing back from sabbatical, Anna van der Breggen is by far the bigger name, but Schneider is the more interesting story. But she’s all the way down in the 30s, while van der Breggen—spoiler alert—is going to be very high up this list, because I have no idea what to make of Schneider’s return to the European peloton.
This is Schneider’s second go-around with the team that’s now SD Worx. She started off with what was then Boels-Dolmans when she was just 17, but after three seasons on the European circuit, she came home to ride for an American semipro team called L39ION of Los Angeles.
L39ION is the creation of the Williams brothers, Cory and Tyler, who own and operate the Continental-level team, which mostly competes in U.S.-based criterium racing. Having a rider-owned team is unusual, all the more so because the Williamses are black, in a sport that just had its Jackie Robinson moment in 2024.
L39ION got a lot of press in the early 2020s, back in that marvelous six-month period where it seemed like the American public was starting to accept that racism was bad and maybe we should think about trying to find ways to mitigate its structural legacy. You know, if it’s not too much trouble. That was great while it lasted, huh?
In addition to breaking down racial barriers and, you know, winning races, L39ION was out to rebrand bike racing as something other than the boring elitist bourgeois sport it often tries so hard to be. L39ION’s riders raced in sick Rapha kits and posted a ton on social media. In addition to the Williamses, they courted World Tour veterans like Schneider and Ian Garrison, and made both their men’s and women’s teams into family operations. Schneider’s sister, Samantha, joined the team, as did Tour of California stage winner Kendall Ryan and her sister Alexis, as well as Neilson Powless’s sister, Shayna.
There were, as you might expect, detractors. Justin Williams brushed a lot of the criticism off as sour grapes and racism, and that’s probably got a lot to do with it. But Williams also made a lot of enemies by fighting on the podium after a race in 2022 and crashing another rider in 2023, both of which got him suspended. L39ION butted heads with USA Crits, then started its own race with a $100,000 purse—a huge payday for a criterium race—but didn’t invite several competitors that had shown “a lack of respect,” raising suspicion that Williams had stacked the deck in his own favor. Williams then took so long to pay the winners that, even in the fly-by-night world of semipro cycling, it turned into major news. There’s other stuff, but you get the idea.
In 2024, Schneider raced for Miami Blazers, another club team under the Williams umbrella, but now she’s coming back to Europe.
And I have no idea if she’ll be any good! L39ION was such a unique entity in cycling, I have no idea how she’ll respond to another turn on the World Tour, especially for such a high-profile team.
17 at the moment, though I can change the other names on this list whenever I want so it doesn’t have to stay that way
Speaking of which, my kit post turned out to be about a day too early.
328 words. So much for self-editing.
Who’s a massive shithead but he’s got a big engine.
Yeah I don’t feel great about that one either