The 40 Most Interesting Riders in Cycling, Year 2, Part 5
The final installment in the long offseason series, on the eve of the Tour Down Under
Embedding a link for every previous edition of this list was bumping me up against the newsletter size limit, so here’s Part 4, and if you want to read the previous three installments all the links are near the top.
The offseason, all of a sudden, is basically over! The World Tour starts this weekend, with the Tour Down Under. In fact, the Women’s Tour Down Under kicks off on Friday in Australia, which is actually Thursday night—tonight, as you’re reading this—in the continental U.S.!
Being so early and so far from the European base of road bicycle racing, this race usually doesn’t attract the really big guns, but there are a few riders from previous editions of this list: Neve Bradbury and Jay Vine flying the flag for their native Australia, plus Kim Cadzow and Chloe Dygert. Plus, American fans can watch it all on Peacock.
But you’re not here for lukewarm excitement over a de facto preseason race. You’re here to finish a list.
6. Tadej Pogačar, 26, UAE Team Emirates-XRG, Slovenia, All-Rounder
I don’t know how Pogačar is going to top what is pretty self-evidently the greatest season in cycling history. It’s not just that he won the Triple Crown, it’s that he won all three races in absolutely dominant fashion. He won 12 grand tour stages in two starts; Chris Froome and Vincenzo Nibali—two all-time great stage racers—each won 14 in their entire careers. Plus Pogačar, oh by the way, won two monuments and two other World Tour classics races.
There’s absolutely nowhere left to go from here. Win all three grand tours in a year? Maybe that’s the move. But not in 2025. Pogačar is slated to go back to the classics schedule he leaned into during his pursuit of the Tour of Flanders, which he won in 2023. Which is probably the right thing to do; it wouldn’t surprise me if Pogačar were bored by his own dominance.
The highest compliment I can pay Pogačar is that he has the potential to make every race he contests unwatchably boring. I tend not to wake up at dawn for the start of races; often as not I’ll take my time getting out of bed and check in with an hour or two to go. Last year, that meant I basically missed Strade Bianche, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and the world road race championship. Pogačar was already gone, and there was no plan for how to reel him in.
That’s the big question, I guess. Apart from Jonas Vingegaard and Visma-Lease a Bike at the Tour de France, the conventional wisdom on what to do when Pogačar attacks is: Give up and race for second. I want to know when that changes, because until then, he’s going to win whatever races he wants, no matter the terrain or conditions.
5. Wout van Aert, 30, Visma-Lease a Bike, Belgium, Classics Specialist
I think this is a put up-or-shut up1 season for the singing squirrel. I’m not certain what to make of van Aert’s advancing age.2 Sprinters—except for Mark Cavendish, but only kind of—lose it in a hurry, and usually around 30. But the thing that makes van Aert so great is that he’s really three or four different types of rider in one; not just a sprinter but also a time trialist and classics specialist and kind-of-mountain breakaway guy. And Fabian Cancellara won his last Tour of Flanders at 33, and the Olympic time trial gold medal in his final professional race at 35.
But even then, van Aert doesn’t have forever to rack up victories—not just podiums but victories—in the races that have eluded him so far. We’re approaching a point where the van Aert-Mathieu van der Poel rivalry isn’t really a rivalry anymore, but one superstar pointlessly and repeatedly bashing his head against an even better superstar.
When I really started following cycling properly in the mid-2010s—not just rooting for Americans in the Tour de France, but keeping up with the whole calendar—my favorite rider was Greg Van Avermaet. Van Avermaet, like van Aert, was a Belgian cobbled classics specialist with enough climbing chops to put on a show even when there were hills involved.3 And like van Aert, his career was defined by a series of near misses.
But it all clicked for him once he turned 30. That year, in 2015, he won his first Tour de France stage, and the floodgates opened. He won another Tour stage the following year, and briefly wore the yellow jersey. He won the Olympic road race the same year, then Paris-Roubaix the following year. It didn’t last that long; by the end of the decade Van Avermaet had been swamped by the cyclocross generation. But he checked off a series of wins that would probably validate van Aert’s career.
So I’m hopeful. Maybe not optimistic, but hopeful.
4. Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, 32, Visma-Lease a Bike, France, Classics Specialist
Ferrand-Prévot’s return to the road racing peloton was the most shocking news of the transfer season. She’s won everything there is to win in cycling—not just road racing, but any two-wheeled, human-powered contest of who can get from A to B the fastest. Pauline Ferrand-Prévot has won world championships in cyclocross, gravel racing, three different disciplines of mountain biking—plus an Olympic gold medal last summer in her native France. Oh, and also the world road race championship in 2014, when she was just 23.
Ferrand-Prévot is the only active rider, other than Marianne Vos, who has this kind of interdisciplinary track record. Except, while Vos has remained one of the most dangerous sprinters and classics riders consistently for more than 15 years, Ferrand-Prévot just up and quit road racing after 2018. Since then, the only road events she’s contested were the French national championships.
So we have, by any standard, an all-time great returning to the road a decade removed from her last big wins, and more than six years removed from riding a full-time road racing calendar of any kind.
Let me give you some context for how big a gap that is in this moment in history. ProCyclingStats has seven races listed on her events calendar this season. She might end up riding more or less, but let’s use this as a starting point. Those seven races: UAE Tour, Strade Bianche, Milano-San Remo, Amstel Gold, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Vuelta, and the Tour de France.
Ferrand-Prévot has never ridden five of those seven races before, because they didn’t have women’s editions in her last season as a road racer. Which was 2018, it bears repeating. That’s not that long ago.
And whatever you might think about Ferrand-Prévot being rusty—and she might be—she’s not cooked. She’s still only 32, and she won an Olympic gold medal and the World Cup title in mountain biking last year. The legs are there.
There is no outcome for Ferrand-Prévot that would surprise me this season. She could win multiple monuments or get swamped and go back into the woods for good by Memorial Day. There’s no bigger wild card in the sport, and not only that, she’s dropping into a team with Vos, and their spiritual successor, Fem van Empel. Fourth might be too low, come to think of it.
3. Tom Pidcock, 25, Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team, United Kingdom, Classics Specialist
The top four riders on this list all either unretired, changed teams, or both this winter. And Pidcock’s Hail Mary transfer from Ineos Grenadiers to a startup second-division outfit is the clear stop-the-presses moment on the men’s side.4
This move is compelling not for one reason, but because of several compounding factors. First, Pidcock came along in the British and Ineos developmental system just as it was collapsing. For a country that had been a second-rate power in road cycling until the 2010s, the U.K., mostly through Team Sky/Ineos, had benefited from some pretty remarkably smooth sailing that decade. Bradley Wiggins gave way to Froome, who gave way to Geraint Thomas, who gave way to Egan Bernal, and Mark Cavendish was floating around in the background the whole time.
Then the Bernal and Froome crashes brought those lines to an abrupt end, Thomas and Cavendish got old, and the vaunted Ineos machine came crashing down just as Pidcock was coming of age. The less favorable environment didn’t matter in a country with a positively American lust for domination in every sport, and the most insane tabloid press you’re likely to find anywhere.
So Pidcock works under a microscope, and he’s good enough to put himself into the conversation with van der Poel and van Aert, or other stars of his generation like Pogačar and Remco Evenepoel…but not good enough enough to beat them regularly. And in contrast to the metronomic, laconic, unflappable Froome, and the easygoing Thomas, Pidcock is more human. He’s got much more flair on the bike, but he’s also outspoken5 and blunt.
This dynamic but volatile character got tasked with maintaining the dominance of a program that had been collapsing from within for years, against a new generation of opponents that rewrote the standards of the entire sport. Of course rider and team would be sick of each other by now.
But instead of moving to another well-resourced superteam,6 he’s dropping all the way out of the World Tour and leaving himself as the biggest fish in a very small pond. It’s an audacious move, one that’s proved a one-way journey for numerous superstars in the past. But Pidcock is younger, and still trying to find his ceiling, rather than trying to grasp onto his final moments there. I’m fascinated to see how this goes.
2. Anna van der Breggen, 34, SD Worx-Protime, Netherlands, GC Specialist
When van der Breggen retired in 2021, at the age of 31, she was the best climber, stage racer, you name it, in the world. She was the biggest star on the team with all the stars, winning all the big races, and you don’t walk away from that with that much tread on your tires unless you’re really sure about it.
So what the fuck is she doing back?
Because last summer, SD Worx7 blew up its chances of winning the Tour de France because it couldn’t get all of its riders pulling on the same end of the rope. As much as Demi Vollering8 leaving will ease some of that pressure, this team still has the best sprinter in the world, Lorena Wiebes, who’ll be in need of support. Lotte Kopecky is the best classics rider in the world, and her burgeoning ability to ride for GC was a big source of friction with Vollering. Plus there are promising young riders like Mischa Bredewold and Blanka Vas who would be sleepwalking into team leadership if they worked almost anywhere else.
I don’t know how van der Breggen’s return doesn’t exacerbate that problem. Especially if there’s any rust on her at all. Which, you know, she’s been off the bike for three years and turns 35 in April, so there might be. What’s going to happen if she demands race leadership while Kopecky is clearly outriding her?
Best-case scenario, the best GC rider of her generation picks up where she left off. Worst-case, it’s the end of the fucking world.
1. Demi Vollering, 28, FDJ-Suez, Netherlands, GC Specialist/Puncheur
So you understand why Vollering wasn’t too broken up about leaving, then.
When the best rider in the world leaves the best team after a months-long transfer saga, that’s always a recipe for great drama. Especially when it’s to a team with one of the most recognizable brands in the sport despite little track record of success.
For years, FDJ has been fine, I guess. But this year, they’re loaded for bear. Not just with Vollering, but bringing in Elise Chabbey and Juliette Labous—the latter would be a dynamite GC leader signing all on her own. Plus the existing core of young French talent: Jade Wiel, Évita Muzic, and 19-year-old Célia Gery, who won the junior Ronde van Vlaanderen last spring.9
All of those riders are really good, and really exciting. You know what they’re not? Better than Vollering. Or even good enough to threaten her.
Now, Vollering is in undisputed leadership of a strong team, which is the best place for her to be. Even in the turmoil of 2024, she managed to win the first four stage races she contested, including the Vuelta, and would have defended her Tour de France title had some small number of heads been removed from their respective asses. And even that wildly disappointing classics season included podiums at Strade Bianche and three of the four races of Greater Ardennes Week. Plus a world championship silver medal.
A year ago, I bumped Vollering pretty low on this list because I worried that she and SD Worx were good enough to make the sport boring. No longer. Now she’s on her own, and almost certainly better off.
Or, as it was put in Beerfest, a Hall of Fame sports movie: “Time to scheiße or get off the crapper”
As horrendous as it is to use that phrase in the context of someone who was born during the 1994-95 MLB strike
I vividly remember van Avermaet coming up to the last climb of the Olympic road race in Rio and being absolutely certain he was going to win gold, which of course he did.
Can’t let the girls have all the fun
An uncharitable observer might say whiny
Any of which would be able to find a spot for him
With van der Breggen as a DS, it bears repeating
And to a lesser extent Marlen Reusser
Ahead of Cat Ferguson, no less