The 40 Most Interesting Riders in Cycling, Year 2, Part 4
The Youth are starting to change, are you starting to change?
The previous installments:
Let’s get moving.
19. Biniam Girmay, 24, Intermarché-Wanty, Eritrea, Sprinter
Girmay made my list last year mostly on potential. He’d had a few big results in 2022, including Gent-Wevelgem and a Giro d’Italia stage win—the first ever by a black rider—but sort of a second half of a Coen Brothers movie of a 2023. I figured he was fast, and capable of hanging in with the big guns in a variety of classics formats and grand tour stages, and any win would be historic on account of the peloton being whiter than pre-packaged mild taco seasoning.
But I wasn’t necessarily expecting much. I remember watching him get worked over by Sam Welsford at the Tour Down Under and going, “Well, I guess it’s not going to happen.”
Suffice it to say I did not anticipate three stage wins and the points classification at the Tour de France.
Girmay did sign a contract extension shackling him to a pretty underwhelming Intermarché team through 2028, but for a stage hunter and opportunistic classics racer, maybe the size of the pond doesn’t matter as much as being the biggest fish in it. And at the risk of jinxing us into a Mathieu van der Poel-dominated classics season, I think there’s going to be a fair bit of chaos this spring. A healthy and in-form Girmay would be well-positioned to knock out more big results if the superstars leave an opening.
18. Ben O’Connor, 29, Jayco-Alula, Australia, Climber
I had kind of written O’Connor off as late-stage Rigoberto Urán with way better hair: A competent GC rider doomed to get dropped by the supermen early in every decisive grand tour climb. Enjoy finishing ninth at the Tour every year, at least the sponsors are pretty happy.
I don’t know if there’s a rider who confounded my preconceptions more in 2024. O’Connor only actually won four races: A stage each at the Vuelta and UAE Tour, the mixed team time trial world championship,1 and his debut race, the one-day Vuelta de Murcia.
Except he also tacked on a world road race silver medal and top-five finishes at two grand tours: The Giro and the Vuelta. And in both—but especially the Vuelta, where he floated into a massive breakaway lead and clung onto the red jersey until the race’s final weekend—he showed grit and ability I did not think he possessed. He’s still a second- or third-tier stage racer,2 but I was massively impressed.
And now O’Connor is leaving Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale, a team with which he’d had great success but an occasionally fractious relationship, for the flagship squad of his native Australia. Jayco Alula is much better set up for the sprints and the classics than the grand tours, but again, that means that O’Connor will be the main man, the successor to the outgoing Simon Yates. Will this incredible season be O’Connor’s high-water mark or a springboard to more and better?
17. Isaac del Toro, 21, UAE Team Emirates, Mexico, GC Specialist
The eye-popping performances slowed down as the season went on—after top five GC finishes in his first two World Tour stage races, del Toro’s last top five in any race came in early June. He’s also, as I mentioned in the Juan Ayuso capsule last week, buried in an extremely crowded UAE stage racing depth chart.
But this is still a 21-year-old with a grand tour in his legs, on the best team in the world in his discipline, hailing from a country with barely any road bike racing history despite having a massive population and even more massive mountains. Why can’t Mexico become the France of the Caribbean?
Would our man benefit from leadership opportunities and teamwide attention? Maybe. But UAE can also bring along a talent of this magnitude slowly. Wins in 2025 would be nice, but mostly I want to see him race more, and play a bigger role in supporting Ayuso and Tadej Pogačar in the big stage races. Then comes world domination in 2026.
16. Cat Ferguson, 18, Movistar, United Kingdom, Classics Specialist
I’ll repeat what I wrote about Ferguson a few weeks ago:
I know it sounds a little silly to pick a rider who was born in 2006 and only turned pro four months ago. However, she’s the defending junior world champion in both the road race and the time trial…she won the junior Tour of Flanders in 2023 and finished second last year. In addition to her road racing exploits, she’s a two-time world junior champion on the track and the reigning world junior cyclocross silver medalist. And within two months of turning pro, she won Binche-Chimay-Binche, which isn’t exactly a cobbled classic, though it had some cobbled sections. And the real heavy hitters weren’t there.
But still, it’s a 1.1-rated elite classics race and she’s 18. I’m taking the over, just…generally.
So maybe it’s OK to throw your baby in the pool and see if she swims. Movistar hasn’t really had a star since Annemiek van Vleuten retired. Poaching Marlen Reusser from SD Worx is nice, but Ferguson’s ceiling is such that she could wrest leadership of the team this season. I don’t know what happens when you put a teenager through a full classics season, but we might find out.
15. Elisa Longo Borghini, 33, UAE Team ADQ, Italy, GC Specialist
Longo Borghini is one of the most well-rounded riders in the sport—she won both the Tour of Flanders and the Giro last season—but that much we knew already. She’s been a monument winner for a decade already.
Her move to UAE Team ADQ has the potential to be even more significant than Demi Vollering’s move to FDJ. Trek started sponsoring a women’s team in 2019, and Longo Borghini has been Queen Shit over there since Day 1. Before that, she was Queen Shit at Wiggle High5.3 And because she’s good—maybe better than anyone except Vollering—at stage races, and good in the cobbled classics, she’s the team leader everywhere.
I already mentioned this with respect to Shirin van Anrooij, and believe me it will come up again later in this list, but Longo Borghini leaving a team that she owned as thoroughly as any rider outside of Pogačar—it creates an enormous power vacuum. By the same token, she’s a one-woman revolution for a women’s UAE squad that remains light on star power otherwise.
14. Neve Bradbury, 22, Canyon-SRAM, Australia, GC Specialist
I think we’re due for a bit of new blood in the women’s GC ranks. I know the term “grand tour” isn’t quite as evocative in the women’s game as the men’s, but bear with me a minute.
Here are the 10 youngest women’s grand tour winners:4 Demi Vollering (born 1996), Kasia Niewiadoma (1994), Elisa Longo Borghini (1991), Anna van der Breggen (1990), Marianne Vos (1987), Claudia Lichtenberg, Mara Abbott, Megan Guarnier (all 1985), Annemiek van Vleuten (1982), Nicole Brändli (1979).
The 10 youngest men’s grand tour winners: Remco Evenepoel (born 2000), Tadej Pogačar (1998), Egan Bernal (1997), Jonas Vingegaard, Jai Hindley (both 1996), Tao Geoghegan Hart (1995), Sepp Kuss (1994), Richard Carapaz (1993), Simon Yates (1992).
The dominance of van Vleuten and van der Breggen distorts this list, as does the availability of only the Giro until the 2020s. But of the seven grand tour winners under 30, only one is a woman, and she’s 28. Out of the 10 Europe-based Women’s World Tour stage races held in 2024, only one was won by a rider younger than Vollering. That was Lorena Wiebes, who swept all three stages of the completely flat RideLondon Classique—hardly a proxy for a grand tour.
Eventually, a Zoomer is going to break through, and I’m going to push the boat out here for Bradbury. She, like Jay Vine, is a Zwift Academy graduate, and is only just now maturing into a well-rounded road racer. Her calling card performance was at the Giro, where she finished third on GC and won the toughest stage of the race, which culminated in an outside-category climb of 16.3 kilometers at 8.0 percent average gradient, up the infamous Blockhaus.
With 9.4 kilometers left in the stage, after Gaia Realini had paced hard in support of Longo Borghini, Bradbury stepped out of the line and said, “Smell ya later, bozos!”
I don’t know yet if Bradbury is the real deal. We’ll need to see how she does in a proper time trial, for starters. But as of right now, she’s my pick of the 25-and-under generation.
The least prestigious world championship out there by a huge margin
Or fourth, if you consider Tadej Pogačar to be in a class of his own
Still my favorite team name ever
Counting the Tour since 2022 and the Vuelta since 2021—i.e. when those races got mountains