The 41 Most Interesting Riders In Cycling
Part 1: Riders 32 through 41
I love making ranked lists, so I’m going to recycle an old gimmick: Previewing the season by way of a power ranking based on completely subjective criteria that even I don’t entirely understand.
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. Despite feeling general ambivalence about much of my nation’s history and civic values, when it comes to sports I am an absolute drooling chauvinist, and for that I make no apologies. When it comes to sports, I love my country so much I get invested in the goddamn Ryder Cup. Of course I’m gonna get hideously overexcited about Magnus Sheffield.
My plan is to release this list in four parts, with the final installment serving as this newsletter’s first paid subscriber-only post on January 2. Friday posts will remain as whimsical and scattershot as ever. My plan is to just write a few sentences distilling each rider down to his or her essence, which will balloon to several hundred words on each rider because my impulse control is for shit. So you’ll be getting 41 articles for the price of four. One, really, since the first three are free.
On to the list.
No. 41: Enric Mas, 28, Movistar, Spain, Climber/GC Specialist
It’s a hard time to be a GC rider. The only man on two wheels who can beat Tadej Pogačar is Jonas Vingegaard, and only if Vingegaard has the full support of the strongest team in cycling. There’s Remco Evenepoel, Primož Roglič, and a generation of scary up-and-coming South American climbers.
Is Mas good enough to win a grand tour? I don’t know. But he hasn’t been given much of a chance. Mas is a three-time runner-up at the Vuelta despite less-than-ideal team circumstances. At Quick Step, he was a GC rider on a classics team that seemed surprised that it might have to support a grand tour challenge. But success there won him a move to Movistar, where for the past four seasons he’s carried the burden of being the best Spanish GC rider on a Spanish team that, despite having significant resources, often has no idea what it’s doing.
There are some real weaknesses to his game: Even when he can hang with Vingegaard and the Slovenians on the climbs, Mas hemorrhages time in time trials. But on the right course, against the right competition, he could probably snag a win at the Vuelta or Giro in a year when the big dogs are concentrating on the Tour de France.
No. 40: Zoe Bäckstedt, 19, Canyon-SRAM, Great Britain, Time Trialist
I might be a year or two early on Bäckstedt, but she’s talented enough I’m willing to take the risk. Both of her parents were professional cyclists (her father, Magnus, won Paris-Roubaix), as is her older sister, but Zoe looks like the best of the bunch. The week she turned 18, she won the world junior road race and time trial championship, and had her World Tour debut in 2023.
She didn’t win a senior-level race or compete in a grand tour, but she held her own. She finished fifth overall at the Simac Ladies Tour in September against a strong field, including third in the Stage 3 time trial. So far, she’s spent her offseason racing cyclocross, where she’s won the European U23 championship and podiumed two of her last three World Cup races. It’s been a mixed bag for female cyclocrossers transitioning to the road, but Bäckstedt could be the first to really make it work.
No. 39: Magnus Cort, 30, Uno-X Pro Cycling, Denmark, Sprinter
Cort is one of my favorite riders in the peloton. I have him listed as a sprinter, which doesn’t quite fit. Most sprinters who can climb a little get lumped in as classics specialists, but Cort does most of his damage in stage races. Racing for EF, Astana, and Orica (now Jayco-AlUla; I’m not sure yet if I’m going to humor their stupid mid-word capital U as a matter of house style) Cort has won nine grand tour stages, including one in each of the past four seasons. In 2021, he won three stages at the Vuelta and almost beat Roglič in the final time trial to claim a fourth.
There’s an art to stage hunting in a grand tour, and Cort is one of the best out there. He’s good enough on the flats to be valuable in a breakaway, a good enough climber to follow every move over the mountains, and a good enough sprinter to finish off the day with a victory.
After four successful seasons at EF, he’s moving to Uno-X, a Norwegian second-division team with an entirely Scandinavian roster. Cort was a great fit at EF, a team that’s usually light on sprinters and GC contenders—the kind of rider you have to build your entire team around. EF has carved out a niche as a great stage-hunting outfit in the ground tours, building a roster of versatile riders and putting them in the breakaway.
Second-division teams, like Uno-X, only get to race grand tours and monuments by invitation; in order to get an invitation, these teams need a draw to make themselves attractive to race organizers. That can mean a local tie, a big-name lead racer, or an entertaining style of racing. For Uno-X, that means lots of time in the breakaway, attacking, and animating the race. If Cort’s new team can get him into these big races, he’s extremely well-positioned to do major damage.
No. 38: Aleksandr Vlasov, 27, Bora-Hansgrohe, Russia, Climber
Vlasov, who races under a neutral flag after the UCI put Russian under sanction, has been on the verge of a breakthrough win for a while now. In 2022, he won the Tour de Romandie, which is on the prestigious end of World Tour stage races. And after a bit of a slow start to 2023, he finished the season strong: Seventh overall at the Vuelta and fourth at Il Lombardia.
But he’s been the next big thing for so long, it almost feels weird that he’s 27 already. And after podiuming Il Lombardia in 2020, he hasn’t finished in the top three in a grand tour or a monument, or even won a grand tour stage. I’m interested to see how Vlasov gets used this year. Is he still going to get chances for GC leadership with Roglič on the team? Can he turn into a stage hunter or a puncheur and contest hilly one-day races? Or will be become a domestique for a team that suddenly has two Grand Tour-winning GC riders? (Bora doesn’t always go in for GC in grand tours, but when Jai Hindley won the Giro in 2022, Vlasov was not in the squad.)
Vlasov is a free agent at the end of the year, so this is a potential make-or-break season for his career.
No. 37: Jonathan Milan, 23, Lidl-Trek, Italy, Sprinter
First of all, let’s acknowledge how cool it is that there’s an Italian bike racer named Jonathan Milan. It’s like having an American bike racer named Fabrizio Chicago.
Milan is 6-foot-4, 185 pounds, and has won gold medals on the track at the European and world championships, as well as the Olympics. As you might expect from such a big, powerful dude, he’s a sprinter. Here he is, winning the first grand tour mass start stage of his career. Milan is the guy in the orange jersey who’s twice everyone else’s size.
Milan went on to take the points classification at that Giro, which is great, but sprinting does not interest me that much. I know for some people it’s the most exciting part of the sport, but on balance the chaos at the end is not worth the typical boredom for the stage that precedes it.
The thing about Milan is that he climbs better than anyone that size has any right to. Not to the point where he could contest stage races—or even individual mountain stages from the breakaway, the way sprinters like Cort or Wout van Aert can. But the kind of short-duration brute force necessary to get over hills in puncheurs’ races? That Milan has got. So look out for a disconcertingly large presence at the end of Amstel Gold Race or Milan-San Remo in the not too distant future.
No. 36: Richard Carapaz, 30, EF Education-EasyPost, Ecuador, Climber/GC Specialist
When he’s on, Carapaz is one of my favorite riders to watch. Too many pure climbers have a reactive, attritional approach to racing; Carapaz loves to go on the attack, and he has the punch to create separation in the mountains.
Carapaz was the surprise winner of a kind of odd Giro in 2019; he just rode the wheels off his erstwhile team leader, Mikel Landa, while Roglič and Jumbo-Visma threw up their last real tactical stinker before the team emerged on its current run of dominance.
That performance earned Carapaz a big-money move to Ineos Grenadiers, where in three seasons he put in a lot of exciting performances but left with less hardware than he should have. There was a thrilling breakaway raid to set up a stage win for Michał Kwiatkowski at the 2020 Tour, after Ineos’ GC challenge had fallen apart, but Carapaz didn’t personally walk away with anything. He nearly beat Roglič at the Vuelta later that season, but lost due to bonus seconds and some Movistar weirdness.
Carapaz finished third on GC as Ineos’ leader at the Tour in 2021, should’ve won the Giro in 2022 but finished second, and signed off by snagging three stage wins at the Vuelta. The biggest win of his Ineos tenure was actually the 2021 Olympic road race, which didn’t actually come in Ineos colors.
When Carapaz moved to EF before 2023, it was exciting but a bit of an odd fit. EF usually has a strong contingent of South American riders, and was looking for a sporting and commercial successor to the aging Rigoberto Urán. But EF’s approach to GC riding at big races—especially the Tour—is usually to get a likeable leader (Urán recently, but before that Ryder Hesjedal and Christian Vande Velde) to grind out a fifth-place finish without seriously contending for the win.
It didn’t end up mattering. Carapaz’s first season with EF was a writeoff. He got off to a slow start, didn’t seriously contend at the spring one-week stage races like Tour of the Basque Country and the Criérium du Daupiné, then crashed out of the Tour de France on Day 2. A run of top-10 finishes at the season-ending Italian classics was a bit of a hollow moral victory.
I don’t think Carapaz has the juice (specifically the time trialing ability) to take on Vingegaard and Pogačar at the Tour, but he’s got to be more competitive than he was in 2023.
No. 35: Biniam Girmay, 23, Intermarché-Circus-Wanty, Eritrea, Sprinter/Classics Specialist
In 2022, Girmay won Gent-Wevelgem and at the Giro became the first Black rider to win a grand tour stage. His combination of speed and punchy climbing ability made him an obvious future contender for hilly classics races, as well as points classifications at the grand tours.
It’ll need to wait another year. Girmay suffered a concussion in a nasty crash at the Tour of Flanders, and wasn’t quite right during his Tour de France debut. I hope Girmay is able to flush it and get back on track, because he could be a huge star.
Road cycling has historically been dominated by Western Europe; it wasn’t really until the 1980s that riders from the Americas and the former Soviet bloc showed up at the biggest races. Even up until a decade ago, cycling was almost entirely Eurocentric. Even when African riders became a fixture in the peloton, it was mostly white South Africans.
But cycling is on the rise in East Africa; the world championships will be held in Kigali, Rwanda, in 2025. The biggest hotbed is Girmay’s home country of Eritrea, which has about half a dozen riders full-time on the men’s World Tour. Girmay is far and away the biggest talent of that group.
Which I think gets lost sometimes in discussion of Girmay, because he has the capability to go to the classics and hang with the cyclocross supermen (van Aert, Pidcock, van der Poel) the way few other riders can. He’s the perfect fit for the vacuum left by the decline and recent retirement of Greg van Avermaet and Peter Sagan.
Even if he weren’t a potentially transformative cultural figure of the sport—which he is—Girmay would still be one of its most important young stars.
No. 34: Ben Healy, 23, EF Education-EasyPost, Ireland, Puncheur
The diminutive Irishman had a huge breakout season in 2023, winning a stage of the Giro, finishing second at Amstel Gold and Brabantse Pijl, and finishing fourth at Liège-Bastogne-Liège. That strong showing at the Ardennes Classics illustrates Healy’s strength: short, steep climbs.
We’re in a bit of a run where GC riders are running the show on the hilly classics; a grand tour champion has won every edition of LBL since the pandemic. But Healy can also damage on that rolling EF stage-hunting machine that Cort profited from so much. With a new contract in hand, expect Healy to be all over the calendar, and animating the race wherever he goes.
No. 33: Lorena Wiebes, 24, SD Worx, Netherlands, Sprinter
The fastest woman on two wheels. Women’s road racing is still at a point in its evolution where it still isn’t particularly specialized. The best riders on cobbles are, for the most part, the best riders on hills. Wiebes is an exception, as pure a specialized sprinter as you’ll find.
Last year, Wiebes moved to SD Worx, the most dominant team in women’s cycling by an enormous margin. In the above clip, she screams out of the bunch at the finish to win Stage 3 of the Tour de France; you’ll notice that her last leadout rider is Lotte Kopecky, who at the time was wearing the yellow jersey as race leader. Kopecky is the reigning road race world champion and one of the best sprinters in the world in her own right. But even she knows there’s no catching Wiebes on flat ground.
No. 32: Brandon McNulty, 25, UAE Team Emirates, United States, Time Trialist
Ever since I’ve been following cycling, I’ve gotten invested in a series of young American GC riders who look like potential future grand tour contenders. And time and time again, I’ve gotten my heart broken. Andrew Talansky. Tejay van Garderen.
And maybe McNulty. The pressure is off him a little now that Sepp Kuss won the Vuelta, but we’re approaching the time in McNulty’s career when we’ll find out what kind of a rider he really is.
A four-time world championship medalist in the time trial at age group level, McNulty showed flashes of championship potential in 2021. He led the Tour of the Basque Country ahead of Pogačar, his teammate, before cracking on the final stage and finishing 17th. He marked Carapaz’s winning move at the Olympics, but faded, was caught by the chasing pack, and finished out of the medals.
He got something like that breakthrough win at the Giro in 2023, when he won a stage. But actual leadership opportunities at UAE are tough to come by. Pogačar is a unicorn, and will lead the team whenever he races. And in an attempt to beef up the supporting cast since McNulty arrived in 2020, UAE has brought in Adam Yates, João Almeida, Pavel Sivakov, Jay Vine, and Spanish youngster Juan Ayuso; all of them are arguably above McNulty in the pecking order for GC leadership at the moment.
Clearly that doesn’t bother McNulty too much, as in August he signed a contract extension that will keep him in UAE’s colors through 2027. But the focus is seemingly shifting from whether McNulty can win it all, to wondering what he can accomplish within his current constraints.