The 41 Most Interesting Riders in Cycling, Part 3
Riders 11 through 20: A legend in search of one last win, The Durango Kid, and a Slovenian with a death wish.
Part 3 of the Top 41 Most Interesting Riders series will be the last free Tuesday post before this newsletter goes paid subscriber-only on January 2. (Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here. I know it’s a lot to read, but you’ll thank me in two days when you’re sick of your family.)
Thanks to everyone who has subscribed, and particularly to those of you who have pledged paid subscriptions already. If you like what you’ve read over the past month and you haven’t made a pledge already, now is the time.
No. 20: Cian Uijtdebroeks, 20, Team Visma-Lease a Bike, Belgium, Climber
A couple weeks ago, I was promoting my post on Wout van Aert on Twitter, and a friend made a comment about what an interesting name that was. My response: Wait until you see Cian Uijtdebroeks. When I was in college, I did a summer study abroad program in Brussels; on our second night there, the director took us out to dinner with a couple kids who were still in town after the spring semester. They offered the following advice: Dutch is like funny English. Also, the subway stop you’re going to use the most is called “Kunst-Wet” and eventually you’ll stop laughing out loud every time you go there.
For as much as the sport has expanded over the past few years—from five or six countries as recently as the mid-80s to a six-continent enterprise now—the is still a disproportionate percentage of races, riders, and teams from the Netherlands and the Dutch-speaking parts of Belgium. Which means I have to learn how to spell names like Uijtdebroeks without looking them up first.
So why this particular Belgian? In the past five years, the aging curve for cycling has shifted downward radically. It used to be customary for developing riders to operate for a few years at the semipro level or on U23 teams. The youth classifications (25-and-under) at stage races were genuinely exclusive. Then in 2019, 22-year-old Egan Bernal became the youngest rider in 110 years to win the Tour de France. The next year, Tadej Pogačar, who’d just podiumed the Vuelta before he turned 21, broke Bernal’s record. All bets were off.
In 2022, the 19-year-old Uijtdebroeks, already a first-year senior pro, won the GC and two stages at the Tour de l’Avenir, the U23 version of the Tour de France. Of the 10 riders who won the Tour de l’Avenir in the 2010s, eight won multiple grand tour stages. Three have won the GC at multiple grand tours. Uijtdebroeks was a star in the making, and a central part of Bora’s plans for the next half-decade.
He might not have been this high on the list of most interesting riders, but for most of the past month it wasn’t clear what team Uijtdebroeks would be on in 2024.
In December, Uijtdebroeks was introduced as a rider on Jumbo-Visma, soon to be Team Visma-Lease a Bike. This despite having a contract in place with Bora; sure enough, hours later Bora issued a response, the gist of which was: “Stop now! Don’t email my wife.”
Almost always, cyclists change teams when their contracts expire; there isn’t really a trade or transfer system to speak of. Sometimes, a rider and team will mutually agree to split up, and in rare instances one team will buy out the contract of a rider on a different team. But the Uijtdebroeks case seemed more hostile, akin to the Oscar Piastri or Álex Plaou sagas that scandalized the motorsports world in 2022.
Two factors complicated Uijtdebroeks’ departure. First, the two teams were already involved in the sport’s biggest contract buyout; Bora was spending €3 million to buy out Primož Roglič when Uijtdebroeks tried to force a move in the opposite direction. Second, rumors appeared (though apparently not from Uijtdebroeks) that the young Belgian star wanted to move not just for competitive reasons, but because he was being bullied.
As of last week, there’s been a settlement and Uijtdebroeks will officially race for Team Visma-LAB in 2024. But now, a rider who already faced sky-high expectations will be under even greater scrutiny. So remember the name.
No. 19: Filippo Ganna, 27, Team Ineos Grenadiers, Italy, Time Trial Specialist
If you put a ramp at one end of the road, and a man with a stopwatch at the other, nobody on two wheels is going to get from Point A to Point B faster than Ganna, the two-time world time trial champion. In 2023, Ganna contested seven time trials; he won four, finished second twice, and finished third once. That wasn’t even Ganna’s best season. In 2020, he won all three time trials in the Giro, plus a mass start stage—the only non-ITT out of Ganna’s seven career grand tour stage wins—in which he got into the breakaway and stormed off solo for the final 16 kilometers.
See, despite being one of the biggest riders in the peloton—6-foot-4, 182 pounds—Ganna can climb a little, and sprint a little. In 2023, he finished second in Milan-San Remo, following the final accelerations up the Poggio and just straight-up riding van Aert and Pogačar off his wheel on the Via Roma.
Last season, Ineos—traditionally a purely grand tour-focused team that uses Ganna as a pacesetter—started to let him cook in the classics. He also finished sixth in Paris-Roubaix and fourth at Gran Piemonte. He’s just so fast on his own that on those rare occasions he gets out in front of a chasing group, it takes real cooperation to reel him back in. That makes him the ideal person to break up the van Aert-Mathieu van der Poel rivalry at races like Paris-Roubaix: By the time the two big dogs get together and decide to chase, Ganna would be unreachable. Ineos just has to let him off the chain.
No. 18: Matej Mohorič, 29, Bahrain-Victorious, Slovenia, Classics Specialist
Mohorič’s Milan-San Remo win in 2022 is one of the most outrageous things I’ve ever seen in sports. The whole race is about 300 kilometers long; the year Mohorič won, his time was six hours, 27 minutes. None of that matters except for one tiny hill about five kilometers from the finish: the Poggio. The whole group usually hits it together, but the hill is neither long nor steep enough to shed weaker climbers. So the favorites congregate up the front and go sprint all the way up. If that doesn’t break up the group, whoever gets over the top quickly will try to descend the hill the fastest, braking as late as possible, skirting close to the ancient stone walls that line the road.
And sometimes hitting them. I’ve mentioned the Michael Matthews cheese grater incident before. The downside of miscalculating a corner at more than 60 kilometers an hour is extreme.
As much as the Tour de France is won and lost by how quickly a rider can get up a mountain, Mohorič gets down a mountain faster than anyone else in the pro peloton. Behold, his monument-winning descent of the Poggio in 2022.
In one corner, he put about four bike lengths into Pogačar, carried a ton of speed out of the apex, then bunny-hopped a curb so he wouldn’t have to hit the brakes. Mohorič takes the next corner so hot he almost hits the TV cameraman’s motorcycle, because, in case you missed the implication, he is going down the hill faster than a motorcycle.
This man leads the UCI rankings in don’t-give-a-fuck. When he got to the finish line, Mohorič made a gesture that at first glance looked like was pointing to his crotch. (Which would not necessarily have been out of character.) In fact, he was pointing out a modification he’d made to his bike.
A few years ago, the UCI implemented new rules make sure riders kept their hands on their handlebars and their asses in their seats on fast descents. Fast descenders like Mohorič could no longer drop down and sit on their bike frame in order to reduce their aerodynamic profile. So Mohorič had his seat mounted on a dropper post—an adjustable-height seat post usually used in mountain biking—that allowed him to get into ride with his seat at the normal level for most of the race, then tuck down into a lower-profile position for the final descent of the Poggio. And it could not have worked better.
Cycling gets a bad rap sometimes because it’s very slow-paced. And that’s all well and good, but sometimes you see a display of skill and daring and intuition that makes Formula 1 drivers look like golfers. All because some maniac from Slovenia with a modded-up bike stopped listening before “or die trying.”
No. 17: Mark Cavendish, 38, Astana Qazaqstan, Great Britain, Sprinter
I wrote a big story about this when it happened so I won’t repeat all the details now, but here’s the basics: For about eight years, Mark Cavendish was the best sprinter in the world by such a huge margin it legitimately made the sport a little boring. Then he got old, had a bad crash, came down with a mysterious illness, and looked beyond washed. As a last resort, he signed up to race basically for free with his old team, backed into leadership at the Tour de France, and won four stages and the green jersey.
In the process, Cavendish tied Eddy Merckx’s record of 34 individual Tour de France stage wins. He had a chance to break the record on the Champs-Elysees in the final stage, but he didn’t get in good position for the sprint and finished third.
Two years later, stage win no. 35 is all that matters for Cavendish, and would probably be the most significant thing Astana could accomplish.
One note on Cavendish: He has one of the coolest nicknames in sports. Cavendish is by far the biggest sports star from the Isle of Man, so he picked up the sobriquet “The Manx Missile.”
Cycling has some great nicknames, in part because Europeans can be pretty shameless about reducing someone to their nationality. That can be fraught when it comes to politics or war, but “The [Noun] of [Place]” is a killer format for nicknames. Richard Carapaz is “El Jaguar de Tulcan.” The great Italian champion Vincenzo Nibali was “The Shark of Messina,” which sounds even better in Italian: Il Squalo di Messina. A person is more than where they’re from, but a great nickname doesn’t have to be.
No. 16: Nairo Quintana, 33, Movistar, Colombia, Climber
Speaking of great nicknames: El Cóndor de los Andes. Quintana was once one of the best riders in the world; he won the Giro and the Vuelta, and podiumed the Tour three times. He came closer than anyone else did to beating Chris Froome and Team Sky at their peak.
Quintana then suffered an acrimonious split from Movistar in 2019, followed by three years of occasional peaks with Arkéa-Samsic, a French second-division team that was able to parley Quintana’s fame into invites to big races. Quintana was climbing as well as anyone in the world in early 2020, then the world shut down. And in 2022, after finishing sixth at the Tour, Quintana tested positive for Tramadol, a substance that was banned by the UCI, but won’t hit the WADA banned list until the new year. Arkéa fired Quintana, who will return to racing with his old team in January.
It’ll be fascinating to see how the cycling world reconciles Quintana’s popularity and the sport’s (understandable) touchiness about PEDs. And returning to Movistar—the New York Mets of cycling—with his tail between his legs is a fascinating career move for Quintana. But a similar decision saved Cavendish’s career. That long-coveted Tour de France title is no longer in the cards, and for the first time in more than a decade, Quintana is almost a complete unknown.
No. 15: Chloe Dygert, 26, Canyon-SRAM, United States, Time Trial Specialist
If you think nerds are ruining sports, Dygert should be your favorite rider. In 2019, she showed up to the world time trial championship without a power meter on her bike, pedaled as hard as she could for 42 minutes through horrendous rain, and flopped over exhausted the instant she hit the finish. She won by a minute and a half. Dygert was 22 at the time, and in a discipline in which fellow American Kristin Armstrong was winning Olympic gold into her 40s, it seemed like the time trial was going to be quite anticlimactic for the foreseeable future.
A year later, Dygert was on the verge of defending her world title at Imola, when she took a corner too fast on wet roads, when she hit an unpadded highway guardrail, flipped end-over-end, and tumbled down a hill, almost severing her leg in the process. (My reaction at the time: We need to invade Italy.)
Dygert’s recovery wiped out the better part of two seasons. Even when she reclaimed her world titles on road and track in 2023, it wasn’t quite the same. Dygert’s second world time trial title came by six seconds over a substantially weaker field.
But it proved that she’s recovering; and Dygert, who’ll be 27 on New Year’s Day, is still young enough that she can find her second wind at a time when many riders are still just starting out. The question, as with Ganna, is how to deploy unparalleled time trial ability when time trials make up a fraction of the racing calendar?
Last year, for Canyon-SRAM, that meant putting Dygert in bunch sprints, where she was frequently competitive but rarely victorious. Over flat ground, Dygert was good enough to come third behind Lorena Wiebes and Marianne Vos most of the time. Another year removed from the leg injury, that might not be the case in 2024, or Dygert could be more competitive on punchy terrain. Or, much like Ganna at Ineos, she could be the key to Kasia Niewiadoma’s challenge against the unbeatable SD Worx machine.
No. 14: Jonas Vingegaard, 27, Team Visma-Lease a Bike, Denmark, GC Specialist
The second-most damaging effect of Lance Armstrong’s cycling career was that it convinced generations of American sports fans that cycling is all about the pursuit of one title: the general classification of the Tour de France. Certainly that’s the most prestigious event in the sport, and prone to periods of domination because the best teams and riders make it their primary target. But it’s far from the only determining factor in cycling stardom.
The best evidence of this is Vingegaard, who’s won the yellow jersey two years running. In so doing, he supplanted one of the biggest stars in the sport, Roglič, as team leader; the other biggest star, Pogačar, he absolutely wrecked on the road. And the impact of the latter shouldn’t be understated; Pogačar had been nearly unbeatable until Vingegaard took it to him in the brutal summer heat in 2022.
But it feels like Pogačar is still the more popular rider, and the better all-around rider. Vingegaard’s attacks on teammate Sepp Kuss at last year’s Vuelta looked like the beginnings of a heel turn, or at least an inability to read the room. And ironically, Vingegaard may have benefited from waiting a year or two to take Pogačar down. The latter had only won the Tour twice in a row, not enough for everyone to get sick of him they way the did Froome and Armstrong. And while Pogačar is seeking out and conquering new challenges at every turn—the classics, then cobblestones, now the Giro-Tour double—Vingegaard remains dedicated to a racing schedule Armstrong or Froome would’ve recognized: the Tour, above all else.
No. 13: Magnus Sheffield, 21, Ineos Grenadiers, United States, Time Trial Specialist
We’re entering a golden generation for American male riders; after a fallow decade, the current under-30 crop is as strong as any the country has produced since the peak of U.S. Postal. And it’s not just star power—Kuss just won the Vuelta—but depth. You can look at big races like the Tour or Strade Bianche or the monuments and see multiple American contenders.
Of the young American riders, this is my guy. And not just because he’s got the coolest name. I keep going back to worlds in 2019 because it looked like a watershed moment for American cycling. (This is not a reference to the huge amounts of standing water on parts of the course.) In addition to Dygert’s title, two Americans medaled in the U23 time trial, and the U.S. swept the men’s and women’s world junior road race titles. Sheffield finished third in the junior road race, which looks even more impressive than it is; he and teammate Quinn Simmons got into a leading group, which Sheffield paced away from the peloton until Simmons launched his decisive attack. After having his face in the wind all afternoon, Sheffield still found the strength to win the sprint for the bronze medal.
In 2022 and 2023, Ineos started using Sheffield as a co-leader and breakaway rider on flat ground. Sheffield won Brabantse Pijl from the breakaway the week before he turned 20. A crash at the world time trial championship prevented him from contending for a medal. And in 2023, Sheffield finished in the top five in four different one-week stage races, all over relatively flat ground.
The absolute floor for Sheffield is as an indispensable domestique on a big team. Squint a little, and you can see a rider capable of winning the Tour of Flanders, perhaps as well as some one-week stage races.
No. 12: Demi Vollering, 27, SD-Worx, Netherlands, Puncheur/GC Specialist
Make no mistake, Vollering is the best rider in the women’s peloton, particularly after the retirements of Annemiek van Vleuten and Anna van der Breggen. But she’s most interesting as an antagonist, the implacable foe for some underdog to take down.
Here’s a fun bit of trivia about Vollering: She is, or at least was, a multi-sport athlete. Plenty of cyclists come in late from another sport—skiing, cross-country, soccer—but speed skating is the perfect cross-training sport, as a high-speed, high-efficiency cardio-based undertaking. (Two of the six athletes to medal at both the winter and summer Olympics were cyclists and speed skaters.) Vollering was a high-level speed skater into her early 20s, basically until the year before she turned pro in cycling. As huge as speed skating is in the Netherlands, it seems like Vollering made the right choice by choosing cycling.
No. 11: Sepp Kuss, 29, Team Visma-Lease a Bike, United States, Climber
Probably not going to win a grand tour this year; Kuss seemed as surprised as anyone that it even happened once. Surely he could’ve moved to another team that would’ve given him more opportunities for stage race leadership, but Kuss just signed an extension that’ll keep him at Visma-LAB through 2027. Vingegaard will be there the whole time, so if Kuss isn’t happy being Vingegaard’s sidekick, signing an extension would’ve been an odd way to show it.
Still, Roglič’s departure could open up some new stage race leadership opportunities for Kuss in the next year or two. Over the past five years, Kuss has mostly helped his team leaders in the mountains and picked off stages where he could; hopefully his role will shift a little toward the latter now that Kuss is a grand tour winner.
But if not, whatever. Kuss might be the only American rider of his quality, ever, who’d accept a return to normalcy. Cycling is a big sport for national stereotypes, and the typical American GC rider is embodied by Armstrong and Greg LeMond: a monster time trialist who’s brash and plainspoken but also a little touchy. Kuss is the exact opposite: One of the three or four best pure climbers in the world, indifferent against the clock, and down for whatever. Nothing bothers him; he’s just down to hang, whatever happens.
We should learn from Sepp’s example: Ride fast, chug hard.