A relatively monotone season - Bahrain Victorious 2025 season verdict

The 2024 season saw Bahrain Victorious win 13 races, along with a top-ten finish in the Tour de France general classification with Santiago Buitrago and fifth place in the Giro d’Italia with Antonio Tiberi. However, one thing was clearly missing: a Grand Tour stage win.

The team brought in top French talent Lenny Martinez for the 2025 season in a bid to compete at the highest level of elite cycling. They appeared ready to go all-in at the Tour with Martinez, while also looking to build on Tiberi’s top-five finish at the Giro the previous year, and to fight for stage victories across all three Grand Tours.

Wins: 8
UCI Ranking: 10th
The Verdict: 5/10

Victories for Bahrain in 2025 were few and far between. The team started the season well, with two stage wins and the overall title at the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana through Santiago Buitrago, who performed brilliantly against some of the best climbers in the professional peloton. The team’s next successes came from their new signing Lenny Martinez, who won three stages in major WorldTour races including Paris-Nice, the Tour de Romandie and the Critérium du Dauphiné.

Later in the season, a bit more luck could have produced a few additional wins, as Bahrain finished near the top in several stage races with multiple second places and other high top-ten results. However, the team was left disappointed by its Tour de France performance, where Martinez ended up fighting desperately for the King of the Mountains jersey after slipping out of GC contention. The Giro d’Italia also proved difficult, with Tiberi finishing outside the top ten in his home race.

As always, cycling is a results-driven sport. With only eight wins despite a talented and well-rounded squad, Bahrain Victorious’ 2025 campaign can be rated as a mediocre 5/10.

It was nip and tuck between Fred Wright and Lenny Martinez for the most valuable rider as Fred Wright excelled in the brutal spring classics with some top placings, but as mentioned previously, observers of the sport will always remember the wins at the end of the day. With Lenny Martinez picking up four of the teams eight wins, with three of them WorldTour victories, it only outlines his future winning potential even further, but it will remain tough as the competition within men's cycling is getting stronger by the year.

With his cracking resuls, Lenny Martinez also without a doubt is Bahrain's best transfer of the season, and it will be interesting to see how thet nurture his development in the forthcoming years ahead, will it be all in for the Tour again?

The best race of the season for Bahrain Victorious was the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana as Santiago Buitrago won the general classification and two stages of the five-day stage race in  the Valenciana region, Spain. Buitrago beat top riders like João Almeida and also his teammate Pello Bilbao, which made the race a brilliant success for the Bahrain team as they truly dominated the 2. Pro race. 

Sadly for the team, they were simply unable to recreate this outcome at any races during the rest of the 2025 season, as it dwindled down for the team to become somewhat lacklustre.

Pello Bilbao has raced 83 times for Bahrain Victorious in the 2025 season.

• Alpecin-Deceuninck
• Arkea B&B Hotels
• Cofidis
• Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale
• EF Education-EasyPost
• Groupama-FDJ
• Ineos Grenadiers
• Intermarché-Wanty
• Lidl-Trek
• Movistar
• Picnic-PostNL
• Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe
• Soudal Quick-Step
• XDS-Astana