The 2025 season in 25 pictures

With about 50 km to go, Tadej Pogačar hit the deck hard, then climbed back on with the damage written all over him. He clawed his way back to co leader Tom Pidcock, then later rode clear to kickstart his classics winning streak, but Strade Bianche could have given the 2025 season a very different shape if he had been even slightly less lucky.

Milan-Sanremo has often been dismissed as the dullest of the Monuments, but this year was different. UAE Team Emirates-XRG went all in on the Cipressa, turning the race into a full gas test instead of a waiting game, and it worked. Only Mathieu van der Poel could match every acceleration, with Filippo Ganna hanging on by a thread before clawing his way back.

On the Poggio, the same script played out again. Pogačar attacked, Van der Poel followed and even launched his own move just before the summit, while Ganna rode it at his own pace and still returned in the descent and on the run in to Sanremo. Van der Poel proved the strongest in a heart stopping sprint, but the 2025 edition did something more important: it made sure that the 21st of March 2026 is already circled with an exclamation mark in the calendars of cycling fans everywhere.

For most of the year, Tadej Pogačar was without peer, but in the Spring, Mathieu van der Poel again proved to be a rival worthy of the name. After their shoot-out at Milan-San Remo, the pair resumed hostilities at the Tour of Flanders, where Pogačar claimed the spoils after another spirited contest.

The stage was set for another all-encompassing duel at Paris-Roubaix. Although Pogačar was making his debut in the Hell of the North, he proved to be a quick learner. Come the final hour of racing, the world champion had done enough to see off everybody but Van der Poel.

The Pont-Thibault sector with 38km to go would prove fateful, however. Pogačar overshot the corner and fell off, while Van der Poel adjusted his line accordingly and powered on by. Van der Poel would claim a third straight Paris-Roubaix in the famous old velodrome, but Pogačar will be back for another title fight on the cobbles in 2026.

Call it Asterix and Obelix versus the Romans, or Neilson Powless versus Team Visma | Lease a Bike, the outcome was the same at Dwars door Vlaanderen. The underdog won, and he won big. Team Visma | Lease a Bike tore the peloton apart with a large part of its squad, mopping up breakaway riders until only Powless was able to hang on.

Visma then chose to play it safe and bring the race to a sprint with Wout van Aert, only for the American to turn the script on its head. Powless caught Van Aert off guard and claimed one of the most spectacular victories of the 2025 season.

Injury would beset Lotte Kopecky later in the season, but she still made a telling impact in the rainbow jersey. Despite concerns about her form, she lined up among the favourites for the Tour of Flanders, and she duly lived up to her billing by becoming the first woman to win the Ronde three times.

Kopecky helped to forge the winning move on the Oude Kwaremont and she proceeded to coolly dispatch her three breakaway companions in the sprint in Oudenaarde, beating Pauline Ferrand-Prévot to the line. 

“Take away my win in the Tour of Flanders and we’re talking about a frankly dramatic year in my eyes,” Kopecky said at season’s end. Perhaps, but Kopecky’s season-saving win would have defined most riders’ careers.

After dedicating years to her successful quest to win mountain bike gold at the Paris 2024 Olympics, Ferrand-Prévot returned to the road with Visma | Lease a Bike in 2025 with eyes on the Tour de France Femmes.

At the beginning of the year, the jury was out as to whether she could beat Demi Vollering et al to the maillot jaune, but her assured Classics displays were a sure sign of things to come. After going close at the Ronde, Ferrand-Prévot was imperious at Paris-Roubaix, where her off-road skills came to the fore. And the best was yet to come.

When Tadej Pogačar soared clear alone at with 47km to go, it looked like business as usual at Amstel Gold Race, but there were twists and turns still to come in Limburg. In only his second race of the season, Remco Evenepoel produced one of the displays of the year to hunt down Pogačar’s seemingly unbridgeable gap, bringing Mattias Skjelmose along for the ride.

They eventually caught Pogačar with 8km to go, and the race would come down to a three-way sprint. Evenepoel went early – too early – but so did Pogačar. Skjelmose, by contrast, left his effort late, and the Dane slung his bike at just the right time to edge out the favourite and claim the upset win of the year.

Isaac del Toro was highly rated even before he turned professional in 2024, but this year’s Giro d’Italia marked a coming-of-age moment for the Mexican. He set out from Albania as Juan Ayuso’s most deluxe gregario, but the race – and his career – changed on the gravel on stage 9, where he moved into the pink jersey in Siena.

He would hold it for two weeks, and when he recovered from his first off-day with victory in Bormio on stage 17, it looked as though he would go all the way. It wasn’t to be, but that wasn’t end of Del Toro’s remarkable 2025 campaign. He recovered quickly and added another 14 wins before season’s end. His Tour de France debut in 2026 could be one of the stories of the year.

It’s a stage that will be parsed and analysed for years to come. The Colle delle Finestre proved the decisive moment of the Giro, with pink jersey Isaac del Toro and Richard Carapaz marking one another so heavily that they somehow allowed Simon Yates to ride away with the whole race. 

By the top of the dirt road climb, Yates was already looking like a Giro winner. Just to make sure, teammate Wout van Aert dropped back from the break to drag him towards the finish line in Sestriere. 

Seven years on from suffering his own heartbreak on the Finestre at the 2018 Giro, Yates completed the ultimate redemption story. Del Toro and Carapaz were left to nurse regrets, but Yates saw his opportunity and seized it. A deserving winner.

Remco Evenepoel won the Caen time trial in the opening week of the Tour, but once the road began to climb in earnest the Pyrenees, it quickly became clear that something was awry. On stage 12, Evenepoel fought back from being dropped on the Col du Soulour to limit the damage at Hautacam, though he still lost 3:35 to a rampant Pogačar. 

A day later, the extent of Evenepoel’s travails were laid bare when he was caught and passed by Jonas Vingegaard on the mountain time trial to Peyragudes. Somehow, he still lay third overall at this point, but once he began to flag on the Col du Tourmalet on stage 14, it was clear that his Tour was over. 

A delayed start to the season and a difficult build-up had simply proved too much of an obstacle to overcome.

Jonas Abrahamsen’s Tour participation looked in severe doubt when he broke his collarbone in a crash at the Baloise Belgium Tour just 17 days before the start. But even though it meant leaving Alexander Kristoff on the sidelines in his final season, Uno-X Mobility kept faith with Abrahamsen and included him the eight-man line-up.

The Norwegian would more than justify his inclusion in July, where he was a typically aggressive presence. The crowning moment came in Toulouse, where he attacked from a break that included Van der Poel and then out-sprinted Mauro Schmid for the win.

“Maybe I’m a super hero,” Abrahamsen quipped before the Grand Départ. Who could argue with him?

After four previous duels between Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar, tied at two Tour victories each, this fifth showdown was one the entire cycling world had been waiting for. In the opening ten days of the Tour, Vingegaard and Team Visma | Lease a Bike threw everything they had at Pogačar in an attempt to unsettle him, but a poor time trial in the first week and an off day on Hautacam left Vingegaard with a significant deficit.

On the iconic Mont Ventoux, Vingegaard went all in one last time, launching a series of attacks, but Pogačar was able to neutralise every move. Just as he did throughout the rest of the Tour, he never looked forced into desperation, instead riding with control as he moved steadily toward his fourth Tour victory.

After a crash in the 2024 Vuelta, followed by a difficult winter and a spring that failed to deliver the successes he had hoped for, doubt crept in for Wout van Aert. A stage win on the gravel stage of the Giro d’Italia restored part of his confidence, but even in the Tour he struggled to find the right feeling.

That changed on the final day in Paris, on the new Montmartre circuit. On the last lap, Van Aert went all in on the climb, rode clear of Pogačar, the only rider to do so in 2025, and crowned himself the king of Montmartre.

Pauline Ferrand-Prévot was already a rainbow jersey in five disciplines, an Olympic champion and a Paris-Roubaix winner. And now, after her victorious Tour de France Femmes debut, the Frenchwoman might well have completed cycling.

Always well placed throughout the race, Ferrand-Prévot built her Tour around the most demanding stage, the penultimate leg that finished atop the Col de la Madeleine. Her crushing win there put her in the yellow jersey and the tough final stage was already a formality. Just to make sure, Ferrand-Prévot rubberstamped her triumph with another stage win.

Iliac artery surgery delayed the start of Sarah Gigante’s season until May 31 and the Tour of Norway, but the Australian climber was quickly up to speed. By the Giro d’Italia in early July, she was in imperious form, and she claimed stage wins at Pianezze and Monte Nerone en route to third overall.

Gigante duly carried that form into the Tour de France Femmes, where she was the only rider to put up firm resistance to Ferrand-Prévot’s onslaught on the Col de la Madeleine. That left her in second place overall, though a troubled descent of the Col de Joux-Plane on the final day would see her slip to sixth.

Shortly afterwards, Gigante broke her femur in training, but the Melbourne native is already on the comeback trail.

Perhaps the least expressive image in this list, yet one that perfectly captures the worrying state of cycling. During the Tour de Romandie Féminin, the UCI turned a small GPS safety tracker into a flashpoint for a much bigger conflict.

What was framed as a safety trial quickly exposed deeper tensions about control, consent and data ownership within the sport. Five major teams walked away, not because they oppose safer racing, but because they refused the precedent of a regulator unilaterally dictating equipment. 

In that sense, the photo says very little about what happened on the road, and everything about cycling’s increasingly fragile ability to move forward collectively.

Juan Ayuso’s exit from UAE Team Emirates felt inevitable long before it became official. Signed as a junior and tied down to a long contract, he arrived believing his moment would come, but Pogacar’s gravitational pull always made that pathway narrow. 

At the Vuelta a España 2025 the tension finally surfaced in public, first in words, then in gestures. When Ayuso won in Cerler and celebrated with his fingers in his ears, it read like a message as much as a moment: to the critics, to the noise, and perhaps to the team itself. UAE announced his departure mid-race, Ayuso called the setup a dictatorship, and the facade fell away. 

Not long after, it all culminated in the blockbuster move that sent the Spaniard to Lidl-Trek.

The 2025 Vuelta a España was shaped as much by what did not happen as by what did. Repeated pro-Palestinian protests linked to the presence of Israel-Premier Tech forced stages to be neutralised, rerouted or abandoned altogether, turning the race into a daily exercise in uncertainty. Riders, teams and organisers were constantly pushed to adapt, and the tension around safety and continuity never fully lifted. It made for a Vuelta unlike any other, one that will be remembered not just for the racing, but for how vulnerable the sport suddenly felt.

Jonas Vingegaard expected to lift the Vuelta trophy in Madrid, but the final stage was abandoned and the official podium never came. Instead, the peloton built its own: a row of coolers with hand written numbers taped to the front, lit up by the glare of car headlights in a hotel parking area. It was stripped of spectacle but full of meaning, a rare moment of improvisation that captured the strange, fragile mood of a race shaped by protests and uncertainty.

Ninety five victories in a single season is a number that barely feels real, yet UAE Team Emirates-XRG made it their new standard in 2025. Twenty different riders contributed to a campaign that rewrote the modern record books, surpassing a the HTC-mark (85 wins) that had stood since 2009 and redefining what dominance looks like in men’s cycling.

Brandon McNulty pushed them past the line in the Tour of Luxembourg, sealing UAE’s 86th win, the moment the old record finally fell.

Tadej Pogačar admitted that being taken over by Remco Evenepoel in the UCI Road World Championships time trial was “a hard one to swallow”, and while he struck back a few days later in the road race, Evenepoel’s ride in Rwanda was on a different level. He put 1:14 into second placed Jay Vine and a staggering 2:36 into bronze medallist and fellow Belgian Ilan Van Wilder.

It was one of the most dominant World Championship time trials in recent memory, the kind of performance that stretches the margins of belief. More than a rainbow jersey, it further cemented Evenepoel’s status as the defining time trial specialist of his generation, and one of the greatest the discipline has ever seen.

29th, 17th, 6th, 2nd, 2nd, 3rd, DNF, DNS, 1st. Marlen Reusser has long been regarded as one of the world’s best time trialists, but at the Worlds it so often seemed to fall just short. Until Kigali, where she finally put it all together, taking a commanding gold ahead of Anna van der Breggen and Demi Vollering.

The women’s world championship race was, without doubt, one of the most spectacular races of 2025. The defining moment was the upset. Magdeleine Vallieres, a rider of clear quality, was barely a footnote in the bookmakers’ odds.

The race dynamics opened the door: the favourites watched each other, hesitated just long enough, and allowed the breakaway to decide it among themselves. Vallieres seized that opening perfectly, delivering a win that was as daring as it was decisive.

And maybe that is exactly why sport is so compelling. You can analyse, predict and calculate all you want, but one race can still flip the script.

Demi Vollering and the Dutch team have not exactly been a happy match so far. From confusing tactics and strange personal choices to the mood and criticism that followed, it often felt heavier than it needed to be. With Laurens ten Dam stepping in as national coach, a new wind seems to be blowing, with far more clarity and direction.

And it paid off. Vollering claimed the European title in commanding style, finishing off a perfectly executed tactical plan. What’s next?

The list starts with Pogacar and it ends with Pogacar. That feels only right, given how he dictated the season from start to finish, setting the tone and colouring almost every major moment.

His final masterpiece came at Il Lombardia, where he won for a fifth consecutive time, a feat no rider has ever achieved in a Monument. And as if that was not enough, he capped the year by becoming the first rider to stand on the podium of all five Monuments in a single season. 

And it almost certainly will not be the last record he adds to his name...