A record $800,000 will be offered across seven individual races and the overall prize payout for the Life Time Grand Prix in 2027, organisers of the off-road series confirmed Thursday. This reflects a 36% increase from this past season, and is more than triple the original prize purse from the inaugural 2022 season.

The overall series purse jumps from $350,000 in 2026 to $400,000, while the other $400,000 will be spread across each stop on the calendar, spread across April to October, an increase from $240,000 last season. All prizes are paid for the top 10 in races and the series, split eventually between the men's and women's pro fields.

"It just continues to elevate the standard. And we think we've seen great success. We want to elevate the stature and the attraction to the Life Time Grand Prix and the individual events. We've been able to do that with continuing to increase the prize purse for both the individual events and the Grand Prix as a whole," Kimo Seymour, president of Events and Media at Life Time, told Cyclingnews.

Life Time launched the invitation-only series in 2022 as the popularity of gravel and endurance mountain bike races surged. Specialized Off-road duo Keegan Swenson and Sofia Gomez Villafañe have won the overall pro titles four times each across the first five years. Swenson won $25,000 for first place in the inaugural year, while Villafañe earned the same amount with her first title in 2023.

In October, they earned $50,000 each for first place. However, next year whoever lands on the top steps will earn $40,000 each. The pool of money now distributes payouts more evenly across the rest of the top 10, with riders going seventh through 10th now receiving $10,000 or more each. Life Time says restructuring the purse was about "incentivizing season-long competition".

"If we want professional off-road cycling to grow, we have to get serious about how athletes make a living. As the Series becomes more successful, the athletes should share in that success. By putting more money into every race and spreading those dollars deeper into the field, we're creating more opportunities for more riders, not just the handful at the very top," Michelle Duff, co-director of the Life Time Grand Prix, stated in a press release.

Emphasis on events

Maybe more significant are the individual race payouts, now equal to the series itself in total money and moving from just the top five to the top 10. A total of $80,000 will be on offer at Unbound Gravel 200, Leadville Trail 100 MTB and Life Time Big Sugar Classic.

Last year, the purses at Unbound Gravel and Leadville Trail 100 MTB were $60,000 each, and Big Sugar was $30,000. In fact, Unbound and Leadville did not offer prize money for pro fields until two years ago.

The other four events - Sea Otter Classic, Chequamegon MTB Festival, The Rad Dirt Fest and Little Sugar MTB - will pay out $40,000 each. That is a 33% increase for three of the races, while The Rad Dirt Fest has an enormous boost from a previous payout of $2,5000, since it was last part of the series in 2024. And, those US dollars are for any athlete who finishes in the top 10, not just the Grand Prix riders.

"I have to give a lot of the credit to the athletes. You know, we spend so much time with athletes, hearing feedback and getting advice and guidance and suggestions. One of the suggestions was about offerings at individual events, not so much on the Grand Prix. So that's why we've chosen to split it equitably between the Grand Prix and the individual events. It's significant enough that big-name athletes are starting to show up," Seymour explained to Cyclingnews.

"There needs to be better opportunities for the athletes to make money. I think with the new distribution this year will continue to draw some of those big international names as well, which only brings more eyeballs, more viewership, more fan engagement, and hopefully more, you know, more sponsor investment."

Where does the money come from for the $800,000? Life Time owns all the races in the series, so has complete control of not just logistics but broadcast rights and sponsorships. Seymour said that an emphasis on social media engagement was the biggest component of their portfolio, which includes the robust live stream shown on the YouTube channel.

"It's not a sponsor-specific prize purse. It just comes out of our overall budget for the Grand Prix. We're able to monetize the series more and more each year, as it's grown overall. So, primarily YouTube engagement, we're able to drive more sponsorship or advertising dollars against the series," Seymour said.

"Probably more than anything, it's been our YouTube views. I think we're over five million views this year on Life Time specific [channel] and Grand Prix content that we've put out."

Seymour confirmed to Cyclingnews that they planned to offer live broadcasts for five of the seven events in 2027, the elements to bring video from mountain bike events at Chequamegon and Little Sugar still being worked out.

The Life Time Grand Prix will continue as an invitation-only field of 50 riders, the rules for participation also evolving to a more performance-driven pathway. The compensation portion of the series extends beyond the podium, and for a second year, athletes who complete the series and finish 11th through 25th will receive a $2,500 finisher bonus, which is outside the primary prize purse. Introduced in 2026, this structure rewards the riders who race all season.

The opening round of the 2027 Life Time Grand Prix will be Thursday, April 15 in Monterey, California, for Life Time Sea Otter Classic Gravel.

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Prize Purse Components for 2027

Life Time Grand Prix series 2027

• First: $40,000
• Second: $30,000
• Third: $24,000
• Fourth: $21,000
• Fifth: $19,000
• Sixth: $17,000
• Seventh: $15,000
• Eighth: $13,000
• Ninth: $11,000
• Tenth: $10,000

Unbound Gravel 200, Leadville Trail 100 MTB, Big Sugar Classic payouts 2027

• First: $10,000
• Second: $7,000
• Third: $6,000
• Fourth: $5,000
• Fifth: $4,000
• Sixth: $3,000
• Seventh: $2,000
• Eighth: $1,500
• Ninth: $1,000
• Tenth: $500

Sea Otter Classic, Chequamegon MTB, The Rad Dirt Fest, Little Sugar MTB payouts 2027

• First: $5,000
• Second: $3,500
• Third: $3,000
• Fourth: $2,500
• Fifth: $2,000
• Sixth: $1,500
• Seventh: $1,000
• Eighth: $750
• Ninth: $500
• Tenth: $250

Gaia Realini has announced that she's departing Lidl-Trek for a move to Picnic-PostNL next season.

The Italian had spent the past four seasons with Lidl-Trek, with both her and the German team agreeing to end her contract a year early this winter. Now, she's on the move to Dutch squad Picnic-PostNL, she announced in an Instagram post.

"After four years with Lidl-Trek, it's time to start a new chapter. Thank you for all the experiences and moments we shared," Realini wrote.

"I'm happy to announce that I will join Picnic-PostNL for next season, a team that has believed in me from the very beginning and our first conversations.

"New colours, new goals, and plenty of motivation to give my best. Ready for this new adventure!"

After joining Lidl-Trek from Italian squad Isolmant-Premac-Vittoria, Realini had impressed during her first two seasons with the team. She emerged as a top climber, taking podium finishes at the UAE Tour, La Flèche Wallonne, La Vuelta Femenina, and Giro d'Italia in 2023.

Meanwhile, a fifth place at the Tour de France Femmes was her highlight of 2024. She hasn't hit those heights in the past two seasons, however, after suffering a fractured elbow in early 2025.

Her top stage race result of the past two seasons came this September with a 10th-place finish at the Faun Tour Femmes.

Realini is the sixth rider to leave Lidl-Trek for 2027, joining cyclo-cross world champion Lucinda Brand and under-23 world time trial champion Felicity Wilson-Haffenden among notable names on the outgoing list as former Tour de France Femmes champion Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney heads their incoming transfers.

She is, to date, the only confirmed addition for Picnic-PostNL this off-season, while Pfeiffer Georgi, Megan Arens, Rachele Barbieri, and Elise Uijen are on the way out.

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After recently announcing that it will support Bahrain Victorious for 2027 and beyond, Factor Bikes is extending its presence in the pro peloton by becoming a title sponsor for Team Amani.

The team will be known as Team Amani Factor Racing from 2027 until the end of 2029, with Factor’s founder, Rob Gitelis, convinced the team can reach the highest levels of the women’s sport.

Factor and Amani have worked together for four years, but the new deal will not only include the bike brand in the team’s name, but also bring the team into Factor's performance programme, as they do with their other pro teams. As such, they will ride the company’s Ostro VAM and Ostro Gravel frames rolling on Black Inc wheels.

The partnership will include not only the Women’s Continental road team, but also their off-road programme and the Black Mamba Development squad.

Amani is a proudly African team, competing with a roster comprised entirely of women from the continent. While they’ve been around as a club-level team for a few years, they graduated to UCI level only at the start of the 2026 season.

During that time, they took three wins, all at fourth-tier .2 level races in Africa, though they showed real promise on European roads, especially at the Volta Ciclista Catalunya, where Haftu Eyerusalem Reda finished 20th in the general classification in the mountainous three-day race.

Despite their status as one of the youngest teams in the bunch, Amani have stated their ambition to ride the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in 2028. However, with UCI Regulations as they currently are, achieving that is likely to require the team to shift up a level from Women’s Continental to ProTeam to guarantee a start at the biggest race on the calendar.

"Of everything we’re doing in racing, Amani is the project I feel most personally invested in," Gitelis said. "We’re back in the men’s WorldTour and expanding our racing programme, which is exciting, but I want to devote real time and resources to this over the next three years. I believe this team can compete at the sharp end of the women’s WorldTour with the right support, experience and time.

"Beyond racing, I believe the opportunities that it creates can change the lives of the women involved. That’s why Amani belongs within Factor Racing."

Mikel Delagrange, Amani’s founder, welcomed Factor’s extended commitment, saying: "What has impressed me most about Factor is that when they say they’re going to do something, they do it. Every commitment they’ve made to this team over the past four years has been planned carefully and delivered in full.

"That’s rare in this world, and it’s exactly what a team like ours needs. Taking on title sponsorship is the biggest step yet, and I trust it completely because I’ve seen how Factor works. We have a clear goal for 2028, and the right partner to help us get there."

The team recently recruited retired South African pro rider Ashleigh Moolman Pasio as General Manager, and with Factor on board, they have a stronger foundation on which to build.

Hosting of the 2027 UEC Road European Championships has been awarded to Denmark, with Silkeborg hosting the time trials and Herning hosting the road races.

It's the first time the nation has hosted a major road championship since the 2017 European Championships, also held in Herning, when Alexander Kristoff and Marianne Vos raced to glory in the road races while Victor Campenaerts and Ellen van Dijk won the time trials.

Previously, the Road World Championships were held in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2011, while the Road Worlds will head back to the nation in 2029.

Previous major championships held in Denmark have ended with mass sprint finishes, and the 2027 European Championships are also expected to favour sprinters after hilly editions in Slovenia and France in the last two years.

The 2027 UEC Road European Championships will run between September 28 and October 3, and while the exact dates of each event are not yet known, that creates a clash with La Vuelta Femenina, which begins on October 3.

"We are thrilled to be returning to Denmark after ten years. In 2017, this country hosted the second edition of the Road European Championships open to the Elite category, believing from the outset in a project that was then in its infancy," said UEC president Enrico Della Casa.

"Today, we are returning with an event that has grown considerably and has become a world-class occasion, capable of attracting the attention of the media and cycling enthusiasts from all over the world."

Hosting of the European Championships is now set for the next three years, with trips to Denmark, the North Brabant region of the Netherlands, and Abruzzo in Italy on the way.

"With Denmark in 2027, the Netherlands in 2028 and Italy, specifically the Abruzzo region, in 2029, the next three years promise to be highly prestigious for the UEC Road European Championships. These three countries, each with a deeply rooted cycling culture, demonstrate the appeal our event has gained and allow us to look to the future with great ambition," said Della Casa.

"I would like to thank the cities of Herning and Silkeborg, Sport Event Denmark, the Danish government and the Danish Cycling Federation and its President, Morten Anderson, for the trust, enthusiasm and commitment they have shown.

"Ten years ago, Denmark helped to write an important chapter in the history of our European Championships, and I am convinced that in 2027, together we will write another equally memorable one."

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After initially fearing the worst, Lucinda Brand was not seriously injured when she hit the barrier during the Superprestige Jaarmarktcross cyclo-cross race at Niel on Wednesday.

Early on during round three of the season-long Superprestige series, World Champion Brand briefly lost control of her bike, hitting the barrier and twisting her ankle as she put her foot down.

Despite what was apparently an innocuous incident, her discomfort was clear immediately; the 37-year-old first grimaced, then fell into tears, before abandoning the race she had hoped to win for a fifth time.

After the incident, her Baloise Verzekeringen-Het Poetsbureau Lions team manager, former World Champion Sven Nys, was fearful Brand had suffered a severe injury, telling Play Sport: "If Lucinda has tears in her eyes, that is usually not a good sign. She is quite a tough cookie, which is why I am a bit worried now."

Then, in a post on the team’s Instagram account, he added: "She can’t put force on her foot right now, so I think it’s important that we monitor that and make sure that nothing was damaged.

"Hoping we won’t lose her for the rest of the season."

However, Nys has since been reassured. "Everything is okay. No serious damage was detected; she just needs to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Taping the foot is important now, though," he told Belgian paper Het Laatste Nieuws.

The season continues apace this weekend, and Brand would have been expected to start round four of the Superprestige at Merkplas on Saturday and Sunday’s Bollekesccross, the second round of the X2O Badkamers Trofee, a series she leads, after winning the Koppenbergcross, and which she has won on four previous occasions. However, following her injury, Brand’s participation is yet to be confirmed.

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Cyclo-cross World Champion Lucinda Brand season could be in doubt, after she was forced out of the Superprestige race at Niel in tears following an opening-lap crash that left her in tears.

Brand arrived for the Jaarmarktcross hoping to take her fifth win in the event, which formed the third round of the season-long Superprestige series, but the most innocuous of crashes left her barely able to walk.

She started the race on the back foot, trying to make up time on Amandine Fouquenet (Pauwels Sauzen-Altez Industriebouw), who had blazed her way through the sand pit to build an early lead. However, as Brand set off in pursuit in the muddy conditions, she was pushed into the barrier on a small climb, apparently twisting her ankle as her foot hit the ground.

While she carried on for a few seconds, riding through the pit area, she then abandoned and was barely able to stand as she dismounted. Though she was seen riding off, her Baloise-Poetsbureau team manager Sven Nys has cast doubt on the rest of her season.

"Lucinda twisted her ankle in the first round, where she made a misstep," Nys said in a statement from the team.

"She lost her line, she can’t put force on her foot right now, so I think it’s important that we monitor that and make sure that nothing was damaged. Hoping we won’t lose her for the rest of the season."

Nys also spoke with the host broadcaster Play Sports immediately after the race, saying: "She told me that she went off the track and wanted to put her foot down, but she twisted it, she couldn't put any weight on it anymore. I told her she needs to have everything checked to make sure no ligaments were damaged," Sporza reported him as saying.

"But if Lucinda has tears in her eyes, that is usually not a good sign. She is quite a tough cookie, which is why I am a bit worried now."

Brand has been the dominant force in cyclo-cross in recent seasons, winning the rainbow jersey twice, the World Cup and X2O Badkamers Trofee four times and the Superprestige on three occasions, as well as taking a total of 89 career wins.

At the weekend, she won her second European title after Luxembourgish rider Marie Schreiber was relegated for an irregular sprint.

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The spotlight of gravel and mountain bike racing always shines on familiar performers like Keegan Swenson, Sofia Gomez Villafañe, Mads Würtz Schmidt, Kate Courtney and two-time gravel world champion Marianne Vos. They line up at an off-road race, and people pay attention.

However, deeper fields around the world now challenge these proven winners, coming from various backgrounds and fresh talent has made impressive moves to grab attention, especially at events in the UCI Gravel World Series, Gravel Earth Series and Life Time Grand Prix.

This year's UCI Gravel World Championships in Nannup, the first time in five years rainbow stripes were decided outside Europe, saw a gravel specialist win the men's race, Magnus Bak Klaris of Denmark. Of course, Vos reigns on all surfaces, but she was put to the test by Rosa Klöser, Larissa Hartog and Nele Laing, women who focus on dirt racing.

Because of the distance and cost to travel to Western Australia, as well as a conflict with Little Sugar MTB in Arkansas for many Life Time Grand Prix riders, some of the breakout rides happened long before races for rainbow stripes. The Traka continued to provide a platform for new stars, while Unbound Gravel always has storylines, during the mudfest itself and in the days following, like riders jumping into iconic US one-day races like Tulsa Tough or winning an unexpected US road title.

Who went from a supporting role to a leading role this season? Who was able to score a career-defining victory or podium?

Here is a collection of notable athletes we noticed from the 2026 calendar of off-road racing.

Magnus Bak Klaris

Magnus Bak Klaris certainly wasn't a rider off the gravel radar before 2026, with multiple Danish National Gravel Championships wins plus victories that included Santa Vall, The Rift and the UCI World Series race Wörthersee Gravel. However, at races like The Traka and Unbound, where the prestige and attention hit another level, Bak Klaris hadn't cut through to the podium step, plus his early-season results in 2026 weren't quite what they had been last season.

The 30-year-old rider, however, had certainly turned that around before 2026 was over. The signs of the building form were on display in September, when the previously missing season win tally started to build at Falling Leaves Lahti and then continued to roll on at Gravel Grit n' Grind. Still, even though he had finished in the top 10 at the UCI Gravel World Series in 2026, that was not enough to make him among the heavily marked men of the rainbow jersey race, which worked to his advantage.

"I didn't come in as one of the favourites, so I could maybe save some more energy than some of the others and hide a little bit," he told a small group of media, including Cyclingnews, following the event. That 'little bit' was enough to help propel him in the four-man sprint and claim a win that means he'll not be able to hide in the pack through 2027, not with the rainbow jersey on his back. (SG)

Nele Laing

A one-time Zwift Academy finalist, Nele Laing entered the 2026 season with some promising gravel results after stepping into a few races in the UCI Gravel World Series and coming just off the podium at two of them. Though when she ventured over to the United States, now with the Canyon-DT Swiss squad, to try her hand at Sea Otter, she was definitely the wild card in the leading group of four that charged toward the line.

Impressive enough was her presence in Monterey alongside three-time US gravel champion Lauren Stephens (Aegis x Land of Enchantment), 2025 Traka 360 and Unbound 200 winner Karolina Migoń (PAS Racing) and the now four-time Life Time Grand Prix series winner Sofia Gomez Villafañe (Specialized Off-road). However, she wasn't just holding on but was the first of the four to put on the pressure through the crucial final section, and dropped Migoń as a result. Villafañe may have ultimately come over the top with Stephens following, but third at that early-season US race was more than enough to make sure she wouldn't be able to go unnoticed.

The 27-year-old then clearly showed that this was more than a one-off with third at The Traka, wins at UCI series events Hegau and 3Rides, plus a fourth at the UCI Gravel World Championships. Then, in a result that will help ensure she is keenly watched by rivals in 2027, she finished off the season by winning Nedbank Gravel Burn. (SG)

Bradyn Lange

Victories define seasons for athletes, and one win stands out the most in 2026 for Bradyn Lange. Yes, he did win Sea Otter Classic Gravel in the stars-and-stripes jersey to take the top spot in the opening round of the Life Time Grand Prix. But it was how he won, out-sprinting four-time race winner Keegan Swenson with a crafty move on the final corner.

Lange proved his decision in 2025 to focus solely on gravel, or "try to be one of the best at one thing instead of good at multiple", was working. He won his first US national title in any discipline on the gravel roads of Minnesota. He moved to Canyon x DT Swiss ATR for the new year and won The Hills, a UCI Gravel World Series event in Italy, then finished second at The Traka 200 in Spain, and beat the best off-road rider in California.

The Oregon native still exhibited his mountain bike prowess with podiums at Leadville Trail 100 MTB and Chequamegon MTB, boosting him to his best finish in the Grand Prix across five years, finishing fifth on the elite men's leaderboard. He had the unique distinction of being the youngest rider in the Grand Prix field back in 2022 at age 21. Now at 27, he's got an early invitation to return for a sixth season, and he can no longer ride under the radar. (JT)

Kylee Hanel

"A surreal experience" is how Kylee Hanel described making the main chase group at Big Sugar Gravel to finish fourth overall. While Stella Hobbs rode away with the solo victory, the 20-year-old held her own against the most dominant riders in off-road racing, Sofia Gomez Villafañe and Hayley Preen taking the final podium spots, while Hanel held off a charging Karolina Migoń.

She sealed the women's U23 title in the Life Time Grand Prix with top series points in all the races except Leadville Trail 100 MTB, where she finished second in the category. In between Sea Otter Gravel and the overall win at Unbound Gravel 100, she went back on the road with Aegis x LOE and went fourth overall at Tour of the Gila, with a stage win and youth classification title.

The multi-talented rider from Oregon competed for the first time at national events last year, where she had top 10s at US road and gravel nationals. Then this summer, she won the USPro U23 women's time trial national championship by 36 seconds over her closest competitor. She didn't realise at the time that it qualified her for Road Worlds, but knew it was a great opportunity for experience and to ride for Team USA in Montreal, even with two more Grand Prix races to follow in October.

"I'm the only one putting pressure on myself," she admitted to Cyclingnews at the UCI Road World Championships, finishing 21st in the U23 time trial and 29th in the road race. The pressure was off when she landed on the wide-angle podium at Big Sugar. (JT)

Matthew Wilson

Matthew Wilson may have been in the Life Time Grand Prix in 2025, but he walked away from last year with 'unfinished business' after not delivering the hoped-for results. With a new team in 2026, Scott Sports USA-Shimano, and determination to show what he was really capable of, Wilson went all out in pursuit of a wild card spot this year. The rider from New Zealand gained that spot, with 12th at Sea Otter Gravel and 28th at Unbound, but this time the best was yet to come.

Some indication of his early season form was already on display when the multi-discipline rider, who had come third at the New Zealand National Championships road race at the start of the year, washed off the mud of Kansas, borrowed a mate's road wheels and went straight to the top of a criterium podium at Tulsa Tough. Then, when he shifted into his mountain bike comfort zone at Leadville, his LifeTime journey all of a sudden took on a whole new complexion.

Wilson went from fighting for a start in the series to fighting for the top spots with his Leadville Trail 100 MTB runner-up spot and then a win at Chequamegon. Fifth at the season-ending Big Sugar Gravel was enough for a third-place overall and to clinch a guaranteed spot in 2026. There is now no doubting what the 25-year-old is truly capable of. (SG)

Mārtiņš Blūms

Martins Blums gained entry into this year's Life Time Grand Prix as a wild card with top finishes at Sea Otter Gravel and Unbound Gravel 200. A 12-time mountain champion of Latvia, including the 2024 Marathon MTB national title, Blums was in the chase group behind winner Matthew Wilsom at Chequamegon MTB and finished eighth. He then surprised the field in second overall at Big Sugar Gravel, where he surged from 12th to seventh overall in the final series standings.

Big Sugar was indeed big for his 31st birthday, racing with bib number 31. He made a breakaway group after backtracking from a wrong turn, finished on the podium in second place, and, with a series top-10 finish, earned his ticket to return in 2027.

He had limited gravel racing in his legs when he started at Sea Otter Gravel in California, but had support for his solo season from Scott Sport USA. Unbound was unfamiliar territory, which he said made him nervous, "but at the same time, it will be a cool challenge," he admitted on a social post. A knee injury at a World Cup mountain bike race in Switzerland kept him away from Leadville Trail 100 MTB, so we'll have to wait another year to see if his precision on a mountain bike can give Keegan Swenson a run for his money. (JT)

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Manon Bakker took her first Superrestige series win on Wednesday, the Velosport Veluwe rider dominating the race, riding alone to take the victory at the Jaarmarktcross in Niel.

Bakker escaped on the second of the five laps of the muddy course, eking out a lead and holding it. She eventually crossed the line 14 seconds ahead of Italian champion Sara Casasola (Crelan-Corendon) in second, with Denise Betsema (De Ceuster Bouwkranen) third.

The race was notable for the abandon of World Champion Lucinda Brand, the Baloise-Poetsbureau Lions rider crashing out on the opening lap.

With Bakker well ahead early on in the race, the day became a huge battle for the podium places, with Betsema edging clear first before Casasola launched her bid to close down Bakker late in the piece.

Bakker has had an excellent start to the year, opening her 2026/27 by winning six North American races from eight starts before returning to Europe for her first season riding as a privateer, running her own team.

In conditions which suited her to the ground, Bakker rode an almost flawless race, building her advantage quickly and defending brilliantly, slipping over only once, in the thick mud.

The third round of the season-long Superprestige series, the annual Jaarmarktcross in Niel, was held over five laps of a varied course, with plenty of sand, a series of what look like moguls, short sharp climbs, run-ups and plenty of mud.

The first sand pit came early in the lap, and, with none of the riders able to ride it, the bunch was spread in the first few hundred metres. Amandine Fouquenet (Pauwels Sauzen-Altez Industriebouw) exited in first place, and with teammate Leonie Bentveld behind her, the French rider quickly had a gap.

After winning the European title in controversial circumstances, Brand set off in pursuit. However, on one of the many short climbs she hit the barrier and was forced to retire from the race with an injury to her ankle.

As Brand rode back to her team camper, Fouquenet was caught, with Aniek van Alphen (777TV) and Bakker briefly gapping the two Pauwels Sauzen riders.

However, as the second lap wore on, the in-form Bakker, fresh from a clutch of race victories in North America, rode clear, taking a lead of 18 seconds into lap three ahead of an expanded six-woman chasing group.

At the end of the third lap, she had lost only one second of that advantage, with Betsema and Casasola beginning to eat away at the lead.

On the final lap, Casasola dropped Betsema and began to pressure Bakker, closing in, almost to within touching distance, but the Dutch rider held her nerve and form to take the win.

Results

Sven Nys' cyclo-cross team will be searching for a new title sponsor as Glowi, owner of cleaning agency Het Poetsbureau, is set to withdraw from its sponsorship deal at the end of this year.

Glowi took up a multi-year co-sponsorship of the team at the start of 2025, but the company had an option to withdraw at the end of each year.

"That option has now been exercised," Sven Nys, who runs the Baloise Verzekeringen-Het Poetsbureau Lions team, told Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws.

The team currently have eight riders on their roster across the men's and women's elite and under-23 ranks, including recently-crowned European champions Thibau Nys and Lucinda Brand, and Annemarie Worst and Pim Ronhaar.

Thibau's father Sven said Glowi's decision to withdraw from sponsorship is unrelated to team results. Het Laatste Nieuws reports that the company is facing its own difficulties.

"We built an incredibly good relationship with the people from Glowi and Het Poetsbureau, where I myself used to give cycling clinics to cleaning staff in all provinces. They were happy with our performance, and we gave them enormous visibility," Nys said.

"[The decision] is also completely unrelated to our team. They made a decision, and we respect it."

A mid-season distraction

The team will continue with Baloise on board until the end of the 2027-28 cyclo-cross season, though they're now searching for a new co-title sponsor, with a contract set to begin mid-season.

"At a more difficult time for us than for a road team. Because we are in the middle of a cyclo-cross season and the contracts run until January 1. That leaves us in a tight spot," Nys said.

"In 2026, that applies to cycling in general and to every team looking for potential new partners. Unfortunately, in this sport, you are never all set.

"Companies that believe in us and 'want' to invest are our only income. It is a constant matter of keeping your feelers out. Discussions are ongoing. But you don't get something like this arranged in a few months."

'Not doomed'

Nys said that the team isn't in danger of disappearing from the cyclo-cross peloton this season.

He also denied that sports marketing and event company Golazo, which runs several cyclo-cross races and contributes to the team's youth structure and Sven Nys Academy, will step up to contribute to the senior squad.

"That is not true. We are part of 'the house', and they will of course continue to support us. But not in the way it is being suggested. No extra money will certainly need to be injected. In that respect, everything is covered for next year," he said.

"In the meantime, we have already found several additional shirt partners, who will be announced in the coming weeks. This means that we are already making concrete future plans.

"We are certainly not doomed. And we are diligently continuing our search... with the strong relationship with Golazo as a reliable foundation."

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Puck Pieterse folds a slice of pizza the way New Yorkers do, and her very first slice was plain cheese, nothing else. She doesn't usually order it that way, she told me later; she just wanted to taste the basic version first.

That was lunch. For breakfast, she had a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon. Somewhere along the way, she hit the M&M's store in Times Square and went to town picking up every flavour she can't buy in the Netherlands. She ate enough that it made her feel sick. "It made me fly on the bike," she laughed. "I'm on holiday," she shrugged. Once her stomach settled, the leftovers became her post-ride recovery snack.

It was 24-year-old Pieterse's first time in New York, and she told a small crowd of fans that evening that it was a lot to take in: the noise, the lights, the sheer scale of it. "It's just so much bigger than my European mind can comprehend," she said.

She'd been to a Knicks game the night before. She was still processing the soundtrack: the organ, the sound effects narrating every possession, and an arena that left no doubt which side it was on, with ominous cues when the visitors had the ball and "crazy TikTok songs" when the Knicks did. You would never have guessed that from watching her ride on 8th Avenue at the start of rush hour earlier that day, or from how smoothly she handled clueless onlookers and city vehicles in a bustling Central Park just days before marathon weekend.

Later that evening, at Roberta's Pizza in Midtown Manhattan, I had a little over 20 minutes and three slices of cake to win her trust. We were both speaking our second language, and we were both frazzled by the room, but the sweets helped break the ice.

Pieterse rides for Fenix-Premier Tech, and everyone asks her the same question: how does she do it all? She races cyclo-cross in winter, the Classics in spring, and mountain bikes and the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in summer, and she has won at the highest level in all three disciplines.

"It's definitely getting harder to combine everything because every discipline is getting way more specific," she told me. Her 2026 season showed the cost: podiums at Flanders, Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Tour's polka-dot jersey and a third straight bronze at the cyclo-cross Worlds, but not the one standout victory she said she wanted.

The more interesting question is how she keeps her head clear while doing it, how a rider pulled in so many directions stays steady in each one. She came to New York between the road and CX seasons, for a community ride and pizza night hosted by Canyon and Zwift, and I spent the day trying to find out to that question. The answer, it turned out, involved circles. And not just riding around in them.

Protecting the circle

The question came from the crowd gathered on Roberta's rooftop, read aloud by the evening's host, Matt Stephens: did she have a mantra, or any trick for staying focused under pressure?

She has circles, Pieterse explained. Circle one is the race and only the race: your line, your effort, what you are doing right now. Circle two sits a little wider; it can be your mom or dad shouting from the tape, and they are allowed in briefly, but then you go back to circle one.

The danger is drifting further out. "On a bad day, you start hearing people talking about you, or your own head joins in with the negativity," she noted. She recognizes it happening and steps back inside.

Her race mornings are built to keep the first circle uncluttered. At a cyclo-cross race, her father prepares her pre-race meal, she rides two or three laps of the course, then tries to visualize it back at the camper, with Dutch rap in her headphones. Nothing superstitious, she insisted.

Back on 8th Avenue at peak time, circle one is a cab door, a delivery cyclist salmoning against the flow, a pedestrian stepping off the curb mid-text. Pieterse slid through the chaos without appearing to think. When I asked how she made urban survival look so effortless, she gave me a look that suggested it was not much of a question.

To her, it is simply second nature. "If you race a lot, you get a bit of awareness about what others are going to do, but of course you can never be one hundred per cent sure," she said. At home in the Netherlands, she rides through a city centre every day to reach her group ride meeting point. Dutch cities are smaller, she notes, but there are more of them, so traffic is woven into every training ride. She knows her routes, including – she admits with a grin – when she might sneak through a red light.

"I think if you're less into cycling and you're a tourist here, it's really dangerous actually with all the cars."

Still, she'd love to ride an alleycat race in New York, she said, before thinking better of it: it wouldn't be safe. NYC drivers, though, got a good review. "They know there are cyclists around, so that's nice."

I watched most of it from a few bike lengths back, on a Canyon Aeroad borrowed from her sponsor. I chased her through Midtown and into Central Park, where about 40 riders had turned out for the Canyon and Zwift community ride, on a loop already crowded with marathon-weekend runners and visitors. Over three laps, Pieterse found her way to the wheel of nearly every rider, chatting and making jokes as she went.

'Cross, Classics, and cake

Most fans on the ride wanted to know when her cyclo-cross season will start. Pieterse, who is still working out her 'cross schedule, was more curious about them: why they took up cycling in a city with so little room for it, and whether they only ride in the park or live somewhere with better roads. She was struck by how big the local community is, given how few bike shops she had spotted while walking around.

I'd heard Pieterse plans rides around bakery stops, so she didn't argue when I told her we would do a cake tasting while we talked. Cakes and sweets are part of the programme. At her local coffee stop back home, she orders apple pie in slices so massive they are meant to be shared.

She took the tasting seriously. The tiramisu was "surprisingly marshmallowy… when it should have been more mascarpone and alcohol," while the red velvet cake had the texture the tiramisu missed. "I know my cakes," she said. The key lime cake, airy and bright, ended up being her favourite.

Between bites, I asked how she manages to switch between disciplines. She splits her year into blocks: road, mountain bike, with the Tour de France sandwiched in between, then back to the mountain bike. 'Cross fills the winter, and by January, she is deep into the intense CX calendar. By the end of February, she has pivoted back to the road for the Classics.

The switch itself is smaller than people think, she insists. She trains on both bikes at home. She sees the Spring Classics and cross-country mountain biking as requiring the same type of explosive effort. The Classics are simply far longer, demanding deeper fatigue resistance.

The hard part is accepting what she has to give up. Her Classics rivals spend an entire winter preparing only for those races, while she is racing 'cross. Before mountain bike Worlds, she notes, she could have been at an altitude camp instead of racing the Tour.

"I'm fully committed to cycling and to becoming the best cyclist I can be," she said. She accepts the trade-offs because variety gives her so much. Pressed by the crowd that night to choose just one discipline or bike, she called herself an all-rounder, then picked the mountain bike. "For now," she added.

It circles back to her mental framework. The ground beneath her keeps changing, from mud to cobbles to singletrack, and her job is to keep circle one steady.

Her record explains why people keep asking about her ability to do it all. In 2024, she won the elite cross-country mountain bike world title, then a stage of the Tour de France Femmes on her first attempt, along with the young rider's white jersey. In 2025, she won La Flèche Wallonne, then five MTB World Cup races in a row.

Then came 2026. Before the Ardennes, she told her team she would "rather have one real stand-out result than three podiums." She got the podiums instead: third at Flanders, second at Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, no win.

When asked which win she would relive, she chose the 2024 Tour stage from Valkenburg to Liège over the closing climbs of La Doyenne. That day, on rain-soaked roads, at just 22, she beat race leader Demi Vollering in a photo finish, with Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney third.

"I had, in the evening before, in the night, I woke up... I dreamed that I was winning today," she told the room. "And then in the end, the final, I just knew what was going to happen. It was super weird."

There is one major title still on her radar. She has stood on the elite cyclo-cross Worlds podium four years running, silver in 2023 and bronze in each of the three years since, but never on the top step. The next chance comes in Oostende, Belgium, at the end of January. A few moments after we talked about it, a stray balloon shaped like a number one drifted up over us and into the black-blue evening sky.

'It's sad that we don't have the US World Cups anymore'

Pieterse knows North American 'cross better than most Europeans. She won the under-23 world title in Fayetteville, Arkansas, in 2022, and has raced World Cups in Iowa and Wisconsin. No World Cup has come back since the 2023/24 season. The 2026/27 series has 12 rounds, including Glasgow on December 13, but none in North America.

When I told her that American cyclo-cross has struggled to regain its momentum in recent years, and asked what the US could learn from Europe, she was frank. "It's a very Belgian sport," she said. In Belgium, a fan can reach most races in about half an hour by car; here, she pointed out, it can take a seven-hour flight. What she liked about the American 'cross races she has done was the weekend format, with amateur and kids' races building to the World Cup on Sunday. She also wondered whether a late-season slot on the 'cross calendar might make the trip across the Atlantic easier on riders. Mountain biking, she noted, wrestles with the same question of where to put its World Cups.

"I think it's sad that we don't have the US World Cups anymore," she said. For riders, those races were a lot of fun, and though getting here is a long trip, "once you're here it's always been worth it." When the biggest names come, the public follows. Several people on the Central Park ride had told her they had watched her race 'cross here.

The other fix, she thinks, is online. "I think being present on social media can play a big role as well," she said, though geo-restrictions make races harder to watch in the US. And 'cross suits a screen: at "only fifty minutes to an hour," she said, a CX race is easier to watch than a mountain bike race.

Back to reality and racing

Whilst New York is something of a holiday, her next big trips away will be for racing. The 2027 Tour de France Femmes starts in Leeds on July 30, the race's first Grand Départ in the UK. She missed the big-name climbs of recent editions and sees chances for herself and Fenix-Premier Tech on a route with shorter climbs. "I think it will only make maybe even a more exciting Tour."

Home is Amersfoort, in the middle of the Netherlands, where she grew up and still lives. She started riding because her father came home muddy from weekend mountain bike rides with friends, and she wanted that too.

As a kid, she said, announcing she would turn pro was like saying "you wanted to be a police officer or a firefighter," something you say without really meaning it. Then, as a first-year junior, she had a good enough season to earn a spot at the Worlds in cyclo-cross and mountain biking. By the time she was under-23 and had signed with Alpecin-Deceuninck, she was suddenly sharing a roster with Mathieu van der Poel.

When things get heavy, she doesn't call cycling insiders. She calls a high school friend, a student whose life looks nothing like hers, whenever their schedules line up. And she calls Mischa Bredewold, who grew up two kilometres away. Bredewold is two years older and rode in the same club as Pieterse's sister, which made Puck the tag-along little sister for years. Now, both are professionals, and over the last couple of years they have grown close. Bredewold, Pieterse said, has a view on most things. "And it's usually a good opinion."

New York is a city built on excess, and hers was a bag of M&M's. From there, she headed to a short team camp in Lisbon, with rides on city bikes, more pastries, and surfing lessons. Then it was back to the Netherlands, back to the mud, and back to Moncler, her pet chicken who terrorises the neighbourhood. "She attacks cats, ducks, dogs," Pieterse said. "Nothing is safe." That includes her mother.

"I don't think I could do just one discipline," she said. "I would go out of my mind." She needs the change of scenery, and believes the variety makes her "a more whole cyclist." After a day with her, I'd put it a little differently. The mud and the cobbles, the cakes, the surfboard, the friend who has nothing to do with bikes: none of it pulls her away from the racing. It's what keeps her whole enough to do it.

Back to when the number-one balloon drifted above us, she didn't look up at it for long. A team camp was waiting, then a cyclo-cross season with the Worlds in Oostende at the end, and a rogue chicken at home in need of supervision. The city had been loud all day. As far as I could tell, circle one had stayed quiet.

Organisers of The Traka World Series, formerly Gravel Earth Series, announced the ranking procedures to determine overall winners for 2027, with balanced points for the top 25 riders in pro divisions at each of the seven races, and a new system for riders to earn entry into the pro category as well.

There will be no enhanced scores for individual events, which had been the case in the past at The Traka 360 and the series finale, The River. At Traka Girona and the final series stop, now The Last Dance, points will be the same as other events.

In the past, riders could compete at either The Traka 200 or The Traka 360, or both, which was rare, with more points on the line in the longer distance. This year, pro fields will be consolidated in the reworked 300km distance on May 1, which will offer points and recognise clear winners in the big tune-up before Unbound Gravel.

There are new criteria for riders to line up in the pro division for the popular Girona race, which prioritise results from last year. Riders having finished within 5% of the winning time in their gender category can race as pros. Top finish times from the year before also apply from The Traka 200, Santa Vall, and the longer distances from Ranxo Gravel, Gravel Desert and The River 160.

And at the first three series races in 2027, the same 5% margin will apply for riders to gain pro status, including a new event in late spring referred to as 'The Traka in the Americas'. Organisers added that a limited number of wild card entries would be considered, "assessed on the sporting information provided and the eligibility criteria of each application".

There will be no minimum number of events required in the series, however, athletes must start the season finale in October, The Last Dance. Once the seventh and final event has been completed, the final standings will be decided from points earned after dropping the two lowest scores in the calendar.

The final top 10 in The Traka World Series pro leaderboards, men and women, will share a €20,000 overall prize purse. At each event, the top five pro riders, men and women, will have another €8,000 on offer, with CORE4's purse double that amount.

The Rift seeks more women to register for 200km distance

The Rift gravel race in Iceland is officially sold out for 2027, but organisers announced a few days ago that they are keeping a limited number of entries open for women in the 200-kilometre distance. They want 200 women on the July 24 start line for the 200km distance.

Started in 2019, The Rift offers routes from 60km to 330km from Hvolsvöllur, Iceland across the rough volcanic highlands, marked by multiple icy-cold water crossings. The 200km distance is considered the main event, won last year by Anton Stensby and Haley Smith.

Registration for The Rift 200k is $320. For any rider, male or female, who wishes to compete in shorter categories - 140km or 60km - opportunities are still available to join the waitlist. The long-distance 'Abyss' event is closed.

Valley of Tears expands racing for US Collegiate Gravel Championships

Valley of Tears returns next year for a fourth year, March 5-6, with two days of racing in Turkey, Texas. Organisers announced they will expand the number of titles on offer for the USA Cycling Collegiate Gravel National Championships, with four stars-and-stripes jerseys up for grabs in 2027.

A star-studded elite field is expected to compete for a $45,000 prize purse, split evenly between pro women and pro men. The first payouts are at Friday's Dirt Crit presented by QTS with $10,000 for pro/open competitors. The balance is shared on Saturday for the 93-mile main event, with chunky gravel, old rail trail, sand and singletrack that passes through Caprock Canyons State Park.

In 2026, Valley of Tears hosted the inaugural nationals for collegiate riders, won by Nate Meister (Fort Lewis) and Emma Kasza-James (Midwestern State). Fort Lewis College took the team title. This year, four categories will be offered - Varsity Men, Varsity Women, Club Men and Club Women.

The event offers three ride distances - 20 miles, 50 miles and 93 miles. Registration is limited to 1,000 riders across all fields and opens with discounted rates at 7:00 a.m. CDT on December 1, 2026.

Last year, Sofia Gomez Villafane (Specialized Off-road) captured her third consecutive victory at Valley of Tears, holding off Paige Onweller (Trek Driftless), while Alexey Vermeulen (ENVE) won from a three-rider sprint among the elite men.

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Canyon-SRAM have announced an AI research and development partner for the remainder of 2026, with the German squad working with FasCat Coaching as they prepare for the 2027 season.

In what looks to be a first in the women's peloton, Canyon-SRAM will use FasCat's CoachCat AI coaching platform to run an "AI-powered season review" on their riders to help prepare for the new season.

The team say that CoachCat can analyse riders' performance history throughout their career "to identify patterns and insights that might otherwise go unnoticed." The system is said to be capable of examining the effectiveness of training blocks based on several metrics, including heat, altitude, training load, heart rate, and sleep monitoring.

Canyon-SRAM worked with FasCat in the lead-up to this year's Tour de France Femmes, with the company analysing their riders' historical data to generate predictions for the race itself and training and preparation beyond.

"WorldTour teams are sitting on a wealth of untapped data that could tell them exactly why a rider won or lost, and what to change. CoachCat finds that in minutes, not months. Working with Canyon-SRAM lets us prove at the highest level of the sport what our AI does every day for the athletes on our platform," said Frank Overton, founder and CEO of FasCat coaching, which has been in business since 2003.

The team will take on a new look for 2027 as leader and Tour de France Femmes runner-up Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney leaves for Lidl-Trek. Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig and Tiffany Cromwell are also among the notable departures.

Lucinda Brand, Steffi Häberlin, and Georgia Baker lead the incoming list, while young German talent Antonia Niedermaier will take Niewiadoma-Phinney's leadership role at the year's biggest races.

"We are always looking for new ways to understand performance, and AI analysis of a rider’s full history is a natural next step," said Canyon-SRAM performance director Dan Fleeman.

"FasCat’s AI analytics give our performance staff a fresh, objective look at what has driven each rider’s best results and where we can build for 2027. We have enjoyed exploring this together.”

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A late crash during Saturday’s UEC European Cyclo-cross Championships not only prevented Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado from fighting for the win, but has forced the Fenix-Premier Tech rider out of this week's racing.

Alvarado had been in a with a shout of winning the elite women’s race in Zeddam on Saturday, but was gapped on the final ascent of the punishing 99-step run up. Then, while battling to return to the leading duo of Marie Schreiber and Lucinda Brand, she crashed, injuring her hand.

After the crash Alvarado could be seen shaking the injured hand, and by the time she crossed the line in third place, she was unable to hold the handlebars.

Medical examinations since the incident have revealed Alvarado had sustained a ligament tear to her right thumb, and a date for her return to competition is uncertain.

"She will wear a custom-made brace, and her return to cyclocross racing will depend on how her recovery progresses. We wish her a speedy recovery!" read a post on both Alvarado's and her team's Instagram account.

Alvarado had been scheduled to race this Wednesday, November 11, at the third round of the Superprestige at Niel, but that is now out of the question, with this weekend’s Merksplas round and the X2O Trofee race at Hamme-Zogge also looking unlikely.

With Alvarado out of contention following her crash, the race was notable for the controversial relegation of Luxembourgish rider Marie Schreiber. Though she crossed the line in first place, the victory was awarded to Brand after Schreiber's sprint was judged as irregular, the 23-year-old later accusing the commissaires of stealing the biggest moment of her career.

Alvarado is one of the sport’s leading lights and has won almost every honour in the sport. She is the current Dutch national champion and won both the World and European Championships in 2020, as well as the season-long World Cup in 2024. She is yet to hit the heights this season, though her third place at the Euros was an indication she was progressing towards her best form.

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Surely we all love a bunch kick? The tension, the uncertainty, the chaos and the sheer speed, the strutting arms-in-the-air celebrations and the bar-banging of the losers can make hours watching an otherwise mundane day of a stage race all worthwhile.

While there might be only a small group of riders able to win at the highest level, it’s the most highly competitive area of the sport, even when there are only a couple of the best sprinters in the final, you can bet your bottom dollar there’ll be plenty of pretenders trying their luck.

And while sheer power is, of course, vital, winning isn’t all about legs, reading the ebb and flow of a fast moving group is essential, and timing is equally important, using whatever slipstream there is before emerging into the wind at the perfect moment to ensure your maximum effort counts.

Then there’s the lead-out, making the high speed chaos all around slow down so the right decisions are made at the right time. And the best sprinters can either profit off their teammates’ work or surf the wheels to be in the right place at the right time.

Sprinting is a true art. But who were the best artists in 2026? Among the women, there can be only one dominant rider, but on the men’s side it’s much harder to determine who was best. When the sprinter’s job is to finish the job of the team and win, statistics count for everything, so we've ranked seven of the best by their wins.

Lorena Wiebes (SD Worx-Protime)

Lorena Wiebes set out her stall for the year in February, dominating the UAE Tour Women and winning all three flat stages for the second consecutive season. She wore the yellow jersey after winning the opening two stages at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift and won two general classifications, at the Tour de Pologne and Tour of Chongming Island, where she won all the stages.

Winning from February through to October, she showed remarkable resilience, though there were some interesting blips. At the Ronde van Brugge she lost the record which had seen her win every bunch sprint she’d contested since the 2024 Tour de France Femmes, finishing ninth behind Carys Lloyd (Movistar). Worse, though, was her disqualification when commissaires found her bike to be underweight after she won the opening stage of the Giro d’Italia.

Despite a crash during the Track World Championships, where she won the Scratch Race rainbow jersey, she’ll be back and looking for retribution next year, and no one would be surprised if she adds another 24 victories to her total.

Paul Magnier (Soudal-QuickStep)

Having turned professional as recently as 2024, Paul Magnier is rapidly blossoming into the sprinter to beat in the men’s peloton. He won his first professional race, bagging a further four victories that year, before taking a whopping 19 wins in his second season.

That number might have dipped to only 15 in 2026, but he equalled his tally of six WorldTour wins, and the total is still formidable, especially when considering he shares the team’s WorldTour sprinting duties with Tim Merlier.

At this year’s Giro d’Italia the 22-year-old Frenchman showed remarkable progression, delivering a hugely contrasting performance to last year’s first participation, when he managed only three top-10 placings and failed to finish. This time round he won three stages and wore the cyclamen jersey for all but two days, eventually taking home his first Grand Tour points classification.

As for his other victories, they came in a steady flow throughout the year, proving not only his consistency, but his place at the forefront of an emerging breed of sprinters, who are arguably more able to win after a lumpy day than their predecessors.

Tim Merlier (Soudal-QuickStep)

That Soudal-QuickStep have two sprinters in our list is an indication of the team’s pivot away from targeting general classifications to stages and Classics. With Tim Merlier they had someone ready made to take advantage, and while he was behind teammate Paul Magnier in the list of overall winners for the season, 14 victories is a great haul.

While Magnier is the young pretender, Merlier is the wily old timer, and though he may not be as versatile as the French tyro, he knows his way around a bunch kick better than most, and is able to deploy a prolonged burst of power few others can match. This means he is often able to rescue lost causes, and makes him perfect for the chaos of high-stakes Grand Tour sprints.

At the Tour de France this year Merlier equalled the previous best ever Grand Tour return set at the 2024 Giro d’Italia, taking three stages before abandoning on stage 15. That took his tally of Tour stage wins to six, winning at least one in each of his three participations at the world’s biggest race. However, though those victories count for a lot, those were his only WorldTour wins of the year, with the bulk of his 14 successes coming at second tier .Pro level.

This is, perhaps, an indication that the team’s sprinting mantel is gradually being handed from the 33-year-old to Magnier, though the older man is sure to fight to keep hold of his status as their leading sprinter.

Matthew Brennan (Visma-Lease a Bike)

If Matthew Brennan hadn’t established himself as one of the peloton’s best sprinters by winning 12 races last season, his first as a professional, he certainly did in 2026.

Not only did he match that total, but the 21-year-old stamped his authority on his first Grand Tour by winning five stages. And there might have been more had Wout van Aert, Visma-Lease a Bike’s star name, not been in the race, the team diverting some of their efforts to the Belgian’s successful pursuit of the points jersey.

Brennan’s Vuelta performance, and two earlier wins at the Vuelta a Burgos, not only helped to establish himself as a top contender, but kickstarted his season after a barren period. Between March and September last year he won in all but one month, while this year seemed less consistent, success coming in clusters.

Still only 20, he began 2026 winning a stage of the Santos Tour Down Under and finishing second three times. Back in Europe he bagged a maiden Classics victory at Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne, but in the following five months he only cracked the top 10 four times, though three of those were stage wins at the third tier Flèche du Sud.

Such blips are a sprinter’s lot, though, especially one so young, and we can expect more from Brennan in 2027.

Jonathan Milan (Lidl-Trek)

Despite winning more in 2026 than in any of his previous seasons, Jonathan Milan’s slightly under-par Giro d’Italia and non-attendance at the Tour de France meant he flew slightly under the radar in 2026. Half of his 12 wins came early in the year, but illness and injury left him short of form and rhythm in the middle part of the year.

The 26-year-old started his season perfectly with victory at the opening two stages of the AlUla Tour, following that with three more wins at the UAE Tour. However, things started to go awry back in Europe, and though he won the final stage at Tirreno-Adriatico, illness ruined the rest of his spring.

He arrived at the Giro d’Italia having not raced for almost a month, and coming up against an in-form Paul Magnier, his chances of a third maglia ciclamino were soon gone. Though he managed three top five finishes, he had to wait until the final day in Rome to claim a victory, second place in the points classification scant consolation.

He gained some momentum during the summer, though, after winning his first Italian road title, Milan beat Magnier into second on two of his three stage wins at the Tour de Pologne. Then victory at stage 1 of the Renewi Tour was perhaps a highlight, beating the likes of Merlier, Olav Kooij, Jasper Philipsen and other sprinting royalty, but his season was over two days later when he crashed out.

While he took more wins than ever, without bad luck, 2026 might have been an even better year for Milan.

Elisa Balsamo (Lidl-Trek)

Elisa Balsamo might not have been able to best Wiebes during the 2026 season, indeed, she’s not won a race ahead of the Dutch rider since 2023, but 2026 saw the former World Champion return to somewhere near her best form, winning more WorldTour races than any year since 2022.

Winning six times through the season, Balsamo took the bulk of her team’s victories, and while she might not have been so prolific had Wiebes not been forced out of the Giro d’Italia Women, she held the overall lead for three days, winning four stages of her home Grand Tour and taking the overall points classification.

Another standout feature of Balsamo’s 2026 successes were their quality, with all but one of her six victories coming at WorldTour level, while at the other, the 1.1 level Egmont Cycling Race, her sprint was so powerful she put three seconds into second place.

One win which showed Balsamo’ versatility was at the Classic Lorient Agglomération, a race rarely won by a pure sprinter and better suited to Classics specialists, setting her apart from Wiebes, who has never started in Plouay.

Charlotte Kool (Fenix-Premier Tech)

For the first time in a while Charlotte Kool seemed to be returning to somewhere close to her best during 2026, last season’s mid-season move to Fenix-Premier Tech finally bearing fruit.

With six wins, it was her best year since 2023, her first season as a lead sprinter. However, in contrast to that year, none of her six wins during 2026 came at WorldTour level, with two 1.Pro victories her best return.

While she failed to trouble the scorers at the UAE Tour, Kool’s spring campaign was excellent, taking four wins between March 1 and mid-May, and finishing outside the top 10 only twice in 12 starts. But as the season wore on her form tailed off, failing to finish either the Giro d’Italia Women or the Tour de France Femmes, though she managed a stage win at the Baloise Ladies Tour, a race where she’s won seven stages earlier in her career.

Kool is a class act, but, like every other sprinter in the women’s bunch, she’s found beating Lorena Wiebes all but impossible. However, she has beaten her in the years since the two were teammates at DSM in 2022, most notably and recently at the 2024 Tour de France, and if she can find her best form and some confidence, she may well do so again in 2027.

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Luxembourg's cycling federation has officially lodged a complaint in a bid to overturn and reinstate Marie Schreiber as the winner of the European Cyclo-cross title.

Schreiber crossed the line first in the elite women's race at the weekend's European Cyclo-cross Championships but was relegated to second place for what was deemed an irregular sprint by the race officials.

Schreiber moved to the left in the two-up sprint to the line with Lucinda Brand (Netherlands), which the jury of UCI commissaires punished with relegation to second place, a decision that has proved controversial.

After Schreiber complained that "it’s disrespectful to steal the biggest moment of my career", the Luxembourg Cycle Sport Federation (FSCL) announced that it had taken the issue up formally with the race organiser, the European Cycling Union (UEC).

"Following the women’s race at the European Cyclocross Championships, the FSCL officially filed a complaint with the UEC regarding the jury’s decision," read a statement.

"That is why the FSCL is calling for the race standings to be determined based on the order in which the riders crossed the finish line."

How can the decision actually be appealed?

It is unclear exactly how the FSCL hope to see the decision overturned.

It states it has filed a complaint with the UEC, which organises the European Championships but does not officiate them from a disciplinary point of view. This responsibility, as with all UCI-sanctioned races, falls to the UCI, which applies its rulebook via a jury made up of a number of commissaires.

The UCI's regulations state that infringements relating to race incidents – of which an irregular sprint is one – "are not subject to appeal", except for any fine that has been applied. So the monetary element of a punishment can be disputed but nothing else.

However, the UCI's regulations do leave some wiggle room, later stating that its Disciplinary Commission, which usually deals with more general and more serious issues, can intervene and even overturn a decision.

"The Disciplinary Commission may, at its own initiative or upon request, decide to suspend the implementation of a decision by the Commissaires' Panel," state the UCI regulations.

The Disciplinary Commission can decide on race infringements "which may have an influence on the sporting conduct or the result of an event", such as this one.

However, the same section of the rulebook also states that the Disciplinary Commission can step in "in case the facts were not observed by the Commissaires' Panel or in case all relevant facts for the assessment of the infringement were not available at the time the Commissaires’ Panel disbanded". Only in the latter case will the decision of the Disciplinary Commission replace that of the Commissaires' Panel, according to the rules.

What this suggests is that the Disciplinary Commission steps in when there's been a flaw in the process – not to review a fully-informed judgement made by a commissaire. In this case, the commissaires had all the facts available in the form of the video footage, so it's difficult to see any provision for overturning their decision under this section of the rulebook.

Schreiber and the Luxembourg federation could in theory take legal action and lodge a case with the international Court of Arbitration for Sport, where the UCI is regularly challenged on disciplinary decisions.

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Marie Schreiber’s controversial relegation at the UEC European Cyclo-cross Championships on Saturday has been described as "ridiculous" by the former world champion Sanne Cant, who is Schreiber's cyclo-cross coach at SD Worx-Protime.

After crossing the line first in the elite women’s race on Saturday, Schreiber was relegated to second place for an irregular sprint, the Luxembourg rider missing out on what would have been the biggest result of her career.

It was clear from the head-on coverage that she did make a move to her left, but despite eventual winner Lucinda Brand asserting she was not impeded, the race jury interpreted this as a breach serious enough to warrant the relegation.

Not only was Schreiber upset by the issue, but she has been joined by Cant, who has been part of the SD Worx team for two winters, and previously won three rainbow jerseys among 126 race wins during a long career.

"It is the most ridiculous reaction I have ever heard," Cant told Sporza after the race.

"I spent a very long time on a bike myself and I have never experienced anything like this. If we already find a mistake here... I think there are other sprints taking place on the road where nothing happens."

Brand did not file a complaint, according to her Dutch cycling federation.

"It really was the UCI president [of the commissaire's panel] who saw it, but it is anyone's guess what he saw," Cant said.

"Maybe he should try sprinting on a 'cross bike himself. It will never be straight. I think the track was wide enough to pass."

Schreiber did not attend the podium ceremony, which, according to reports in the Belgian press, was a decision that came primarily from Cant.

"I didn't want her to stand on [the podium]. That is not because there is no respect for Lucinda, but because you shouldn't accept a medal that doesn't belong to you," Cant told Sporza.

Cant added that "we are not going to leave it at this", and while it is unclear what action SD Worx-Protime might be able to take, given that the European Championships are contested by national teams, the Luxembourg cycling federation has announced it will appeal the decision.

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Luxembourgish rider Marie Schreiber has condemned the decision to relegate her to second place at the European Cyclo-cross Championships on Saturday as disrespectful.

Schreiber crossed the line first in the Elite Women’s race at Zeddam in the Netherlands, apparently bagging the biggest win of her career, but a few minutes later, she was relegated for an irregular sprint. She later refused to attend the podium ceremony.

"The UCI and UEC they always advocate for and everyone they always advocate for clean and fair sport and then they do this, it’s unfair," Schreiber said after the race.

She and World Champion Lucinda Brand (Netherlands) had come into the finish straight together after the Luxembourgish rider overtook on the brutal run up the flight of 99 steps. Leading out, Schreiber opened her sprint early, holding Brand at bay. From the footage, it was clear she did move to her left as the pair closed in on the finish line, and it seems it was this move the race commissaires penalised.

"We reviewed the footage and both me and Lucinda said our views," Schreiber said. "Lucinda said I did nothing wrong, she couldn’t have passed anyway, so I think it’s really thankful that she said this, but it doesn’t change the commissaires’ decision.

"It’s a sprint after 50 minutes of all out racing, you come with 190 heart rate, I change my gear, I saw I moved a little bit to the left, but then I think if every person watches the race you know this moving around it’s normal. I did not close the door on purpose or anything, Lucinda knows this and she also said it.

"I think it’s disrespectful to steal the biggest moment of my career just for this because I think for being fair everyone knows I won, if it would have been decided by two centimetres I can argue with them I can understand, but like this I think it’s just disrespectful to be honest."

Though Schreiber was relegated to second place, with Brand’s compatriot Ceylon del Carmen Alvarado in third, she was not present on the podium, and was asked if her team manager, former World Champion Sanne Can’t, had advised her not to attend, something which may mean she is fined by the race jury.

"Yeah, I was going to go because I thought everyone’s going to hate me if I don’t go, but then it’s like if they’re being like this to me then I also don’t owe them anything, to be honest. It’s hard to be standing here right now, so you can imagine it’s harder to stand on the podium, so they said I shouldn’t go, I shouldn’t let myself be treated like this. I can live with a fine probably better than going to sleep tonight."

Though she has a World Cup race win to her name, victory in the Euros would have been by far the biggest success of Schreiber’s career. Riding for her road trade team, SD Worx-Protime, Schreiber has had an excellent start to the 2026/27 season, winning the two opening races of the year, taking three more wins, with third place at the X2O Koppenbergcross her worst result.

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USA’s Noah Scholnick and Lilliana O'Donnell won the junior men's and junior women's titles, respectively, at the 2026 Pan-American Cyclo-cross Championships in Washington, DC, on Saturday.

O'Donnell (16) outsprinted Canada's Alexa Haviland to claim the gold medal, while Haviland claimed silver for the second consecutive year. Canada’s Anna Christensen crossed the line 47 seconds later to take the bronze medal. USA’s Graden Baume took fourth ahead of her compatriot Elena Svenstrup, who was fifth.

O’Donnell had just come out of a strong showing, sweeping the two women junior races at Cycle-Smart Northampton Cyclocross. She also had four second-place finishes in four races, so far this year.

For the second year in a row, the continental championships were held on the historic grounds of the Armed Forces Retirement Home, home to President Lincoln’s Summer Cottage and a residential community for U.S. veterans dating back to 1851.

Scholnick soloed to victory for the second consecutive year, and led a USA sweep of the podium. The 17-year-old has claimed two UCI victories and a pair of runner-up placings in four races so far this season, in addition to claiming the continental champion jersey today.

Rylan Zacharek (USA) crossed the line 17 seconds later to claim silver, with compatriot Finnley Sonneman taking bronze a further 12 seconds behind. USA’s Jacob Hines, outsprinted Stephen Savino IV to secure fourth place. American riders claimed the first seven places in the results.

Results

In a close sprint to the finish line, world champion Lucinda Brand and Marie Schreiber were shoulder to shoulder, battling for the win and the elite women's European Cyclo-cross title in Zeddam, in the Netherlands, on Saturday. It was so close that neither raised their hand in victory after they crossed the line, not knowing who had won the title.

Although Luxembourg’s Schreiber was initially declared the winner, the jury later revised the result following a delay, relegating her to second place for “an irregularity in the final sprint” and reshuffling the podium.

The European champion’s jersey was therefore awarded to the Dutch rider, who first won the blue-and-white jersey in 2021 in Wijster, Netherlands. Schreiber was given second.

"It's another title. A bit of a strange title, I have to admit,” Brand told media including Wielerflits, after the race.

Brand, Schreiber and Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado (Netherlands) broke away from the pack in the opening laps, with Schreiber setting a fast pace from the start. The three riders gradually extended their lead, finding themselves alone at the front to battle it out for the European jersey.

The battle remained open right up until the final moments, when a fall took Alvarado out of contention, leaving Schreiber and Brand to contest the victory in a tight sprint.

"It was a tough race," Brand said. "The entire final lap was difficult. Marie was very strong today, especially on the stairs—she pushed us to our limits there. Perhaps that’s why Ceylin made a mistake."

The race came down to a final two-up sprint across the long uphill start/finish straight. Schreiber had the front position and opened up her sprint first, but Brand came alongside as the two fought all the way to the line.

"She started a bit earlier than I did. I tried to get past her and pulled up alongside her. And, well, the jury made their decision," Brand said. ”I can’t really say anything more about it. Every title is wonderful, but this one feels a bit different."

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USA’s Alyssa Sarkisov pulled clear of her closest rival on the penultimate lap to claim the elite women’s title at the 2026 Pan-American Cyclocross Championships in Washington, DC, on Saturday. The victory marked a step up from last year, when she finished second.

With two laps remaining, Sarkisov and compatriot Lidia Cusack were locked in a battle for victory after breaking away from the lead group on the third lap. Sarkisov then delivered the fastest lap of the race, clocking 7:22, to open a six-second advantage by the bell lap. She maintained her lead to the finish, securing the victory after seven laps.

Cusack crossed the line six seconds later to claim silver, while newly crowned Canadian champion Sidney McGill, broke through the USA domination to take the bronze, finishing a further 36 seconds back.

After finishing seventh at the Cyclo-cross World Championships back in February, Sarkisov also raced on the road and placed third in the U23 time trial at the USA National Road Championships. The 19-year-old also tackled the U23 road race at the UCI Road World Championships in September.

For the second consecutive year, the Continental Championships were held on the historic grounds of the Armed Forces Retirement Home, the site of President Lincoln’s Summer Cottage and a residential community for United States veterans since 1851.

After one lap of racing on the approximately 3.3km long course, Sarkisov, Cusack and McGill, along with USA riders Lizzy Gunsalus, Raylyn Nuss, Mia Aseltine, had a 21-second lead over Lauren Zoerner, with Amelia Shea, Emma Betual and Emily Shields chasing together, a further 10 seconds back.

One lap later, 2025 Pan Am U23 champion Aseltine fell off the pace, while defending champion Gunsalus, Nuss and McGill were dropped after another lap, leaving Cusack and Sarkisov to battle for the gold medal.

With two laps to go, McGill was solo in third, a position she would keep until the finish. Nuss finished fourth, four seconds behind third place, while Aseltine was fifth.

All the riders in the field, apart from Canada’s McGill, represented the USA.

Results

Americans Ada Watson and Miles Mattern won the U23 women's and U23 men's titles, respectively, at the 2026 Pan-American Cyclo-cross Championships in Washington, DC, on Saturday.

In her first year racing in the U23 category, Watson soloed to victory, crossing the line 19 seconds ahead of compatriot Kaya Musgrave. Musgrave improved on her fourth-place finish last year to claim silver.

The win marked Watson’s first UCI victory. She had competed in the elite category at all six UCI events contested so far this season.

Canada’s Aislin Hallahan broke through the USA contingent to take third, 27 seconds later. USA’s Bridget Wilson and Anna Olesen finished fourth and fifth, respectively.

Mattern outsprinted his compatriots to win the gold medal and lead a USA sweep of the podium.

Competing in the elite men's category this season, the 20-year-old has claimed three UCI victories, sweeping the Major Taylor Cross Cup before adding a win at USCX Rochester Cyclocross Day 1. He has also recorded three runner-up finishes.

Aidan Vollmuth took silver, and Dylan Haynes finished third for the bronze medal. Crossing the line, 5 seconds later, Calvin Conaway was fourth while Garrett Beshore finished fifth. American riders claimed the first seven places in the results.

Results

World champion Lucinda Brand (Netherlands) claimed the elite women's title after Marie Schreiber was relegated at the UEC European Cyclo-cross championships in Zeddam on Saturday.

Brand and Schreiber came to the line together in a particularly closely fought sprint after a thrilling three-way battle that also involved Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado (Netherlands).

The Luxembourg rider crossed the finish line in first place and was briefly announced as the winner. But a subsequent decision by the jury, relating to an irregularity in the final sprint, altered the order of finish.

The European champion’s jersey was therefore awarded to Brand, who adds another prestigious victory to her list of achievements, ahead of Schreiber. Alvarado finished third despite her crash in the final stretch.

Schreiber put in her characteristic lightning-fast start to take an early lead, and her strength on the gruelling stair climb made life difficult for the stacked Dutch side, who were finally able to close her down on lap three. They could not shake her entirely, though, and it all came down to a final sprint for the line across the long uphill start/finish straight.

Brand came off Schreiber’s wheel and fought shoulder-to-shoulder with the younger rider all the way to the line, with the pair appearing to cross the line side by side.

How it happened

The women's elite race was the final race of three on day one of the UEC European Cyclo-cross championships, with conditions a little more slippery than they had been earlier in the day, and conditions dry but cloudy.

Hélène Clauzel of France pushed to the front of the pack on the lengthy start/finish straight, along with Schreiber, as the field stretched out on the first lap.

Schreiber impressed on the first climb of the gruelling 99-step staircase, opening a remarkable 13-second gap as the first lap unfolded, with the rest of the field desperately giving chase. Ceylin del Carmen Alvarado was the nearest challenger as the second lap began, leading the chase for the sizeable Netherlands squad, with a bigger group another eight seconds behind.

Resplendent in the rainbow bands but seeking her second European title, reigning world champion Brand attacked on lap two to try and bridge to her compatriot. Brand did not look comfortable on the steps, however, and Schreiber was able to maintain her lead as the chasing pair of Dutchwomen fought to join forces. They finally united towards the end of lap two, but Schreiber took a commanding lead of 14 seconds into lap three as Brand appeared to be dissatisfied with Alvarado’s work rate, seeds of discontent once again visible within the Dutch team.

Brand made the difference on lap three, however, pushing the pace to close down Schreiber, with the gap coming down to ten seconds. Brand attacked her teammate Alvarado, but she wasn’t able to shake her, and she encountered trouble just after that, sliding out on a corner and hitting the ground, leaving Alvarado to chase down Schreiber alone.

Alvarado closed Schreiber down at the foot of the stairs, but a stumble near the top allowed Schreiber to go clear once again, but not for long – Alvarado finally bridged the gap to form a leading duo. Behind them, Brand had quickly remounted and pursued the leading pair, using her power over the long rising start/finish straight to finally join up with the leaders.

Alvarado led the charge on lap five, making life difficult for Schreiber, who fell back until she was able to re-establish her place within the group with another strong stair climb. There was nothing to separate the trio heading into the penultimate lap, and Brand turned the screw, doing everything in her power to try and shift the stubborn Schreiber from her wheel, as Alvarado began to slip away from the head of the race.

It would all come down to the final lap. Crossing the line, the trio were once again locked together, and for the final time on the stairs Schreiber was able to sneak through the two Dutchwomen to retake the lead and set up a thrilling final section of the race. Alvarado slipped and crashed shortly after, taking herself out of the running for gold and looking to be in some discomfort with a hand injury.

Heading into the sprint, everything appeared to point to Brand; Schreiber had the front position, and she opened up her sprint first, but Brand wasn't able to come through, the two battling shoulder to shoulder all the way to the line, with neither rider celebrating as it was unclear who had clinched the win.

Results

It was double joy for Belgium at the UEC European Cyclo-cross championships over the weekend, with Lentel Huys and Lars Peers respectively, winning the junior women's and men's races on Dutch soil.

On Saturday, Huys used her power on the daunting 99 stairs of Zeddam's course to stamp her authority on the junior women's race as the championships in the Netherlands officially got underway.

The host nation had high hopes for glory, and Isis Versluis flew the flag for the Dutch, leading into the field from the green light. She was joined by her compatriot Nynke Jochems, along with another pair of pre-race favourites, Huys and Shana Huber (Switzerland), the four leading the charge following the opening lap.

The tough Zeddam parcours began to take its toll on subsequent laps, however, with gaps beginning to emerge. Czech Karolina Rothbauerová had joined the lead group, while Brit Peggy Knox struggled to stay in touch. By the time Knox made it back to the front, Huys attacked.

She maintained a confident presence at the front of the race, particularly on the arduous staircase where she was able to add seconds to her lead, while behind her, the chase group were disorganised and unable to mount a significant challenge to the dominant Huys.

Huys led Jochems and Huber by eight seconds heading into the penultimate lap but gained further ground on the stairs, and though the chasing pair were able to close the distance somewhat on the final lap, Huys held her ground, pushing hard on the final straight to hold the resurgent Huber at bay.

Huys took the European jersey at the first time of asking, while Huber claimed silver for Switzerland, with Jochems finishing third.

On Sunday, the junior men’s race became a battle between two riders, with 16-year-old Belgian Lars Peers taking the honours to win the title at his first attempt. The race was a duel between Peers and his Dutch rival, 17-year-old Delano Heeren, with the younger man escaping with two of the six laps left to race and building his advantage.

Peers eventually crossed the line 15 seconds ahead of Heeren, with another Belgian, Bas Vanden Eynde, riding solo to third place.

The race stayed largely together on the opening lap, with a large group crossing the line together; however, as it progressed, Heeren began to stamp his authority on the rest of the pack, setting the fastest lap on the third time round and going clear.

He remained alone at the front next time round, but by the end of the fourth lap Peers had caught him, taking a lead of eight seconds onto the penultimate lap, extending it as the race wore on and taking a lead of 17 seconds onto the final circuit.

Heeren battled hard, sometimes getting to within 12 seconds, but Peers was not to be denied.

Results - junior women

Results - junior men

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FDJ United-SUEZ manager Lars Boom has outlined Demi Vollering's main goals for the 2027 season and talked about what went right in a stunningly successful 2026 campaign.

Vollering enjoyed her most successful season yet, with wins at the Tour of Flanders, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Giro d'Italia Women, Tour de France Femmes, and the World and European Championships, among 16 victories.

She added another trophy to her collection on Monday, taking home the Keetie van Oosten-Hage trophy as the best Dutch female cyclist of the year. It's her second time winning the award, having previously triumphed in 2023.

At the ceremony in Utrecht, Boom told WielerFlits about Vollering's 2027 goals, with her schedule likely to follow a familiar pattern.

"Well, I think the Tour de France again. And defending her world title," Boom said of her top priorities for next season. Her early season goals and starting point have yet to be defined, however.

"She will ride some Classics and maybe the Giro again. It's a bit obvious, of course, but I think the Tour and the World Championships will be major milestones again."

Vollering has been in the USA in recent weeks, travelling through California and Oregon and taking part in events and rides with sponsors Specialized, Red Bull, and visiting Nike HQ in Portland.

Attention will soon turn to the 2027 season, though, and renewed hostilities with rivals including Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney at Lidl-Trek, new Movistar pairing Paula Blasi and Marlen Reusser, Visma-Lease a Bike leader Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, and UAE Team L'IMAD's Elisa Longo Borghini, among others.

She beat all of them in 2026, and Boom hinted at what she did right.

"I think she has grown a lot mentally. If I take the Giro as an example, she was quite nervous back then," Boom said.

"In the Tour, however, there was total calm, and we basically didn't say anything on the bus or just before the start. That really made a world of difference."

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Ashleigh Moolman Pasio's career could have ended very differently had she given in to a drawn-out and frustrating recovery to a fractured vertebrae. She considered hanging up her race bike during the 2025 season, a year earlier than planned, her confidence weakened after 18 months of trying to find form due to a crash at the 2024 Volta a Catalunya.

However, the South African was determined to write a different final chapter to her 17-year professional career, and saddled up for one last campaign.

Following the Road World Championships in Montreal, where she finished 19th in the road race, and the Gravel World Championships in Nannup, the pioneer of African women's cycling has retired in a much happier place than a year ago.

Speaking to Moolman Pasio over a video call from her home on the outskirts of Girona, it's clear that this conversation would have been very different had it occurred twelve months earlier. The AG Insurance-Soudal rider is leaving the peloton satisfied to have bowed out on her own terms and in good shape, rather than being forced out through injury.

She isn't leaving the sport altogether, however, and now takes up a role with Team Amani as the African Continental outfit's general manager, aiming to take its women's team to the Tour de France Femmes in 2028.

"At the end of 2025 I actually didn't know who I was as an athlete any longer. It was such a disconnect from the athlete I was in training and who I knew I was in terms of the power and the performance I could produce," Moolman Pasio tells Cyclingnews a few days after her final bow at the gravel worlds. "I felt quite lost and desperate. It did cross my mind to retire sooner than planned."

Alongside her T10 vertebra fracture, Moolman Pasio also discovered at that time that she was suffering from high insulin sensitivity, causing her muscles to flush out glucose from her bloodstream; a physiological concept known as the 'athlete paradox'. After adjusting her diet, she got back in shape for the 2026 season.

"I decided that I wanted to finish my career on my terms and managed to get back to a level that I was very happy with," she says, having finished fourth at April's Brabantse Pijl among several other strong results in her final year.

"I finished on my terms and I finished the athlete that I know I should be. Whereas if I had finished last year having had all those performance issues I would have felt like I was forced to retire because I'm not good enough any longer. Now, I actually could continue… I still am at the level that I could hugely contribute to a team."

"I didn't finish because I wasn't good enough any longer. I finished because I've decided it's time to put my focus into other things," she adds.

Moolman Pasio was pleased with her final road worlds performance, finishing in the top-20 on a tough course in Montréal. Things didn't go quite as smoothly on the gravel two weeks later, however, as she endured a cold in the days before and ended her final race early due to a crash.

No "fairytale ending," she says, but turning 41 in December, Moolman Pasio is now taking time to reflect on almost two decades in Europe that have themselves had the twists and turns of a good novel.

An outsider infiltrating a European sport

No African woman precedes Moolman Pasio for her longevity and achievements in professional cycling. After qualifying as a chemical engineer at Stellenbosch University, the Pretorian discovered her talent for cycling later than most, encouraged and supported by her husband, Carl.

Moolman Pasio began racing on the South African scene while at university. She soon signed for one of the country's big teams, Cyclelab-Toyota, which in 2008 enabled her to race in Europe for the first time at the Tour Feminin de l'Ardèche. She finished the six-stage race in 39th, doing enough to convince Lotto Ladies to hand her a life-changing contract.

"The Tour of Ardèche was a big big eye-opener. [I was] totally out of my depth at that point in time; crashing, punctures, all sorts of nonsense. But thankfully I made contact with Lotto. We managed to negotiate this ride for a couple of members of the local team on the Lotto set-up. [It was] for free. We just got our bikes and support," she explains.

"It took determination, it took guts. I had to be really brave to make this all happen. It also took the support around me which I was very lucky to have."

Moolman Pasio describes racing a 'double season' in her first couple of years; competing in Europe during the northern hemisphere summer with Lotto, and then again throughout the summer months in South Africa. She survived on the small amount of pay from racing in South Africa as well as some personal endorsement deals from South African companies.

She says her first "proper contract" came along in 2014 when she joined the Norwegian Hitec Products team after a season in which she finished on the podium at La Fléche Wallonne. However, throughout all this time, she and Carl had been struggling with visa restrictions due to their South African passports. Utilising his Italian heritage, Moolman Pasio's husband managed to get Italian passports for both of them, solving their visa restriction woes.

Moolman Pasio went on to take a total of 49 UCI victories throughout her career. She became the first African woman to win a WorldTour stage race in 2022 at the Tour de Romandie, won the UCI eSports World Championships in 2020 and was twice overall runner-up at the Giro d'Italia Women. For much of that time, Moolman Pasio has been the only African rider at the top level of women's cycling, something which she plans to change in the next phase of her life.

'The hunger in their eyes' – Paying it forward with Team Amani

Moolman Pasio's career has not only been characterised by what she has achieved on the bike, but also her activities off it. She set up Rocacorba Cycling in 2021 alongside her husband, a boutique cycling hotel in a restored 17th century estate, nestled in the mountains near Girona and named after one of the local climbs. Alongside the hotel, Moolman Pasio established the Rocacorba Collective, a thriving indoor cycling community with a particular mission to uplift and bring women together.

In a sport that has become more insular, with riders able to focus on little else aside from their performance, Moolman Pasio has always ridden with a wider set of goals in mind. In 2023, during the middle of her Classics campaign, she travelled back to South Africa to support women from Khaltsha Cycling, a cycling project partnered with Rocacorba Collective in the country's largest township, to ride the Cape Town Cycle Tour.

"I've always been driven by impact, purpose, paying it forward, deeper than winning bike races," she says. "Yes, performing at bike races motivated me, obviously, to keep always giving my best, but my real inspiration as an athlete was so much more than winning bike races."

Now that she has hung up her wheels for good, Moolman Pasio will plough her full focus into her new role as general manager of Team Amani. She will guide the East African cycling project's women's Continental team, which aims to enable African women to race at the very top levels. The ultimate and immediate goal is to race the 2028 Tour de France Femmes.

Moolman Pasio's original plan in the latter stages of her career was to set up her own cycling team, linked in with the Rocacorba community. However, after speaking with Ethiopian former men's WorldTour rider Tsgabu Grmay, she recognised a synergy between her ideas and what Amani was already putting in place. Instead of competing with Amani, Moolman Pasio was invited to join the team staff, and has even spent time supporting its riders this season, hosting a small group at Rocacorba and spending a day coaching them in descending.

Instantly, Moolman Pasio was gripped by the potential of the riders from Ethiopia, Rwanda and elsewhere in East Africa.

"It was actually quite mind-blowing really," she recalls of her day coaching the riders in June.

"We went out for a session on Rocacorba to do some downhilling skills and it still gives me goosebumps to think of that day because it was just so high impact… The hunger in their eyes, that's something that really stands out to me with these girls. They have so many challenges back home, especially the Ethiopians with war that's looming [In October, fighting resumed in the Tigray region, where Amani's Ethiopian riders are from, following the 2020-2022 Tigray War between the Ethiopian Armed Forces and the Tigray People's Liberation Front – Ed.].

"Two of them have young children and their families are there, but the hunger and just how they were soaking up everything that I was showing them, everything I was saying to them. I could just see their eyes, I could see the sparkle, I could see the switch flick in their brains."

Days later, Moolman Pasio raced with her AG Insurance-Soudal team against Team Amani at the Volta a Catalunya, finishing 12th. Amani's best finisher was Ethiopian Eyerusalem Haftu Reda in 20th overall.

"Seeing how [Eyerusalem Haftu Reda] moved in the peloton, how she was fighting for her place. She transformed her descending just from spending a few hours with me. I was just blown away by it and that's when I was like these girls have it, you know."

"It's now moved from 'I want to pay forward, I want to help Africans, I want to give them opportunity', to saying 'We can get to the Tour de France, we can compete at the highest level'. If this is how quickly they can turn things around, imagine if they have a full season. They can do it."

"It didn't change my motivation, I was always motivated, but it just amplified everything. We need to make this happen. So that's when we really started talking quite aggressively. We want to be at the start line of the Tour de France in 2028 and we really do believe we can do that. So now it's about putting everything possible in place to make that happen."

The loss of Moolman Pasio's presence in the WorldTour peloton will be felt in 2027. This driven rider, with her punchy style and consistency, has been a constant figure in the bunch for 17 seasons.

However, speaking with this giant of African cycling, you get the sense that she is just getting started.

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The first year as a professional cyclist is often one of finding a footing in the intensely competitive pelotons, where the dream of being paid to race a bike can become a brutal reality. There are some, however, that do just more than learn and survive in that first year – they step up to the challenge and thrive.

Some neo-pros entered the 2026 season with the weight of expectation already on their shoulders, such as Jarno Widar and Jakob Omrzel after steadily laying foundations and building blocks via years of racing in Europe through the junior and U23 ranks, accumulating results that put them in the spotlight along the way.

Others took a more unconventional path, such as Sandrine Tas, Lennart Jasch and Lauren Dickson, starting out in another sport and then discovering a talent for cycling later on. Then there are those, like Jasch and Talia Appleton, who at the start of the season were actually not yet even neo-pros but made such a splash in the development teams that a mid-season promotion to the next tier came early.

From the surprise breakthroughs to the long watched new stars of the professional peloton, we take a look at the achievements and path of 10 riders who have made such a big mark in their first season as a professional that it seems likely you'll be hearing about them on an increasingly regular basis through coming seasons.

Lennart Jasch (Tudor Pro Cycling)

This German rider wasn't on anyone's radar as one of the neo-pro's to watch at the start of this year for one simple reason, at that point he was still listed on the Tudor Pro Cycling development team roster.

Lennart Jasch came to cycling late, coming from speedskating, but has been quick to make a big impression since he signed up with a regional cycling team in 2024. After a year with the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe Rookies in 2025, Jasch made his potential crystal clear at the 2.Pro ranked Tour of the Alps when, having stepped up to take on an event with the senior team, he claimed victory on stage 4 from among a field packed with WorldTour riders. Not surprisingly after that he was quickly bumped up to that squad for the rest of the season. That, however, is not where his winning run ended with a stage win at Il Giro d'Abruzzo to prove his early season efforts were no fluke.

That left him heading into his final stage race of the season with what he said was 'absolutely no pressure' but undoubtedly a big opportunity. The newcomer to the world of cycling who had only just stepped up into the ProTeam level was being given a chance to take on a general classification tilt as team leader at Le Tour de Langkawi with the pre-race objective outlined as his team being a top five overall. He well and truly overshot that goal.

After the very first climbing challenge to Gunung Jerai on stage 2, Jasch was already in the overall lead with a 20 second margin, though other teams had multiple options lining up behind. There were no shortage of attempts to find ways to wear down the leader, but even as the temperature of the competition and environment continued to rise, Jasch kept a cool head. He displayed the patience and composure that many far more experienced players often find it hard to muster. Plus, while he was prepared to rely on his team, Jasch was also ready to take responsibility for jumping on a dangerous move and could also finish off the team effort in a way that meant he could not only hold onto, but also add to, his leading margin. It was a race that Jasch said would provide a 'first answer' as to how he may fare as a GC rider and that first answer is one that is bound to make his rivals sit up and take notice.

Sandrine Tas (Lotto–Intermarché Ladies)

Sticking to the theme of skaters turned cyclists, let's take a look at Sandrine Tas. The 31-year-old this year turned a childhood passion and one time training tool into a profession this year. Tas switched from the ice to the road with her debut at this year's La Flèche Wallonne just months after competing in the speedskating at the Winter Olympics.

She had already made her cycling capabilities clear, coming eighth in the elite women's road race at the Belgian National Championships in 2025 and also winning two national level races. However, the first real test was launching into the professional peloton in the tough and talent packed one-day Women's WorldTour race, and Tas came through it with flying colours. She finished 57th, 3:35 off the winning time of Demi Vollering in a showing that clearly demonstrated an ability to manage the chaos of a top-tier peloton.

What's more, on just her sixth race day in the professional peloton the first win came on stage 1 of the Bretagne Ladies Tour. Then she followed it up with another on stage 3 which landed her in second overall at the three day 2.1 tour. A win, let alone two in a first season as a professional, is an impressive beginning, though more podium appearances and a Tour de France Femmes start were yet to come. In fact Tas even managed another top step before the season was over, with victory ahead of Charlotte Kool on stage 1 of the Eneco Tour to round out one extremely successful first year.

Luke Tuckwell (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe)

Australian rider Luke Tuckwell certainly wasn't heading into his first year as a professional without eyes on him, his second place overall at the Giro d'Italia Next Gen and top 10 at Tour de l'Avenir in 2025 made sure of that. He started the year at home at the Santos Tour Down Under, where he came fourth in the youth classification, and then as the season built so did the results.

At the Tour de Romandie, Tuckwell delivered his first WorldTour overall top 10, taking sixth among a strong field led by none other than Tadej Pogačar. That was impressive by itself, but it also opened up another opportunity, as it led to the decision to send the Australian to the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. That's when an already great season as a first year professional turned into a phenomenal one.

After a solid start to the race, stage 6 delivered an opportunity that Tuckwell wasn't going to let slip through his fingers. A huge break got away, with Tuckwell part of it, and while he helped his teammate Maxim Van Gils claim the stage win the Australian also finished third with a margin that comfortably shifted the rider up from twelfth overall to the very top spot.

Isaac del Toro (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) did manage to pull back the margin and take overall victory, though Tuckwell had two days riding in the yellow leader's jersey and held on to second overall – a result that neither he or anyone else will be forgetting in a hurry.

Federica Venturelli (UAE Team L'IMAD)

It was a step up from the UAE Development Team for Federica Venturelli in 2026 straight into the world's top team, and while track was still a focus – which delivered plenty of success – there was no hiding in the peloton on the road. The Italian's very first race of the season was the 1.Pro Clásica de Almeria in late February and she went straight to the top step of the podium with a winning sprint from a reduced group of six.

There was then another victory at Dwars door de Westhoek in June, quickly followed by a second place in the opening stage of the Tour Féminin International des Pyrénées. At the end of three stages of racing she also walked away with the points classification. It's an impressive tally from just 16 days of racing as a professional and bodes well for what's to come when the all-rounder adds some more in 2027, particularly if the 2025 U23 European time trial champion manages to add some more races against the clock into the mix.

Jakob Omrzel (Bahrain Victorious)

It was Jakob Omrzel who beat Luke Tuckwell to the top spot at the Giro d'Italia Next Gen in 2025 and the 20-year-old also delivered strong GC results as he stepped into the a new tier. That began with sixth overall at the Tour of the Alps in April, a top 10 at the Tour de Hongrie, third at Tour of Slovenia.

Then in the second half of the season it was time for the rider from Slovenia to take on his first Grand Tour, as the youngest rider at the Vuelta a España, and he did way more than just survive it. First there was a fourth place on the challenging uphill finish of stage 7. Then on stage 12 Omrzel got into a 30-man breakaway and then also rode away from it to cross the line solo and claim his first WorldTour win, and at a Grand Tour no less. In doing so he became the youngest Slovenian to win a Grand Tour stage, no small feat given this his compatriots in the peloton include Tadej Pogačar and Primož Roglič. Also in that moment he became the second youngest ever stage winner at the Vuelta, after Celestino Prieto who took his win in 1981.

The rider who is signed with Bahrain Victorious through till the end of 2029 also walked away from the Spanish tour with second in the youth classification and seventh overall. Though, perhaps, more importantly he left his first Grand Tour having gathered experience and tested his limits, which look set to stretch to considerable heights through the years ahead.

Mackenzie Coupland (Liv AlUla Jayco)

For Liv AlUla Jayco, there is plenty of pride wrapped up in the Australian summer, as it is the one time of the year when the nation's only Women's WorldTour Team gets to perform at home. There, too, is plenty of effort put into making the team is also taking the green and gold stripes of the national champions jersey back to Europe. Ruby Roseman-Gannon may have been the favourite from the squad to do just that, but Mackenzie Coupland, who had just stepped up from the Liv AlUla Jayco development squad at the start of the year turned out to be the one to claim the jersey after making a late move that stuck.

That meant a neo-pro year in the distinctive national champions kit for the first year professional, a big enough achievement on its own delivered in one of her very first races with the Women's WorldTour team. She was also the squad's top finisher at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race later that month, narrowly missing the podium with fourth and then in March, joined the development squad for a race and claimed a stage and the overall victory at Vuelta a Extremadura Femenina. A third place at La Périgord Ladies when then followed up with a spot on the Tour de France Femmes squad and a strong fourth at Chrono Féminin de Gatineau to help round out a first year in the professional peloton for the 21 year old.

After starting with such a strong opening round in Australia in 2026, there is no doubt there will be plenty of eyes on her to see what she can deliver in round two in 2027.

Jarno Widar (Lotto Intermarché)

There was no shortage of focus on Jarno Widar in 2026 as he stepped up to the Lotto Intermarché WorldTour team from the development squad, having won the Kristallen Fiets young talent of the year award for a second year running plus delivered results that included victory at Liège–Bastogne–Liège U23, stage wins in the Giro NextGen and the Tour de l’Avenir as well as the European U23 road race title. It was a results list that meant he was ushered into the team with considerable fanfare, with the expectation that he would be doing far more than learning the ropes but would be supported to chase key results, in fact the 20-year-old even entered his first Grand Tour, the Vuelta a España, as team leader.

The first half of the season had its challenges, with illness and lingering knee injury keeping him away from racing for 16 weeks, though he made a solid mark soon after his return with fourth on the final stage of Tour de Suisse. He then upped the ante in his Vuelta debut, coming second on stage 4 behind Tadej Pogačar. There was also a fourth on stage 13 of the Spanish Grand Tour.

It was, however, the closing month of 2026 when Widar stepped up to deliver on the promise and to the top step, with a win Tre Valli Varesine and then his first WorldTour stage victory in the final day of racing at the Tour of Guangxi, which also clinched him the overall win. Those strong closing weeks are bound to help make the challenges of the early season feel like a distant memory and set the rider up as a focal point for the team in 2027, a year where the squad will be losing its former great hope, Arnaud De Lie.

Lauren Dickson (FDJ United-Suez)

Lauren Dickson is another of the later entries to cycling, initially finding her way into the sport via triathlons but only a couple of years after her first race finding a spot on one of the world's top teams, FDJ United-Suez. It may have been a fast progression but there could be little doubting that the British rider who turned 26 this year was ready for it.

Less than three months into her professional racing career and she already managed to find her way onto the podium the Spanish 2.1 ranked race, the Vuelta a Extremadura Femenina, when Dickson snared second behind new Australian champion Mackenzie Coupland on stage 3 and also second overall. Impressively she then also followed that up with podiums in the Women's WorldTour race of Itzulia Women, where her third place on stage 3 once again also secured her the final spot on the overall podium. Then it was fourth at Durango-Durango Emakumeen Saria and 11th overall at the Giro d'Italia. There was another second on stage 1 of the Tour de Suisse Women, though her run was halted by a broken collarbone later in the race. Still the momentum was recaptured later in the season and she moved up to the top step at the Faun Tour. The late season win will make sure that even though she may be a new rider at one of the world's top teams, there will be no disappearing into the background when plans for 2027 are being formulated.

What's more, she did all this while also proving her value as a domestique, delivering a prominent support role in Demi Vollering's Giro d'Italia victory.

Brady Gilmore (NSN)

Brady Gilmore succinctly summed up his year at the top level of the sport in a social media post as "a season I'll never forget" with "a lot to be proud of". He may not have entered his neo-pro season with quite the same fanfare as some of the others on the list but with multiple wins while racing with the development team, including two Volta a Portugal em Bicicleta stage victories and a Circuit des Ardennes stage and overall win, there was plenty of reason for optimism that he could make some kind of impression in his first season with the NSN Cycling WorldTour squad.

There was certainly no waiting around, as he did just that in his very first races with the squad, twice missing the podium by just one spot on stage 4 and stage 5 of the Tour Down Under and then landing on it with a third at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race. It wasn't long then until he found the top step, beating Dorian Godon and Remco Evenepoel over the line in a reduced group sprint on the final stage of Volta a Catalunya. From there the top tens continued to roll in through the season. Given the home performance at the start of 2026 as Gilmore was just integrating with the team, it will be intriguing to see just what the 25-year-old can deliver if we see him on the start line again for the Australian summer season in 2027.

Talia Appleton (Liv AlUla Jayco)

Talia Appleton had well and truly proven her ability in Australia and beyond in 2025, claiming a number of victories across the top-tier domestic series, the ProVelo Super League and also coming second overall, plus also stepping up to the podium on three stages and in the overall of the Tour de l'Avenir. It was a season that earnt the rider a place in the Liv AlUla Jayco development squad for 2026, but she quickly proved that she was capable of even more. An early season run of results that saw her take seventh at both the GP de Chambéry and the Clásica de Almería as well as third overall at Vuelta a Extremadura meant by May she had been promoted to the WorldTour team.

Once there the solid results continued to flow, with the 20-year-old consistently near the front section of the field despite the then 20-year-old rider's very recent introduction to it. Regularly a top five performer in the youth classification, and also finishing 14th overall at the Tour de Suisse, Appleton also broke through with her first professional win in June, making the most of her climbing strength to claim the 1.1 ranked Alpes Gresivaudan Classic. With that win and a results list through the season that paints a picture of consistency and strength, the rider from Victoria not only clearly justified the fast track to the Women's WorldTour team, but delivered more than a small hint of her GC potential.

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Hannah Otto (Scott Sports) added another endurance record to her resume on Wednesday, this one to an elevation of 19,300 feet above sea level. On November 4, she completed a Fastest Known Time (FKT) with Beyond the Summit: Kilimanjaro for World Bike Relief, becoming the first woman to use a mountain bike to summit Mount Kilimanjaro and descend in one day.

Her effort on the highest mountain in Africa almost came to an abrupt end with two miles to go, when she slipped in some mud and broke her tibia. She was able to remount her bike and pedal with one leg to complete the journey, a film crew nearby capturing the effort for a future film, though she refused assistance so the record would count, recorded as 'one day' for the FKT since it was a mark.

"Kilimanjaro FKT!! Mission accomplished! Dream come true! The first known woman to climb and descend Kilimanjaro in one day by bicycle," she posted to Instagram one day ago.

"From the dark hours of the early morning and listening to the monkeys scream at me in the rainforest to steep pitches over 40% gradients, to scrambling over rocks with a bike on my back, to a 19,300-foot [5895 metre] summit covered in snow this was the best experience of my entire life and also the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

"As if it wasn’t hard enough, with two miles to go I had a small crash. It was simple, just sliding out in some mud. But my foot got caught and I felt the bone snap. I laid in the mud feeling my dreams slip away, and that felt more painful than any broken bone. I crawled to my bike, used it as a crutch, and finished the final two miles pedaling with one leg to the finish.

"X-rays show a broken tibia. I think this shows that a dream may just be the most powerful thing in the world."

After an assessment at hospital in Tanzania, Otto told Cyclingnews that she travel back to the US immediately for medical attention to repair a proximal tibia fracture.

"I was advised to fly home for further care and examination. I’m heading home from Africa today [Friday]. I have a consult with a surgeon on Tuesday and I’ll have more information then."

The Utah-based mountain bike specialist completed her fifth season as part of the Life Time Grand Prix two weeks before making the trip to Africa. She ended her run of four consecutive seasons in the top 10, missing the mark by just three points for 11th overall. Her best race finishes in the series this year were third at Little Sugar MTB and eighth at Leadville Trail 100 MTB, a race she won in 2022.

Otto has accumulated an eye-popping collection of FKTs, which she also uses as training for her endurance off-road racing. Last fall she set a new FKT for women on Mauna Kea, riding the 55-mile (88.5km) mountain road with 13,700 feet (4,175 metres) of climbing in Hawaii in 5 hours, 43 minutes and 50 seconds. She also has a trio of FKT records in high terrain US desert routes - Kokopelli Train, White Rim and Whole Enchilada.

While only 26.5 miles in distance (42.6km) in Tanzania, the main obstacle was elevation gain across the dormant volcano. The summit is just above 19,300 feet (5,895 metres) with five climate zones crossed from top to bottom.

Several days prior to her solo FKT, Otto made an initial ascent with a group and local crew, including a lead guide who had summited Kilimanjaro over 180 times. The 'first' summit was made on November 1.

"The entire crew made it to the top to celebrate this momentous moment together. Now we descend all the way back to the bottom and I’ll attempt to summit in just one day on November 3rd," she wrote on her social diary.

"After seeing this whole mountain piece by piece, it scares me. Things can change in an instant and the only constant is inconsistency. But that’s the entire point. I’m diving into the fear, I’m believing despite not knowing. I hope what anyone takes away from this attempt is the bravery to try without promise. We’re almost at $60K raised for World Bicycle Relief via The Intrepid Foundation!"

She said she realised her power on the bike would drop at the higher altitude, so she was keeping a close watch on her heart rate. "Instead of tracking miles I'm tracking elevation climbed."

Clad in a heavy coat, lined gloves and her helmet, Otto smiled for a photo when she was able to dismount and sit on the rock wall at the top of the mountain with a bright blue sky shining above.

"This film will be absolutely epic; that I’m sure of," Otto posted. The date of the film release is yet to be announced.

The fundraising campaign for World Bicycle Relief has raised $62,137 so donations going through the Intrepid Travel Foundation so that up to 1,000 bicycles reach women and girls to access education, healthcare and jobs.

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Aniek van Alphen (777tv) pulled off her first victory of the season in the nighttime Superprestige in Middelkerke, soloing away from the field on the second lap and maintaining a strong advantage to the finish. The result signalled she will be a strong competitor at the upcoming European Championships in Zeddam on Saturday.

Defending European champion Inge van der Heijden (Crelan-Corendon) couldn't chip away at Van Alphen's lead after missing the attack as she was caught in traffic in the early laps. However, she held on for second place, conserving her energy after distancing Denise Betsema (De Ceuster Bouwkranen), who bobbled in the final lap and had to settle for third.

The nighttime round of the Superprestige had a small women's field with the European Championships just two days away. While the race was missing top rider Lucinda Brand, 27 women toed the line under the bright lights in Middelkerke.

After following closely as Hélène Clauzel (777tv) took the hole shot, Defending champion Amandine Fouquenet (Pauwels Sauzen-Altez Industriebouw) remained at the head of the race for the first lap.

But on the next one, she bobbled on one of the many short, steep climbs and had to chase Van Alphen, who opened up a lead of six seconds at the start of lap three.

Fouquenet continued to fade as European champion Van der Heijden caught Clauzel and set off in pursuit of Van Alphen. Betsema latched on during the fourth lap to form a three-rider chase.

Clauzel began to struggle, losing touch with Van der Heijden and Betsema, and by the end of lap four, the European champion was 10 seconds behind, with Betsema just ahead of Clauzel at 15 seconds by the start of the fifth lap.

It was Van der Heijden and Betsema chasing together with two laps to go, with a 14-second deficit to Van Alphen, with Clauzel and Fouquenet further behind.

Betsema surged on lap six, bringing the gap to the leader down to ten seconds but Van Alphen matched her acceleration and extended her lead on the sinuous second half of the circuit and started the final lap with 16 seconds over the two chasers.

Results

Swiss bike brand BMC are set to make their first foray into the women’s peloton for many years, partnering with a Spanish ProTeam, Laboral Kutxa-Fundación Euskadi.

The deal, which is with the team’s Basque Country parent organisation Fundación Euskadi, will see the team not only riding their Teammachine SLR 01 frame sets, but also using their cockpits and wheels.

BMC have been a presence in the men’s peloton for some years, and currently provide bikes to the Tudor Pro Cycling Team. Before that, they worked with AG2R Citroën, Dimension Data, CCC and, obviously BMC Racing. However, they have not worked with a women’s team since at least the creation of the UCI Women’s WorldTour in 2016.

The company recently teased the partnership with a press release, saying "it’s about time we saw BMC bikes in both the men’s and Women’s Grand Tours," and the partnership has now been announced. As Laboral are one of the sport’s second-tier ProTeams, they have realised their desire to be present at the biggest women’s stage races.

"This partnership represents an exciting new chapter for BMC," said BMC’s head of marketing, David Heine. "As one of the brands that supported women's cycling early on, we are proud to return to the highest level of the sport with Laboral Kutxa-Fundación Euskadi.

"Women’s racing is thrilling, inspiring, dynamic, and growing rapidly worldwide. We look forward to supporting the team with our performance-driven bikes and proudly cheering for the riders throughout the season."

The partnership is part of BMC’s bid to gain more relevance with younger and more diverse riders and, as the team has riders from both Colombia and Chile on their 2027 roster, will help the company expand their presence not just in Spain but also South America.

Spanish rider Sandra Alonso will return in 2027, having several seasons of experience on the WorldTour level and raced the Tour de France Femmes three times.

Laboral Kutxa have been riding at UCI level since 2020, starting life as Continental level team before moving up to ProTeam in 2025. During the 2026 season they rode Chinese XDS bikes and Shimano groupsets, it is not yet known whether Shimano will remain on board.

The president of Fundación Euskadi, Iñaki Isasi, is rightfully pleased with the partnership. "Their technical standards and culture of performance correspond to the ambitions of Laboral Kutxa-Fundación Euskadi. This support allows us to approach the season with confidence and continue to grow our women's team at the highest level."

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After nurturing the Gravel Earth Series for four years, organisers Klassmark have revamped the global collection of races under their direction as The Traka World Series in 2027, announcing a compact framework of seven events, all with consistent prize money and live streaming.

Six of the seven events have been revealed, with Klassmark owning and operating all but one of the events under their 'The Traka' brand. The majority of racing will take place across Spain, with the multi-day Santa Vall by The Traka stage race, February 6-7, taking place in Catalonia, followed by Gravel Desert by The Traka on March 13, which moved from a July slot, in the Monegros region.

The Traka 300 will take place on May 1 as the only distance of three race days with points for pro fields. Two other distances, 100 kilometres and 200 kilometres, remain centerpieces for amateur fields on either side of the series race, April 30 and May 2, and as a set the event will now be called The Traka Girona.

The back half of the series will return to the US at Iowa's CORE4 by The Traka on August 21 and revisit Belgium with The River by The Traka on September 11. The series concludes in Spain with the Last Dance, formerly known as Ranxo Gravel, a date in October yet to be confirmed.

"The story of The Traka World Series does not begin from scratch. It is the result of years of growth, shared experiences and an approach to gravel that has evolved alongside the sport itself. Gravel Earth Series has played a fundamental role in that journey, connecting races, athletes and organisers from different countries and helping build an international gravel community," organisers said in a press release about setting a foundation for 2027.

"Throughout 2026, this evolution was already taking shape through the development of By The Traka, a concept that connects different events under The Traka philosophy while preserving the character, identity and distinctive qualities of each race.

"The Traka consolidates its position as an international brand, By The Traka brings together the events linked to the project, and The Traka World Series provides the framework for elite competition, with a calendar and overall standings connecting the season’s races."

Unlike the Life Time Grand Prix which has a series prize purse for invited riders only, the open format for The Traka World Series remains in place, with a total of €20,000 on offer to the top 10 overall, split evenly among pro women and pro men. Klassmark will also offer €8,000 in prize money at each event. At CORE4, sponsor River Products Company will double the race purse to €16,000, which will bring the overall cash payouts to €84,000 for races and the series. Individual race payouts go five deep.

CORE4 has been part of the global series for two previous editions, and this year has an appealing calendar slot between Leadville Trail 100 MTB and Lauf Gravel Worlds. The Iowa gravel race has a new venue north of Iowa City in a new urban downtown area of Solon, and will create new courses to mark an expanded collaboration with the By The Traka family, while retaining local ownership.

"Being part of that next tier in the series allows another level of marketing support and other components too, such as our pursuit of a live stream. We'll have 100% control over all the components, it's still a community-based and grassroots-supported event," Alex Buhmeyer, race director and founder of CORE4, told Cyclingnews.

"The last couple of years we've had some of the best athletes here. Since we joined [the series], we've seen a surge of top-level athletes. The move into downtown Solon and be able to grow and accommodate more athletes. We roll out the red carpet with our age groupers and youth riders and everybody, regardless if they're pro or not."

Live coverage was promised for all Traka World Series events, though details are yet to be confirmed. Last year organisers launched Gravel Earth Series TV, but streaming on the YouTube channel was limited to Santa Vall, The Traka 200 and The Traka 360.

A modified points-based scoring system was used the last two years, which was easier to follow, and was expected to be in place again to determine rankings. In 2026, Specialized Off-road teammates Mads Würtz Schmidt and Geerike Schreurs came away with the pro titles.

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Former Time Trial World Champion Ellen van Dijk has shed light on the management culture within the Picnic-PostNL team after the leadership was accused of creating a culture of anxiety and fear.

Van Dijk spent the 2017 and 2018 seasons with the team when it was called Sunweb, and described the management structure as "special", saying their methods contributed to her leaving the team after her two-year tenure brought 10 victories.

However, she does not recognise the culture of fear exposed in an extensive recent report from the Dutch public broadcaster NOS, though she accepts it might have existed.

"They have a strong opinion on how to work with riders, and they really believe in their approach. And for them, it's only that way that works," Van Dijk told Cyclingnews.

"There's a lot written about an anxiety culture, and I never experienced it that way. The management wanted you to listen to them, but I never was scared of them. I mean, if I wanted to say something, I would say it. But maybe if you're a younger rider, you can experience that.

"I just didn't experience the anxiety they are they are writing about, and for me that's a that's an important nuance to it. Maybe some people did experience that, but I didn’t."

'We were not a perfect match'

During an investigation into the team, NOS and the podcast In der Waaier spoke to 71 current and former riders and staff members, revealing accusations of a culture of fear and a "form of tyranny", with some staff leaving the organisation feeling traumatised.

The report further spoke of a lack of support for riders’ mental welfare and a management culture that feared losing control of its staff and was unwilling to allow riders any room outside the organisation’s decision-making.

Van Dijk’s time at the time came in the middle of a storied career that saw her take 71 victories, including three World and four European time trial titles. With Sunweb, her 10 race victories contributed to almost a third of the team’s total, but she left after two years, joining Lidl-Trek where she now works as a coach after retiring at the end of the 2025 season.

Though the team have a reputation for recruiting younger riders, Van Dijk was 29 when she joined, with one world title and victories at the Tour of Flanders and the Boels Ladies Tour GC already on her palmarès. The equally established and mature Lucida Brand arrived at the same time.

"I had quite some discussions with the management, they have a special way of working, and it didn't always fit my way of working, I kind of knew when I signed there that they are like that, but it was a bit more than I expected and yeah, we were not a perfect match together.

"But elite sports, being at the top level, it is really hard, and you need a special character for that. I think in this team, let's say, the characters that are less suited for pro cycling, they are offended a bit more easily, maybe.

"I think it's kind of part of the job that sometimes at the highest intensities, the highest emotions, people say things which are not okay, and then it depends on how sensitive you are at that moment. Sometimes it really hurts, and sometimes you think 'I don't care'. But it's a complicated subject for sure."

Harder for the youngsters

Picnic-PostNL has always had reputation for recruiting younger riders across its two WorldTour teams and that certainly applied to the women’s team, the 17 women on their 2026 roster averaging only 23 years of age. This has advantages and disadvantages, according to Van Dijk. On one hand riders are developed, but on the other they lack the maturity to challenge poor practice.

"I think they were really good for young riders to develop them and to guide them in the process of developing," she said. "I didn't agree with their way of working, but that's why I left, and maybe I had a bit of an easier position because I already had my place. It’s definitely easier than when you are young and you still are fighting for your place in cycling."

Van Dijk’s time with Sunweb was a hugely successful period for both the men’s and the women’s rosters. On the men’s side Tom Dumoulin was at the height of his powers, winning the GC at the 2017 Giro d’Italia and four stages across the two years, while other riders took multiple stages at the Tour de France among the 31 wins in the two years.

In the same period the women’s squad bagged victories at the Tour of Flanders, Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, the Ride London Classique and Madrid Challenge by La Vuelta among their haul of 29 wins. And both teams won the now defunct Team Time Trial World Championships in 2017.

"That was a surprise, and I wouldn't say that was because of their structure, I think; it was because of many things together," Van Dijk said of that success.

"But they got the confirmation that their way of working was going well, and from what I heard after that year it only became more strict because they started to believe in it even more."

Since the allegations emerged the team have appointed a prominent Dutch sports lawyer to lead an independent commission.

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Almost four weeks after her serious crash at the UCI Gravel World Championships, Dutch rider Geerike Schreurs is finally well enough to travel back to Europe to continue her recovery.

After an excellent season riding for Specialized Off-Road Racing, Schreurs had been one of the favourites to at least reach the podium at the World Championships in Nannup, Western Australia. However, with around 50km of the race remaining, the Dutch woman’s wheel got caught in a rut, causing her to crash hard and forcing her out of the race.

After being transferred to hospital in Perth, she was found to have suffered multiple fractures to her neck and spine, along with broken ribs and a broken collarbone.

After multiple surgeries and 11 days confined in hospital, she was allowed out, but she was only given the all-clear to travel home earlier this week, though she was forced to wear a neck brace on the journey.

"Finally, after weeks in Australia, I’ve got the green light to fly home," she wrote in a social media post. "An 'off-season' in Australia normally sounds pretty exotic, but this wasn’t quite how I had pictured it.

"Between little walks, fresh beach air, sand between my toes, hours of audiobooks, colouring books and lots of short, one-hour naps, I tried to make the most of the good moments while being 'stuck' in Perth."

She went on to praise her fiancé, who has remained with her through her recovery in Australia. "He’s been an absolute saint, taking care of me in every possible way and, most importantly, being there through the low moments, the ones you’ll never see in any picture.

"Now we’re heading to the Netherlands, where I can finally see doctors and physios to get the right help and support for my rehab. Not exactly how I had planned, but one step closer to getting back on track."

Schreurs’ rise in elite gravel racing came after a stalled road career and time spent working as a soigneur for various Women’s WorldTour teams. She rode as a privateer in 2024, then spent a year with SD Worx-Protime, riding a mixed gravel and road programme before moving to the Specialized Off-Road team for 2026.

This year alone, she won five races from 13 starts, with ninth place her lowest placing, taking the top spot overall in the Gravel Earth Series (now The Traka World Series). The UCI World Championships, which was eventually won by Schreurs’ compatriot Marianne Vos, was the only race she failed to finish. Her future in the sport is not yet known.

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The route of the 2027 Giro d’Italia Women was revealed on Tuesday and presents the peloton with a tough nine days of racing. With four mountain days, including an uphill time trial, and five flatter stages, it will be interesting, but it seems a little like an enhanced version of the 2026 race, won so brilliantly by Demi Vollering (FDJ United-SUEZ), with everything turned up to 11.

Since taking over the organisation of the women’s Giro in 2024, RCS, which organises the men’s event, has done a good job in modernising and increasing the visibility of what remains the second biggest race in the women’s calendar. Of course, visibility was helped this year by the date change, which the previous organisation requested, but with the power of RCS behind it, the race has been to places and climbs it would otherwise have been unable to reach.

However, despite that obvious progression, the 2027 race route is not a step forward, just much, much more of the same. The race has been made punishingly difficult, thus reducing the number of riders able to compete for the podium, and it could either be won on the first mountain top finish on stage 4, or we may be faced with a desultory stand-off, riders waiting for the final day.

The 2027 Giro is, in fact, shorter than this year's edition, though not by much. Organisers have slated 1,132km, as opposed to last year’s 1,151, which was reduced from the original distance after the Colle delle Finestre stage was truncated for safety reasons.

However, next year’s race includes a whopping 17,450m of vertical ascent, more than 5,000m more than 2026. And we all know by now that harder is not necessarily more entertaining.

Of course, we don’t yet know whether Vollering will defend her title next year, but she has developed into the most outstanding stage racer of her generation, able to climb better than almost everyone, with the punch to create gaps and the engine to maintain them. With more climbing and the retention of the mountain TT from the 2026 race, the route plays into her hands, reducing, rather than increasing jeopardy.

But it’s not about whether Vollering wins or not; whether the race was harder or easier she would probably still win, such is her class and strength and that of her French team. It’s about entertainment and engagement, getting eyes on the sport and keeping them there, and for that, as in all sports, there needs to be jeopardy.

Jeopardy is why the 2026 Giro was so brilliant. With 40km of the final stage left to ride all three places on the general classification podium were up for grabs until Vollering played her card, eventually winning the GC by 30 seconds with a jaw-dropping ride. I was on my feet from the moment she attacked until she triumphantly crossed the line, awestruck by her performance while simultaneously feeling for Anna van der Breggen (SD Worx-Protime) as her grasp on the pink jersey slipped away. The day had everything I wanted from sport.

And all that happened on a stage with only 2,100m of vertical ascent, just a bump in comparison to next year’s trio of Alpine stages.

Bigger isn’t better, harder isn’t more entertaining

Let’s start with the mountain time trial. It’s the second consecutive edition with such a stage, and last year the TT set up that thrilling final, Van der Breggen’s win startling her rivals as she moved into pink. But such a stage influences the GC hugely, and to include a near facsimile the following year is too much. In a race of only nine stages, to have such a similar defining stage each year lacks imagination.

Like the entire race, this year’s TT is shorter than in 2026, but unlike last year, it’s unrelentingly uphill and will produce some notable time gaps. Better might have been a more sporting time trial, flatter, allowing those specialists who are slightly less capable in the mountains to stay in touch with the overall lead and add some of that crucial jeopardy into the final day.

Don’t get me wrong, of course there is a place for brutal TTs, but we had one last year, so why do it again so soon? Even in a nine-day race there’s also a place for stages with 3,500m climbing, we had one last year, after all, but three in one week? Add in that TT, and we have four stages in the mountains likely to produce sizeable time gaps, especially when two of them are mountain top finishes.

Perversely, those mountain top finishes could be the saving grace, allowing the real lightweight climbers like Petra Stiasny (Human Powered Health) and especially Sarah Gigante (AG Insurance-Soudal), who came close to winning the 2025 race, to challenge. For them descending is the problem and without that to challenge them they could challenge Vollering.

The first of those 3,500m days comes on stage 4 with the final climb to the Passo della Presolana, if that doesn’t decide the final podium, stage 6 will, with even more vertical ascent over two climbs of almost 20km.

The one saving grace about the three Alpine stages is that they get progressively harder, but we really could see the GC all but decided on day four, and if it’s not we could have three days of pure grinding stalemate, the favourites waiting for the final day to make their bid for glory.

The flatter days are the saving grace

On the other hand, RCS has provided some real interest for the five flatter days, even if they do all contribute to the total amount of climbing metres.

Last season the same sprinter won each of the three opening stages, Elisa Balsamo (Lidl-Trek) eventually taking four victories in total. This year there’s less for the fast women, with each of the opening three days covering much more climbing than last year’s corresponding stages, the second stage has as much as 2,100m of climbing, though the run into Genoa is relatively flat before an uphill kick to the line.

Perversely, this could be very good for Balsamo, who deals with punchy climbs brilliantly, but it doesn’t matter who wins, it matters that the race interesting and entertaining, and stages like these invite attacks, uncertainty and miscalculation in the chasing bunch. It doesn’t even matter if they all end up in bunch sprints with the same rider winning, provided there is some of the crucial sporting ingredient: jeopardy.

While it won’t affect the racing, the location of the route also fails to show off what is arguably the most beautiful country in the world. When we first saw the overview map of the nine stages the first thing we noticed was a huge expanse of empty space – where is the race? It seems as though the entire event has been geographically swept into the top left-hand corner.

Of course, nine stages limit where the race can go, and long transfers are hard on riders and race staff alike, but with its diversity and distinct regions, it’s a shame we won’t see more of Italy.

The Giro is always a great race, and since RCS has been in charge it’s far better organised and executed, with better coverage and more fans at the roadside. That is to be applauded, what is not is constantly making races harder but not more interesting, and we should hope for a more even parcours in future years.

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The Vuelta a España's hardest climb may just be getting even tougher in future as a gravel sector could be added to the Alto de l'Angliru.

According to a Eurosport report, a former local mayor has proposed the addition to the Vuelta race director, Javier Guillén, who is set to consider it.

José Antonio Muñiz, the former mayor of Riosa, a municipality local to the 12.4km 9.7% climb, reportedly outlined two options for adding gravel sectors to the Angliru in future.

"The ascent of the Angliru is bordering on extreme difficulty, with large crowds of spectators. We are open to studying its feasibility as long as it increases the interest and spectacle of the stage without overloading the riders or compromising safety. We listen to all ideas, although only some can be put into practice," Guillén said at a ceremony at the climb where La Vuelta Femenina was awarded a gold badge by the 'Association of the Friends of the Angliru', led by Muñiz, this week.

Guillén had previously not been a fan of gravel sectors before the addition of a sector on the final climb of stage 6 at the men's Vuelta this year. The gravel sector was a success, as eventual champion Enric Mas chased down Tadej Pogačar, and Guillén conceded later that gravel will have a place in future editions, too.

Any possible addition of a gravel sector to the climb would come in the first 5km of the ascent, before the road reaches a false flat at Viapará.

The route would then rejoin the usual road for the final 6km and the climb's toughest section, where the gradients reach double digits, including the famous La Cueña les Cabres section, where gradients reach up to 23% in places.

Local newspaper La Nueva España explained the options laid out by Muñiz: "One of the options to include some gravel sections in the ascent to Angliru would be to ascend from the town of Muriellos along a track of about 4km, which combines concrete and dirt, until linking up at the Llagos curve with the traditional climb from Viapará.

"The other option would involve taking the road from Ablaneo to El Cabornín and then ascending a track that would also connect at the Llagos bend, before La Cueña les Cabres.

"Both options combine gravel with concrete on the steepest slopes and would make the legendary Angliru climb even tougher, although they would shorten some of the current 12km from La Vega to the Angliru"

It remains to be seen whether Guillén accepts the proposal for future editions of the men's and women's Vuelta.

The climb, without the gravel roads, has featured 10 times in the men's race, with riders including José Maria Jiménez, Roberto Heras, Alberto Contador (twice), and Primož Roglič triumphing at the top. It made its debut at this year's La Vuelta Femenina, with Petra Stiasny climbing to a final stage win while Paula Blasi took overall victory.

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