Mountain Bike World Champion Alan Hatherly has said he's playing the "long game" when it comes to his WorldTour career on the road, not wanting to rush into the discipline after joining Jayco AlUla at the start of the season.
Hatherly got his WT road career off to a bang in 2025 after impressing throughout the AlUla Tour in Saudi Arabia, where he finished third and second on the key climbing days and sixth overall as a fellow multi-discipline star, Tom Pidcock (Q36.5), rode to victory.
Since then, there hasn't been too much to shout about in terms of road results, with a national time trial title in South Africa being the other highlight, but Hatherly has learned a lot about which skills he needs to develop and adapt over from his excellence on the MTB.
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"It's been a good mix, even though I've been really unlucky this year, with a lot of illness and challenges along the way. But I've learned a lot and gained a lot of experience, which was really the main objective on the road for me," Hatherly told Cyclingnews at the Tour of Guangxi.
"I think we can really target the road a bit more next year, and we know where to make the improvements and hopefully we have a better year next year."
He's mixed the two disciplines well without seemingly any detriment to his off-road career, shown best by the defense of his cross-country Olympic world title in Crans-Montana, Switzerland, but also his win at the Lenzerheide World Cup to close out the season.
Although there hasn't been a specific learning curve for Hatherly riding in the WorldTour peloton, he has been able to identify the metric which he believes will put him within striking distance for road races in the coming season and at the Tour of Guangxi.
"It's not too much I've learned from the peloton, it's more about the preparation. The racing in the peloton is pretty full-on all the time, and I think fatigue resistance is the key thing," said the South African.
"Obviously for me, coming from MTB where the duration needed is 90 minutes, so VO2 max pretty much, whereas here it's four to five hours on a solid tempo threshold, and it's about being able to deliver in that last hour where it's quite difficult – that's where all the races are exploding and there's very few guys making it nowadays."
Hatherly had respect for what Pidcock, whose best results have mostly come in MTB, has managed to do in 2025, finishing third on GC at the Vuelta a España, but did point out how much of the off-road discipline the Brit has cut out of his schedule to do so.
"I think he made a big jump this year and if you look back on what did on the MTB, he didn't do too much," said Hatherly, with Pidcock having only raced the European Championships and World Cup in Pal Arinsal this year – both of which, he won.
"Each discipline needs to be respected and you really need to commit to each for whatever goal it is, and I think for me, I juggled a bit of both to get experience on the road and really target the MTB Worlds, and I think I managed to do just that.
"If I'm going to do more on the road, I'm really going to have to just focus on the road to do something there. But I think it's a progression, I don't want to focus on it too early and lose my mountain biking completely so I think it's just a balancing act at the minute and about playing the long game."
In China, Hatherly is Jayco's co-leader alongside Brit Paul Double, with the pair sat 38 and 40 seconds off the lead of Paul Magnier (Soudal-QuickStep) as the queen stage 5 arrives on Saturday. After finishing off his MTB races for 2025, he raced two Italian Classics in preparation, and was eager to get stuck into the hardest stage of the race.
"I'm coming off of quite good MTB shape, so I've transferred a bit of that to the road in the short time I had," said Hatherly.
"I had some good Italian Classics in preparation for this and it's my first time here, so I think the motivation and excitement is quite high. I'm looking forward to the rest of the week, at the moment it's all sprint stages, so I'm ready for some hills now.
"Me and Paul Double are the leaders here, and I think the fifth stage with the kind of 10-minute-ish climb that suits both of us well will be key, so we'll survive the days in between and really target that fifth stage as I think everyone else will."
