Retirement class of 2025 – the riders calling time on their career

There's arguably only one thing that all bike riders have in common when the moment comes that they retire: it's about pulling the plug on their career. Beyond that, the reasons for doing so are as many and varied as they were for getting into the sport in the first place, and the point, too, when riders opt to pull down the curtain on their career is equally varied.

Do you opt to go out at the top of the sport and with all guns blazing, a la Bernard Hinault in 1986? Or is it better to finish with a small-scale criterium in the middle of nowhere in Spain, like Miguel Indurain? This year, just to take two examples of star names, Geraint Thomas opted to end his career on home soil in Cardiff, just a few miles away from Maindy Velodrome where it all began for him aged 10. Alexander Kristoff, on the other hand, ended with a crash-out in the Tour of Langkawi, literally half a world away from his native Norway.

Cycling is a sport which is long on nostalgia and tradition but with a very short memory in other ways, and these absences, no matter where the final bow was taken, will quickly be put behind us as soon as the new season begins and the first flurry of competition gets underway. Which makes it only right to pay tribute to the departing class of 2025 and – in alphabetical order – remember how much they gave to the sport, just before the curtain falls on their careers for good.

Rui Costa

Consummate tactician who used well-developed race instincts to see off potentially stronger rivals

• Top victories: Road World Championships 2013; Tour de France, three stages; Vuelta a España, stage; Tour de Suisse x3 plus five stages; Grand Prix de Montréal; Japan Cup.
• Career win tally: 33

As Spain's Joaquim Rodríguez and Alejandro Valverde realised to their immense cost in the 2013 World Championships, you could never rule out Rui Costa. In the final kilometres of the rain-soaked Firenze Worlds elite men's road race, Spain was at a numerical advantage over Portugal's lone rider and Italy's Vincenzo Nibali, and when Rodriguez attacked, it looked like it should have been game over. However, Costa gambled – rightly – on Valverde failing to chase down and shadow his pursuit of Rodríguez, leaving Rodríguez's teammate utterly exposed when Costa bridged across. The net result was gold for Portugal, with Rodríguez, who took the silver, in tears during the winner's ceremony.

Costa's racecraft was exceptional and his strategic ability made him one of a privileged group who were always able to punch above their weight regardless of the scenario. A succession of three victories in the Tour de Suisse, considered cycling's fourth Grand Tour, were all secured as much by ably playing off more powerful squads and riders building for the Tour de France against each other as they were by Costa's won talents. In all three of his stage wins in the Tour de France, it was a similar story – except on these occasions, it was Costa fighting for solo breakaway success, not the GC battle.

While his targets never extended into the GC of Grand Tours – Portugal would have to wait until João Almeida to find a successor to Joaquim Agostinho, their only previous real specialist in that area – Costa's reputation for clinical brilliance preceded him to the point where it almost became a two-edged weapon. Many rivals realised that their chances of success with him in a breakaway were limited, and that in turn resulted in a much smaller number of victories than perhaps he deserved. But what Costa lacked in quantity, he always made up for in tactical quality, and long after his retirement, they'll surely be used as master classes on how to beat back against superior odds – and win.

Lizzie Deignan

Trailblazing figure for women's cycling who 'showed it was possible to be a professional athlete and a mum.'

There are probably two major reasons why Lizzie Deignan is so often held up as a role model and as a kind of pioneer, too, for women's cycling. "Half of the races that I’ve won weren’t even on the calendar when I first started. I’ve grown up alongside the sport," Lizzie Deignan told The Guardian as she prepared for her final race of her career in 2025, the Tour of Britain. "When I started, everyone was racing just for passion." And as Deignan told the same newspaper in 2024, "I've showed it was possible to be a professional athlete and a mum."

Quite apart from handling the challenges of parenthood at home, Deignan's ability to succeed at the highest level in her sport, too, kept her career very much in the public eye as well.

More of a one-day racer than a GC contender – although she won the Tour of Britain twice, too – Deignan was more than comfortable in all kinds of terrain in the Classics, from the hills of Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Trofeo Alfredo Binda to the cobbles of the Tour of Flanders and Gent-Wevelgem, and from sprints to solo moves like in the opening edition of Paris-Roubaix.

Four National Championships road race wins were testament to her versatility, while images of her bleeding hands after pounding across the pavè to win the Hell of the North four years ago were another sign of her resilience and determination on the bike.

Deignan's highlight of her career, though, was not a victory, but her silver behind Marianne Vos in the 2012 London Olympics road race, making her the host nation's first medallist of the Games. But her most important role, she told The Guardian, was to be part of the fight for parity between men's and women's racing in general.

I’ve never shied away from ­confrontation, or calling out ­inequality,” she said. "That’s something I will continue to strive to push towards. We’re not quite there, but we’re certainly on our way. Being part of that means more than any result."

Alexander Kristoff

Longstanding Classics specialist and top sprinter who assumed team captain's role at Uno-X in final years of career

• Top victories: Milan-Sanremo; Tour of Flanders; Gent-Wevelgem; Tour de France, four stages; GP Ouest-France; Scheldeprijs x2; Eschborn-Frankfurt x4; Cyclassics Hamburg; RideLondon Classic.
• Career win tally: 98

When Alexander Kristoff fell heavily and crashed out with 110 kilometres to go in the final stage of the Tour de Langkawi, for many fans it felt immensely unfair: surely he could have avoided a final piece of bad luck so close to celebrating the end of his career and perhaps going out on a high note with one last win?

"It's not the way I wanted to end the race or the career, but cycling is a brutal sport and it changes fast," said Kristoff in a team press release. Furthermore, despite the harsh ending, Kristoff's 20-year career had plenty of high points, amongst them two Monuments, four Tour de France stages, and a staggering wealth of 98 victories.

Numbers rarely tell the whole story, but on this occasion, they did: from 2006 all the way through to 2025, the Norwegian was rarely out of the running, and from 2011, his second year at BMC, all the way through to his final season at Uno-X Mobility, Kristoff racked up at least one win per season. In the process, he became the record holder of victories in races as varied as one of Germany's two biggest Classics, the Eschborn-Frankfurt, the Tour of Norway, the Tour of Oman, the GP Argau in Switzerland and the Arctic Race.

Milan-Sanremo in 2014 was the first of the two Monuments Kristoff succeeded in taking, with hard work from Katusha, notably teammate Luca Paolini, providing the perfect launchpad for victory in a small group sprint. Then, a year later at the Tour of Flanders, Kristoff managed to outduel Niki Terpstra in the final metres. Winning in such very different circumstances was testament, yet again, to the breadth of Kristoff's abilities, and while he was able to win the sprinter's unofficial World Championships on the Champs Elysées in one Tour de France, it came as no surprise that he had the bandwidth to succeed on the very first day of the most unusual Tour ever, the delayed 2020 pandemic race, and pull on the yellow jersey.

Nino Schurter

XCO legend, with an incomparable track record of victories

• Top victories: World Championships x10; World Cup Seriesx9, Olympic gold medallist; European Champion; National Championships x8.
• Career win tally: 36

What is there left to be said about Nino Schurter? Not much, probably, given his unquestioned status as the greatest ever racer in men's MTB XCO. What's certain is that a year after his counterpart in Downhill, Greg Minaar, quit the sport, another massive name in MTB has now ended his career. Like Minaar, Schurter was an incredibly popular racer, too. As Thomas Frischknect said after his fellow Swiss racer's final event in Lenzerheide this autumn, "I think he was the very first superstar of mountain biking. Nino showed who he is as a person, not just as a racer."

By the time Schurter claimed his final career victory, at the MTB World Series in Val di Sole in June 2024, in the Olympics alone he'd racked up a gold medal in the 2016 Games, a silver in the same event in 2012 and a bronze in 2008. While that was impressive enough, his World Championships track record was jawdropping in the extreme: 10 rainbow jerseys in 14 participations (2009, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022) whilst he in the same period he claimed the overall World Cup title nine times (2010, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022, 2023).

What was the secret to Schurter's success? His near-obsession and thoroughness with the training side of the sport and technological advances were well-known, but when it came to the actual competition, Schurter was constantly one step ahead of his rivals, redefining how races could be won. No one, it seemed, had such a natural gift for finding new lines and jumps on circuits, making it impossible for the competition to outguess him. Like Tadej Pogačar in road racing, adapting to the new conditions and unwritten pathways to success set by Schurter was the only option for his rivals, but by the time they did, Schurter had moved on again. Put simply, he all but defined the sport.

Such extraordinary results call for extraordinary dedication, and when Schurter said in his retirement press release: "For the past two decades, I've given my body, my mind and my soul to mountain biking," nobody could question that. Explaining his decision to retire, Schurter said, "It's a beautiful sport, but also brutal at pro-level. You either win races, you are a contender, or you're gone. There's no place for passengers. It's all or nothing. 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

Geraint Thomas

Hugely versatile Tour de France champion, Olympic and World Championships track gold medallist and multiple one-day and stage race winner

• Top victories: Tour de France overall (2018), three stages; Tour de Romandie, overall; Tour de Suisse, overall; Critérium du Dauphiné, overall; Paris-Nice, overall; E3 Harelbeke; Commonwealth Games road race; Olympic Games team pursuit gold, 2008 and 2012; World Championships team pursuit, 2007, 2008 and 2012.
• Career win tally: 25

Looking back at Geraint Thomas' career, one thing strikes you instantly: variety. Former teammates like Chris Froome might have won many more Grand Tours, and others may have shone more brightly in the Classics or stage racing. But with the possible exception of the long-since retired Bradley Wiggins, none of them ever managed to have such a wide-ranging skill set as the 39-year-old Welshman.

Had Thomas hung up his wheels in 2012, he'd already have gone down as one of his country's greatest ever track racers, with two gold medals in the Beijing and London Olympics and numerous other World and National titles. But a victory in the junior Paris-Roubaix even before turning to pro and his ability to complete his first-ever Tour de France in 2007, almost as soon as he had joined his first squad, Barloworld, as its youngest participant, already spoke volumes about his ability to bridge multiple divides. Then the years went on, and that extreme versatility remained his strongest suit.

After he joined Sky in 2010 and then moved away from track racing after the London Olympics, fighting for success in multiple week-long stage races and the Classics, together with a continuous team role in Grand Tours – including racing almost the entire 2013 Tour in support of Chris Froome with a broken pelvis – initially formed the mainstay of Thomas' career. There were near-misses and lost opportunities in some Classics like Flanders, but he built steadily towards major successes in other major one-day races, the high point being a fine victory in the 2015 E3 Harelbeke after attacking alone in the closing kilometres.

Thomas' increasing interest in his own chances in Grand Tours, though, also grew steadily, with a victory in the opening time trial of the 2017 Tour de France seeing him claim Wales' first-ever yellow jersey prior to ceding the leadership to teammate Chris Froome. Then in 2018, with Froome struggling slightly and losing time following an early crash, Thomas' triumph on Alpe d'Huez in yellow – the first Briton ever to win on cycling's most emblematic finish, and the first ever victory there by any rider when in the Tour de France lead – placed him in pole position for overall victory. Despite a moment's scare in the final time trial when his back wheel blocked up, Thomas maintained that top spot all the way to Paris to secure the biggest triumph of his career.

It was never all about the results for Thomas, though. There were too many times when Sky's media policies appeared overly obsessed with controlling the narrative (something press officers would do well to remember nearly always backfires in cycling) and reinventing the wheel, and Thomas was in stark contrast to all of that. His approachability and willingness to cut through the hype with down-to-earth, articulate explanations – often garnished with some amusingly sardonic Welsh humour – made him something of an unofficial spokesperson for the team.

The final years of Thomas' career were somewhat overshadowed by the rise first of Ineos teammate Egan Bernal, winner of the 2019 Tour, and then younger stars of the calibre of Remco Evenepoel and Tadej Pogačar. But despite continuing to suffer from more than his fair share of crashes and injuries, he also continued to rack up both Tour de France podium finishes – second in 2019, third in 2022 – as well as a fine win in the Tour de Suisse in 2023, his last victory. There were two more podium finishes in Grand Tours as well, one in the 2023 Giro d'Italia, where he came agonisingly close to overhauling Primož Roglič for outright victory in the final time trial and third in 2024, the last major landmark achievement of his career.

It's also striking that Thomas was the last currently active rider to remain continuously with Team Sky/Ineos Grenadiers from its inception in 2010 right through to the end of his career: yet another of the multiple doors that closed when – surrounded by friends, fans, family, teammates and staff – Thomas stepped off his bike in Cardiff at the end of the Tour of Britain this September one last time.

Chantal van den Broek-Blaak

Key part of the wave of Dutch domination of women's cycling of recent years

• Top victories: World Championships; Vargarda Road-Race; Het Nieuwsblad; Tour of Flanders; Amstel Gold; Strade Bianche.
• Career win tally: 27

Like fellow 2025 retiree Ellen van Dijk, Chantal van den Broek-Blaak was an integral part of the Dutch steamroller of success in women's racing over the last 15 years. Unlike Van Dijk, though, Van den Broek-Blaak's career moved towards much more of a team role after early triumphs. It ended somewhat abruptly with a retirement early this season, too, after becoming pregnant with her second child.

Despite being somewhat overshadowed by leading Dutch figures in the sport like GOAT Marianne Vos, Van den Broek-Blaak nonetheless had an impressive palmares in her own right. The solo breakaway to victory – her in-house speciality – in the World Championships in 2017 was the biggest triumph of all, but others like the Tour of Flanders in 2020 with another lone move or dropping home favourite Elisa Longo Borghini to win Strade Bianche in 2021 will not be quickly forgotten.

There was time, too, for one final victory in the Dutch National Championships in 2024, her third and again taken with a solo move – in Arnhem – by which point, having taken time out from cycling for her first pregnancy. However, on her return, she was already wondering if the time had come to quit. It was only in February this year, though, that she opted to hang up her wheels for good.

Ellen van Dijk

One of cycling's all-time time trialling greats

• Top victories: Elite women's World Time Trial Championshipsx3; Tour of Flanders; UEC European Championships elite women's road race, UEC European Championships Time Trialx4; Dwars door Vlaanderenx2; Hour Record holder (2022).
• Career win tally: 71

You could hardly have expected Ellen van Dijk to leave the sport any other way than by winning a time trial. And in her last ever race this autumn, the Chrono des Nations, Van Dijk duly delivered, taking the event for the second time in three years.

Over a two-decade career, the Dutchwoman secured 42 time trial victories, more than half of her impressive total of 71, her superiority against the clock often reaching the point where it felt as if her name appeared on a time trial startlist; the event already had a winner.

Van Dijk's total of three World Time Trial Championships golds put her one short of all-time great Jeannie Longo's record total, and she was even more impressive in the European Championships, with an unmatched tally of four golds – a record shared with Marlen Reusser – and four silvers out of ten editions. But there were other colossal triumphs as well, both in the Hour Record, perhaps the ultimate test of time trialling endurance, and outside racing against the clock, in classics as important as the Tour of Flanders in 2014 and back-to-back editions of Dwars door Vlaanderen in 2018 and 2019.

Both driven and dedicated, Van Dijk was also blessed with a fine sense of humour when it came to her number one speciality, once telling Cyclingnews, “maybe that’s my purpose in life, to make time trialling more interesting.” That was something her clear-cut, straightforward, but in-depth explanations of that speciality meant she excelled at doing. But her dedication as a teammate was also something that stood out throughout her career, and it was more than appropriate, then, that her last stage racing lead should come thanks to a team time trial success for Lidl-Trek in the Vuelta a España Femenina this spring.

During Van Dijk's exceptionally long career, her prolific win rate always kept her in demand, and her pro racing began in earnest when she signed for the powerhouse Team Colombia squad in 2009, a year in which they notched up a mere 35 victories. Van Dijk stayed loyal to the same team through its various iterations to 2013, when she moved onto a series of Dutch teams, starting with Boels-Dolmans – the earliest version of the top SD Worx team – and after a two-year stint at Sunweb, from 2019 onwards, she's been an integral part of yet another top women's team, Lidl-Trek. But while it was only logical, she was always so much a part of the Dutch predominance of women's cycling, Van Dijk always had her own voice.

By the time Cyclingnews interviewed Van Dijk in late 2022, she admitted that she had already achieved enough to be thinking about the kind of legacy she left to cycling, something she described with characteristic frankness as "weird." But her longevity also gave her a great deal of perspective beyond the sport, and after taking time away from racing to become a mother in 2023, quite soon after her return, she admitted that the sport had moved in directions she did not find so appealing, and at the end of 2025, she opted to quit.

In a typically articulate and honest final press release, she explained that "I also love road cycling, but especially in the last two years, I had a lot of nasty crashes, and this for sure makes me more scared on the bike in the peloton, and it makes me lose the real love of the road racing."

"I feel that the peloton is not my place any more, and it’s time for a new generation," she concluded. Perhaps that's so, but whenever a time trial looms on the horizon on the women's racing calendar next season, after years as the natural point of reference she became in those events, Van Dijk's presence will be sorely missed.

Mike Woods

Gutsy climbing specialist who led the charge for men's cycling in Canada for nearly a decade

• Top victories: Tour de France, stage; Vuelta a España, three stages; Milan-Turin; Canadian National Championships; Tirreno-Adriatico, stage; Tour of Romandie, stage.
• Career win tally: 16

Mike Woods would be the first to agree that he came into the highest echelons of the sport fairly late, but when Woods finally reached WorldTour level with Cannondale-Drapac in 2016, aged 29, after a rollercoaster beginning to his time as a professional, the former elite runner certainly made the most of it.

The highest-profile point of his career came in 2023 with victory on the Puy de Dôme in the Tour de France, hauling his way up one of the country's relentlessly steep ascents and overtaking Matteo Jorgenson, then with Movistar, just 500 metres from the line. "It's the greatest result I ever had in cycling," Woods said, "I'm 37, so I felt like the window was beginning to close."

Woods' summit victories on ascents as memorably tough as the Balcon de Bizkaia in the Basque Country in the 2017 Vuelta, the Ancares in the same race in 2024 ahead of a rampaging Primoz Roglič or the Superga in Milan-Turin back in 2017 were certainly amongst the most emblematic of his career. But his near-misses, like his podium finishes in Liège Bastogne-Liège or in the World Championships in Austria, both in 2018, were also hugely important. And his victory in the Canadian National Championships in 2024, one of his last wins, was as big an emotional moment as any of his actual triumphs.

As articulate a talker off the bike as he was talented on it, Woods was also a standout teammate, working hard for Hugo Houle when his fellow Canadian took a stage in the 2022 race and ending third himself on the same day. Woods' exit from the sport was regrettably a low-key one, as illness stopped him from participating one last time on home soil in the Canadian WorldTour races.

More notable retirements

The list of departures from professional racing each winter leaves the ranks of top team workers as bereft as it does the highest-profile echelons of the sport, and this year is no exception. That's equally true within other road specialities with a sprinter as prolifically successful as Jakub Marezcko (Mazowsze Serce Polski), a relentlessly consistent winner of 50 lower-level races in an 11-year career, or as high profile as Olympic and World Championships track gold medallist and Tour de France stage winner Elia Viviani (Cofidis), both missing from next year's peloton.

Amongst other notable fastmen who made one last dash for the line in 2025, former Champs Elysées champion and winner in all three Grand Tours, Caleb Ewan's decision to quit came mid-season after a fine final triumph in Itzulia Basque Country. As for Arnaud Démare (Arkéa-B&B hotels), one of France's greatest ever sprinters who claimed four Tour stage wins but who was even more successful in the Giro d'Italia, Dema' opted to quit on home soil after Paris-Tours. Also taking a bow in 2025 was another top Giro sprinter, Giacomo Nizzolo (Q36.5), who never took a Giro stage win – unlike Démare's total of eight – but did wrap up two points jersey victories in 2015 and 2016.

Riders of the calibre of former Australian National Champion Sarah Roy (EF Education-Oatly) and the legendarily indefatigable team worker Tim Declerq (Lidl-Trek) have also opted to quit. If Roy didn't feel wholly content with the time of her exit, telling Cyclingnews in a recent interview she left the sport with some dreams unfulfilled, but Declerq – despite never winning a single race – said in the press release confirming his departure, it was time "to move on to new adventures."

Romain Bardet announced a mid-season move across to gravel after years of representing France in its biggest GC Grand Tour battles and in stage racing in general. However, he will barely have had the time to cross swords with the soon-departing former road pro Nathan Haas, who is ending his four-year gravel career with an impressively regular series of wins in events like Tier the Campos, Rattle Gravel and the Rift.

The exit of Alessandro De Marchi, a former Giro d'Italia leader, one of the top breakaway specialists in the sport and one of the most insightful voices in professional cycling, will hardly go unnoticed in Italy. Equally, the absence of Rafal Majka, both a hugely important part of Tadej Pogačar's support team in UAE Team Emirates-XRG, as well as a winner of multiple Tour de France mountain stages, will be a major loss for Polish cycling. Yet another two hugely representative figures of their countries' road racing scene, Ane Santesteban (Laboral Kutxa-Fundacion Euskadi) and double Monuments winner Jakob Fuglsang (Israel-Premier Tech) have also bid the peloton farewell. Another important exit is South Africa's most successful racer of recent years, top climber and multiple national champion Louis Meintjes (Intermarché-Wanty).

It's also worth noting, too, that some major names continue to have question marks over their potential departure from the sport. The biggest in men's racing yet to make a decision, or at the very least to make it public, is four-times Tour de France winner Chris Froome (Israel-Premier Tech), but the 40-year-old Briton is far from being the only rider to not yet tell the world what his plans are for 2026.