UCI MTB World Championships: Alan Hatherly destroys the competition to defend elite XCO title

Alan Hatherly (South Africa) defended his rainbow jersey on Sunday with a dominant display in the elite men's Cross-Country race at the 2025 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships in Switzerland.

Riding with the No.1 dossard on his back, Hatherly took advantage of a mistake from early frontrunner Victor Koretzky (France) to go clear on the second of nine laps of the Crans Montana circuit, and he was never seen again.

"I just had one of those days. It'll be hard for me to repeat a performance like that. All the starts aligned," Hatherly said.

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Simone Avondetto (Italy) claimed the silver nearly a minute in arrears, with Koretzky taking the final spot on the podium.

Mathieu van der Poel's quest for a world title in a fourth separate discipline faded dramatically as the Dutchman, despite initially being in the select group behind Hatherly, slipped to 29th by the end of the race.

After fending off a spirited early chase from three-time runner-up Mathias Flückiger, Hatherly ground the competition into the dirt, extending his lead to a full minute by the half-way mark. In fact, by the end of that fifth lap, the emergent five-man chase group were soft-pedalling down the home straight, 1:21 down and seemingly resigned to racing for silver.

As such, the last half of the race was something of a procession for Hatherly. He did make a mistake with a slip on the very rooted section where Koretzky had made that crucial early error – and where countless riders including Van der Poel came unstuck. And his lap times, so consistently fast for so long, did finally start to dip at the end, just as the battle ignited and sped up behind.

However, by that point the race was long since won and the rainbow jersey effectively in the bag already.

"Before the race I said it was going to be a time trial and a less tactical race and I guess I did that from the beginning, taking it straight on and just TT-ing it all way through. With two or three laps to go I started to feel the effort of going so early but the gap was so big I could just consolidate and see it through."

With the gold medal decided so early, the real race played out just behind, and while Van der Poel and Christopher Blevins (USA) were part of the conversation early on, it soon reduced to six riders.

Flückiger was caught on lap 5 by Koretzky, his fellow Swiss Luca Schatti, and the Italian duo of Avondetto and Luca Braidot. Denmark's Simon Andreassen dropped Van der Poel to join after they'd soft-pedalled at the end of that lap.

After a couple of laps of inertia, in which Hatherly's advantage went out towards two minutes, Flückiger finally reignited hostilities in what was now a battle for silver. But it was Avondetto who, on the penultimate lap, managed to sneak clear and maintain a slim advantage all the way to the line to claim an emotional silver medal.

Koretzky was home three seconds later, holding off the Swiss duo of Schatti and Flückiger and denying the host nation from the podium.

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