The ultimate wave of the Australian January racing block, which begins the season of WorldTour and Girls’s WorldTour racing, performed out on the waterside course of the Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Highway Race, as soon as once more delivering a predictable stage of unpredictability.
The dynamic programs, the early-season date and the chance for home riders and rising skills to make their mark all mix to supply an explosive combine. This 12 months was no totally different. The plans of the favourites have been largely annoyed however a brand new technology of riders acquired a possibility to attract a line within the sand.
Two first-time WorldTour winners stood atop the rostrum to say the wave trophy, and various riders and groups walked away from the race with each cause to face the approaching season with confidence.
The racing this 12 months began on Wednesday with the Geelong Basic criterium for the ladies, adopted by the Surf Coast Basic for the lads on Thursday. The weekend noticed Saturday’s Girls’s WorldTour race and adopted by the lads’s occasion the following day. Cyclingnews was as soon as once more on the bottom for all of the racing, and now we have a look again on among the key conclusions from the ultimate chapter of the January racing in Australia.
Again with mid-week motion
The return of midweek racing helped to bridge the hole between the Tour Down Below and the Nice Ocean Race. The Geelong Basic had a hefty – by criterium requirements – prize purse of €14,520 because of the occasion’s longstanding follow of delivering equal prizes to the ladies’s and males’s area even when the race ranges differ. The lads have been in motion the following day within the 1.1 categorised Surf Coast Basic.
“It is good to have this race on Thursday, coming off the again of Down Below,” Israel-Premier Tech sports activities director Sam Bewley advised Cyclingnews earlier than the race headed out from Lorne. “As a lot as we love being over right here and the Geelong space, it’s a protracted week, so it is good to have a race at the moment to interrupt it up.”
It offered one other hit out, one other alternative for factors and podiums and one other likelihood for followers to observe riders fly by on their residence roads, with some spectacular territory swept up alongside the best way.
The organisation had initially deliberate a point-to-point race for the ladies, however they have been unable to tie up the final particulars to make it a actuality. However whereas that ladies’s midweek street race didn’t come to fruition this 12 months, the work has already begun to make it a actuality for 2025.
“We’re forward of schedule already for 2025,” race director Scott Sunderland advised Cyclingnews. “So ideally we wish to see, each the ladies’s and males’s occasions the identical. That is all the time been our goal – the parity and equality in that.”
On the rise
The Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Highway Race usually has a behavior of throwing up some sudden podium placers, and winners for that matter. The ladies’s race on Saturday adopted that sample. Whereas Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig could have made it onto the rostrum in third, she was the one one on these steps that had come to consideration as a pre-race favorite.
The unpredictable race completed with a shocked 19-year-old on prime of the rostrum as an alternative. This was not only a first WorldTour win for Rosita Reijnhout, or a primary skilled victory however, as she put it, “my first win ever as a result of I’ve by no means received one thing.”
The Dutch Visma-Lease a Bike rider has aspirations of being a prime stage-race performer, and now has made her mark in her second WorldTour season, after developing by way of the ever productive Dutch biking improvement pathway.
Nevertheless, Reijnhout wasn’t the one shock on the rostrum, with UAE Group ADQ neo-pro Dominika Wlodarczyk charging to second on her twenty third birthday. The Polish rider had actually already made a mark as an under-23 rider, profitable the Watersley Girls’s Problem total for the previous two years and already having a considerable listing of two.2 stage victories on her outcomes sheet, however the step as much as WorldTour stage introduced a bit extra of an unknown.
These query marks are rapidly disappearing for Wlodarczyk, who was additionally fifth total on the Tour Down Below and now has the jersey of the Girls’s WorldTour chief in her baggage.
Subsequent spherical of Australians to hit the WorldTour?
The Australian January racing is the one time of the 12 months when a number of of the perfect native riders get an opportunity to see how they stack up in opposition to squads of WorldTour professionals. It’s an important alternative as a result of, as Zac Marriage put it: “Everybody else within the peloton is the place I wish to be, the place all of us wish to be.”
It was nearly a given, then, that the 2 wildcard Australian continental groups could be on the assault as quickly because the races acquired underway and, within the case of the ladies’s race, the nationwide group have been on the offensive as effectively.
Lucie Fityus (ARA Skip Capital), Gina Ricardo (Group BridgeLane) and Stephanie Hibburt (Australia Nationwide Group) all set off within the early break on Saturday, with Fityus and Ricardo claiming the highest factors within the first dash, although the robust winds and a nervous peloton made it exhausting going. Alli Anderson (ARA | Skip Capital) was one other of the native riders to take a prove the entrance later as effectively.
Within the males’s race on Sunday, confronted with calmer winds it was a younger however decided quartet out the entrance of Joshua Cranage, 18, and Dylan Proctor-Parker, 19, of ARA Skip Capital together with Jackson Medway, 19, and Zac Marriage, 20, of Group BridgeLane.
The BridgeLane riders, Marriage and Medway, swept up each the king of the mountain and dash jerseys, claiming full factors alongside the best way earlier than being swept up simply excessive of the second final ascent of Challambra climb at 26km to go. It was a protracted however rewarding time out entrance and each riders hope will probably be a stepping stone to larger issues.
Medway, for one, had already drawn consideration proper from the beginning of the season when he claimed the U23 time trial on the Australian Championships, beating Hamish McKenzie, who will step as much as the WorldTour with Jayco-AlUla in 2025, and Oscar Chamberlain, who was the junior world champion within the self-discipline in 2023. The triathlete, who has made the change to biking comparatively lately, appears a very probably candidate to hitch the pair within the worldwide ranks. The rider stated that up to now he had obtained some “messages right here and there, however nothing large but,” including, “hopefully after going to Europe I’ll have a number of leads to the bag and we are able to type one thing for subsequent 12 months.”
Understanding how one can win … and lose
“I understand how to do it and I understand how to lose it,” stated the one rider within the Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Highway Race to have received it earlier than, Elia Viviani, in a pre-race interview with broadcaster Seven.
The Ineos Grenadiers rider’s second place on the Surf Coast Basic confirmed the 2019 winner was coming into the weekend with some sturdy type, and there was little question he had a powerful group behind him, together with the firing Tour Down Below runner up Jhonatan Narvaez and the power of Filippo Ganna, however historical past was all the time in opposition to him. The race is nothing if not unpredictable, with totally different profitable eventualities enjoying out and never as soon as, in both the ladies’s or males’s race, has a rider been capable of ship repeat victories.
That held agency in 2024. Viviani could have positioned a giant goal on the race, however this was not a 12 months for the sprinters. The Italian completed again in a gaggle 24 seconds again from the winner, together with the rider who got here second to him in 2019, Caleb Ewan (Jayco-AlUla). The climb of Challambra topping out 9 kilometres from the road had defeated each of them, however the genius of the course is that there’s all the time the hope that it could not subsequent 12 months.
The race has all the time been, and continues to be predictably, unpredictable.
Edwards again in full flight
The final time Ruth Edwards (nee Winder) lined up on the Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Highway Race she was contemporary off her 2020 win on the Santos Girls’s Tour Down Below, and she or he claimed a powerful eighth in Geelong in her third look on the occasion.
The American rider already had a ninth and second place to her title on the race, so it’s clearly a course that fits her, however when the race returned after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2023, she was on current. Edwards had retired on the finish of 2021 however, because it seems, not for good.
Given the success the 30-year-old had loved in Australia, it appeared a becoming place to reboot her profession and, as she advised Cyclingnews earlier than the Tour Down Below “to see how good I may be.” It hasn’t taken too lengthy for the reply to that query to begin to be revealed.
It was a strong return together with her new group, Human Powered Well being, on the Tour Down Below, the place Edwards positioned sixteenth total, however higher was nonetheless to come back. Edwards simply missed the rostrum on Saturday, however this clear present of energy is an early indication that the rider hasn’t come again merely to experience round within the bunch and mentor others.
“I’m feeling tremendous assured being again within the peloton and I’m excited to have the ability to push and try to race exhausting,” Edwards stated. “I take a variety of motivation going into European races.”
Pithie’s prize
Groupama FDJ’s Laurence Pithie got here away from final week’s Tour Down Below with beneficial classes realized. The New Zealander could have been among the many rising technology of riders that had the distinct drawback of attempting to construct their budding worldwide race expertise at a time when COVID-19 locked the nation’s border, however he’s rapidly making up for misplaced time.
At Mount Lofty on the ultimate day of TDU, he could have been berating himself for going too early and lacking a primary alternative to take victory, however by the next Sunday he already had absorbed the lesson and managed to play out the alternate plan to perfection. Pithie performed the ready recreation by way of the assaults, this time saving his effort for exactly when it was wanted, within the small bunch dash.
His sound evaluation and skill to adapt bodes effectively for the rider as he heads into his second season as knowledgeable, with a Giro d’Italia debut on the radar.
Sunday could have been Pithie’s first WorldTour podium, however with the best way the 21-year-old has hit the bottom working this season it looks like it is probably not too lengthy till there’s one other.
Leaving at intermission
Each males’s WorldTour group has to come back out to the Santos Tour Down Below however there’s nothing compelling them to remain on for the Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Highway Race, given the UCI rules solely require participation in occasions that have been registered on the 2016 WorldTour calendar. That signifies that regardless that the break in racing between the 2 could have been simply an intermission within the Australian block of racing, most of the males’s squads took it as their cue to return to their residence base in Europe, and because of this they missed the finale.
It meant the race that began in 2015 and shifted as much as WorldTour standing in 2017 – only a 12 months later than the 2016 calendar specified for obligatory attendance – had simply ten WorldTour groups on the beginning line, down from 11 in 2023 and 15 again in 2020. The next COVID-19 cancellations appeared to result in an alteration in early-season habits. The full variety of riders within the peloton due to this fact, with the 2 wildcard Australian continental groups of ARA Skip Capital and Group BridgeLane added into the combination, was simply 88.
The Girls’s WorldTour groups, nevertheless, the place attendance wasn’t obligatory at both occasion, rose to 9 from six the earlier 12 months with none drifting away between the 2 occasions, which led to a major enhance within the depth within the ladies’s area.
It is constructive to see numbers head in that course for the ladies’s area however discouraging to see the other trajectory within the males’s race – it appears as if one thing is awry within the WorldTour system for a well-run occasion that earned the top-tier designation to be able the place perilously near half of the top-tier groups aren’t exhibiting. If solely the race had hit the WorldTour stage a 12 months earlier.
