Once for South Australia, it was the Formula 1 Grand Prix that was the crowning jewel of sporting occasions however its loss to Melbourne turned out to be Australian biking’s achieve – it delivered a transparent opening for the state to quickly get behind a really completely different sort of race, the Tour Down Under.
What began as a males’s occasion in 1999 has modified significantly previously 25 years, delivering the extremely anticipated begin to the season for each the lads’s and ladies’s WorldTour with the 2025 race actually delivering a stage of competitors that matches as much as that top-tier standing.
“In its first years, it was such an enormous step in Australian biking however possibly it was seen as a race that was a beautiful vacation and plenty of enjoyable however with the WorldTour standing, it is simply evolving annually,” stated Michael Rogers, who raced the occasion ten occasions, received it in 2002 and was again this yr on the race with Lidl-Trek, having taken on a brand new function as administration assistant lat final yr.
“The groups come right here to race now, to get factors, whereas in all probability in its first years, it was thought-about extra of a coaching race to get used to the European season. It’s been fairly an evolution.”
An evolution that may be seen in a myriad of how. On prime of the lads’s and ladies’s WorldTour occasions the race has this yr added a brand new 1.Pro ranked ladies’s one-day race and introduced a competition with an ever-growing array of supporting occasions – from a mass participation trip that provides amateurs the prospect to trip the identical course because the professionals, to gravel races and avenue events.
It’s a method that final yr drew 770,600 guests whereas creating 490 full-time equal jobs and producing $87.2 million in financial influence for South Australia however, after all, its core goal will all the time be the top-level racing.
Internationalisation
It’s what attracts so many like Peter Tyquin to the occasion repeatedly. More than 20 years in the past and again in 2025, making the lengthy journey all the way in which down from northern Queensland, round 2,000km away to get Stuart O’Grady to clean up the signature on a Credit Agricole jersey signed in 2001 by the person who was then on his solution to a second general victory on the occasion the place he’s now race director.
The newest race content material, interviews, options, critiques and professional shopping for guides, direct to your inbox!
O’Grady stepped into the function forward of the COVID-19 cancellations of the WorldTour occasions, although even then the race continued on in a distinct guise with organisers opting to ship the Santos Festival of Cycling as a substitute to offer home riders who had their alternatives severely curtailed by the restrictions of the pandemic a world-class racing expertise. Then when the occasion hit the WorldTour stage as soon as once more, this time at each the lads’s and ladies’s occasions, a brand new period hit its stride.
“We’ve had the Richie Porte period, we have had the Simon Gerrans domination however this yr felt like an actual worldwide Santos Tour Down Under,” O’Grady stated by the banks of the Torrens River in Adelaide after the sixth and remaining stage of the lads’s WorldTour occasion and the brand new 1.Pro ladies’s race had performed out on Sunday. “The Aussies have been challenged throughout the ladies’s and the lads’s which suggests the standard of the sector, the extent of racing and rider, is best.
An general podium that was as soon as heavy with home stars, in 2025 had none. Ecuadorian Champion Jhonatan Narváez (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) claimed the ochre jersey of the lads’s occasion, with Spain’s Javier Romo (Movistar) second and New Zealand’s Finn Fisher-Black (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) third. In the ladies’s Tour Down Under Swiss rider Noemi Rüegg (EF Education-Oatly) completed in ochre, with the Dutch Silke Smulders (Liv AlUla Jayco) second and Norwegian rider Mie Bjørndal Ottestad (Uno-X Mobility) in third.
“It simply goes to point out how I assume, the blokes and women are actually coming right here targeted on attempting to win levels, to get these extremely vital UCI factors,” added O’Grady.
The programs are additionally evolving, with riders broadly pointing to the truth that 2025 was a very difficult yr within the race and O’Grady including “that Willunga stage was in all probability one of many hardest we’ve ever had” nevertheless it’s additionally a matter of holding the steadiness in place given the early season time slot and potential for excessive temperatures.
Though the largest adjustments are in all probability afoot within the ladies’s racing on the occasion, which kicked off in 2011 with a sequence of criteriums and morphed right into a UCI 2.2 tour in 2016, earlier than upgrading to 2.1 standing in 2018, when it additionally led the way in which by providing the identical prize cash as the lads, after which in 2023 it hit the top-tier with WorldTour standing. In 2025, the race added one other day of UCI racing to the three-stage tour, with a 1.Pro race on Sunday.
“We want extra alternatives, we wish to have extra groups popping out, we wish larger stage groups and it is displaying,” stated assistant race director Annette Edmondson as racing was about to kick off. “We’ve acquired 10 ladies’s WorldTour groups out right here this yr, so that is the strongest discipline ever for our ladies’s race.
“It simply implies that the development of the racing is simply going to maintain lifting and we’re going to have the ability to, hopefully, proceed to progress and add maybe one other stage into our WorldTour occasion, however in the intervening time we’re specializing in our sustainable development as properly. Changes do not occur in a single day and we’re very proud that Santos, our main sponsor is absolutely prioritising the expansion of the ladies’s race.”
What’s extra the announcement got here out through the racing that the Santos sponsorship that had been in place since 2010 was now locked in for an additional three years, guaranteeing – in an period the place quite a lot of aces have fallen by the wayside as a result of lack of funds – that the Australian ladies’s and males’s WorldTour race is on a agency footing because it celebrates its 25-year anniversary and units a course towards the subsequent large landmark.