The Australian summer time {of professional} highway racing has ended on a excessive. The sweep from west to east – that began in Perth with the nationwide title chase and continued in South Australia on the Santos Tour Down Under, resulted in Geelong with the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race.
The last week of racing included the Surf Coast Classic, added for the ladies in addition to the lads in 2025. In each races all of it got here right down to a dash in Torquay, although not with no combat, as Ally Wollaston (FDJ-Suez) and Tobias Lund Andresen (Picnic Post NL) claimed the highest steps on Wednesday and Thursday.
The weekend delivered the primary occasions, the ladies’s and males’s WorldTour Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race, the primary one-day races of the 2025 WorldTour.
The 142km ladies’s race was on Saturday and was raced in comparatively delicate 27°C. The peloton was torn to shreds earlier than the end on the waterfront in Geelong however the specter of a dash remained and Wollaston made it two for 2.
For Sunday’s males’s race, the temperature touched 40°C, including an enormous additional problem on high of the already arduous 184km course.
A small group emerged on the robust Geelong circuit and raced to the road however late attacker Mauro Schmid held them off to say the primary ever win on the males’s race for his Australian Jayco-AlUla crew.
Cyclingnews was on the bottom, from the Lorne begin of the ladies’s Surf Coast Classic on Wednesday to the sweltering sprint to the road in Geelong on the males’s Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race.
As traditional, it was a race that threw up some surprises, with Challambra Hill making the race unpredictable to the final gasp as soon as once more.
Read on for 5 of the conclusions we drew from the 4 days of UCI racing throughout the lads’s and ladies’s peloton.
Raising the bar with the Surf Coast Classic
The assaults by no means stopped in the course of the males’s Surf Coast Classic (Image credit score: Getty Images)
There was no doubting that each the ladies’s and males’s peloton got here to the road able to race the 1.1 Surf Coast Classic, with the assault and cut up stuffed racing proper from the robust climb out from the beginning within the coastal city of Lorne a transparent indicator of simply how severely the fields had been taking the mid-week foray.
The ladies had been taking up the 118km occasion for the primary time, including additional UCI factors potential with 125 up for grabs for the winner of the 1.1 race, in comparison with the 400 on provide in Saturday’s Women’s WorldTour race.
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As the ladies’s Australian summer time of racing is constructing – with the Tour Down Under additionally this 12 months including a 1.Pro race – so is the energy of the sector, with 10 Women’s WorldTeams on the startlist this 12 months.
What’s extra there could also be extra factors up for grabs subsequent 12 months throughout each the ladies’s and Thursday’s 157km males’s Surf Coast Classic subsequent 12 months, with race director Scott Sunderland outlining that the objective for 2026 was for each the races to be UCI ProCollection occasions in 2026.
That will up the providing to 200 factors for the winners, delivering another excuse for the highest ladies’s groups to come back out and bolster the fields for the entire summer time season and in addition an added incentive for extra of the lads’s WorldTeams to remain on the Tour Down Under.
The velocity of 13 in opposition to one
Tobias Lund Andresen beat Sam Welsford to win the lads’s race (Image credit score: Dario Belingheri/Getty Images)
Six of the lads’s WorldTour groups could have determined to not keep on after the obligatory occasion of the Tour Down Under however the opening volley served up by the smaller subject on the Surf Coast Classic wasn’t any much less motivated, in actual fact judging by the velocity those that remained had been motivated than ever to stroll away with a consequence.
As a consequence it wasn’t simply any outdated goal in-form sprinter Sam Welsford (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) had, figuratively, painted on his again at first of the Surf Coast Classic – it was a shiny flashing neon one.
The rider was contemporary from three stage victories on the males’s Santos Tour Down Under, and a few extra earlier than, so the plain drawback for each crew with a sprinter was simply how they might beat Welsford and his dialled lead out prepare.
“I feel everyone knew that if we will have a simple race, it might be straightforward sport for Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, and so everyone tried to make it a bit tougher for them,” mentioned third positioned Lidl-Trek rider Tim Torn Teutenberg.
The 13 groups versus one tactic left Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe continually having to expend vitality on the chase and damage Welsford and finally ended his scorching streak of dash wins. Welsford joked that it was ‘Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe versus the world’.
It additionally had one other consequence, a scorching tempo, with the typical velocity of the profitable rider Tobias Lund Andresen (Picnic PostNL) at 48km for the 157km occasion.
To put that in perspective, in keeping with Pro Cycling Stats the typical race velocity of WorldTour Classics final 12 months was 43.2 kph.
The Kiwi calvacade
Aaron Gate within the New Zealand nationwide champion’s jersey (Image credit score: Getty Images)
Cycling could also be a sport centred in Europe, however the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race this 12 months was all about New Zealand.
The listing of key contenders from the nation was lengthy, from defending champion Laurence Pithie (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe), Ally Wollaston (FDJ-Suez), Corbin Strong (Israel-Premier Tech), Niamh Fisher-Black (Lidl-Trek) and her brother Finn Fisher-Black (Bora-Hansgrohe) and extra.
And in a notoriously unpredictable race, New Zealand ended up taking half the rostrum spots throughout the lads’s and ladies’s WorldTour race.
First it was Wollaston, who confirmed that she was “not only a sprinter” when she received Surf Coast Classic win of Wednesday after which the WorldTour race too, neatly managing the field-splitting Challambra climb.
On Sunday Swiss nationwide champion Mauro Schmid lastly added a Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race win to Jayco-AlUla’s palmares nevertheless it was the silver fern-clad Aaron Gate (XDS Astana) who claimed second and defending champion Pithie was third.
After that show it’s honest to say the battles to win the New Zealand highway titles between February 6-8 are certain to be ‘alternative’.
Feeling the warmth
(Image credit score: Getty Images)
The summer time climate in Victoria might be unpredictable, a truth which the riders on the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race in 2025 know too effectively.
They got here into temperatures at 42°C on Monday as they transferred from Adelaide, raced midweek on the Surf Coast Classic in temperatures about half of that after which it was again to round 40°C for the race on Sunday, with the possibility of thunderstorms additionally within the forecast.
Daunting circumstances however the warmth was additionally a welcome flip for some after the lads’s peloton largely missed the hotter race days in Adelaide.
“I imply, we have been in Aussie for practically three weeks and have not had a scorching day, so it is good to lastly have the solar out and hopefully this rain holds off, in any other case it will be fairly harmful on the market I feel,” mentioned Israel-Premier Tech’s George Bennett earlier than the race took off.
Even for many who had been comfortable to see the mercury climb, it was unquestionably a brutally troublesome 184km’s out on the highway with ice stocking aplenty and the riders coming over the road to the run-out space desperately searching for shade and the quickest attainable strategy to calm down.
For some it was iced drinks and dousing themselves with water from bottles however there have been no half measures for final 12 months’s winner and this 12 months’s third-placed rider, Pithie, who noticed a big bucket of now largely melted ice that had been used to maintain the drinks cool and tipped it over his head.
There had been additionally many who didn’t make it over the road, with 24 riders not ending the race, in contrast with simply 9 final 12 months.
It might have been worse, as after the racing had completed on Sunday an almighty storm blew by way of, sending rivers of water flowing down the roads because the thunder and lightning rolled above.
The originals
Amanda Spratt (Image credit score: Getty Images)
When the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race was first run in 2015, two of the riders who had been close to the entrance of the pack had been Simon Clarke and Amanda Spratt, each on the time racing for the Australian squads now often known as Jayco-AlUla and Liv-AlUla-Jayco.
Some of these they raced alongside are actually within the crew vehicles, others are others nonetheless pinning a race quantity on however Spratt and Clarke had been but once more stand-out riders within the occasion.
Spratt, who got here fourth in 2015, received the race in 2016 after which added one other three podium locations since. This 12 months she was thirteenth, however nonetheless within the thick of the motion, making an attempt to launch an assault within the last run to the road, although she was finally swamped on the run-in.
Clarke, who got here second in 2015 and third in 2023, could not have been on the pointy finish of the sector, ending fiftieth, however the effort he delivered to reel in riders in the course of the last levels for teammate Corbin Strong was relentless.
Clarke was pulling on the entrance of the peloton far longer than might probably be anticipated, notably on such a scorching day, with the hassle clearly seen as he charged previous the crowds on the Geelong waterfront with a glance of dedication and gritted tooth.
Neither rider could have been on the rostrum this 12 months, however as traditional they could possibly be counted on to go away all of it on the market within the try to get their arms on that particular wave trophy for his or her groups.