Following its cancellation in 2024, the Maryland Biking Traditional will return to the UCI calendar in 2025, larger than ever earlier than, with the addition of a girls’s one-day occasion alongside its males’s occasion on September 6.
The highest-ranked UCI highway occasion in america was cancelled in 2024 as a result of Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse. The race vowed to return however some followers had been uncertain. Within the latest previous, too many American races have gone on hiatus solely to by no means return once more.
But, that has proved to not be the case for “an important race in America” because the race will return this September with a complete new addition of a girls’s race that can run the identical day as the boys’s race alongside the same course. Particulars and taking part groups will probably be introduced within the coming months.
“We’re excited to announce the occasion dates and the addition of a girls’s occasion, which we’ve been creating plans for for the reason that inception of the mission,” Terry Hasseltine mentioned in a press launch. Hasseltine is the President of the Sport & Leisure Company of Maryland, which owns and produces the occasion.
Together with the addition of a girls’s race, the Maryland Biking Traditional is shifting away from its Labor Day spot to the next week, Saturday, September sixth. This transfer brings the Maryland Traditional nearer to the Canadian one-day WorldTour occasions.
Beforehand, the two-week hole was simply lengthy sufficient that it proved tough for the boys’s WorldTour riders to handle. Whereas the race organisers didn’t listing this as a purpose for the date swap, the six-day hole between the UCI occasions will make the journey throughout the Atlantic extra viable for the European groups attempting to find factors.
There’s presently no equal WorldTour pairing for the ladies’s peloton in Canada. Nevertheless, September is an enormous hole within the Girls’s WorldTour schedule, and the Maryland Biking Traditional may bridge the summer time race calendar with the UCI Street World Championship.
The Baltimore race additionally fills an enormous gap within the professional calendar for the ladies’s peloton on U.S. soil.
“It’s thrilling to see world-class girls’s skilled biking return to america, and I’m glad to be a part of the crew,” Joanne Kiesanowski, the occasion’s new competitors supervisor, mentioned. “Our objective is to draw a extremely aggressive area that showcases a few of the greatest girls on this planet.”
Earlier editions of the Maryland Biking Traditional ran in 2022 and 2023, with Sep Vanmarke (Israel-Premier Tech) and Mattias Skjelmose (Lidl-Trek) profitable the primary two thrilling occasions, respectively. In each situations, the race broke aside early throughout Baltimore’s rolling terrain earlier than the peloton reached a quick ending circuit round Baltimore’s interior harbour.
The 2025 version guarantees a larger European contingent and much more pleasure within the males’s race. The ladies’s race may doubtless permit high Individuals like Olympic medalists Kristen Faulkner and Chloé Dygert to struggle for victory in entrance of a house crowd.
