The Australian summer time {of professional} street 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 Below, led to Geelong with the Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Highway Race.
The ultimate week of racing included the Surf Coast Traditional, added for the ladies in addition to the lads in 2025. In each races all of it got here all the way down to a dash in Torquay, although not with out a battle, as Ally Wollaston (FDJ-Suez) and Tobias Lund Andresen (Picnic Publish NL) claimed the highest steps on Wednesday and Thursday.
The weekend delivered the principle occasions, the ladies’s and males’s WorldTour Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Highway Race, the primary one-day races of the 2025 WorldTour.
The 142km ladies’s race was on Saturday and was raced in comparatively gentle 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 prime of the already arduous 184km course.
A small group emerged on the powerful Geelong circuit and raced to the road however late attacker Mauro Schmid held them off to assert the primary ever win on the males’s race for his Australian Jayco-AlUla workforce.
Cyclingnews was on the bottom, from the Lorne begin of the ladies’s Surf Coast Traditional on Wednesday to the sweltering sprint to the road in Geelong on the males’s Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Highway Race.
As ordinary, 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.
Learn on for 5 of the conclusions we drew from the 4 days of UCI racing throughout the lads’s and girls’s peloton.
Elevating the bar with the Surf Coast Traditional
The assaults by no means stopped through the males’s Surf Coast Traditional (Picture credit score: Getty Photographs)
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 Traditional, with the assault and break up stuffed racing proper from the powerful climb out from the beginning within the coastal city of Lorne a transparent indicator of simply how critically the fields have been taking the mid-week foray.
The ladies have been taking over 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 supply in Saturday’s Ladies’s WorldTour race.
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As the ladies’s Australian summer time of racing is constructing – with the Tour Down Below additionally this 12 months including a 1.Professional race – so is the energy of the sphere, with 10 Ladies’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 Traditional subsequent 12 months, with race director Scott Sunderland outlining that the objective for 2026 was for each the races to be UCI ProSeries occasions in 2026.
That may up the providing to 200 factors for the winners, delivering one more reason for the highest ladies’s groups to come back out and bolster the fields for the entire summer time season and likewise an added incentive for extra of the lads’s WorldTeams to remain on the Tour Down Below.
The pace of 13 in opposition to one
Tobias Lund Andresen beat Sam Welsford to win the lads’s race (Picture credit score: Dario Belingheri/Getty Photographs)
Six of the lads’s WorldTour groups could have determined to not keep on after the obligatory occasion of the Tour Down Below however the opening volley served up by the smaller area on the Surf Coast Traditional wasn’t any much less motivated, the truth is judging by the pace those that remained have been motivated than ever to stroll away with a consequence.
Because of this it wasn’t simply any outdated goal in-form sprinter Sam Welsford (Crimson Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) had, figuratively, painted on his again firstly of the Surf Coast Traditional – it was a brilliant flashing neon one.
The rider was contemporary from three stage victories on the males’s Santos Tour Down Below, and a few extra earlier than, so the plain downside for each workforce with a sprinter was simply how they may beat Welsford and his dialled lead out prepare.
“I believe everyone knew that if we will have a simple race, it could be straightforward sport for Crimson Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, and so everyone tried to make it a bit more durable for them,” stated third positioned Lidl-Trek rider Tim Torn Teutenberg.
The 13 groups versus one tactic left Crimson Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe always having to expend vitality on the chase and harm Welsford and finally ended his sizzling streak of dash wins. Welsford joked that it was ‘Crimson Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe versus the world’.
It additionally had one other consequence, a scorching tempo, with the typical pace of the profitable rider Tobias Lund Andresen (Picnic PostNL) at 48km for the 157km occasion.
To place that in perspective, in accordance with Professional Biking Stats the typical race pace of WorldTour Classics final 12 months was 43.2 kph.
The Kiwi calvacade
Aaron Gate within the New Zealand nationwide champion’s jersey (Picture credit score: Getty Photographs)
Biking could also be a sport centred in Europe, however the Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Highway Race this 12 months was all about New Zealand.
The listing of key contenders from the nation was lengthy, from defending champion Laurence Pithie (Crimson Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe), Ally Wollaston (FDJ-Suez), Corbin Robust (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 girls’s WorldTour race.
First it was Wollaston, who confirmed that she was “not only a sprinter” when she received Surf Coast Traditional 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 Nice Ocean Highway 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 street titles between February 6-8 are certain to be ‘alternative’.
Feeling the warmth
(Picture credit score: Getty Photographs)
The summer time climate in Victoria will be unpredictable, a reality which the riders on the Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Highway Race in 2025 know too nicely.
They got here into temperatures at 42°C on Monday as they transferred from Adelaide, raced midweek on the Surf Coast Traditional 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 principally missed the hotter race days in Adelaide.
“I imply, we have been in Aussie for almost three weeks and have not had a sizzling 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 believe,” stated Israel-Premier Tech’s George Bennett earlier than the race took off.
Even for many who have been completely happy to see the mercury climb, it was unquestionably a brutally troublesome 184km’s out on the street with ice stocking aplenty and the riders coming over the road to the run-out space desperately on the lookout for shade and the quickest doable method to settle 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 have 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 may 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.
When the Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Highway Race was first run in 2015, two of the riders who have been close to the entrance of the pack have been Simon Clarke and Amanda Spratt, each on the time racing for the Australian squads now often called Jayco-AlUla and Liv-AlUla-Jayco.
A few of these they raced alongside at the moment are within the workforce automobiles, others are others nonetheless pinning a race quantity on however Spratt and Clarke have 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 ultimate 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 sphere, ending fiftieth, however the effort he delivered to reel in riders through the ultimate phases for teammate Corbin Robust was relentless.
Clarke was pulling on the entrance of the peloton far longer than may presumably be anticipated, significantly on such a sizzling day, with the trouble clearly seen as he charged previous the crowds on the Geelong waterfront with a glance of dedication and gritted enamel.
Neither rider could have been on the rostrum this 12 months, however as ordinary they could possibly be counted on to depart all of it on the market within the try and get their palms on that particular wave trophy for his or her groups.
