Thank You & 2024 End-of-Year Review

Breaking down a few key trends from the incredible 2024 cycling season and looking forward to 2025

With the great 2024 cycling season at an end and the 2025 season quickly approaching, I wanted to take a moment to thank the amazing BTP readers who have followed the newsletter throughout the season. None of this would be possible without you.

I also wanted to take a moment to discuss BTP’s plans for 2025. Even as I continue to expand my footprint outside of Beyond the Peloton with regular podcast hosting and appearances, when the 2025 season gets underway, I will continue to provide free weekly analysis for the sport’s biggest races and daily race coverage during the Classics and Grand Tours for paying subscribers. The resources created via the paying subscribers allow me to dedicate my time to in-depth analysis of professional racing, so many thanks to any and all who decide to contribute.

In the short term, premium subscribers will receive the upcoming in-house BTP NET 2025 Team Projections over the coming weeks, in-depth transfer, and off-season analysis.

Also, if you want a quick overview of the major storylines throughout the season, check out the Beyond the Peloton Podcast (available on Apple, Spotify & more). I host it with Andrew Vontz (from the Choose the Hard Way Podcast and The Better Lab). Throughout the season, we cover topics I don’t have the space or time for in this newsletter and interview some of the sport’s top athletes and thought leaders.

2024 Men’s Season Review & Emerging Trend Overview:

For those who want to look back at 2024 before we ring in 2025, below is a comprehensive list of the breakdowns from nearly every major race over the past season. It is fun and somewhat shocking to reflect on the sheer depth and breadth of the top performances from the sport’s best riders in the biggest races. From Alpecin–Deceuninck’s dominant spring, with Jasper Philipsen’s surprising Milano-Sanremo victory to Mathieu van der Poel’s E3/Flanders/Paris-Roubaix treble, to Tadej Pogačar’s 25-win season, which saw him re-define what we thought was possible from a modern Grand Tour contender with his Giro d’Italia/Tour de France double, which he glided through with relative ease, and his solo ride to grab his first career road World Championships.

• Additionally, Jonas Vingegaard’s ride to take an impressive and hard-fought second behind Pogačar at the Tour de France after recovering from his significant injuries suffered at the spring’s Tour of the Basque Country marked 2024 as a season in which we saw some of the truly great performances of modern cycling.

• Vingegaard’s comeback, combined with the return of Pogačar to the cobbled Classics, has teased potentially great showdowns for both the one-day Classics and Grand Tours in 2025.

Outside of the physical quality of the winning riders, two trends that stood out to me the most were the phenomenon of an extremely select number of riders and teams winning nearly every major race, and, at least in the case of the one-days, doing so with devastatingly powerful solo attacks.

• For example, through the last two seasons, every major one-day race (Monuments, World Championships, and Olympics) has been won by just four riders (Evenepoel, Pogačar, Van der Poel, and Philipsen), with twelve of those thirteen races won via solo attacks.

  • This may have seemed like a potential blip in the data after last year, but now, it appears to represent a new trend in one-days where the top riders are attacking earlier and earlier and leveraging their superior strength, and the dreaded ‘second group syndrome,’ to eliminate variables en route to victory.

• Meanwhile, in stage racing, only four riders have won Grand Tours over the past two seasons, and just eight unique riders spread over four teams won a single of the sport’s major one or three-week stage races over that same time period.

  • This trend would suggest that as the sport continues to professionalize and the training science is refined, it is extremely advantageous to be on a team with both the resources and willingness to adapt to changing trends by providing an endless series of high-powered domestiques who could be stars in their own right, high-altitude training camps, private chefs, and perfect on-bike nutrition strategies during major events (which includes both the staff and vehicle infrastructure to deliver that nutrition at multiple points along a long point-to-point stage day after day).

Top One-Day Races:
Strade Bianche (Tadej Pogačar solo win)
Milano-Sanremo (Jasper Philipsen sprint win)
Tour of Flanders (Mathieu van der Poel solo win)
Paris-Roubaix (Mathieu van der Poel solo win)
Amstel Gold (Tom Pidcock sprint win)
Liège–Bastogne–Liège (Tadej Pogačar solo win)
Olympic Road Race (Remco Evenepoel solo win)
World Championship Road Race (Tadej Pogačar solo win)
Il Lombardia (Tadej Pogačar solo win)

Top One-Week Stage Races:
Paris-Nice Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
Critérium du Dauphiné Part 1| Part 2 | Part 3
Tour du Suisse Part 1 | Part 2

The Grand Tours:

Giro d’Italia:
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Stage 4
Stage 5
Stage 6
Stage 7
Stage 8
Stage 9
First Rest Day
Stage 10
Stage 11
Stage 12
Stage 13
Stage 14
Stage 15
Rest Day #2
Stage 16
Stage 17
Stage 18
Stage 19
Stage 20
Stage 21
Giro Debrief: Breaking Down Exactly Where/How Tadej Pogačar Won the Race

Tour de France:
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Stage 4
Stage 5
Stage 6
Stage 7
Stage 8
Stage 9
Rest Day #1 Reflections
Stage 10
Stage 11
Stage 12
Stage 13
Stage 14
Stage 15
Rest Day #2 Reflections
Stage 16
Stage 17
Stage 18
Stage 19
Stage 20
Stage 21
Breaking Down Where/How Tadej Pogačar Dominated the Race

Vuelta a España:
Stage 1
Stage 2
Stage 3
Stage 4
Stage 5
Stage 6
Stage 7
Stage 8
Stage 9
Stage 10
Stage 11
Stage 12
Stage 13
Stage 14
Stage 15
Stage 16
Stage 17
Stage 18
Stage 19
Stage 20
Stage 21
Breaking Down Exactly Where/How Primož Roglič Won the Race