With 35km of the 119km route to go, a small group of riders were still together in Kigali, Rwanda. The junior world championship road race in September was on a hot day. The air quality was poor and the pace was high. As the group neared the top of the Côte de Kigali Golf climb, the 18-year-old Harry Hudson got out of the saddle and stomped hard on the pedals, moving away on the smooth, dusty tarmac. No one could go with the teenager, they just watched as the gap increased.
Hudson built his cushion to 36 seconds and soon realised no one was coming across. If he wanted to win, he’d have to do it solo. “The group had been pushing quite hard so I decided that was a good time to attack since people might have been struggling,” Hudson says, “and I thought that at the very least it would drop some more people. But I ended up going solo because no one followed.”
He managed his effort and tried to hold the good feeling he had in his legs until the last 15km when he decided to push. After 35km alone, Hudson crossed the line with his arms in the air, 16 seconds ahead of France’s Johan Blanc. The Harrogate Nova rider, with his tuft of curly brown hair and helmet-strap tan lines, stood atop the podium in the rainbow-banded jersey. He was Britain’s first ever junior men’s world champion.
Hudson on the podium in Rwanda with Blanc, left, and bronze medallist Jan Michal Jackowiak from Poland
DAVID RAMOS/GETTY IMAGES
“It was pretty hard, it was probably the most climbing I’ve done in a race of that length [2,671m in 119.3km],” Hudson says. “It’s still pretty weird to think that I’m riding around in a rainbow jersey for the next month or so. But yeah, every time I go on a ride I get to ride in rainbows at the moment.”
It was the moment that Hudson announced himself to the world, part of a year of great British successes, including a Giro d’Italia winner in Simon Yates, a La Vuelta podium for Tom Pidcock, fourth at the Tour de France for Oscar Onley and Matthew Brennan’s 12 victories. Hudson shows that the rich vein of cycling talent that has run through this country since Bradley Wiggins won its first Tour de France in 2012 looks set to continue — even as Britain’s most recent Tour winner, Geraint Thomas, retires.
Hudson got into cycling through his father, Paul, with whom he watched the Tour de France on TV as a child in Sheffield. He remembers Chris Froome, in particular, and Mark Cavendish, and enjoying the British dominance during those years. Hudson then started riding his bike at the weekends with his dad.
Hudson was able to pull away from the rest of the pack to take his first world title in Kigali…
DARIO BELINGHERI/GETTY IMAGES
And was left exhausted by the hot conditions
JEROME DELAY/AP
“It became a bit more serious,” Hudson says. “But it’s usually just been for fun. And then I began to train more and more in the last few years and the last two years, I’ve really focused and targeted races. I set some pretty fast times on some climbs in France, Alpe d’Huez and stuff like that, and then I also won my first race as a second year under-16.”
Hudson had a fantastic 2025, winning not only the junior world championship road race but also the junior version of Liège-Bastogne-Liège with Fensham Howes-MAS Design-CAMS, a team run by Tom Pidcock’s father, Giles. He also won the Classic Région Sud under-19 race in the Alps between La Joue du Loup and Superdévoluy. It showed that — at 58kg, the same weight as Jonas Vingegaard — he has a talent for climbing and hard, hilly days ideal for a future stage-race competitor.
By the middle of the year, Hudson was already talking to Lidl-Trek Future Racing, a development team which is designed to feed young riders into its elite-level Lidl-Trek outfit, one of World Tour cycling’s so-called big-budget super teams and home to riders such as the 2020 Giro d’Italia winner Tao Geoghegan Hart, Mads Pedersen and Juan Ayuso.
Hudson is aiming to secure a spot on Lidl-Trek’s elite team
AP PHOTO/JEROME DELAY
“I signed quite early,” Hudson says. “At the start of the year that was probably one of, if not the, top team I wanted to try to get into. I felt it was the best place for me to develop into the rider I wanted to be.”
In the middle of December, Hudson headed out to Calpe in Spain to join the rest of the Lidl-Trek team at their training camp. This is not just for the development team but mixed with the elite men’s and women’s teams too, offering the teenager an opportunity to get a taste of the highest level of training with proven winners. Now, he has his sights on 2026.
“I know what races I’m hopefully going to target,” Hudson says. “I want to get selected for the world championships again in Canada next year in the next category up [under-23], so I need to get selected. That’ll be a big goal of mine.”
Then he will want to take the next step up to Lidl-Trek’s elite men’s team and while he’s not taking that possibility for granted, he is a young man with clear aspirations for the highest level of this sport. What sort of rider does he want to be? The sort of new-era rider that has been ushered in by the likes of Tadej Pogacar and Pidcock, one that enjoys stage races as well as the one-day classics, who likes to ride gravel as well as tarmac.
“The Tour de France would be the big race that I’d love to win,” Hudson says. “But Strade Bianche and Liège are pretty close. That’s what I want ultimately — that would be my dream season if I made it to World Tour level.”