Published December 16, 2025 12:23PM
Grand tour podiums, world titles, major wins, and historical milestones — it was a banner year in 2025 as North American cycling hit a new generational high.
North Americans have always been there, but this past racing season saw something special as Mexico’s Isaac del Toro, Canada’s Magdeleine Vallieres, and a host of U.S. riders rewrote the history books.
OK, no grand tour wins (nearly with Del Toro), but Vallieres won Canada’s first elite road race world title, and U.S. riders from Chloé Dygert to Brandon McNulty and Matthew Riccitello all hit personal bests in what was a season of breakouts and confirmation.
Selecting the best riders of the season is never easy.
It often comes down to crunching statistics, interpreting what’s important, or just personal preferences. Some riders just rub people the wrong way, no matter what they do on — or off — the bike.
For our top picks for 2025, we look strictly at the significance of the results, where it comes in a rider’s professional trajectory, and what it might mean for the future.
There were plenty of highlights in 2025 for riders on the North American side of the pond. Let’s dive in:
Best US female: Chloé Dygert
Dygert started hot in Australia to score some early-season wins. (Photo: Chris Auld/Velo)
In many ways, 2025 saw a reconfirmation of the North American road racer.
There were huge breakouts north and south of the U.S. borders — read more below — but within the U.S., a deep pool of American riders continued to make their presence felt inside the elite peloton.
That confirms a growing trend over the past half-decade or so as the Americans have re-consolidated their space within the pack.
Americans didn’t necessarily fall off the radar, but there was a lull, especially in the fallout from the USADA controversy.
There were still plenty of top U.S. men and women racing at the elite level, but the headline-grabbing results weren’t as common as a new wave of Colombians and the Roule Brittania generation from Mark Cavendish to Bradley Wiggins to Lizzie Deignan and Chris Froome ruled the roads and boards for the better part of a decade in the 2010s.
That’s changed since the dawn of this decade, and the past year or two has seen U.S. riders hitting big wins that suggest a new golden era.
Think Sepp Kuss and his historic grand tour win at the 2023 Vuelta a España, and Kristen Faulkner and her double-gold twin-discipline harvest at the 2024 Paris Summer Games last summer.
That momentum carried straight into 2025.
On the women’s side, standout rides included Chloé Dygert, who nearly won the road stripes in Zurich in 2024. She came out gangbusters in January to win just her second WorldTour-level race to debut 2025 in Australia. A steady classics season saw her hit top 10s at Milan-San Remo and Paris-Roubaix.
Lily Williams also continues to bang at the door with another ever-steady year, with a top 10 at Gent-Wevelgem and a return to the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift with Human Powered Health. Teammate Ruth Edwards hit third in a stage at the Tour, while Megan Jastrab also shone with a WorldTour podium at the Ladies Simac Tour.
Faulkner’s 2025 season was eventually cut short by injury, while Lauren Stephens is now a huge force on gravel, but continues to dip her toes into the road, with victory at the Tour of the Gila, and battled Faulkner for the stripes at U.S. nationals at Charleston.
Our winner? Dygert, simply for being the closest to what seems like an overdue big European win this season.
Best US male: Matthew Riccitello
Riccitello, shown here in 2024, won the best young rider’s prize at La Vuelta. (Photo: Chris Auld/Velo)
The men’s peloton delivered a surge of American results in 2025, but the standout — measured by consistency, ambition, and grand tour gravity — was Matthew Riccitello, Velo’s best U.S. male rider of the season.
Riccitello, 23, quietly put together the strongest American grand tour campaign since Kuss, riding into the best young rider’s white jersey and finishing in the top-5 at the Vuelta a España.
The Arizonan delivered the kind of sustained performance that promises more, and he’s since penned a deal with Decathlon CMA CGM, and is expected to get a chance to lead team colors next year.
Along with Matteo Jorgenson, Brandon McNulty, and Kuss, Riccitello is emerging as a fresh GC candidate of his generation.
There were plenty of big wins and milestones across the U.S. peloton.
Neilson Powless produced one of the smartest one-day victories of the season at Dwars door Vlaanderen, outfoxing Visma-Lease a Bike despite being outnumbered three-to-one.
Jorgenson confirmed his place among the WorldTour elite by defending his Paris-Nice title, the only American ever to do so. A top-20 at the Tour de France and 10th overall at the Vuelta a España, largely in service of Jonas Vingegaard, underlined his growing authority within Visma’s hierarchy. Expect more leadership chances in 2026.
Quinn Simmons added some fresh luster to his palmarès, with third at GP Montréal, fourth at Il Lombardia — a rare American top-five at a monument — and his first WorldTour victories with stages at the Volta a Catalunya and Tour de Suisse, while winning the stars and stripes jersey. Hulk Hogan would be proud.
Kuss was also back at his best, helping to pace GC captain Vingegaard to second in the Tour and victory at the Vuelta a España. McNulty also enjoyed a breakout season as part of UAE Emirates XRG’s historic season, hitting a career-best GC ninth at the Giro with six wins across the year.
All this reflects a generational high among the elite U.S. men racing at the top of the sport right now, and all signs suggest there’s more to come.
Riccitello, however, delivered that kind of defining performance that changes the script. For that, he’s our U.S. male rider of the year.
Oh, Canada: Vallieres makes history
Vallieres celebrates the win with teammate Jackson. (Photo: Chris Auld/Velo)
North Americans have always had a bit of a chip on their collective shoulders when it comes to racing against cycling’s ancien régime.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that North Americans truly made an impact on the world cycling stage, from Greg LeMond and Connie Carpenter, to Steve Bauer and Raul Álcala, as Canadians, Mexicans, and bushy-tailed gringos started to light up the European roads.
And 2025 marked a turning point, and Canada is seeing a buzzing resurgence.
Michael Woods helped carry the Maple Leaf standard for a while, but his retirement comes as Derek Gee, Isabella Holmgren — winner of the women’s Tour de l’Avenir — and Vallieres are keeping Canada on the map.
Gee seems stuck in contract arbitration hell right now, but should emerge to resume his progress in 2026. A podium push in a men’s grand tour would be a new high-water mark for Canadian cycling that has seen just one grand tour winner with Ryder Hesjedal in the 2012 Giro.
The rising Holmgren sisters, along with newly minted world champion Vallieres — Canada’s first elite road racing crown — are sure to keep Canadian colors in the headlines for years to come. Stalwarts like Alison Jackson and Guillaume Boivin continue to provide steady ballast.
Our pick for the top Canadian in 2025 is Vallieres.
Her tenacity, inner confidence, and ability to deliver on the day made her Canada’s first elite rainbow jersey on the road. Quiet and hard-working, insiders knew she was due for something big, but Rwanda was a stunner in every measure.
Vallieres’s victory is a watershed achievement, not just for Canada, but for North American elite road cycling. Her win breaks a decades-long drought in elite world road titles from the entire continent.
And it comes just in time for Montréal’s world championships in 2026, the first in North America since Richmond in 2015.
Isaac del Toro: Mexico’s Merckx and North America’s best in 2025
Del Toro lit up the back half of 2025 to earn kudos among North Americans. (Photo: Chris Auld/Velo)
No North American lit up racing more than Mexico’s Del Toro.
Born and raised in Ensenada, just over the border from San Diego in Baja California, the 2023 Tour de l’Avenir winner exploded in terms of quality and depth across his sophomore pro season.
Del Toro’s breakthrough season — a grand tour podium with the Giro, third in the season-ending UCI rankings, and an avalanche of wins — signals the emergence of a new transformative talent for North America at the elite WorldTour level.
His Giro performance served as a before-and-after for Del Toro. Ever humble, he looked to have the pink jersey wrapped up when a tactical train wreck unfolded on the Colle delle Finestre climb high in the Italian Alps.
Simon Yates stole away the win with a heroic penultimate-stage raid — and on the same mountain where he infamously collapsed against Froome in 2018 — but Del Toro refused to buckle emotionally.
In fact, he came back stronger and more determined after what could have been a crippling collapse. Instead, he booked it as a brutally hard lesson learned and started to race even more aggressively and take more control of his own destiny.
He won more races than anyone in the back half of 2025, and is now poised to make his Tour de France debut alongside UAE teammate Tadej Pogačar, who’s already anointed the mild-mannered Mexican as his heir apparent.
Del Toro single-handedly reignited cycling in Mexico. The roads of Mexico used to boast one of the busiest and vibrant stage racing calendars anywhere in the Americas, but the scene slowly dried on the vine, much like in other parts of North America.
But thanks to Del Toro’s meteoric rise, there’s talk of reviving a Mexican stage race perhaps as soon as 2027. We can only hope so.
For Velo, the choice was clear. In 2025, no North American rider reshaped expectations or delivered more sparks than Isaac del Toro.