{"id":597507,"date":"2026-08-27T10:54:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-27T10:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/597507\/"},"modified":"2026-08-27T10:54:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T10:54:11","slug":"can-the-philly-classic-ignite-another-golden-age-of-us-road-cycling-cycling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/597507\/","title":{"rendered":"Can the Philly Classic ignite another golden age of US road cycling? | Cycling"},"content":{"rendered":"

After a decade-long absence, the beloved Philadelphia<\/a> International Cycling Classic is set to return this weekend, with some of the world\u2019s best bike-racing teams taking to the famous circuit around the city\u2019s leafy Art Museum, Manayunk, and Roxborough areas on Sunday.<\/p>\n

The race is one of just a handful of events on American soil sanctioned by UCI, cycling\u2019s international governing body, and will feature squads such as EF Education EasyPost, Lidl-Trek, Lotto-Intermarch\u00e9, and Jayco AlUla in the men\u2019s race, and powerhouses CANYON\/\/SRAM zondacrypto and Human Powered Health in the women\u2019s event. It is classified as a 1.1 race, meaning it\u2019s two levels below the top-flight WorldTour, whose races include the Tour de France, Paris-Roubaix, and Li\u00e8ge-Bastogne-Li\u00e8ge.<\/p>\n

The race will retrace its celebrated 14.4-mile loop, starting on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, roaring past the city\u2019s famous art museum, snaking along the Schuykill River, through Fairmount Park, and into the Manayunk neighborhood, where the race\u2019s most famous segment awaits. It\u2019s a short but brutal climb, known as \u201cThe Wall,\u201d that averages a leg-crushing 17% of incline and has become synonymous with the Philly Classic. So synonymous in fact, that Manayunk officially designated the stretch of road as the \u201cManayunk Wall\u201d in 2002.<\/p>\n

After tackling The Wall, the racers will head back toward the Ben Franklin Parkway only to do it all over again. The men\u2019s peloton will complete eight laps of the circuit, totaling 124 miles. The women will complete 62 miles. Those distance totals make a bit more sense on the metric scale, as they equal 200km and 100km, respectively.<\/p>\n

Beyond the headline-grabbing rebirth of this famous American race, the new iteration of the Philly Classic is being lauded for offering equal prize money for both the men\u2019s and women\u2019s races. At $75,000 each for both the men\u2019s and women\u2019s races, the total prize money is double the minimum for a UCI race at this level. However, parity is nothing new for this race, which offered equal prizes as far back as 2013.<\/p>\n

Lisa Nutter, a world champion track cyclist and the wife of Philadelphia\u2019s mayor, originally pushed for equal pay between the genders.<\/p>\n

\u201cMayor [Michael] and Lisa Nutter were very adamant that we should have prize parity back then,\u201d the race\u2019s director, Robin Morton, said. \u201cAnd so, we felt that we needed to continue that tradition and make sure the men and the women got paid the same.\u201d<\/p>\n

The race, which originally ran from 1985 to 2016 (with a women\u2019s race being added in 1994, known as the \u201cLiberty Classic\u201d through 2012), hit its zenith in stride with the rest of American cycling. That is to say, around the time Lance Armstrong was winning seven Tours de France, all of which were vacated after Armstrong admitted to doping. That era was not only the result of Armstrong\u2019s dominance and subsequent fame but also of the seeds that were planted in American cycling in the 1980s, thanks to the success of racers such as Greg LeMond, a three-time winner of the Tour de France, and Ohio native Andy Hampsten, who won the 1988 Giro d\u2019Italia.<\/p>\n

It was in the early 1980s that the United States began to foster a domestic racing scene, eventually hosting marquee races such as the Coors Classic, the Ore-Ida Women\u2019s Challenge, the Tour de Georgia, the San Francisco Grand Prix, the Tour of California and of course, the Philly Classic.<\/p>\n

Past winners of the men\u2019s race include 11-time-Tour de France stage winner Andr\u00e9 Greipel, Armstrong, American cycling legend George Hincapie, and 1995 American national champion Norm Alvis. The women\u2019s race was dominated in the late 1990s and early 2000s by five-time winner and Olympic gold medalist Petra Rossner, and counts two-time world champion Giorgia Bronzini and American standout Evelyn Stevens as past winners.<\/p>\n

Today, the United States hosts just a few UCI-sanctioned road races: the Redlands Bicycle Classic, the Tour of the Gila, the Maryland Cycling<\/a> Classic, and the Tour of Arkansas, formerly known as the Joe Martin Stage Race. Adding the Philadelphia International Cycling Classic to that list is a huge step forward for American cycling, which has shifted its focus from road racing toward criterium racing and gravel racing over the last two decades. Or maybe it\u2019s more accurate to say it\u2019s a huge step backwards, to that brief stretch in American sports history when cycling was at its peak and the US was a major player on the world scene.<\/p>\n

The Philadelphia Cycling Classic will be livestreamed on Channel 6 ABC, with the women\u2019s race kicking off at 8.30am Eastern. The men will follow at 12.30pm. Of course, you could always trek to Philly and become part of the party yourself. I highly recommend snagging a spot somewhere along The Wall.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After a decade-long absence, the beloved Philadelphia International Cycling Classic is set to return this weekend, with some…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":597508,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,105],"class_list":["post-597507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=597507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/597507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/597508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=597507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=597507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=597507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}