The Secret Pro checks in after a season defined by chaos, peaking at the brutal Road World Championships in Rwanda.
Sime Moody
The Vuelta was chaos, the transfer market is chaos, and then Worlds in Rwanda … also chaos. That’s been the theme of 2025. Chaos.
Rwanda is the one everyone’s buzzing about this week. If you watched on telly, you saw the climbs around Kigali, the heat, the altitude, and the crowds packed in everywhere. What you didn’t see was how cooked a lot of riders were just getting there. The travel was brutal. Long flights, hardly any recovery after the Vuelta or Montreal. Add the altitude on top of legs already emptied out by the season, plus some nasty gut stuff going around, and the attrition rate was high before the racing even started. What was it, 30 guys that finished? I’m surprised it was even that many to be honest.
And yet the Worlds themselves? They delivered. The fans were unreal, probably some of the most passionate I’ve ever seen. Kids running alongside the team buses, whole neighbourhoods packed onto the roadside, music and noise from start to finish. It made all the suffering feel like it meant something.
I know there was chatter about the government (pros can read, you know) but for us, on the ground, that stuff feels pretty far away. I sometimes struggle with this, personally. Matej [Mohorič] said it really well I thought. A lot of us wish we were more up to speed, but we just aren’t. Plus, the list of things we have to pay attention to, according to some fans, just keeps growing. I didn’t even know Charlie Kirk was a person until this week, when Chloe Dygert put a sticker about him on her fork, and now I’m supposed to have an opinion on him? I don’t know Chloe, let alone Charlie. Though even the briefest of Googles suggests that the sticker probably wasn’t the best call on her part. Bet Canyon is raging.
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