{"id":191219,"date":"2025-10-10T20:03:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T20:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/191219\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T20:03:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T20:03:10","slug":"something-always-went-terribly-wrong-former-winner-matej-mohoric-hoping-gravel-world-championships-will-turn-around-a-near-disastrous-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/191219\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8216;Something always went terribly wrong&#8217; &#8211; Former winner Matej Mohori\u010d hoping Gravel World Championships will turn around a near-disastrous 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"fdd90bcf-0e9e-4590-9505-9646a47527fe\">When not even a late crash could stop Matej Mohori\u010d (Slovenia) from blasting to a<a data-analytics-id=\"inline-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.cyclingnews.com\/races\/uci-gravel-world-championships-2023\/elite-men\/results\/\" data-before-rewrite-localise=\"https:\/\/www.cyclingnews.com\/races\/uci-gravel-world-championships-2023\/elite-men\/results\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"> solo victory in the 2023 Gravel World Championships <\/a>ahead of Florian Vermeersch (Belgium) and Connor Swift (Great Britain), it rounded off a stunning second half of the season that had already seen Mohori\u010d win a third stage of the Tour de France,<a data-analytics-id=\"inline-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.cyclingnews.com\/races\/tour-de-pologne-2023\/stage-7\/results\/\" data-before-rewrite-localise=\"https:\/\/www.cyclingnews.com\/races\/tour-de-pologne-2023\/stage-7\/results\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\"> the Tour de Pologne overall <\/a>and stages of the Renewi Tour and CRO Race. That summer and autumn, it seemed he couldn&#8217;t stop raising his arms in the air.<\/p>\n<p>This time around, it&#8217;s a very different story.<\/p>\n<p><a id=\"elk-seasonal\" href=\"\" data-url=\"\" target=\"_blank\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer-when-downgrade\" data-hl-processed=\"none\"\/><\/p>\n<p id=\"fdd90bcf-0e9e-4590-9505-9646a47527fe-2\">For Mohori\u010d, the Gravel Worlds Championships is the last chance saloon to try and salvage something from his near-disastrous 2025 season. Or as the Bahrain Victorious racer told <a data-analytics-id=\"inline-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.wielerflits.nl\/\" data-url=\"https:\/\/www.wielerflits.nl\/\" target=\"_blank\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer-when-downgrade\" data-hl-processed=\"none\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Wielerflits<\/a> recently, &#8220;I even hit my best form ever a few times this year, but then something always went terribly wrong.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>You may like<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\" aria-hidden=\"true\">&#8220;It&#8217;s probably my worst season ever in terms of results.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>After riding the Gravel World Championships, Mohori\u010d will take part in the Japan Cup on Saturday, October 18, to pull down the curtain on his racing year. But it&#8217;s on Sunday in Limburg that he&#8217;s hoping to hit the jackpot.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s an important goal for me. I&#8217;m probably one of the favorites. Maybe not the favorite, but I think I can compete for a good result,&#8221; Mohori\u010d said.<\/p>\n<p>Looking back on a winless year &#8211; something that he only previously suffered once in the last decade, during the pandemic-struck season of 2020 &#8211; Mohori\u010d said that whenever he found himself taking a couple of steps forward in 2025, he then found himself taking two steps back. The main highlights were a third place in the last stage of the Tour de France and a fifth place in the GP de Qu\u00e9bec &#8211; meagre takings for a racer of his stature.<\/p>\n<p class=\"newsletter-form__strapline\">The latest race content, interviews, features, reviews and expert buying guides, direct to your inbox!<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\" aria-hidden=\"true\">&#8220;I started well in the Tour de la Provence,&#8221; &#8211; where he finished second overall &#8211; &#8220;and those first races, but then I got sick twice. I probably pushed my body too hard in the winter to take an extra step in preparing for the Classics,&#8221; he explained.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\" aria-hidden=\"true\">&#8220;But yeah, that didn&#8217;t really pay off, and what followed was my worst Classics campaign so far.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\" aria-hidden=\"true\">&#8220;After the Classics, I tried to pull myself together, take some rest, and start again. That&#8217;s where I found really good form again. Actually, I even hit my best form ever a few times this year, but then something always went terribly wrong.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>You may like<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\" aria-hidden=\"true\">Problems with his bike on the breakaway stage 20 of the Tour de France, a day he&#8217;d earmarked as a goal, were followed by a promising top three in Paris around the Montmartre circuit. However, so far, there hasn&#8217;t been a truly standout result.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\" aria-hidden=\"true\">Hence the interest in trying to reverse the 2025 trend in the Gravel Worlds, although he&#8217;s not been able to recon the course and will be riding, he says, on intuition &#8211; something he often does, so he&#8217;s not overly troubled by that.<\/p>\n<p>Likewise, he&#8217;s trying to put a positive spin on what has already been a very long season, which started way back in late January with two Spanish one-day races and will only end with the very last race of the road calendar, the Japan Cup.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\" aria-hidden=\"true\">&#8220;It&#8217;s challenging,&#8221; he told<a data-analytics-id=\"inline-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.wielerflits.nl\/\" data-url=\"https:\/\/www.wielerflits.nl\/\" target=\"_blank\" referrerpolicy=\"no-referrer-when-downgrade\" data-hl-processed=\"none\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"> Wielerflits<\/a>, &#8220;but we&#8217;ll see.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p id=\"505264f7-150e-4971-80b8-98e7d849cab9\">Get unlimited access to all of our coverage of the 2025 UCI Gravel World Championships and the final rounds of the Life Time Grand Prix &#8211; including breaking news, interviews and analysis reported by our journalists on the ground in Limburg and Arkansas as the action unfolds. <a data-analytics-id=\"inline-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.cyclingnews.com\/sub24\/?utm_source=Referral+link&amp;utm_medium=Website&amp;utm_campaign=Gravel+25\" data-before-rewrite-localise=\"https:\/\/www.cyclingnews.com\/sub24\/?utm_source=Referral+link&amp;utm_medium=Website&amp;utm_campaign=Gravel+25\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Find out more<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When not even a late crash could stop Matej Mohori\u010d (Slovenia) from blasting to a solo victory in&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191220,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-191219","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-cycling","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191219"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191219\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}