Here is a partial list of his 2025 victories: four stages of the Tour de France and the general classification; three stages of the Crit\u00e9rium du Dauphin\u00e9 and the general classification; the World Championship road race, the European Championship road race, the Tour of Flanders, Li\u00e8ge\u2013Bastogne\u2013Li\u00e8ge, La Fl\u00e8che Wallonne, Strade Bianche; and he became the only rider to win Il Lombardia five years in a row.
That would be a great palmar\u00e8s for any rider\u2019s career, but Poga\u010dar did it in one season. All in all, he won 20 races this year, two more than 21-year-old Paul Magnier, who registered 18 victories, all in second-level races and five alone in the season-ending Tour of Guangxi. Poga\u010dar\u2019s UAE Team Emirates\u2013XRG teammate Isaac del Toro finished the year with 16 victories. Together, the two riders accounted for 36 of their team\u2019s 95 victories in 2025, the most ever by a cycling team in a calendar year.<\/p>\n
The king<\/p>\n
But the story of the year was Poga\u010dar\u2019s absolute dominance of the sport and, to a lesser degree, the resignation it has created in the peloton among almost all riders, except Remco Evenepoel (Soudal Quick-Step) and Jonas Vingegaard (Visma\u2013Lease a Bike). But all of Evenepoel\u2019s victories came in time trials and in road races in which Poga\u010dar did not ride, and all of Vingegaard\u2019s victories, including three stages and the GC of the Vuelta, came in races in which the 27-year-old Slovenian did not ride. In the races where they went head-to-head, the Dane\u2019s record shows a string of 11 second places. The upstart<\/p>\n Not if 19-year-old Paul Seixas has anything to say about it. A native of Lyon, Seixas rides for the French team Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale Team and has registered only three victories this year, all of them in the Tour de l\u2019Avenir, a French race for young semi-professionals that is not part of the WorldTour. However, previous winners include Joop Zoetemelk, Greg LeMond, Miguel Indur\u00e1in, Laurent Fignon, Egan Bernal, and Poga\u010dar, who have won 18 Tours de France, so it is far from insignificant. Race of the year<\/p>\n There were a few races that stood out for several reasons, but primarily because they were dramatic and had surprise winners. For example, Mattias Skjelmose\u2019s stunning upset in the Amstel Gold Race, when he beat Poga\u010dar and Evenepoel in a sprint to the line; or that crazy Giro d\u2019Italia, with all the drama surrounding UAE\u2019s Juan Ayuso and Isaac del Toro, and the heroics of Simon Yates (Visma\u2013Lease a Bike) on the penultimate stage, with a big helping hand from Wout van Aert, to pull out the GC win.
For the record, Poga\u010dar\u2019s 20 wins are the most in a year for a male rider. But 26-year-old Lorena Wiebes (SD Worx\u2013Protime) chalked up 27 victories in 2025, including the Gravel World Championship. She may very well be the best rider in the world, male or female, as she has already won 118 races, 10 more than Poga\u010dar. The difference is that she is a one-day rider and has not yet challenged for a Grand Tour GC. That is probably why no one writing about women\u2019s cycling has suggested that she is dominating the sport or that her success is stifling, and even discouraging, competition.
But as this year has progressed and all the major road races came to resemble each other \u2013 breakaway is caught, Poga\u010dar bursts away from rivals, wins \u2013 more and more commentators suggested that many riders don\u2019t even try to race against the world champion, but resign themselves to competing for the lesser podium places. (You can read the latest such story here<\/a>.) Is it really a problem? Will it become a big problem?<\/p>\n
I have included him in this year-end review because he seems to have the talent and the ambition to become a major star. In 2025, he placed third in the European Championship road race, seventh in Il Lombardia, and eighth in the Dauphin\u00e9 \u2013 and he has spoken openly about his desire to dethrone the king. Asked on Eurosport\u2019s Bistrot V\u00e9lo<\/a> if he expected to eventually beat Poga\u010dar, he said, \u201cNot right away. But we know his best performances. We\u2019ll train to try and beat him. That\u2019s sports\u2026 There\u2019s a lot of work to do, that\u2019s for sure. You have to reach his level to win races today, the biggest races, in any case.\u201d
He went on to say that, rather than discouraging him, Poga\u010dar\u2019s dominance is an inspiration. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter what the [stage] profile or the effort, between 2 minutes and an hour, he is the strongest. It\u2019s really crazy. He\u2019s also a source of inspiration because that is how you become complete [as a rider] and win the general classifications. You try to understand how he does it.\u201d Seixas then acknowledged the age difference between the two and said that this means he doesn\u2019t have much time to reach the king\u2019s level. \u201cBecause the goal is not to beat him when he\u2019s on the decline, but when he is at his best level,\u201d the prince-in-waiting said.<\/p>\n
But for my money, the race of the year was the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift and Pauline Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot\u2019s superb ride on the Col de la Madeleine. It was an intelligent, powerful, and unexpected performance by the 33-year-old Visma\u2013Lease a Bike rider and the first Tour de France win by any French rider since the last of Jeannie Longo\u2019s three successive wins in an early and ultimately failed version of the Tour in 1989. But Ferrand-Pr\u00e9vot had to go to hell and back to get herself in shape for such a dominant performance.
\u201cBecause my preparation was so hard for the Tour de France, now I don\u2019t really see myself doing the same again,\u201d she said<\/a> after the race. \u201cOver these past months, dedicating myself to this has been good, it\u2019s paid off. But it\u2019s also been really hard. That\u2019s why I couldn\u2019t do it multiple times in the year. It\u2019s so much sacrifice.\u201d
Incredibly, she was criticised from several quarters for what she had done to her body to achieve her cycling dream. Yes, her body. She handled the criticism with aplomb and honesty and instantly became a model for women and girls around the world. And in a recent interview with Ouest-France<\/a>, she set herself apart from the so-called \u201ccannibals\u201d of cycling, like the sport\u2019s GOATs, Eddy Merckx and Poga\u010dar.
\u201cIt\u2019s a bit contradictory, but I don\u2019t necessarily like competition,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s not what drives me to ride a bike. Racing every weekend isn\u2019t something I particularly appreciate. Mentally, for me, it\u2019s too tiring. What I really like is to prepare for a specific goal and put everything into place to try and attain it. That\u2019s why I came back on the road. I had the Tour de France as my objective.\u201d
In other words, she doesn\u2019t want to win everything. But she also said in the interview that winning the Tour once was \u201cgreat\u2026 but doing it twice could be even better.\u201d So she will return to the race next year. With her rivals now knowing what to expect, it should be another terrific \u2013 and unpredictable \u2013 race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Here is a partial list of his 2025 victories: four stages of the Tour de France and the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":217355,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-217354","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\/217354","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=217354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/217354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/217355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=217354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=217354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=217354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}