After retiring from being a full-time elite-level cross-country racer on the UCI circuit, Nino Schurter’s future has been a bit of a mystery. He is maintaining his status as an elite-level racer for 2026, but we didn’t know what races he was going to be doing. It was clear that he was going to be racing in some events this year, but we still hadn’t heard what they would be.
Curious to find out what Nino would be doing this year, we wrote to Thomas Frischknecht at Scott and asked him. “Frischi,” as he is known to his friends, has been working with Nino for years. For most of the 1990s, Frischi was widely considered to be the best World Cup XC racer in the world. He won three overall World Cup XC titles in the 1990s, and came away with a silver medal in the first Olympic mountain bike event, in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1996.
We asked Frischi what Nino was going to be doing this year. We suggested to Frischi that Nino compete in the Marathon World Championships and try doing some eMTB and enduro races, too, where we thought Nino would have a good shot at continuing his winning tradition.
Frischi wrote back to us and told us: “We will announce Nino’s schedule later on. Marathon worlds is unlike[ly] as it is a climbers only course in Italy[.] He will for sure do some gravel races and BC Bike Race is also on his schedule.” —TF
A few months ago, Nino shared the following photo of himself riding a Scott gravel bike:
He also shared this photo of the bike by itself.
Nino Schurter’s gravel bike.
If Nino starts competing in gravel races, we look forward to seeing how he does when Mathieu van der Poel is racing against him. Those two guys put on some of the best cross-country battles on the World Cup circuit when they were racing against each other in 2018 and 2019. They both raced together in the 2018 Mountain Bike World Championship, where Nino won the gold medal, and Van der Poel won the bronze.