The 23-year-old former duathlete only started racing two years ago. Now she’s an Amstel Gold Race winner.
Just two years ago, Paula Blasi was an unknown 21-year-old riding for a Spanish club team having only just started in the sport. Today, Blasi has a WorldTour one-day victory to her name, after outgunning the biggest names in the sport at Sunday’s Amstel Gold Race – the only Dutch race in the Women’s WorldTour.
It’s been a remarkable rise through the ranks for the now-23-year-old from Catalonia – two years spent exceeding expectations with every step she taken. And Blasi’s story is only just beginning.
Sport has been a constant in Paula Blasi’s life for as long as she can remember. At school it was basketball, before injury forced a change of direction. She followed her brother into middle-distance running – 800 and 1,500 metres in particular – and in 2022, she even spent a year playing football (soccer) and rugby at university. But duathlon – cycling and running – would be the sport she’d find herself most invested in. That was until early 2024 when an injury forced her out of Spain’s Duathlon National Championships leaving cycling as “my only training option”.
It’s a familiar story: an endurance athlete from another sport getting injured and turning to cycling during recovery, only to find that they have an aptitude for riding, and that they love it just as much, if not more, than their previous sport. In Blasi’s case, she joined the Catalonia-based Massi-Baix Ter club team in early 2024 and did her first races in March. She “immediately fell in love with the sport.”
It probably didn’t hurt that she was seeing great results right away. She managed a bunch of podium finishes in national-level events in her first months of racing, before winning the road race and time trial at the Catalan Championships in May 2024. By June, less than six months after dedicating herself to the sport, she was Spain’s U23 ITT champion.
More success would follow at the domestic level, before Blasi was selected to represent Spain at the second edition of the Tour de l’Avenir in August. In a race that featured many riders already competing at WorldTour level, Blasi didn’t just hold her own, she excelled. Fourth overall, including third on the Colle delle Finestre mountain-top finish that ended the race, spoke of a rider on a phenomenal trajectory.
And her 2024 wasn’t done yet. In September she’d don the Spanish colours again at the Road World Championships in Switzerland, this time riding to a top 10 among the U23 women’s road race contingent. She recalls finding herself in the peloton with eventual winner Lotte Kopecky on one side and Demi Vollering on the other. She says she was so starstruck that she lost concentration and was dropped from the bunch.
It was little surprise that Blasi had several teams chasing her for the 2025 season. She opted to join UAE Team ADQ’s development team, attracted by the prospect of a clear pathway to the top of the sport. The plan had been to spend a year with the Continental-level squad, learn the ropes, do the odd race with the WorldTour team, then hopefully step up to the WorldTour team in 2026. In the end, that transition happened a lot sooner than anyone would have expected.
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