Published December 30, 2025 07:13AM
The 2025 racing season never took a day off, but 10 decisive race days stood apart.
Nearly every classic, stage race, and grand tour served up moments worthy of any year-end “best of” list.
The peloton’s stars served up one tasty morsel after another in a non-stop, season-long highlight reel. From Pauline Ferrand-Prévot blowing up expectations to Tadej Pogačar steamrolling the record books, 2025 was a high-speed train that never had any stops.
But only 10 race days truly rose above the rest.
These are the ones that cracked the races wide open, changed narratives, and reshaped careers.
Sometimes tactics backfired or new names elbowed their way into the conversation. Others were just full-gas, smash-mouth racing that reminded everyone why pro cycling is the world’s best sport.
Here’s our curated list of the 10 race days that defined 2025:
Strade Bianche Donne: The return of the queen
Strade Bianche Donne kicked off the whole season and this day across the Tuscan white roads previewed a lot of what was in store for 2025.
The race was the first serious read on Anna van der Breggen’s comeback. Four years after swapping the bike for the DS chair, Strade Bianche proved that AVDB’s racing chops were fully intact.
She didn’t win, but she came out swinging. She attacked Vollering all the way to the final wall. Later on, she got a big win at the Vuelta and hit podiums at the worlds TT and European road race. The queen was back.
Strade also confirmed that Ferrand-Prévot’s road return wasn’t just a work in progress. In an early signal of very big things still to come, she was right back into the mix only weeks into her full-time return to road racing. It proved she could handle the speed and pressure of the WorldTour’s best.
And then there was Vollering, who was racing with supreme confidence that looked to set her up for a massive season.
Though she later won the Vuelta Femenina as part of a spectacular spring, she ran out of gas at the Tour de France and worlds when it counted most.
Milan-San Remo: Van der Poel master class
La Primavera lived up to its reputation as the hardest classic to win, a lesson that Pogačar took to heart coming into this year’s absolutely stunning edition.
His long-range, high-risk assault over the Cipressa was the first hit out in a season that the Slovenian was out to rewrite (again) the conventions of modern racing. No one had won with a move on the Cipressa since the 1990s, but Pogačar knew that following the script was never going to work.
Mathieu van der Poel and Filippo Ganna hitched a ride and turned the final 30 minutes of San Remo into the most scintillating closing acts of the season. Pogačar attacked like a fiend, Ganna was gapped and clawed back, but MVDP packed the diamonds in his legs.
Coming down the Via Roma for a three-up sprint, Van der Poel went long to deliver his latest stunning rebuke to Pogačar.
The Dutchman remains the lone rider who can consistently match Pogačar and come out on top. Of course, he’s not going to drop Pogačar in the Alps or win any time trial, but in the biggest one-day races on favorable terrain he has proven again that he is the peloton’s top Pog-Slayer.
Dwars door Vlaanderen: Flawless Powless defies the odds
Dwars door Vlaanderen produced one of the odds-defying finales of the 2025 classics season. Neilson Powless was flawless despite being outnumbered three-to-one, and managed to pull off the upset of the year.
Did Visma-Lease a Bike get beaten, or did Visma beat itself? It was a bit of both. Van Aert later admitted he insisted the team race for him for the win in the sprint, meaning that Visma wasn’t going to use its numerical advantage to dislodge Powless.
Old-school tactics called for taking turns attacking Powless to assure a Visma winner. Instead, WVA took Powless to the line, and lost in what was the face-palm moment of 2025.
Powless deserves credit in what’s one of the biggest U.S. wins in the northern classics. It confirmed the American is stronger, smarter, and now wants nothing less than a monument victory.
Giro d’Italia: White road carnage
The 2025 Giro d’Italia will always be remembered for the tactical disaster on the Colle delle Finestre that opened the door for Simon Yates to ride away with pink. But the race turned on its head much earlier.
Stage 9 across Tuscany’s white roads was the real hinge point. In a classics-style, attack-riddled stage, crashes took down pre-race favorites Juan Ayuso and Primož Roglič, and both would later abandon. Yates limited the damage and stayed within reach, laying the groundwork for his revenge two weeks later.
But up front, the race came alive with a gripping battle between two of the peloton’s most exciting riders. Wout van Aert and Isaac del Toro went head-to-head in an epic duel of generations, with Van Aert taking an emotional win and Del Toro riding into the maglia rosa.
The Giro wasn’t decided on the gravel of Tuscany, but it set the stage for its gut-wrenching finale over the gravel road pass in the Alps nearly two weeks later.
Tour de Suisse: Almeida road rage
The Swiss tour in 2025 lived up to its billing as a proving ground for future stars and saw UAE’s João Almeida deliver the season’s best come from behind win of the year.
The Portuguese star hemorrhaged time in stage 2 when he missed a big 28-rider breakaway that gained more than three minutes. Rather than give up, he attacked with a frenzy across the rest of the race, clawing back fistfuls of time each stage. He won three stages and finished second in two others, capping it off with a smashing final TT to win the overall.
The clincher came in stage 5 when he ripped apart the peloton, with only Oscar Onley able to follow.
The Swiss tour was a central chapter in a breakthrough season for Almeida, who won three stage races, finished second in two others, and hit second overall at the Vuelta across 2025.
The final podium included Kevin Vauquelin and Onley, both who would light up the Tour de France in July.
Giro d’Italia Women: Raid for pink
The Giro’s second major mountain test with a summit finish atop Monte Nerone delivered a scrappy stage that decided the entire race. Elisa Longo Borghini went long before Sarah Gigante bridged across to steal away the victory in what was her breakout ride of 2025. She took the win, and all but secured third overall in one shot.
Behind her, Longo Borghini rode with trademark precision to wrestle away the maglia rosa from Marlen Reusser, who lost the jersey but held on for the podium.
With the race moving to a better slot on the calendar in 2026, when it will not overlap with the men’s Tour de France, more fans will be able to tune in.
Tour de France: Hautacam slaughter
Perhaps no single day of 2025 better encapsulates the essence of Pogačar than this monster day up the Hautacam, one of the most fearsome climbs in the Pyrénées.
Visma-Lease a Bike tried to pummel Pogačar into submission for the first 10 days of racing, but the first major mountain top finale is always the most telling of any in the Tour. It peels back to the world who’s the strongest and Pogačar absolutely just crushed it, taking more than two minutes out of Vingegaard and leaving everybody else shaking their heads to his superiority.
The drama in the Tour was all but over in one mountain stage and it raised the questions that would trend across the remainder of 2025: Can anyone could ever beat Pogačar? Is cycling becoming too predictable because he wins nearly every race he starts, and how does Pogačar keep himself interested enough to stay at the top?
This stage captured the essential Pogačar moment of 2025 in a season marked by more exceptionalism, from his daring Paris-Roubaix debut to a second straight world title.
Tour de France Femmes: PFP throw down
When Ferrand-Prévot made her outlandish prediction that she was going to win the Tour de France in the wake of her Olympic gold medal on home dirt in Paris in 2024, everyone thought that she might be able to do it, but the feeling was that the modern peloton had evolved and changed so much since she last raced on the road nearly 10 years ago that she would at the very least need time to adjust and catch up.
If there was any doubt after winning Paris-Roubaix, she blew that notion away in the big mountain stages stacked up back-to-back in the Alps. On paper, it favored the likes of defending champion Kasia Niewiadoma or Vollering.
In one of the most spectacular summit finales in 2025, PFP rode everyone off her wheel on eye-watering steeps of the Col de Madeleine. Her rivals were helpless and the Frenchwoman tapped away to bury everyone.
The performance sparked a fierce debate about how far an athlete should push their bodies, but the result was undeniable. Ferrand-Prévot rode into history as France’s first Tour de France winner in decades.
Vuelta a España: Valdezcaray crusher
In a Vuelta a España racked by controversial and eventually race-breaking protests, the decisive GC battle came in the most unexpected of settings. In proof that the hardest stages on paper often do not deliver the most explosive sparks, this relatively minor summit finish stage into Spain’s central mountains was all but overlooked by the pundits.
But Visma had something else in mind, and Jonas Vingegaard launched a long-range attack that put everyone into the red zone. Almeida took control of the chase, with only Vuelta surprise packet Tom Pidcock able to hold his wheel, prompting the season’s best quote about growing some — eh, hem — courage.
Vingegaard got his Vuelta crown, and though the final half of the race would be contested with fits and starts against the backdrop of widening protests, Valdezcaray proved the decider.
Rwanda road worlds: Vallieres out of nowhere
The worlds are wonderfully unique because they’re contested with national teams, without race radio, often on a grueling circuit set against the globe’s most exotic locations.
Anything can happen, and occasionally the worlds will deliver a true miracle on wheels. That’s what happened in Africa’s first worlds.
Magdeleine Vallieres‘ victory in Rwanda represented all of those things wrapped up into one. It was mind-boggling how the favorites just sat there and watched the gap just grow. By the time the favorites ramped up the chase, it was too late. Vallieres had a legs to hang onto win Canada‘s first rainbow jersey and North America‘s first world champion since the 1990s.
All just in time for Montreal and North America’s first worlds since 2015 Richmond.