These Are the Racers We Can’t Wait to Watch
It feels strange to be considering which riders to watch for the 2020 season in August, but 2020 has been a year like no other.
As racing finally is starting to return in Europe, the women’s peloton is back on the road. While the sport might look different in terms of spectators on the course and masks on riders as they stand atop the podiums, within the peloton, not much has changed. Heat acclimatization is still a factor in midsummer races, attacks are still being thrown in final kilometers at races, and teams are doing their best to work together after spending months apart.
For female riders, the racing options are even slimmer than they are for the men, and for fans of women’s cycling, this has been a horrifically dull summer. Even with racing back on the calendar, it has to be noted that the men are getting many more opportunities than the women to race, which isn’t surprising—but is certainly disappointing. But even without many races in the books for 2020, we can make some conjectures about who we know will put in a good showing, and who’s already surprising fans.
Annemiek van Vleuten (Mitchelton-Scott)
It’s nearly impossible to top this list with any other racer, since van Vleuten is not only the 2019 World Champion, she’s also currently crossing finish lines with huge gaps behind her. There have been three races so far this season with a solid international women’s field, and van Vleuten has rocked them all: She won Strade Bianchi, Clasica Femenina Navarra, and Durango-Durango Emakumeen Saria in recent weeks. In fact, she’s won the last six races that she’s entered. (If rumors are to be believed, she will be moving to another team for 2021-2022, likely Movistar, according to Dutch news reports.)
Anna Van der Breggen (Boels - Dolmans Cycling Team)
Sitting third in the current UCI women’s ranking, Van der Breggen finished second at World Championships in both the road race and the time trial and second overall at the 2019 Giro Rosa, which means of all the women in the pro peloton, she might just be the one hungriest for an outright win. Unfortunately, van Vleuten keeps snapping those up, and so far this season, Van der Breggen has had to settle for top-five finishes. But last season, the 30-year-old scored the overall win at the Tour of California and secured her fifth victory at La Flèche Wallonne Féminine, one of the major single-day races for the women’s peloton. She recently announced her intention to retire after the rescheduled 2021 Olympics, where she hopes to defend her gold medal that she scored in 2016, before finishing the 2021 cycling season and transitioning from racer to sport director for her 2021 team, SD Worx.
Mavi Garcia (Alè BTC Ljubljana)
Garcia surprised cycling fans when she came out and raced to win at Strade Bianci last weekend. She was in the lead until nan Vleuten caught her with only seven kilometers to go, and she managed to take second. It wasn’t completely without precedent: the week prior, she finished second to van Vleuten at Emakumeen Nafarroako Klasikoa in Spain ahead of Anna van der Breggen. At 36 years old, she’s one of the older—though far from the oldest—racers in the women’s peloton, but is relatively new to cycling. She began her endurance sport career as a duathlete and shifted to cycling in 2015, which may explain why bold breakaways rather than in-the-peloton tactics make sense to her. She’s had solid results in the past, but the Strade Bianchi finish represents a breakout moment for her: Last year, her top result was a second in the Tour de Yorkshire stage race.
Marianne Vos (CCC-Liv)
It’s really not a ‘who’s who in cycling’ list if you don’t include multi-time World Champion and Olympic gold medalist Marianne Vos on the list. Even in her worst seasons where she’s plagued by injury, she’s still worth a mention in road and cyclocross as a wild card when she does come back. In 2019, she not only scored four sprint-finish stage wins at the Giro Rosa, the most prestigious women’s stage race in the world, she also turned around and won the 2019 edition of La Course. So far in the season restart, she’s been racing healthy and appears to making her way toward the front of the peloton. She finished sixth at this year’s Strade Bianchi.
Amanda Spratt (Mitchelton-Scott)
The 32-year-old Australian has been racing since 2004 and has been racking up medals since she first hit the road. She started the 2020 season with third-place finishes in both the Tour Down Under and the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race. (It’s worth nothing that in 2017, 2018 and 2019, Spratt handily won the Tour Down Under.) In 2019, Spratt was bronze medalist at World Championships as well as at the Giro Rosa—with van Vleuten as a teammate, she likely will spend most races working with her to secure the team’s win, but when van Vleuten isn’t on the start line (or in 2021 when she switches teams, if rumors are to be believed), Spratt becomes the top Mitchelton-Scott contender.
Leah Thomas (Équipe Paule Ka)
The American is on the U.S. Olympic long list for road, and she’s the only American racer to have a major result so far this season with a third-place finish at Strade Bianche earlier this month. Despite coming to cycling later in life—the 31-year-old didn’t start racing professionally until 2015—she stomped onto the scene in a big way. In 2019, she secured a win at Chrono des Nations as well as the overall win at the Women’s Tour of Scotland. She also finished second in Stage 8 at the Giro Rosa in a tough sprint, so in addition to being a fantastic time trialist, she can handle herself in a pack.
Elisa Longo Borghini (Trek-Segafredo Women)
The 28-year-old Italian racer has been on lists like these for years now, and she hasn’t disappointed in the season’s restart so far: She’s been top five in the last four races, and is one of the few racers who has opted to toe the line at all three Spanish races and Strade Bianchi. Top five seems to be her curse though: Last year, she was fifth at the World Championships and the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race, though she did secure the overall win at the WWT Emakumeen Bira stage race. Longo Borghini rarely drops out of the top 10 and can be counted on to keep races interesting—she’s certainly due for a big result in 2020.
Chloe Hosking (Rally Cycling)
As racing restarts, the Australian racer and team leader for Rally Cycling’s women’s team will be making her way back to Europe to be at La Course on August 29. Hosking won that race back in 2016, and this year comes in with a new team and a new sense of hope and excitement. Last season, she ended her time with Alé Cipollini by winning the last stage race of the year, the Tour of Guangxi Women’s WorldTour—after going on a bikepacking trip with her dad to prep for the race! After years of racing with European teams, Hosking has expressed her enthusiasm for having an American team backing her, and she hopes to pass along her racing knowledge while sprinting it out for finish lines.
Liane Lippert (Team Sunweb)
Lippert might only be 22 years old, but she’s been racing seriously since 2013 and started with Team Sunweb back in 2017. Now, 2020 appears to be her breakout year. In January, the German rider started the season strong with a silver medal overall at the Tour Down Under while winning the young racer, QOM, and sprint categories. She also took the win at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race while in Australia. She’s currently leading the UCI Women’s World Tour standingsthanks to her early season racing, but it’s likely that at the least, she’ll hang onto the young rider classification as the season progresses.
Lauren Stephens (TIBCO-Silicon Valley Bank)
Technically, Stephens’s best results this season come from her GC win in the Zwift-run Tour de France virtual racing this summer, but up against fierce competitors like Olympic contender Chloe Dygert, that deserves a shoutout. She’s one of the few Americans back to racing in Europe as well, though her Strade Bianche finish was mid-pack. History has shown Stephens to be a bit of a time-trial specialist, with a second place at Pan-Ams in 2018, so it’s not surprising that she was able to deliver on Zwift Island. Of course, the jump from trainer to peloton is a big one, but if Stephens can harness the power she brought to the virtual Tour for La Course at the end of this month, she will certainly be one to watch.
Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig (FDJ Nouvelle Aquitaine Futuroscope)
With a win at the GP de Plumelec-Morbihan Dames and third place finishes at Trofeo Alfredo Binda, Tour of Flanders, and La Course in the 2019 season, Uttrup Ludwig became a rider to watch. She also became a favorite for cycling fans thanks to this exuberant postrace interview last season. After leaving her position on Bigla for FDJ Nouvelle Aquitaine Futuroscope this season, the Danish rider is starting to find her footing with her new team.
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