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Thursday June 5, 2025
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2024 Tour de France | 2024 Giro d'Italia
My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth. - George Washington
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Upcoming racing:
- June 8: Brussels Cycling Classic
- June 8 - 15: Critérium du Dauphiné
- July 5 - 27: Tour de France
Latest completed racing:
- May 9 - June 1: Giro d'Italia
- May 29 - June 1: Tour of Norway
- May 14 - 18: 4 Jours de Dunkerque
- May 18: Rund um Köln
- May 13: Classique Dunkerque
- May 11: Tro-Bro Léon
- May 10: GP du Morbihan
- May 9: Tour du Finistère
- April 27 - May 4: Tour of Turkey
- April 29 - May 4: Tour de Romandie
- May 1: Rund um den Finanzplaz Eschborn-Frankfurt
- April 27: Liège-Bastogne-Liège
- April 24 - 27: Vuelta Asturias
Here’s the team’s news:
Remco Evenepoel headlines our team for one of the most prestigious stage races of the season.
For many riders a key pre-Tour de France test, the Critérium du Dauphiné will get underway from Domérat and the first two days should go to the fast men who can overcome the rolling terrain in Montluçon and Issoire. Stage three could be a good opportunity for the breakaway specialists, before the 17.7km individual time trial held in the Ardèche department, which will create the first significant gaps in the general classification.
Remco Evenepoel in the race leader's jersey before the start of stage five of the 2024 edition. Sirotti photo
Mâcon, a city that has featured many times on the route of the Grande Boucle, will give the sprinters one last opportunity to shine, with the climbers set to take center stage on the final three days of the race. Combloux, Valmeinier (16.5km, 6.7%) and Plateau de Mont-Cenis (9.6km, 6.9%) are the three summit finishes – boasting some steep gradients – that are going to be decisive for the overall standings of this 77th edition, with the winner of the yellow jersey set to be crowned next Sunday, after a stage of non-stop action.
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Olympic Champion Remco Evenepoel, a stage winner at the previous edition, is set to lead Soudal Quick-Step at the Critérium du Dauphiné, where he’ll be backed by a strong cast comprising Pascal Eenkhoorn, Tour of Oman runner-up Valentin Paret-Peintre, Casper Pedersen, Pepijn Reinderink, Itzulia Basque Country stage winner Maximilian Schachmann and Louis Vervaeke.
“I’m happy to be back in action with the team. I had a solid altitude training camp in Sierra Nevada and now I’m ready for the Dauphiné. I can’t say that I’m going there with any specific goals, as the most important thing will be to see how the form is. It goes without saying that I would like to be in the fight for a couple of good results, but the plan is to take it one stage at a time and see where this leads next week”, said Remco.
“The course is very demanding, which isn’t a surprise. The time trial is going to be a nice test, although the differences won’t be big. The last stages will be the hardest of the race and will give us a good idea where we stand at the moment there. We’ll see how Remco is and we hope he can do a good time trial and be there on the climbs, but we aren’t thinking of going for the overall win. He can count on a strong and balanced team, and we’ll give our best to get some nice results”, sports director Tom Steels said.
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Here’s the team’s post:
Time and experience can do many things, and for Luke Durbridge it has taught him to savour the big moments in his cycling career.
The 34-year-old Team Jayco AlUla rider won his second national road race title at the start of this year in his hometown of Perth. Making it all the sweeter were the close calls he’d already had with the podium in the time trial and criterium in the days leading up to the race.
Some 12 years after winning the green and gold on the road for the first time, he had another chance to take the jersey to Europe and he was definitely going to make the most of it.
“All of these things were lining up to be a bit of a fairytale situation. We couldn’t script it better than that,” says Durbridge. “When I won in 2013, I’d had a few victories in my first year in 2012 and I probably took it for granted. I don’t think I necessarily enjoyed the victories as much because that was just how it was. I was pro now and now I would be winning all the time.
Luke Durbridge wins the 2025 Australian Road Championships.
“It’s funny, you don’t realise just how hard it is to win at the top level, and it had been a few years between drinks for me. It was definitely nice to do it again. This time, I think it meant a lot more than the earlier ones, because of that.”
From a young age, Durbridge knew that he wanted to be a professional athlete, it didn’t matter what sport. Sitting still wasn’t in his repertoire, and he loved finding competition in just about anything he did.
“I’d make obstacle courses and time myself,” he says. “I wanted my mum and dad to time me doing everything. I probably wore my brother and sister down because I wanted to time them doing obstacle courses they didn’t want to do.”
Outside of competitive obstacle course racing in his back garden, the young Aussie’s first sporting love was rugby. He was a keen supporter of the national squad, known by their nickname of the Wallabies, and played it as child – as did his Team Jayco AlUla teammate Eddie Dunbar.
While he still loves watching rugby, he soon came to terms with the fact that participating in it wasn’t in his future and he’d have to look at other sports.
“[As a kid] I slept with my rugby ball, and I slept with my Wallabies jersey,” jokes Durbridge. “I think if you look at me and Eddie, I don’t think we would have gone too far. I think we made a good decision to quit while we were ahead.
“I was tall and pretty skinny, and I got injured quite a bit. I started out in the back line, but I wasn’t that quick in the end, I was sort of more of a diesel. I sort of moved towards being a flanker and then moved into the lock position.”
Finding cycling
Durbridge dabbled in quite a few sports growing up. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given his height, he played some basketball, and he started competing in triathlons – though he knew early on it wouldn’t be the sport for him because he hated the solitude of swimming.
Eventually, something would have to give if he wanted to perform at a high level in one. So, at age 16 he plumped for cycling. The decision to go for cycling was a little left field, but he found himself drawn to it.
“My mum sat me down and said, ‘mate, you’ve got to focus on one thing if you want to be a professional sportsman. We can’t keep doing one training session to the next’,” he explains. “So, I said I was going to quit it all and do cycling. It was quite a random decision because I’d only just started, but there was something about cycling. I was a real team player and I loved team sport. With cycling, you had that team element, but what you put into it individually you got out of it as well. I think I would struggle if it was just an individual sport like tennis or triathlon.”
At the time, the young Durbridge didn’t have a clue about the world of professional road racing. He’d been drawn into the sport through the track after getting a free pass to go to the velodrome and have a tester.
It would take a little while before he discovered the European road racing scene, but once he did he was hooked.
“I was staying up until 1 or 2 am watching the Tour de France. I remember watching Stuey win Roubaix [in 2007]. I ran out to my mum and dad, who were asleep, to tell them that Stuart O’Grady had won Paris-Roubaix. They were like one, who is Stuart O’Grady, and two, what is Paris-Roubaix?”
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Cycling in the family
While his parents may not have been keen cycling fans, Durbridge would soon discover that there was cycling pedigree in his family, and it was closer than he might have imagined.
Grandpa Durbridge was a good rider in his day and the young “Durbo” was following in his footsteps, but his career path would take him far further than his grandfather had been able to do.
“My granddad was a very good cyclist, but I didn’t know him because he died before I was born. When I started cycling my dad didn’t like cycling because my granddad pushed him into it,” Durbridge explains. “Then when I mentioned that I wanted to be a cyclist my dad went to the shed and got out all these medals and bikes and showed me races that my granddad had won.
“It was quite funny, there was a race that my granddad won in 1961, and then I won it probably 40 something years later. I’m the same build as him, I look pretty similar. My mum and dad say it’s pretty uncanny the family resemblance with him. He never got to go to Europe. He was going to go to France, but his wife was pregnant, so he didn’t. It’s funny now I got to complete it.”
Durbridge’s passion for cycling would eventually rub off on other members of his family. It gave him the opportunity to do something a bit special in 2023 and ride the Cape to Cape mountain bike race at home in Australia with his mum Helen.
“My mum got into mountain biking since I became a cyclist. She loves it and she was actually going to do the Cape to Cape, but I asked her to come to the Rugby World Cup in Japan [in 2019] instead. She was really fit for this race, but she ended up bailing on it and I felt a bit bad about that,” he explains.
“It was a couple of years later and I was heading home early because Henry [Durbridge’s son] was going to be born in Australia. Normally, I wouldn’t be home in October. I rang her as soon as I got home and asked her if she wanted to train up and get ready for it, because I was keen to do it.”
Durbridge was able to use all of the knowledge he’d accumulated over his career to help his mum through the experience. However, even as an experienced professional cyclist the race was a venture into the unknown for him as he’d never raced mountain bikes before.
“It was really cool. It was one of those special things you don’t often get to do, and it worked out well,” he says. “I crashed twice, I wasn’t very good so I was glad I was back with my mum, and I could take it easy.
“It’s funny when you’ve been a professional for so long, you take for granted what you know. Just to be able to give her food every 30 minutes meant her performance went through the roof. She was definitely not eating properly. From there, her skills improved really well. I was a bit of a mental coach as well, because she was having a hard day one of the days and I had to tell her it was ok and to keep going. It was quite challenging, but because of that it was really memorable.”
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