Records get broken every year in the world of cycling, but 2025 was truly prolific. From time trials and Hour records, to endurance milestones and WorldTour speeds, these are some of the new benchmarks pushing the limits of human performance.
7 February: Fastest ever women’s WorldTour race: Lorena Wiebes wins stage two of the UAE Tour Women with an average speed of 48.407kph.
16 May: Finance professional Dr Sarah Ruggins rides from John o’ Groats to Land’s End and back (2,700km) in five days, 11 hours and 14 minutes – a new LEJOGLE, or in Ruggins’s case, JOGLEJOG, record.
31 May: A blisteringly-fast edition of Unbound, the gravel racing calendar’s marquee event, sees the men’s and women’s course times fall in both the 200-mile and 350-mile distances.
25 June: Robin Gemperle becomes the first rider to finish in under 12 days at the Tour Divide. His winning time: 11 days, 19 hours and 14 minutes.
29 June: Time triallist John Archibald sets a new competition best at the 50-mile British National Championships with a time of one hour, 30 minutes and eight seconds.
6 July: Ex-pro Molly Weaver breaks the record for riding around Britain’s coastline (7,700km), doing so in 21 days, 10 hours and 48 minutes. She is the first woman to hold the record, beating the previous benchmark, set in 1984, by 17 hours.
27 July: Fastest Tour de France in history: Tadej Pogačar wins the 3,302km race in a time of 76 hours and 32 seconds, an average speed of 43.4kph. During the race, the Slovenian also rides the fastest known ascent of Mont Ventoux: 53 minutes and 47 seconds for the almost 21km climb from Bédoin.
A year of firsts
2025 witnessed the first…
African to win a stage of the Tour de France Femmes, and to wear the race’s yellow jersey: Kim Le Court-Pienaar
Canadian elite road race world champion: Magdeleine Vallieres
British men’s junior road world champion: Harry Hudson
Rider to win Il Lombardia five times in a row: Tadej Pogačar
Rider to podium in all five Monuments in the same season: Tadej Pogačar (3rd, Milan-San Remo; 1st, Tour of Flanders; 2nd, Paris-Roubaix; 1st, Liège-Bastogne-Liège; 1st, Il Lombardia)
14 August: Para-cyclist Will Bjergfelt smashes the 50km barrier in the UCI Hour Record (C5 para-cycling classification). He finishes with a distance of 51.471km, almost 4km more than the previous benchmark.
14 August: Matthew Richardson becomes the first rider ever to clock below nine seconds in the 200m flying lap on the track. The sprinter breaks his own record again 24 hours later, settling it at 8.857 seconds.
7 September: Alf Engers’s 25-mile road bike time trial record from 1978 (49 minutes and 24 seconds) is beaten twice on the same day; first in Hampshire by Paul Burton, who went three seconds faster, and then by Casper von Folsach in South Wales. The Dane’s record is now 47 minutes and 39 seconds.
21 September: UAE Team Emirates-XRG collect their 86th victory of the calendar year, thanks to Brandon McNulty at the Škoda Tour of Luxembourg, and surpass Team Columbia-HTC’s record of 85 from 2009. Tadej Pogačar’s team would go on to raise the bar to 97.
28 September: In beating Lachlan Morton at the Yorkshire Dales 3 Peaks Cyclocross, Ribble Outliers rider Jenson Young sets a new course record: two hours, 49 minutes and 17 seconds.
19 October: The men’s WorldTour season concludes at the Tour of Guangxi with a record-breaking average speed of 42.913kph across the 36 events.
This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 18th December 2025. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.
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