Day one of the 2025 Lloyds National Road Championships opens with a coastal figure-of-eight around Ceredigion’s postcard lanes. Each name on the provisional startlist carries its own storyline into Thursday’s race.
Josh Tarling (Ineos Grenadiers) is the obvious headline. The 21-year-old home-town ace arrives in Ffos-y-Ffin wearing two national stripes and, now, the glow of a first Grand Tour stage win after scorching the Giro’s opening test in Tirana last month. A third consecutive title on the same Welsh asphalt would cap a hat-trick and put a particularly gleaming stamp on his palmares. Yet he won’t have it his own way: Max Walker, last year’s silver medallist and newly minted WorldTour pro, has spent the spring fine-tuning his drag-strip cadence in EF colours and still smarts from that Catterick defeat, while Ethan Vernon — fresh from sprinting to a Volta a Catalunya stage and wielding a punchy 10-minute power curve — brings raw speed that can turn a wind-buffeted flat section into daylight on the clock.
In the women’s race Anna Henderson stands guard over her crown. The Lidl–Trek racer parlayed last year’s national win into Olympic silver and is hunting a third jersey to match Nicole Cooke’s tally. Pfeiffer Georgi arrives as a national road race champion with Paris-Roubaix pedigree, a rider who can levitate over Rhiw Goch’s ramps and still thunder the big ring on the run-in. Keep an eye, too, on Josie Nelson: runner-up to Ferguson in Scotland and desperate to flip that script when the gradients bite.
Reigning under-23 time-trial champion Tomos Pattinson (Team Visma | Lease a Bike Development) lines up to defend his crown, but must hold off the ambitious Ben Wiggins (Hagens Berman Jayco CT), intent on upgrading last year’s silver to gold. In the women’s under-23 event, the most obvious threat is Yorkshire prodigy Cat Ferguson, whose audacious Tour of Britain stage victory in Kelso — at nineteen, on rain-slick cobbles no less — confirmed that her hype is fully warranted.
Day one of the 2025 Lloyds National Road Championships opens with a coastal figure-of-eight around Ceredigion’s postcard lanes. Each name on the provisional startlist carries its own storyline into Thursday’s race.
Josh Tarling (Ineos Grenadiers) is the obvious headline. The 21-year-old home-town ace arrives in Ffos-y-Ffin wearing two national stripes and, now, the glow of a first Grand Tour stage win after scorching the Giro’s opening test in Tirana last month. A third consecutive title on the same Welsh asphalt would cap a hat-trick and put a particularly gleaming stamp on his palmares. Yet he won’t have it his own way: Max Walker, last year’s silver medallist and newly minted WorldTour pro, has spent the spring fine-tuning his drag-strip cadence in EF colours and still smarts from that Catterick defeat, while Ethan Vernon — fresh from sprinting to a Volta a Catalunya stage and wielding a punchy 10-minute power curve — brings raw speed that can turn a wind-buffeted flat section into daylight on the clock.
In the women’s race Anna Henderson stands guard over her crown. The Lidl–Trek racer parlayed last year’s national win into Olympic silver and is hunting a third jersey to match Nicole Cooke’s tally. Pfeiffer Georgi arrives as a national road race champion with Paris-Roubaix pedigree, a rider who can levitate over Rhiw Goch’s ramps and still thunder the big ring on the run-in. Keep an eye, too, on Josie Nelson: runner-up to Ferguson in Scotland and desperate to flip that script when the gradients bite.
Reigning under-23 time-trial champion Tomos Pattinson (Team Visma | Lease a Bike Development) lines up to defend his crown, but must hold off the ambitious Ben Wiggins (Hagens Berman Jayco CT), intent on upgrading last year’s silver to gold. In the women’s under-23 event, the most obvious threat is Yorkshire prodigy Cat Ferguson, whose audacious Tour of Britain stage victory in Kelso — at nineteen, on rain-slick cobbles no less — confirmed that her hype is fully warranted.
Here are the provisional startlists.
Featured image: SWpix.com
U23 – Open
Elite – Women
U23 – Women
Elite – Open
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