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Analysing the men’s sprinting class of 2025
Explosive power. Breakneck speed. Victory. Sprinting is an art form when done right, leadout trains clicking into place among a chaos of bodies to deliver leaders to the forefront for the final desperate dash for honours at the finish line.
To build up to the season’s big sprint races – including the sprinters’ unofficial world championships at the UAE Tour – let’s look at the riders set to make the headlines in 2025, plus those who need to improve to keep up with the pace and some underdogs to look out for.
The top step
It’s not easy to shake off a moniker, but Jasper Philipsen has managed to turn his ’Jasper the Disaster’ title into ’Jasper the Master’ and has secured his place on the top step of an ever-changing sprinting hierarchy. Now a lock for the team in the Tour de France, to date he has racked up nine stage victories and a points classification on the biggest stage of all.
Philipsen will face off against Lidl-Trek’s Jonathan Milan at the Tour this year. In career head-to-heads between the pair, Philipsen has prevailed over 80% of the time but Milan has seen success where his rival has not: at the Giro d’Italia. It’s here last year that Milan scored three stages and the points classification against fierce competition in Tim Merlier and Biniam Girmay.
Milan has spent time this off-season improving his position on the bike, particularly his upper body in a bid to limit its movement. If a man who can hit almost 2,000W is able to unlock more potential, the sky is the limit. Milan is pencilled in for Tirreno-Adriatico, a race he won two stages and the points classification at last year, as well as one-day Classics in Milan-San Remo, Gent-Wevelgem and the Tour of Flanders.
Despite his considerable Giro success to date, the 24-year-old Italian is yet to win a Classic. His best performance so far came at Gent-Wevelgem in 2024 where he finished fourth, in a group that trailed in behind a pair of breakaway riders. Now in his second year al Lidl-Trek, don’t be surprised if Milan’s one-day record improves this year.
Merlier, meanwhile, has been the king of semi-Classic Nokere Koerse for the past three years. He’ll return again this year looking to extend his reign and stand alone as the man with the most victories ever before heading to defend his title at sprinters’ Classic Scheldeprijs.
He will also be at the Tour in a two-pronged attack along with Remco Evenepoel. It’s typically hard for any team to balance the ambitions of two leaders, and typically end up putting their stall behind a single leader before long. That said, Soudal-QuickStep’s reluctance to go all-in on Evenepoel is understandable – after all, it’s hard to ignore a man who won 16 races last year, accounting for over 40% of the team’s victories, in a race whose first half lends itself to his strengths.
There’s also Girmay, Mads Pedersen and Wout van Aert. Girmay is lighter than the likes of Milan and Merlier and therefore is perfect for days with an uphill kick at the end – as he displayed at the Tour in 2024. However that race also showed his outright sprinting talent, and he’ll be looking to defend his green jersey at the Tour this year. He has also tasted success on the cobbles, having won Gent-Wevelgem in 2022.
Pedersen and Van Aert are more all-rounders than outright sprinters, with Milan-San Remo and the cobbled Classics high on their agendas. Van Aert will be looking for redemption after a crash at Dwars door Vlaanderen scuppered his Classics campaign last season. Pedersen, meanwhile, is handing over Tour de France sprint duties to Milan and will be targeting the Giro after his Classics schedule concludes at Paris-Roubaix.
Middle ground
Starting 2025 hot is Sam Welsford, who dominated the sprints at the Tour Down Under this year for a second year running. As the season progresses, he typically picks up another victory here or there at a stage race or two but is yet to grab one in a Grand Tour. His absence corresponds with a move from DSM to Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe given his new team’s GC focus.
Kaden Groves is another card to play for Alpecin-Deceuninck, always the Giro d’Italia and Vuelta a España sprinter for the team with Philipsen leading the charge at the Tour. He seizes the opportunities when he gets them, previously winning against Van Aert at the Vuelta and Milan at the Giro. Despite initial plans to leave the team and head elsewhere for 2025, he has signed a two-year extension with a target on the spring Classics and more Grand Tour stages. How likely this will be is yet to be seen.
Arnaud De Lie and Olav Kooij are two young guns eager to be the next to break through to the top echelon of sprinters. De Lie can switch from sprints to cobbles with ease. He came close on multiple occasions in Grand Tours last year, with a plethora of top five results. He has quite the responsibility on his shoulders as his team is looking to score points and get back into the WorldTour. The 22-year-old was Lotto’s second highest points scorer last season – their highest, Maxim van Gils, has now left for Red Bull-Bora Hansgrohe.
After a victory at the UAE Tour and doubling up at Paris-Nice, Kooij had mixed fortunes in his Grand Tour debut at the 2024 Giro d’Italia, winning Stage 9 before abandoning with a fever. Kooij still has plenty of time to develop and will target races including Tirreno-Adriatico, Milan-San Remo and Gent-Wevelgem with the goal of winning one, and will participate in the Giro once again. This will be tough though, with teammate Van Aert also heading to Italy looking to complete his Grand Tour stage win triple.
He has kicked the ground running, though, with two wins at the Tour of Oman. The sprinting field there might not have featured the biggest stars, but it doesn’t hurt the confidence levels.
Welsford’s teammate Jordi Meeus shares the weight of being a sprinter in a general classification team, and, as such, isn’t going to get the same opportunities as the main stars. Absent at Grand Tours in 2024, the 26-year-old was mostly confined to the Classics – where he picked up a podium at Gent-Wevelgem – and 2.Pro stage races where his two wins came at the Tour of Norway and Tour de Wallonie.
However Meeus has one thing most others don’t – a coveted victory on the Champs-Élysées at the Tour de France. In 2023, Meeus shocked the world to claim a famous victory on the streets of Paris. However, with the team focussed on Primož Roglič and Welsford on the rise, it might be tough for Meeus to get a look in this year.
Improvement needed
The past two seasons have not been kind to Caleb Ewan. He only managed one win at Lotto in 2023 and three for Jayco-AlUla in 2024, barely a shade of his former self. Once a formidable sprinter that could score wins against the world’s best, his last major victory in Grand Tours came at the Giro d’Italia in 2021, with a litany of abandonments, non-selections and the rise of stronger, younger sprinters limiting his chances since.
Now at Ineos Grenadiers, the 30-year-old is looking for a clean slate at a squad whose sprinting capabilities have been lacking for most of its history.
Fabio Jakobsen’s career was derailed after a life-threatening crash at the 2020 Tour of Poland. It led not only to a lengthy physical recovery but a mental one too.
He moved from Soudal-QuickStep to DSM in 2024 but had his least successful season so far, with just one victory picked up at the Tour of Turkey. It was a stark contrast to his dominating ‘Wolfpack’ ways where he would average eight wins a year including a couple in Grand Tours. In an interview with Rouleur, he cited endurance as his issue and has apparently adjusted his training accordingly, so let’s hope he can return to form in 2025.
The older gen
Arnaud Démare and Alexander Kristoff are no strangers to the changing guard of sprinting dominance. Both Tour de France stage winners, national champions and Milan-San Remo victors, they were forces to be reckoned with in their heydays. Now 33 and 37 years old respectively, both are past their golden years but can still win smaller races.
Bryan Coquard is also an older sprinter that can still stick his nose in the wind should the occasion arise, winning at the Tour Down Under in January. When it comes to stage races, he has amassed a few DNFs in the last couple of seasons, with back-to-back abandonments at Paris-Nice and the Volta Catalunya, then later the Tour de Suisse and Vuelta a España.
Sam Bennett has had a disrupted past few years, including team politics at Soudal-QuickStep and Bora-Hansgrohe and a series of injures. New pastures is always a good opportunity to reset and the Irishman ran wild at the 4 Jours de Dunkerque in 2024, winning four of six stages and both the overall and points classifications. Now in his second year with Decathlon-AG2R, he’ll be looking to the Giro d’Italia for his first Grand Tour victory in three years.
He used to rack up a formidable number of victories a season, with 14 in 2018 and 15 in 2019, but Dylan Groenewegen’s win rate has decreased and the level of races he’s seen success at is mostly now below WorldTour level. The Dutchman did pick up at a win at the Tour last season though and kicked off 2025 with two second place finishes at the AlUla Tour. While he was once the sprinting star of the Netherlands, he has – like many in this list – seen how quickly the tide can turn.
The underdogs
Soudal-QuickStep rising star Paul Magnier won the majority of stages at the Tour of Britain last year and the 20-year-old recently enjoyed early season success at the Étoile de Bessèges, winning the opening stage and finishing third on the second day.
Pavel Bittner from Picnic-PostNL was lurking in the background of the first two sprint stages at his debut Vuelta a España, finishing sixth on Stage 2 and fifth on Stage 3. The 21-year-old shocked the world with his expertly timed bike throw for victory against Van Aert and Groves on Stage 5 though to announce himself to the world. This year, Bittner was just edged out of a first win by Kooij on Stage 1 of the Tour of Oman, with his next race set to be Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne. He needs to be set free at a Grand Tour again this year.
Elsewhere, Marijn van den Berg gets the nod for sprints by EF Education-EasyPost. Israel-Premier Tech have several cards to play in Corbin Strong, Ethan Vernon and Pascal Ackermann. 24-year-old Strong claimed multiple top ten finishes at the 2024 Vuelta and finished his season with a win at the Giro del Veneto.
Phil Bauhaus is Bahrain Victorious’s representative in top level sprints, finishing on the podium three times at the 2023 Tour de France and twice at the 2024 Giro d’Italia before abandoning. He misses the final kick needed to keep up with the top guys though, with speed only translating to success twice a year since 2022.
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