The Godfather Part II, Shrek 2, The Dark Knight, Top Gun: Maverick, the 2025 elite men's European Champs road race. What do all of these have in common? After tomorrow, they may all go down as superb sequels to a main event, maybe even superior to the original. Maybe.
Sequels are notoriously hard to pull off, and we don't get them often in cycling, especially when the big names seem to take such care to avoid one another outside one or two big events. And almost never in the same season. But the European Championship road race has this year managed to attract a peloton of 2025's stage racing protagonists, in particular the big three: Tadej Pogačar, Jonas Vingegaard and Remco Evenepoel, as well as João Almeida, Juan Ayuso, and a collection of climbers and hilly Classic types including reigning Faun-Ardèche champion Romain Grégoire, Mattias Skjelmose, Mads Pedersen (who may or may not be ill), Marc Hirschi, Christian Scaroni and Toms Skujiņš.
It's a relatively small, even tiny peloton at just 101 starters, a list that would not be out of place at one of the weird and wonderful post-Tour de France criteriums. Only the Euros actually matter; the winner gets a shiny new jersey (to add to their collection?).
The big draws are of course Pogačar, Evenepoel and Vingegaard, and the promise of a showdown the like of which we've not witnessed since the first week of the Tour.
Did we do a good job with this story?
