The Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Highway Race has confirmed it is going to be stepping up the racing for the ladies’s area in 2025, including the Ladies’s Surf Coast Basic as a lead in to the Ladies’s WorldTour occasion.
The 1.1 ranked race was re-introduced for the lads’s elite area in 2024 and there had been a UCI ranked occasion for each the women and men earlier than the COVID-19 hiatus in 2021 and 2022 – Race Torquay.
In 2024 as the lads’s area tackled the returned UCI-ranked point-to-point race from Lorne to Torquay the ladies’s area had a criterium in central Geelong. Sofia Bertizzolo (UAE Group ADQ) received the prize purse of €14,520, loaded due to the occasion’s long-standing apply of delivering equal prizes to the ladies’s and males’s area even when the race ranges differ.
This 12 months the race ranges can be equal too, each taking over the 1.1 ranked highway race as a precursor to the one-day Ladies’s WorldTour and males’s WorldTour occasions on the weekend of February 1 and a couple of. The 118km ladies’s Surf Coast Basic will happen on Wednesday January 29, whereas the 157km males’s lead-in race will roll out on Thursday January 30.
“It’s implausible for the area and for our elite riders,” race director Scott Sunderland stated in a media assertion formally asserting the races, which have been earlier listed within the UCI calendar. “The Surf Coast Basic was well-received by the worldwide Elite Males’s groups in 2024, and we’re delighted to now provide the identical expertise for the worldwide Elite Ladies’s groups.”
The course begins on the coast, heading straight right into a 10km climb that takes it inland to Deans Marsh. Shortly after that the lads’s and girls’s course diverges with the lads looping out additional with a route that features Barwon Downs and Forrest earlier than as soon as once more re-joining the shared course that takes the race over the rolling hills of the Victorian countryside. After that the purpose to level race heads to the coast as soon as once more, with the ultimate dash unfolding alongside The Esplanade in Torquay.
The Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Highway Race has been run since 2015, with 2025 the tenth version. When it returned to the calendar in 2023 the standard course path was reversed however it is going to be again operating clockwise once more – first heading alongside the coast, and the revered browsing sizzling spot of Bells Seaside, earlier than looping again inland to tackle native circuits that embody the race splintering climb of Challambra.
The boys’s race moved as much as WorldTour degree from 2017 and the ladies’s from 2020, each operating on the identical course however with variations within the variety of occasions over the ultimate loop. In 2025 the lads will tackle the ultimate loop – which now additionally takes within the Botanic Gardens – 4 occasions for a complete distance of 184km with close to 2,000m of elevation achieve. The ladies will sort out it twice for a race over 142km with slightly over 1,400m of elevation achieve.
The Surf Coast Basic and Cadel Evans Nice Ocean Highway Race are the ultimate races in Australia’s summer time of biking which opens up the worldwide racing for a brand new season.
The Australian riders additionally first get a success out on the Nationwide Championships from January 8 to 12 earlier than the Ladies’s WorldTour and WorldTour opens up in South Australia from January 17 to 26. Groups then skip east for the racing in Victoria earlier than abandoning the warmth of the Australian summer time as they return to Europe.
