THE DUAL THREAT: ALAN HATHERLY
XC World Champion Alan Hatherly, a recent addition to the Giant Factory Off-Road Team, has his sights set on new challenges—including WorldTour road racing—for 2025 and beyond.
Anthem Advanced Pro 29
Alan Hatherly has a vision. There are still details to be worked out, but he has a working blueprint. The timeframe is July 2028. The location is Los Angeles, California. The objective is an Olympic gold medal. The path he’s taking is unconventional.
Coming off a near-perfect 2024 season, the 29-year-old from South Africa felt it was time to raise his goals and expectations. He had earned an Olympic bronze medal, a rainbow jersey at the World Championships, and the World Cup XCO overall title.
So, what next? With a few years before the next Olympic Games, what’s next is to take on road racing at the sport’s highest level.
During the off-season, Hatherly announced that he was switching teams to join the Giant Factory Off-Road Team in a combined program with Giant’s WorldTour road racing partner Team Jayco AlUla. He would continue racing mountain bike World Cups while also competing in select road events.
Calling it a new chapter in his career, Hatherly spoke of stepping out of his comfort zone while acknowledging that he would face a steep learning curve.
So far, his road results have been promising—and also revealing.
In January, Hatherly finished second and third on stages of the AlUla Tour, an early season stage race in Saudi Arabia, finishing sixth overall among a talented field. A week later he won South Africa’s national time-trial championship, an event where he’d twice finished runner-up.
These were stellar results. Once on European soil, however, the learning curve grew steeper, and Hatherly rode more anonymously, finishing in the middle of the pack. An illness made the whole endeavor even more challenging.
“I realized quickly I was in the deep end,” Hatherly says. “The level is obviously incredibly high, and, you know, everything is new to me, just from the basics like team bosses, nutritionists, racing as a team. There are a lot of things that I needed to adjust to. Even if the shape was tip-top, there was so much going on around me, just trying to learn the new ways, that it was quite tough.”
In May, after he skipped the opening MTB World Cup rounds in Brazil to focus on his road racing, Hatherly switched back to mountain biking. A solid showing at the XCO race in Nové Město, Czech Republic, was derailed by an errant pedal strike that led to a heavy crash. He was bloodied, but managed to finish ninth and avoid serious injury. Two weeks later, in Leogang, Austria, he struggled in the muddy conditions but still finished in the top-10.
STAYING HUNGRY
Hatherly’s primary objectives for 2025 remain on the dirt—to defend his rainbow jersey, and to win at least one World Cup race along the way. Next year he intends to target specific road races.
“The future of me doing both disciplines is still kind of to be determined at this point, how it's actually going to look and shape up,” Hatherly says. “I’ve enjoyed how it's been so far this season with a kind of 50/50 split. But I think it's obviously going to come down to the team and coaching and the people around me to help me transition better on the road. I think I'm playing a game of catch up on the road now just to get up to speed. And if I don't take it seriously, I'm going to run out of years quickly.”
The question is why? Why take on an entirely new discipline just as he’s hit his peak with mountain biking? And why, at age 29, when there is a prospect of “running out of years”?
Because once he has reached the top of a proverbial mountain, Hatherly says he would rather try to climb the next mountain than the same one again. Because testing himself against the best road cyclists in the world has been a long-term objective, something he and his coach Phil Dixon have been contemplating for years. And because the time is now.
“I'm goal-driven,” Hatherly says. “The more I have to learn and adapt to perform better, the better for me. It just really keeps me hungry. Since the beginning, I've always wanted more.”
AN EXCLUSIVE CLUB
There is precedent for world-class mountain bikers crossing over to success on the road. Both Cadel Evans and Ryder Hesjedal began their careers in XC racing and went on to win Grand Tours. Recent Paris-Roubaix winners Mathieu van der Poel and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot have multiple XCO World Cup wins under the belt.
Tom Pidcock, the current men’s Olympic MTB champion, has won spring classics Strade Bianche and Amstel Gold Race. Puck Pieterse, the current women’s XCO world champion, has won La Flèche Wallonne Femmes and a stage at the Tour de France Femmes.
While there is overlap in the talents and gifts required in road and XC racing, they are also very different animals. XC races are short and intense, highly technical, and, at their core, individual efforts. Road races are much longer, more of a slow burn and highly tactical. When the results come on the road, they come from a team effort.
Hatherly cites a mountain biker’s explosiveness—the durability that comes from repeatedly sprinting out of corners—as a strength he brings to road racing. “I think that side of mountain biking really helps on the road, that it's not just a one-off effort that we're capable of,” he says. “It's multiple hits, over and over, and being able to still be there. Over the last few years, we've seen a few riders doing multi-discipline racing, and it's been a great success for them.”
But top MTB racers crossing over to the road haven’t always succeeded. Nino Schurter, the most successful XC racer of all time, competed at the Tour de Romandie and Tour de Suisse in 2014 with unremarkable results. Former XC world champion Roland Green showed promise on the road before a heavy crash in the peloton upended his career.
None of this seems to weigh on Hatherly’s mind. He looks to Pidcock and Van der Poel as rivals, but also as inspiration. “I know I will make it to the front of the road peloton and have my opportunity at some point,” he says. “It's just a matter of patience and building up like I have the last few years with mountain bike.”
A NEW QUIVER OF BIKES
Simultaneously joining a new team and adding a new discipline has meant that Hatherly quickly needed to become acquainted with a new quiver of Giant bikes—the Anthem Advanced 29 for XC racing; the TCR Advanced SL and Propel Advanced SL for road racing; and the Trinity Advanced SL for time trial events. While this might present an issue for some riders, Hatherly says he embraces the variety.
“I've always been one to change bikes,” he says. “I'm not a fan of staying fixed in one position, riding the same bike all year round. I think changing bikes and positions is good, just to keep my body in check and work the muscle groups in different ways to avoid injuries as I have in the past. I think that kind of takes care of itself.”
That sentiment neatly encapsulates Hatherly’s relaxed attitude toward the entire project. Become world champion? Check. World Cup champion? Bonus. Transition into a world-class road cyclist? Why not? Win the Olympic gold medal? That’s the plan.
“The biggest thing I'm trying to achieve by bridging the two disciplines is obviously to become a better athlete in general, and specifically targeting the LA Olympics,” he says. “Obviously, it takes quite a few years to build on the road, to just lift that base level that little bit higher, and then to go back to the mountain bike in a big way for 2028. I think to be world champion, World Cup overall winner, and the Olympic champion would be an absolute dream career for me.”
