Germany’s Jason Osborne won back-to-back elite men’s titles at the 2025 UCI Cycling Esports World Championships, leading from start to finish, though he faced hard-charging competitors in the race held live in Abu Dhabi.
Michal Kaminski (Poland) surged in the third and final stage to claim the silver medal, while Lennert Teugels (Belgium) took the bronze medal.
“To be honest, I wasn’t that happy with stage 1, because I saw the gap was not …like it was in the semis, and I wasn’t feeling that great, so I was mentally a little bit hit, let’s say,” said Osborne, who dominated in the opening stage to win the semi-finals.
“But then in stage 2, I really felt the system was activated, and could really push on and dig deep. And then progressively, each stage, it got actually better. And stage 3, I was back to my old self, and then went off the front, and did some good teamwork with Lionel [Vulasi] out there.”
Osborne finished with 564 points, 71 points ahead of second-place Kaminski. Teugels garnered 468 points for third place. Norway’s Njål Pedersen and Denmark’s Bjørn Barreby Andreassen finished fourth and fifth, respectively.
How it unfolded
The 2025 UCI Cycling Esports World Championships finale unfolded across three distinct stages, each crafted to challenge every dimension of a rider’s power, strategy, and endurance.
The competition opened with Mountain’s Verdict, a punishing uphill test, followed by Puncher’s Playground, a dynamic course blending sprint and climb segments. It all concluded with Sprinter’s Paradise, an eight-lap battle around a fast 1.5 km criterium circuit.
Twenty-two finalists raced shoulder to shoulder in a live arena in Abu Dhabi, competing on the MyWhoosh platform.
The championships employed a points-based scoring format, with all riders starting at zero. The strategy revolved around getting the right balance between scoring aggressively and managing recovery across the three stages.
USA’s Hayden Pucker put in the first attack in the Mountain’s Verdict over the 8km course with gradients increasing up to 20% but was soon caught by the group. In this stage, riders earn points for every five seconds they remain ahead of the chase line, with points scoring starting two minutes after the race begins.
15 riders were still in contention after 10 minutes of racing as Osborne put in an…
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