Preview, favourites, profile, route and predictions men's elite European Championships time trial 2025 - Evenepoel vs Ganna vs Tarling in windy ITT

The European Championships men's time trial will be taking place on the 1st of October and feature a truly stellar field looking to take an important victory late in the season. We take a look at the startlist of the race, which is expected to have its start at 15:45CET and finish at 17:00CET.

The European Championships have hosted the men’s elite time trial since the late 1990s. In 2024, Edoardo Affini of Italy claimed the European time-trial crown in Hasselt, edging out strong rivals such as Stefan Küng and Mattia Cattaneo, whilst a lot of the world's best time-trialists were absent. This year that is very much not the case, as the World Championships course was not attractive for many of the pure time-trialists. That win added a prestigious continental title to his palmarès and reinforced the competitive depth in modern men’s time trialing.

The event is scheduled in Drôme-Ardèche, with the men’s individual time trial slated to unfold over roughly 24 km between Loriol-sur-Drôme and Étoile-sur-Rhône. It is a mostly flat one, matching the women's course, favouring the specialists with around 90% flat roads but with a small hilltop finish where the key differences can still be made - last year the winning margin was of a mere 9 seconds.

It is an effort for the specialists, however it is still necessary to save some power for the final 1.1 kilometers which average 5% uphill. Not a brutal effort but certainly a few seconds can be gained or lost there, and often in a time-trial that can be a winning margin.

Very strong northern wind. This is no joke, this is a very windy region of France as is known and it will be very important on the day, because most of the route will head north and into a block headwind. Means the average speeds will be lower and aerodynamics will be even more important than a regular time-trial.

There's an obvious favourite and a strong group of contenders for this race. Remco Evenepoel will be the man to beat, this does take into consideration his rocky travel schedule from Rwanda to France but let's be honest these are seasoned professionals with all the logistic support in the world and it's also a 24-kilometer effort that he is preparing towards, not an hours-long technical race. The Belgian is the world's best time-trialist and is on stellar form, and honestly the headwind in this race is likely to favour him more than anyone taking into consideration the extremely good aerodynamic position he has which has allowed him to be a leading figure in the time-trials.

In the opposite side of the spectrum is Filippo Ganna in my opinion, who has notably struggled in the past with windy time-trials. If there was a taildwind he would largely benefit from having the superior raw power, but in this case he will have to have an even bigger advantage in terms of watts if he wants to counter-balance Evenepoel's aero advantage... I don't have a clear track record on how the other specialists do on such adverse conditions in the time-trial, but I think everyone will be up against a likely unbeatable Evenepoel.

But if we remove the effects from the wind from the equation then certainly Evenepoel will have competition. In fact this is a much superior field to the worlds, and we have true specialists here. Great Britain has Joshua Tarling who's been rather absent in the past few months but was the European Champion at 19 years of age only recently and he is joined by Ethan Hayter who stormed to a massive TT victory at the Tour de Luxembourg recently; The Swiss have the very experienced Stefan Küng and Stefan Bissegger who are constants in these types of events and can certainly match the riders above on their best day...

The French have Rémi Cavagna and Bruno Armirail who stand in a similar position to the Swiss; Belgium's Alec Segaert himself is definitely a podium contender on his best day and will be interesting to watch; Portugal has both João Almeida and Nelson Oliveira who skipped the worlds to have their very best form here, and the Lidl-Trek quartet of Mads Pedersen (Denmark) Daan Hoole (Netherlands), Mathias Vacek (Czech Republic) and Jakob Söderqvist (Sweden) all pack the power to grab a medal here, specially the latter who is still an under-23 rider (current ITT World Champion) but is vastly superior to most elite riders in this group, specially on a flat course. 

*** Remco Evenepoel
** Filippo Ganna, Joshua Tarling
* Alec Segaert, Mathias Vacek, Mads Pedersen, Bruno Armirail, João Almeida, Stefan Küng, Ethan Hayter, Daan Hoole, Jakob Söderqvist

Pick: Remco Evenepoel