[Words by Steve Thomas]

Last week came the surprise announcement that 28-year-old South African cross-country MTB racing ace Alan Hatherly was set to join the Australian WorldTour road team Jayco-AlUla for 2025 and 26 and that he is to mix the rough stuff with the hardcore smooth of pro road racing.

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Back in September Hatherly rounded off his best season by winning the UCI XCO/Cross Country Elite World Championship in Andorra, finally realising a career-long goal. Earlier last summer Hatherly also took a superb bronze medal in the Paris XCO Olympic title race, and on top of that wrapped up his 2024 season with the overall UCI XCO World Cup title, not a bad haul for the Durban dirt shredder.

With a U23 World XCO World title, an E-MTB World title, numerous World Cup round victories and an overall XCC World Cup title already bagged, his career has progressed predictably well. Yet, it would also be reasonable to assume that he also appears to be a fat tyre off-road purist, who did start by also racing downhill in South Africa – so why trade, or mix, flat bars for curly bars when you’re at the top of your game?

2024 alan hatherly 1.jpg, by Liam Mercer

Although Hatherly is by far best known for his mountain bike racing prowess, he is no slouch on the road either, having taken silver medals in the South African TT Championships in 2023 and 2024 as well as doubling up on stage victories and snaring the overall win in the 2024 Tour de Cap stage race in South Africa. Even so, this far removed from the sharp end of WorldTour road racing and stepping up from 25-minute XCC races to five-hour road races and stage races is a huge and challenging leap to take.

Although no outline of his potential schedule has been mooted,  we suspect this will include at least several MTB World Cup rounds and the World Championships, while his road schedule is also wide open right now, but likely to be taken in small steps. 

In the past, Green Edge/Jayco AlUla teams have historically been an “almost pure” road team, though, during 2014 they did have XCO racing GOAT Nino Shurter on their roster, too, with him also mixing road and mountain bike racing for a while before deciding that the rough stuff was more to his liking. Hopefully, the move of Hatherly is also a sign of the growing acknowledgement and acceptance of having at least a sub-sect of road teams based on embracing other areas of the sport, much as EF Pro Cycling has done with their “alternative program” in recent years. Given that Hatherly did race for Cannondale and was also on the EF development team roster for a short while, that would have been a more anticipated step to take.

So far, we’ve been unable to get input from Alan as to how the whole deal came around and what his aims are with the new team. On the team website, he said “I think now is the perfect moment for me to get out of the comfort zone and develop even further. Moving to a WorldTour road team is of course something new for me, it will be a steep learning curve, and I will be learning from the best. Combining road and MTB is new and refreshing and I am really looking forward to where this journey can go!”

2024 alan hatherly 2.jpg, by Liam Mercer

At this stage of his career, the only thing left to top his scorecard would be an Olympic title in MTB, though that chance is a long way off and a huge gamble for any rider to base everything on, and when opportunity knocks in this way then it makes perfect career sense to take this step, and it will be fascinating to see how it unfolds.

Those who have come and gone before

With the grand arrival of gravel racing and through the results of a select few, the whole sport of professional cycling changing, especially on the roadside, although riders switching between and mixing disciplines is nothing new.

Way back in 1985 the legendary US racer John Tomac started his pro cycling career as a BMX rider before taking on the new sport of mountain biking – racing XC and Downhill with staggering effect. During that time Tomac also rode pro for the US-based 7-11 and Motorola road team, where between racing a full MTB World Cup schedule he also raced in several of the major European road classics and the Giro d’Italia, although he did revert to pure MTB racing again in the early 1990s.

Mountain bike icons - Cancel Evans, by Steve Thomas, Absa Cape Epic, road.cc

Throughout the 1990s numerous older road pros also turned their hands to MTB racing, including Adri van der Poel, father of Matthieu. There were also a whole bunch of notables who started with MTB racing and then also turned to WorldTour road racing, with varying degrees of success. From starting through mountain biking to taking junior World Championship road medals and on to becoming the MTB Cross Country World Cup winner before winning Tour de France and road World Championship, Australian Cadel Evans surely stands out as the most successful of those early converts. He did initially also start with a mixed program through the Saeco road team, but like those who followed him, it soon became fully in for the road after a short while.

Olympic XCO World Champion Miguel Martinez also went on to race with the Mapei road team, yet he didn’t quite manage to achieve the same level as he did in the dirt. Even now he still races offroad, while his son Lenny is one of the hottest road prospects around. Canadian Ryder Hesjedal and also made a successful road transition, as did Dane Michael Rasmussen. 

The current generation

In the past few years, riders such as Jakob Fuglsang and Sepp Kuss have also converted from MTB to the road with great success, while Pauline Ferrand-Prevot has spent her entire career switching between dedicated road and MTB season. French racer Victor Koretzky also started with cyclo-cross and mountain bike racing, was Junior XCO World Champion in 2011 and took on a road sojourn in 2022-23 before fully re-committing to MTB, but few have attempted to mix both disciplines at the same time and come out of it well. 

2024 ferrand prevot riding.jpg, by Liam Mercer

In part, not attempting to mix disciplines was long since down to the belief within pro road cycling that such a thing was heretic, risky, and unattainable. Even so, many pro riders of old would even ride and train on MTBs for fun and the benefits gained, and many would also do it in secret, as it was frowned upon and even forbidden by pro teams – but, times are changing, or are they?

The two biggest recent success stories in mixing road and MTB at the same time must be Tom Pidcock and Mathieu van der Poel, and their results did seem to raise a few eyebrows in the direction of showing that it was actually possible to do this well. That said, Pidcock has now also decided to follow the traditional path of taking a pure road focus or the foreseeable, and logic would say that if you want to be successful in three-week grand tours, it is essential to do so.

2024 pidcock riding.jpg, by Liam Mercer

On the flip side, MVDP took something of a back seat with mountain bike racing this year, choosing to focus on an Olympic Road Race title bid, but has stated that he will now also be targeting MTB again in the future, in a bid to snare an MTB world title to add to his road, cyclocross and gravel titles from over the years. It also needs to be noted that MVDP is not a Grand Tour GC racer, which makes for a very different scenario to that of Pidcock. Naturally, we cannot but mention the XCO World Champion Puck Pieterse, who also took a stage victory in the women's Tour de France this year, and who is also looking to take the road rite of passage in the not-too-distant future.

Mixed feelings

From a career and financial point, road racing is still far more inviting for top-level riders, although the schedules and pressures of modern-day WorldTour road racing also go hand in hand with that. Let’s hope that that often-elusive middle ground of achieving success in multiple genres works out for the extremely gifted and brave few that attempt it – as it is great to watch and for the health and image of cycling in general.

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