'The goal was to win one race... then it spiralled' – Matthew Brennan on his remarkable breakthrough year

Matthew Brennan is Cycling Weekly's Male Rider of the Year for 2025. This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 4th December 2025. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.

There’s a video that keeps popping up on Matthew Brennan’s Instagram feed. It opens with a shot down the Carretera de Girona, an unassuming residential road in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, onto which bursts the chaos of stage one’s finale of the Volta a Catalunya. “Here comes Brennan,” announces Carlton Kirby excitedly on commentary. And it’s at this point that the 20-year-old switches the video off. “I see the first like three seconds, and I just keep scrolling,” says the Visma-Lease a Bike rider.

It’s not that he doesn’t like it – quite the opposite, actually – but he just doesn’t need any help remembering his first WorldTour victory, his breakthrough on cycling’s biggest stage. “It was a nice day,” he smiles. “Well, the day wasn’t nice, but it was really nice to finish it like that. I think it’s something quite special that will always be with me.”

If Brennan were to watch on, he’d hear Kirby grow more and more animated. “My goodness, Brennan is really grinding into the gap here,” the commentator says, but it seems to be too late – Alpecin-Deceuinck’s Tibor Del Grosso is riding solo towards the gantry, rapidly passing the distance markers at the side of the road: 150m to go, 100m, 50m. Then comes the bike throw. “Oh, he’s got it! He’s absolutely nailed it!,” Kirby shouts. Brennan punches the air with his fist. “A genius at work!”

It was mid-March when the then 19-year-old took the leader’s jersey at the Volta a Catalunya. Cycling fans didn’t know it at the time, but they’d come to see a lot more of Brennan’s genius over the rest of the season; he won 14 times, a tally bettered by just four other male riders: Tim Merlier, Isaac del Toro, Paul Magnier and the world champion Tadej Pogačar. The Brit began the season 349th in the UCI’s rankings, and ended it 43rd, having jumped more than 300 places. All that, and he only turned 20 in August.

“It’s been a good year,” Brennan says understatedly. We’re speaking over videocall the afternoon before his final race of the year, Paris-Tours. Does he have any regrets about 2025? “Not having my holiday earlier,” he smirks. Everything else exceeded expectations. “We came into the start of the season with the goal of trying to win one race, essentially. Then it spiralled a bit quicker and a bit more than we thought it would.”

That box was ticked almost immediately, in March, when he won three French one-day races on the trot, culminating in the cobbled GP de Denain, Paris-Roubaix’s little brother. The teenager’s next stop was meant to be the Classic Brugge-De Panne, until he got a call from his coach, Robbert de Groot, while out shopping with his girlfriend. Did he want to replace the injured Jonas Vingegaard in the squad for Catalunya? “Bearing in mind I’d never heard of this race before,” Brennan says, “I was like, ‘Right, OK, yeah, whatever.’ But I wasn’t too convinced… It was good that I listened to them.”

The team plan was always to ride for Brennan that afternoon in Saint Feliu, and he ended up doing it all himself. Gripping the drops of his handlebars, he clawed back the tearaway Del Grosso all by himself, and held off the peloton behind. The timing was perfect. “In that moment, you’ve got to trust your racing instincts,” Brennan says. Four days later, he proved it had been no fluke when he sprinted to a second victory. Then came another phone call: did he want to ride Paris-Roubaix? “You’re not going to turn that down.”

Brennan arrived at his first Monument after a week of illness. The youngest rider on the start list, his expectations were low, so it came as a surprise to find himself in the front group deep into the race, riding alongside Pogačar and Mathieu van der Poel, while his team-mate Wout van Aert advised him over the radio to go for his own chances. At almost 260km, however, the longest ride the teenager’s longest-ever ride soon took its toll.

“Unfortunately the parachutes came out a little bit,” a dusty-faced Brennan said in the velodrome after the finish. Reflecting on it now, he’s impressed at how long he lasted. “It gives confidence that you can make it so far into that race so young. Looking back at the [power] numbers [required], they’re not something that is necessarily crazy, either. It’s exciting.”

Brennan was brought up in the north-eastern market town of Darlington, County Durham, by a bike-racing father and triathlete mother. He joined his local club, Stockton Wheelers, at 12 years old, and excelled on the track as a junior, winning two world titles in 2023. The following year, he signed a two-year deal with Visma-Lease a Bike’s development squad, but amazed the team bosses so much on his first training camp that they decided he’d turn pro a year early.

As he prepared for that step-up last winter, he recalls, it was the off-the-bike changes the he feels made the difference.

“I was able to move out [to Girona, Spain] and get my own independence. With that, you can also then change your nutrition a little bit, the style of life, and all these types of things, which I think in the end helped me quite a lot. [Previously] I’d come in after doing five hours, and have whatever my family is having.”

Brennan also focused more on gym work, with the aim of holding a more aerodynamic position in sprints. “That helped stabilise everything and make everything aggressive, but also powerful,” he says. The roll call of top-class sprinters he conquered this year is proof that it worked; he beat Biniam Girmay at Germany’s Rund um Köln, Alexander Kristoff at the Tour of Norway, Tour de France green jersey winner Jonathan Milan – twice – at the Lidl Deutschland Tour, and Alberto Dainese at the Tour of Britain.

It might come as a wonder, then, that Brennan doesn’t regard himself as a pure sprinter. He politely dismisses any comparisons to Mark Cavendish (who, by the way, won three fewer races in his first pro year). “I think I’m really quite a versatile person in terms of what I can achieve,” Brennan says. “I can survive my way through quite nicely.”

Take, for example, his stage victory at April’s Tour de Romandie, which came after more than 3,000m of climbing. There was similar elevation, too, when he won stage two at the Tour of Norway, outpunching climber Maxim Van Gils on a 7% incline. Where does he rank that win? “Which one was this?” he says, the victories blurring into one. Of the four stages in Norway, Brennan placed first twice, second twice, and won overall. “This is the problem, I don’t remember what stage is what at the moment.”

Despite all the podium visits, Brennan remains modest. He’s noticed his celebrity grow at races – “your name is shouted a little bit more,” he says – but he doesn’t get stopped for selfies in the street, at least not yet. “I look at a guy like Wout, who steps off the bus and immediately is swarmed. That’s quite overwhelming,” he says.

Instead, Brennan prefers his world of calm and understatement; he describes his last-gasp Catalunya victory as “quite cool”, and his envious season win tally as “alright, not bad”. How has he found the year? “I’ve had a great time,” he smiles.

He’s also got a sense of humour. When I ask what would be his dream race to win, he looks into the distance for a moment, and then cites the Salt Ayre criteriums in Lancaster – “I’ve never won one of those,” he grins.

This laidback attitude is his natural character, no doubt – it’s also one of his superpowers on the bike. “I think one thing I’ve taken away from this year is that, generally, I just feel quite relaxed towards everything,” he says. “I’m just in a mindset of, if it goes great, brilliant, that’s what we strive for. But if it doesn’t, it’s also not a problem. I can try another day.”

The future now is in Brennan’s hands. He’d like to go to the LA Olympics in 2028. Before that, though, there’s another event he has circled in his diary: the 2027 Tour de France, which starts in Edinburgh, a two-hour train journey from his home. “I mean, yellow jersey day one on the Tour in the UK I don’t think is a bad goal to try and achieve,” he says. “I think that would be quite cool rolling through the UK in a yellow jumper.”

If it happens, Brennan could become a household name. The moment will be watched live by millions. It’ll then be cropped into a video to be replayed over and over on Instagram. Even Brennan won’t be able to scroll past that one.