Tadej Pogačar might be on top of the world right now – the Giro-Tour champion has more than double the UCI points of next-best Remco Evenepoel so far in 2024 – but there’s another UAE Team Emirates rider who’s setting the roads alight, and that’s Marc Hirschi.
After securing his fifth one-day win in a row at Saturday’s Italian mini-classic the Memorial Marco Pantani, the versatile Swiss rider is on track to have the best season of his career so far – by far – and the next logical step is to win the world title on home roads. Logic has little to do with it, of course. But the stars are edging into alignment with the World Championships now just two weeks away.
Take a look at Hirschi’s social media right now and you’ll see a lot of toothy grins, finish-line celebrations, trophies, and showers of confetti and champagne. If you look a little closer, there are a number of comments from other pros expressing awe at their teammate and colleague who can’t stop winning right now. There is of course also the announcement of his signing to Tudor Pro Cycling, the Swiss team of his mentor and fellow Bernese Fabian Cancellara, who is inheriting a reheated property from UAE Team Emirates – and, based on recent form, a world champion in waiting?
The fact is, he was already ‘back’ in 2023, racing to several WorldTour top 10s and seven wins, including overall victories at the Tours of Hungary and Luxembourg, the Swiss national title and the Italian semi-classic Coppa Sabatini, finishing the season 12th in the UCI individual standings. After a couple of years of drought – relative to the success that brought him to UAE in the first place – 2023 was the redemption he needed to be taken seriously again.
What’s different this year is that he’s returned to the top step of a WorldTour race for the first time since 2020 (La Flèche Wallonne and stage 12 of the Tour de France), a year in which he also finished third at the World Championships in Leuven, Belgium. His San Sebastián victory this August came soon after overall victory at a hotly contested Czech Tour and 16th at the Olympics; it was a powerful resurgence, and since then, he simply cannot stop winning.
Next was the Bretagne Classic the day after his 26th birthday, his second WorldTour win since 2020, then a return to the Italian one-days where he has enjoyed some success before. In six days, he won the GP Industria & Artigianato, the Coppa Sabatini – for the second consecutive year – and Saturday’s Memorial Marco Pantani in Cesenatico.
“Luck is on my side at the moment,” he said after the Memorial Marco Pantani, “it’s nice to continue my winning series.”
He’s been honing his entire skillset in the process, from a two-up sprint against future teammate Julian Alaphilippe in the Basque Country, to riding a small pack off his wheel on the downhill run to the finish in Plouay, Brittany, then in Italy, a late attack on a hilly finishing circuit, a long-range solo move, and Saturday’s reduced bunch sprint.
His timing could not be better. Hirschi is peaking in the same month as the World Championships which will be held this year in Zurich, Switzerland, a little over a hundred kilometres from his native city of Bern, and on a course that could hardly suit him better, a wearing hilly circuit with a short downhill run to a flat finish.
Assuming he’s well and truly earned leadership status at this point, he’s going to have a stellar support team, including Stefan Küng, who cut weight to perform at the mountainous Vuelta where he won his first-ever Grand Tour stage in the final TT, and national champion Mauro Schmid who also raced aggressively in Spain with multiple days in the breakaway. They’ve also got one of the best domestiques in Silvan Dillier who spends his working life at the services of Jasper Philipsen and Mathieu van der Poel.
With Hirschi at the helm, the Swiss are emerging as one of the top favourite nations alongside the Slovenian team of Pogačar and Roglič, Evenepoel’s Belgian squad, and the Netherlands with reigning champion Van der Poel.
Next up for the 26-year-old is a return to happy hunting ground at the five-day Skoda Tour de Luxembourg next week where he’ll be wearing the number 1 on his back. He’ll then have a week before the World Champs road race and the biggest opportunity of his career.
There’s now a huge target on his back, but that just puts him on par with his biggest rivals. March Hirschi is flying, and the world is watching.
What did you think of this story?