The 2025 season is proving to be something of a breakout for Luke Plapp (Jayco AlUla). The 24-year-old is a proven performer at home in Australia, with six national titles already – three on the road, three in the ITT – but before this year, he hadn’t won a race in Europe.
In early April though, in his first race back after wrist surgery, Plapp won a stage of the UCI 2.1 Tour of Hellas (the Tour of Greece). He wouldn’t have to wait long for his second win on European soil – a victory that was much bigger than his first. On a mountainous stage 8 of the Giro d’Italia, Plapp fought his way into the breakaway, then attacked solo with 45 km remaining to take his first WorldTour win, at a Grand Tour no less.
Plapp didn’t finish the Giro – he withdrew on stage 17 due to illness – but the race was still a successful one; not just for him, but for his Jayco AlUla team. Plapp's teammate Chris Harper won the incredible penultimate stage too, a day that will go down in Grand Tour folklore for the remarkable way it decided the race overall.
A little over a week after leaving the Giro, Plapp took the time to catch up with Escape to reflect on his race, his season more generally, and what might come next. Speaking from his new European base of Monaco, Plapp still sounded hoarse and congested. In his words, he's been as “sick as a dog” since leaving the Giro, but he feels like he's now turning a corner.
The following interview transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and fluency.
Matt de Neef: I want to get to the Giro in a sec, but I just wanted to talk a bit about the lead-up first. You had a good start to the year and then you had wrist surgery, and I think you had 10 weeks before your next race. What was that layoff like?
Luke Plapp: Yeah, it was tough. So I re-injured my wrist just after Christmas, just before Nationals [while descending Mt. Buffalo in north-east Victoria – ed.] and raced Nationals and TDU really, really sore but knew how good the legs were so I wanted to really try and still make the most of Nats with TDU as the really big focus this year. And went into TDU feeling pretty good and then on the last day at Willunga, it really, really got sore.
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