The morning sun – the first we’ve seen in a while – slants through the cafe window and casts an angelic glow across Joe Blackmore’s face. And well it might, for this lad from London can, it seems, do little wrong right now.
The 21-year-old, a former dyed-in-the-wool off-road racer, has spent the past season putting the finishing touches on an alchemical progression that has seen him turn mud into road race silverware and graduate from the British Cycling Academy to the WorldTour with Israel-Premier Tech, all while picking up win after win.
Among those was a momentous GC victory at the prestigious French under-23 race the Tour de l’Avenir in August which, in a 63-year history, counts Greg Lemond, Egan Bernal and Tadej Pogačar among its winners – but never a rider from Britain. Until now.
The seed for that win was planted in last year’s race, when Blackmore was still a mountain biker with the BC Academy. He rode to 12th overall. A turning point.
“I got that result with more focus on mountain biking,” he tells me. “That’s probably where I thought, you know, road racing suits me – should I have a proper winter training for it?”
Even as a mountain biker, the road bike was a key training tool; he is keen to point out that he didn’t somehow discover skinny tyres this January. He’d done the odd race too, including the 2023 Tour du Rwanda.
But l’Avenir opened his eyes. “To do that with a lack of tactical experience, even of riding in a peloton, and then have the physical ability [to win], I was happy with that,” he says.
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Blackmore and Marion Bunel on the podium of the Tour de l’Avenir
(Image credit: Tour de l’Avenir)
Blackmore comes from a cycling family – his father has always raced off-road – and began racing at just six years old at the Herne Hill Youth Cycling Club.
Based at the famous track it may be, but the club – and indeed Blackmore himself – was all about the muddy stuff.
“I never really rode the track,” he says. “I tried it a few times, didn’t like it. And from there, it was always cross and mountain bike. I’ve always ridden on the road as well,” he caveats, “whether that’s local road training sessions or a few local crits. But I’ve never properly travelled around the country for it. I’d go to national cyclo-cross and mountain bike series, but I’ve never done that for road races.”
Until now, of course.
We’re chatting with Blackmore at Westerham’s Velo Barn cafe, a frequent flyby for him on his long road forays out of south-east London and into the Kent hills.
Road rides took precedence last winter when, for the first time since he was in primary school, Blackmore forwent the entire cyclo-cross season. Instead, he focused on building road speed and endurance, ahead of what would be his first season with the Israel-Premier Tech Academy development squad. It was a sacrifice that paid off immediately he began racing.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
He was thrown straight into the mix with his WorldTour stablemates, starting the year with three stage races – the Tour of Rwanda, Tour de Taiwan and the Circuit des Ardennes – all of which he won. He also took stages in each.
Cycling Weekly described him as a “young British winning machine“. Blackmore himself, who comes across as a measured, unassuming young man, is a touch more understated: “It was definitely a good start to the year,” he says. “It was good racing as well, to win with good team-mates and tactics as well. So yeah, it was exciting.”
Did he expect to win so much? “I’ve just gone race to race, and just tried to keep the momentum going. I think at the start of the year I wanted just to be up there in more races, a bit more ‘in the race’ as such. But to do as well as I have, I didn’t imagine that.”
A fast finisher, good in the hills and a rider who thrives in the stage-racing environment, Blackmore has yet to work out exactly what sort of rider he is.
Versatile, perhaps?
“I think pretty versatile,” he says. “Ultimately, pretty much every race day I’ve done this year, I’ve just got stuck in doing the best I can. Anything can happen in a bike race, so you’ve got to be pretty all-round these days, I think.”
Given that he had such a successful start to the year on secondment to Israel-Premier Tech’s WorldTour squad, it only looked like a matter of time before Blackmore would be granted permanent leave to hang with the big dogs. It came sooner than most onlookers expected: in early May, he put pen to a two-year contract with the WorldTour team.
Winning the U23 Liège-Bastogne-Liège
(Image credit: Israel – Premier Tech / Alexis Dancerelle)
He acknowledges that moving to Israel-Premier Tech has been a big step up: “It’s just a really good environment and they’ve made me feel like I can go to the right races, and mix a few off-road races as well,” he says. “I feel like it was the right step, after the races I’d done the year before.”
While off-road racing will always be his first love, Blackmore acknowledges that he is, essentially, better at the road.
“I think it probably just suits me more, maybe it’s my body type. I have done a few mountain bike races this year [he took two U23 World Cup top-10s and won a round of the National XC Series]. Obviously I’m in good form, but it’s hard to transfer it back to the mountain bike.”
Racing mountain bike continues to be important to Blackmore, though. He has watched riders such as Tom Pidcock and Mathieu van der Poel succeed with their multi-disciplinary approach and been inspired; that the team supports this approach appears to have been significant in his signing for them.
“The pathway that Van der Poel, Pidcock and Wout van Aert are making with multi-discipline is definitely cool,” he says, conceding that switching back to off-road does not come easy for him – and he wouldn’t take any chances on it.
“If I can get that balance where I’m also doing well on the mountain bike, then obviously I’d enjoy it,” Blackmore says. “Ultimately I want to race at the front and do best in whatever discipline that is. At the moment, that’s road.”
Blackmore’s part-season as a fully paid-up WorldTour rider was constructed largely of high-level races – UCI Pro Races, .1s and WorldTour races – meaning gaining experience became as important as the results.
That did not stop him from registering some memorable results, though: fifth overall at the Tour of Britain Men, for example, and the same in the U23 men’s World Championship road race in Zurich. And let’s not forget that win at the Tour de l’Avenir, of course.
On his way to fifth place in the Commonwealth Games mountain bike 2022
(Image credit: Getty Images)
While this season has been the second key year in a row, as Blackmore first decided to switch to road and then progressed to the WorldTour ranks, next season is equally rich in opportunity and anticipation as he considers what will be his first full season at the top level.
He doesn’t know many of the details yet, but as the reigning U23 Liège-Bastogne-Liège champion he is hoping for a crack at the full-fat version as part of an Ardennes foray. He also mentions Brabantse Pijl, where he was fourth this year and which was Pidcock’s first pro road win in 2021. “[It] would be a cool target race, because I’ve been there, out front, and experienced it.”
Beyond that, he has mentally earmarked rides in the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, “and a Grand Tour”, for his career bucket list. It’s not hard to imagine him being granted all three of those wishes, perhaps sooner than he thinks, and with successful outcomes, too.
His dream wins, he says, would be victory in the World Championship road race, and a Tour de France stage. The latter is perhaps inspired by the man who helped him to victory in the Tour of Rwanda earlier this year, team-mate Chris Froome, whom he cites as his sporting hero: “As a young child I wasn’t racing as much road, but when [Froome] was winning the Tour, that was really cool,” Blackmore says.
For now, though, racing dreams and racing itself – including his beloved CX – are on hold. It’s off-season. “After this year’s race season, I’m grateful to not do any cycling,” he confesses. “I’m happy for a good break and some consistent training as well.”
He has been building strength in the gym, putting in a few unstructured miles when the weather’s good, and the week after we met was due to head to Cyprus with his girlfriend and a few mates for some sociable riding and relaxing. Things began more earnestly at the team’s December training camp in Girona, Spain. Then it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to the first competitive outings.
“To be on the start line of some of the biggest races in the world will be pretty cool,” he says. “I’m excited for it.”
Rounding out the 2024 season at the Tour of Guangxi
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Blame it on my youth
Joe Blackmore may be one of the youngest new stars in the WorldTour peloton, but in terms of experience, he is already a veteran, having started out at just six-and-a-half years old.
Taking inspiration from his dad Steve, a dedicated off-road racer himself, Blackmore joined Herne Hill Youth Cycling Club in 2009 and began riding and racing his mountain bike on the trails behind the famous velodrome.
By dint of sheer quiet consistency, within a few years the young Londoner had blossomed into a rider with obvious ability. “I think because his dad was a regular racer, he was brought to all the races because his dad was going, and he’d turn up and do it,” says Herne Hill Youth founder Bill Wright. “After a while, people who do that, they just suddenly find that they’re quite good.”
Even at 10 years old, Blackmore was beginning to glean a few raised eyebrows and knowing nods of approval, says Wright, who says the emphasis at HHY is on enjoyment. “He was always in the top four or five, and sometimes winning,” Wright says, “And then, as he got to 12 or 13, he was pretty much winning everything.”
Bill Wright remembers Blackmore as having a “quiet personality and getting on with stuff. But he had a solid group of friends.” As a youth rider, Blackmore would ride cyclo-cross and mountain bike races, before ultimately graduating to National Trophy events, which he began riding at U14 level.
The club had been thrilled to watch their young charge’s progress through the British Cycling Academy, development and now WorldTour ranks.
Blackmore’s bangers
Joe Blackmore was only 19 when he began last year’s Tour of Rwanda with the British Cycling Academy. By the time the eight-stage race was over, he’d celebrated his 20th birthday, taken four top-10s and sixth overall, and lit the blue touch-paper on a season that would alter the course of his cycling career. Here are some of his most memorable road results since.
2023
Orlen Nations GP: 9th overall
Tour de l’Avenir: 12th overall
2024
Tour of Rwanda: 1st overall, two stage wins, two second places on stages
Tour de Taiwan: 1st overall, two stage podiums
Circuit des Ardennes: 1st overall, points and youth winner, one stage win
De Brabantse Pijl (first race with Israel-Premier Tech): 4th
Liège-Bastogne-Liège U23: 1st
National Championship Elite Men’s Road Race: 8th
Tour de l’Avenir: 1st overall, points winner, stage win, two second places on stages
