Michael Woods isn’t done competing yet. The 39-year-old Canadian retired from the WorldTour at the end of 2025 but his appetite for challenging himself hasn’t faded.
In a reflective blog post published today, the four-time Grand Tour stage winner revealed that he plans to compete in triathlon, gravel racing, mountain bike marathons and ski mountaineering.
The former Canadian national champion had hoped to end his time on the WorldTour at the Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal, a race on home soil that helped launch his career more than a decade earlier. Instead, his final race turned out to be the closing stage of the 2025 Tour de France on a cold, wet Champs-Élysées.
“Crossing the line with Benjamin Thomas at the Tour, I had no idea this would be my last race as a professional cyclist,” he writes. “I wasn’t rolling around the Champs-Élysées thinking this was my final pro road race.”
“Instead of sinking beers on Rue St. Catherine post-race [in Montréal], I found myself sitting at a dinner table in the Shouldice Hernia Hospital with a bunch of men my dad’s age, discussing our impending hernia surgeries and retirements,” Woods shares.
“I want to challenge myself again. I want to put myself outside of my comfort zone and try to compete in and against the best endurance athletes across a range of disciplines,” he says.
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