How a former teammate of Mathieu van der Poel became a triple world-champ, but never succeeded in the WorldTour

There are plenty of riders who have the talent to reach the highest levels of professional cycling. But talent is one thing, because the other factors matter just as much. Jason Osborne was one of those riders that had the legs, but had more difficulty with other things, even though he had an immense talent for sports. He showed that just this weekend in sensational style.

Jason Osborne was never a cyclist to begin with. The German first made his name in rowing – and he was very good at it. He took silver at the World Championships with the German coxless four in 2013 and even made it to the Olympic Games in 2016. After that, though, he chose a different project. His talent for cycling turned out to be huge, and he first showed it on Zwift.

On the online cycling platform, Osborne became the first-ever UCI Cycling Esports world champion in 2020, during the corona crisis. That performance earned him a stagiaire spot at Deceuninck–Quick-Step, but it was Alpecin–Fenix that eventually signed him in 2022. After a year with the development squad, he moved up to the team’s WorldTour roster at Alpecin–Deceuninck.

There, Osborne showed some very solid things, including a second place overall at the 2023 Tour of Austria. But in a team built around stars like Mathieu van der Poel and Jasper Philipsen, holding your own proved brutally hard. After two seasons in the WorldTour he said goodbye in 2024 – and went back to Zwift. That paid off immediately: he jumped into the virtual peloton again and reclaimed the rainbow jersey that same year, becoming world champion once more.

This weekend, Osborne even added a third world title to his name. It’s obvious: the German is overflowing with talent. So why did it never quite work out on the road? "I am seeing numbers at the moment that I never got," he explains to Elite after his winning race. "It's also a bit sad because I think with those numbers, I could achieve some good results in the World Tour, but it's not my game anymore."

It's a bittersweet story. "I just didn't really find the balance within the sport, I was just going from race to race and I couldn't really build my form, also you were often pretty tired from the races and there was not sufficient time for recovery, which is normal, but I couldn't reach my full potential it seems."

At Alpecin–Deceuninck, a few things kept rubbing Osborne the wrong way, and he never really felt at home in the team environment. "I would have also liked to take my former cycling coach into the team, but it wasn't allowed. The team wanted to have everything internal within the coaching team at Alpecin. I felt like I could never really reach my full potential and right now, I actually like having stepped away from the World Tour.”

No regrets then for the German, who claimed his third world title in Abu Dhabi, ahead of Poland’s Michal Kaminski and Belgian rider Lennert Teugels. "I am more passionate about it, trying to find in every race some small margins where I can do better, if it's tactical issues or training specific, if I need to change something in training, I am trying to be the best E-cyclist in the world.”