🇮🇳 'A pivotal moment' - India launches first ever UCI stage race
Five-day UCI 2.2 Bajaj Pune Grand Tour kicks off on Monday 19th. Global Peloton speaks to India national team rider Naveen John about landmark race
India, the world’s most populous nation, hasn’t held a UCI-ratified road race outside of its national championships for 13 years. In a few days, that will all change, and the sport is going through some encouraging progression in certain parts of the country.
The Bajaj Pune Grand Tour is a landmark event. Held in the state of Maharashtra over five stages, the UCI 2.2 race will feature top talent from across Asia, as well as ProTeam Burgos-Burpellet-BH and others from Europe and Australia with a total of 171 riders.
India is a huge potential new market for cycling, and this race could be the catalyst that’s needed to see the sport grow.
Read more: Naveen John, the Indian who races in Belgium
“In the amount of visibility the race is getting. It’s not just state level or it’s not just like cycling circles. For the first time an event in our sport is sort of bursting outside of that bubble,” Naveen John, India’s most prominent road cyclist over the past decade, tells Global Peloton ahead of the race.
“Every sport has that pivotal moment. I think for road cycling, this is hopefully going to be it,” John adds.
The last UCI races to be held in India took place back in 2013. It was an event called the Tour de India which began in 2011, consisting of a number of single-day races. In the first year, with the races at 1.1 level, winners included Elia Viviani, who out-sprinted Robbie Mcewan to win the Nashik Cyclothon, and Robbie Hunter, who beat Viviani two days later at the Mumbai Cyclothon. The races were downgraded to 1.2 level in the final edition in 2013, with only a smattering of riders from outside of India competing.
Those events failed to capture the imagination of the Indian public, but since then, road cycling participation has soared across the country, with Pune in particular viewed as a hub for the sport.
“To witness a UCI 2.2 category race attract a peloton of 171-rider mark is unprecedented. For India to do it in first year of its Pune Grand Tour is a momentous occasion,” Pinaki Bysack, the race’s technical director said in a press release.
The race is being organised by the local government of Pune, with support from the state of Maharashtra. 500km of roads have been freshly paved especially for the event and more than 3,000 volunteers have been recruited to make it happen. This is no small race, and interest within the wider public has been bigger than expected.
“They're really putting in a lot of effort into this and just throwing everything at this,” says John, speaking to Global Peloton while collecting his luggage having just landed at Pune Airport with the rest of the Indian national team.
“You see a lot of corporate sponsors now looking at this and seeing the visibility that the brands who have stepped on board are getting. There's no lack of resources here.”
John hopes that this race will inspire other state governments to host their own road cycling races in the future, potentially sparking a significant national road racing scene, although this reality far off.
“There's a lot of healthy competition between states,” John says. “I think it's just a matter of time before we see a second, like a one-day race or maybe another state race pops up after this. Hopefully everything goes well here; safety-wise, course-wise”
India is a nation where the potential for growth for the sport of cycling is enormous. The national federation has invested heavily in its track programme in recent years, developing several strong young riders, including a junior men’s team sprint squad that took home the world championship rainbow bands back in 2019. Since then, track cycling has continued to develop, as has road racing, with participation numbers in local races all across the country multiplying.
This race could be an important catalyst for the next phase of growth.
The race
The Bajaj Pune Grand Tour kicks off with an 8km prologue, starting and finishing in Deccan. With a range of abilities on the start-list, this is likely to have a significant impact on the look of the general classification.
The race’s second road stage will be the most challenging, with 1500 metres of climbing over 109 kilometres. The route will take in steep climbs of the Deccan Plateau Ghats before a 15km descent into the finish in Nanded City. There are hills in each of the other three stages, but the top teams are likely to be able to control those and they should end in bunch sprints.
“Stage two is where the time gaps are going to explode,” says John.
African champion Merhawi Kudus goes into the race as one of the favourites for victory. The likes of Fergus Browning (Terengganu) and Kudus’ Burgos team-mate Jambaljamts Sainbayar could also feature heavily when the course gets tough.
Given the importance of the prologue, a rider like Andreas Miltiadis (Quick Pro) or Alexandre Mayer (Burgos) could also do well overall. For the sprints, Belgian veteran Timothy Dupont (Tarteletto) is the stand-out name, but he will face challenge from Luke Mudgway (Li Ning Star) and Georgios Boúglas (Burgos).
‘If I can get the finish line, that’ll be huge for me’
Alongside the international teams, two Indian squads are set to take part in the Bajaj Pune Grand Tour, with a national team joined by an Indian Development team. For two weeks prior to the race, both squads took part in a training camp near Patiala, a city in Punjab in India’s north west. The team flew to Pune on Wednesday and will get an opportunity to see the course, particularly focusing on that crucial second road stage.
Technically nations are only allowed to have one national team starting in a race, so the Indian Federation had to create a development team in order to have two squads of Indian riders.
“The UCI rules only allow one team per nation, so they had to really push to get a second team started. The only angle that they could make it work along is having a development team, so having under-23 riders on there and so we kind of split up like that,” says John, who won the national time-trial title for a sixth time in 2025.
“With a race like this, you want riders to have the opportunity to start this, right? The guys here are going to be bearing the flag of the next generation. We’ve got a solid bunch of guys there in the under-23 team too.”
John has spent more than a decade racing internationally, competing extensively every summer on the Belgian Kermesse scene. As a result, he knows some of the Belgian riders coming across and is aware of just how tough this race is going to be.
The rest of the Indian team are much less experienced than John, who is now 39 and says he has been waiting his entire cycling career for this moment.
“It's a high level. I'm the only guy in this team who's done anything close to this, so I am acutely aware of how challenging it's going to be. Everyone else is a little bit unaware as to what's about to hit them.”
“I'm looking at it day by day. For me, if I can get the finish line, that'll be huge for me.”
And what of the future of Indian cycling? John doesn’t think that the Bajaj Pune Grand Tour will create India’s first professionals, but it’s step one on that journey.
“Everyone keeps asking me like, ‘when are we going to see an Indian in the Tour de France? Or when are you going to see an Indian go to the Olympics?’ You don't get to Z without going through ABCDEFG…right? There's so many steps in between.”
“I knew this was one of those steps. I knew it was on the horizon. Because when you've been around the scene for so long, you see the changes, even though they're small. And so, yeah, kind of I've been holding out for this one for a while.”
You can follow updates on the Bajaj Pune Grand Tour on their Instagram
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