The Riders Who Stood Out at the Junior Worlds

The medal table tells us who won in Zolder, but it does not quite tell us who had the most interesting championship.

Some riders dominated a particular event, others kept appearing on podiums throughout the week, while a few added another exceptional Junior Worlds to what they had already achieved in Apeldoorn twelve months earlier. Look at the results that way and five riders in particular begin to stand out, although for very different reasons.

Matteo Ghirelli - nowhere off the podium

Matteo Ghirelli was the most prolific individual medallist of the championships, leaving Zolder with kilometre gold, silver in both the sprint and keirin and bronze from Italy's team sprint.

Nobody else reached four medals, but the more interesting detail is where those four came from. Ghirelli was the only rider, male or female, to reach the podium in every sprint discipline available to him.

Maya Ferrante medalled in the kilometre, sprint and keirin but not the team sprint. Veronika Solozobova reached the podium in the kilometre, sprint and team sprint but missed out in the keirin, while Ioan Hepburn won the sprint and keirin alongside team sprint silver without adding a kilo medal. Ghirelli was the one rider whose name remained on the podium throughout the complete sprint programme.

Even the kilometre was hardly comfortable. Leonidas Rekowski had been faster in qualifying before Ghirelli reversed the result in the final, winning in 1:01.484 by only 0.028 seconds.

That time was some distance from the junior world record and does not belong alongside the extraordinary timed performances produced elsewhere in Zolder. The point was not how fast the kilometre was, but that Ghirelli never disappeared from contention across the entire sprint programme.

Jacopo Vendramin - six medals across two Junior Worlds

Italian endurance rider Jacopo Vendramin left Zolder with two gold medals and a silver, already enough for an outstanding championship, but his record becomes considerably more impressive when Apeldoorn 2025 is added.

This year he won the elimination, partnered Nicola Padovan to Madison gold and finished second to Raul Esch in the scratch. Twelve months earlier he had taken elimination silver together with bronze medals in the scratch and omnium, leaving his complete Junior World Championship career with a beautifully symmetrical record of six medals - two gold, two silver and two bronze.

The symmetry makes for a good statistic; the repeatability behind it is what really matters.

Vendramin has built those six medals across the scratch, elimination, omnium and Madison rather than around one event that particularly suits him. He was already reaching three World Championship podiums as a first-year junior, then returned against a different field twelve months later and converted two of those opportunities into rainbow jerseys.

Junior championships inevitably produce riders who have one extraordinary week. Vendramin has effectively produced two of them, across every season in which he was eligible to do so.

For a junior rider, there is not much more evidence of repeatability available.

Emma Jimenez Palos - has the USA found its next major endurance rider?

Emma Jimenez Palos was already one of the most interesting women's endurance prospects arriving in Zolder. She left looking considerably more so.

The American defended the scratch title she won in Apeldoorn, added silver in the omnium and then rode 3:29.181 in individual pursuit qualifying. For a brief period it was a junior world record, before Zoe Bihan lowered it first to 3:29.043 and then to 3:28.218 in the final, where Jimenez Palos again finished second.

Across two Junior Worlds, her record now stands at five medals - two gold and three silver - with the same particularly unusual pattern repeated in consecutive seasons: scratch world champion and individual pursuit silver medallist.

Winning a scratch world title once can come from one perfectly judged race. Doing it twice starts to look rather less accidental, particularly when the same rider is simultaneously capable of producing world-record pace over 3km.

For the USA, that combination is difficult to overlook.

Jennifer Valente has spent much of the past decade defining the American women's endurance programme, combining elite bunch-racing intelligence with the physical ability required for the omnium and team pursuit. Jimenez Palos is nowhere near the stage where comparisons of achievement would be sensible, and junior medals offer no guarantees once the transition into senior racing begins, but some of the underlying qualities are familiar.

The USA appears to have another rider emerging with both a serious engine and the ability to repeatedly make good decisions in unpredictable bunch races. More significantly, she is doing so with Los Angeles 2028 only two years away.

She will still be exceptionally young by then, but that is precisely what makes her development so interesting. America may already have found one of the riders capable of helping shape the next era of its women's endurance programme, and perhaps early enough for the two generations to overlap.

Agata Campana - from team sprint to Madison

That three of the five riders highlighted here are Italian should probably surprise nobody.

Italy's junior programme has produced this sort of depth for years, and Zolder provided another demonstration of it. Ghirelli appeared on every sprint podium, Vendramin continued a remarkable two-year endurance record, while Agata Campana may have shown the widest range of either.

To understand Campana's championship properly requires going back to Apeldoorn.

She was part of Italy's 2025 junior team sprint world-title squad, riding third wheel in qualifying as Italy produced the fastest time of 49.994 before Rebecca Fiscarelli replaced her for the later rounds. Yet during the same World Championships Campana was also eighth in the scratch.

That result is important because it stops the easy interpretation of what happened next. This was not simply a sprinter who was subsequently converted into an endurance rider; Campana was already competitive in a World Championship bunch race while being used within Italy's team sprint programme.

Twelve months later, that endurance potential had moved decisively to the foreground. She finished second to Jimenez Palos in the Zolder scratch, won the elimination and then partnered Matilde Rossignoli to another rainbow jersey in the Madison.

Campana therefore leaves junior racing with three World Championship gold medals and one silver spread across team sprint, elimination, scratch and Madison.

It may also say something about why Italy continues to produce so many successful juniors. Young riders are not always forced neatly into the event categories they may eventually occupy as seniors, allowing qualities to emerge before specialisation closes some of those possibilities down.

Campana has shown enough speed to contribute the final lap of a world championship team sprint and enough endurance, positioning and tactical ability to become one of the best bunch racers of her generation.

Where that eventually takes her is impossible to know, but the range alone makes her one of the most intriguing riders to emerge from Zolder.

Ioan Hepburn - GB have a serious sprint talent

Ioan Hepburn did not collect as many medals as Ghirelli, but in the two tactical individual sprint events he looked head and shoulders above the field.

The Great Britain rider won both the sprint and keirin, adding team sprint silver, and there was very little sense that either individual world title had been scraped out. Hepburn looked comfortable in the sprint rounds, had the speed to resolve races when required and then carried the same authority into the keirin.

What made that particularly striking was the contrast with his Commonwealth Games only a few weeks earlier.

Glasgow had already shown how quick Hepburn is. Racing for Wales, he produced a 9.807 flying 200m to set a British junior record, but the Games also delivered a very public reminder that the rider producing those numbers was still only 18. A panic attack immediately before the team sprint bronze-medal ride required medical attention and meant Wales could not contest the final.

It was a difficult moment on the biggest senior stage Hepburn had experienced, but it did not linger for long.

He returned to racing at the Games, then came back into junior competition, won the British sprint title and arrived in Zolder looking entirely at ease. Rather than appearing affected by what had happened in Glasgow, he seemed to have absorbed the experience and moved on.

That matters because his speed was never really the unanswered question. A 9.807 flying 200m at 18 already provides plenty of evidence there.

Zolder showed what he could do with it.

Hepburn repeatedly put himself in the right positions, appeared comfortable making decisions under pressure and had more than enough speed to finish races once the opportunity arrived. Against the best junior sprinters in the world, both the sprint and keirin looked remarkably straightforward.

Great Britain has produced enough exceptional sprinters that every successful junior should not immediately be projected towards Olympic medals. There is a long development process between dominating Junior Worlds and doing the same thing against Harrie Lavreysen and the rest of the elite field.

What Zolder did establish is that GB has a serious talent here.

The Commonwealth Games reminded everyone how young Hepburn still is. A few weeks later, the Junior Worlds showed how good he already is.

What the medal table doesn't show

There were plenty of other exceptional championships in Zolder. Veronika Solozobova won the sprint and team sprint alongside kilometre bronze, while Maya Ferrante took keirin gold and silver in both the sprint and kilometre. Several more riders appeared repeatedly on podiums across the five days.

What separated these five was not simply how many medals they won, but what those results revealed.

Ghirelli went through the complete sprint programme without missing a podium. Vendramin completed two Junior Worlds with six medals spread perfectly across gold, silver and bronze. Jimenez Palos combined consecutive scratch titles with pursuit performances already at world-record level. Campana produced a World Championship medal range stretching improbably from team sprint to Madison, while Hepburn simply looked better than everybody else once the racing came down to individual sprint and keirin.

Three of the five coming from Italy is also an appropriate reflection of a junior system whose strength now looks structural rather than cyclical.

None of this tells us with certainty what happens next. Junior world champions disappear, riders who were never junior world champions become Olympic champions, and physical development, coaching, opportunity and injury will repeatedly alter the picture over the coming years.

But that is precisely why looking beyond the rainbow jerseys is useful.

The medal table records who won in Zolder. The performances around those medals give us the better clues about which riders may be worth remembering.

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