Laurence Pithie and Finn Fisher-Black will start their time at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe together at the Tour Down Under in January, after joining from Groupama-FDJ and UAE Team Emirates respectively in the Summer.
The Kiwi pair have raced previously as teammates on the home nation’s squad at the New Zealand Cycle Classic stage race back in 2021, however, being just seven months apart in age, they’ve raced more frequently as rivals.
“We’ve probably known each other since we were 13, 14, years old, I reckon,” Fisher-Black told Cyclingnews and The Cycling Podcast, speaking alongside Pithie at their team’s December training camp in Mallorca.
“We kind of grew up racing together. I remember back in Paris-Nice this year, we were already kind of throwing up ideas that it would be nice to be racing on the same team next year, and a couple of months later, we found out it would be going ahead.”
Both natives of New Zealand’s south island, the pair know each other well from the close-knit racing community back home, albeit, with Fisher-Black often coming out on top according to the narrowly younger rider Pithie.
“We’re from a five or six-hour drive apart. But in New Zealand, everyone races against each other because it’s not such a big community there. We grew up doing nationals all together and junior tours around the country,” said Fisher-Black.
“We’re both from the South Island so yeah, it’s pretty close. Now we live in the same place, back in Christchurch, so we’ll do some training together when we’re back in New Zealand. Growing up together it was always nice to race with Finn. But also not nice because he’d always smoke me,” said Pithie with a smile.
“We were always competitive on the bike, always friends when we hopped off. I always looked forward to when Finn left the age group and I could have my time to shine again.”
They’ve had differing journeys into the WorldTour from racing in New Zealand, however, they now find themselves at one of the sport’s ‘super teams’ after significant investment from Red Bull into Ralph Denk’s project.
After Pithie’s breakthrough year in 2024, when he showed himself to be a potential Classics star of the future with a highlight seventh-place finish at Paris-Roubaix, his season will revolve mainly around the bergs and hellingen of Flanders after kicking things off in Australia.
“I will start at the [Tour] Down Under. Then I’ll do the Surf Coast classic and Cadel’s to try and defend the title there,” said Pithie, who took his first WorldTour win back in January at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race.
“Then I’ll move on to national champs to do the TT and road race. Then back to Europe to do [Milan]-San Remo and into all the Flemish Classics.”
For Fisher-Black, who missed out on Grand Tour racing with UAE in 2024 despite impressing in the early season Middle-East races, he’ll target GC at the Tour Down Under to kick off the new year, before getting into the hilly Classics and more stage racing.
“My biggest goals for the first part of the season is the Tour Down Under and the Ardennes,” he said. “Then Basque and Romandie, and then to be in a Grand Tour in the second half of the year. Whether it’s the Tour or the Vuelta, it’s not confirmed yet, but hopefully, we’ll be at one of them.”
At 22 and 23 years old, the New Zealand pair still has an abundance of potential to unlock and will be hoping that comes in their time at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe.
