Eusebio Unzue on Ivan Romeo’s future: “Movistar’s priority is to build around his greatest strength”

The road cycling season is about to begin. One day before the official start, Movistar Team hosted an exclusive screening of the first episode of the new season of El Dia Menos Pensado at Espacio Movistar on Gran Via. Our Spanish language sister channel CiclismoAlDia were present at an event where Eusebio Unzue and Perico Delgado were the main figures.

After the screening, when the screen faded to black and the lights came back on, the focus returned to the team’s general manager. The press session began, and with Ivan Romeo as the clear star of the episode, the key question for Unzue was inevitable: how does he see the rider from Valladolid in the long term at Movistar?

Over the last season, Romeo fought for general classifications (at the UAE Tour, where he finished fourth just seconds away from a podium topped by Tadej Pogacar), for one-day wins (at the Dauphine, the Spanish Championships and the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana), and in his specialist discipline: the time trial.

A rider with Ivan Romeo’s engine is rare. Movistar Team know that, which is why every decision about his future and how they want him to develop will be crucial, both for his own growth and for the long-term direction of the Spanish team in the WorldTour. So which version of Romeo does Unzue really want?

“Our main priority is to help him progress,” Unzue began. “To keep betting on his greatest strength, which is his ability to move perfectly across almost all kinds of terrain.”

“On a given day he can be a great domestique, a vital rider who can help another teammate win. We know he is a great time triallist and that he is only 22 years old. His room for improvement is very big, so we have to be patient. You have all seen that he is also a great communicator, a different kind of rider,” he added.

As Unzue continued talking about his star rider, he became more open. And at one point he made one thing very clear: it is unlikely that Romeo will become a general classification rider, and that his result at the 2025 UAE Tour was more of an exception.

“We know that high mountains will probably make certain goals unreachable for him, like winning WorldTour stage races overall. But I repeat, he is 22 years old and has a very big margin to grow. That means we will have to wait and see what his real ceiling can be,” he concluded.

Taking advantage of the moment, Perico Delgado was also asked for his view on Ivan Romeo. His long and unforgettable career perhaps led him to see the current Spanish champion slightly differently from Unzue. This is what the two-time Vuelta winner and 1988 Tour de France champion said:

“Ivan is in that phase every rider of his age goes through: a young rider who is projecting himself as one of the best in the future. In 2025 we saw that he is someone who likes to compete under pressure. Living with pressure all the time is very hard, because you force yourself to win, and you almost never will. But he has that hunger to make his own mark, and I think over the next decade we are going to see the development of what could be one of the stars of Spanish cycling.”

These comments from Eusebio Unzue and Perico Delgado came just days before Ivan Romeo’s first race of the 2026 season. Expectations will be high for a rider who will begin his campaign at the Challenge Mallorca.

For now, the only races confirmed in the Spanish champion’s calendar are the five classics in the Balearic Islands:

In all of them, Romeo will race alongside Enric Mas. The two Movistar leaders will share the roads in a season that also marks the start of the new UCI three-year cycle from 2026 to 2028, which brings back the threat of relegation.

For Movistar Team, the last three-year cycle was calmer than the one before. The Spanish squad effectively secured their WorldTour licence a year earlier than expected thanks to an excellent 2024, when they collected a large number of UCI points, especially in the Grand Tours.

Back then, Ivan Romeo was still just a promise who had recently become under-23 world champion in the time trial. He was already highly rated, but he did not yet carry the weight within the team that he does now. Over the next three years, the squad will depend heavily on him and on the results he can deliver.

If Romeo is not the rider who scores the most UCI points for Movistar in this new cycle, it would be a surprise. For that reason, even though only the Challenge Mallorca races are confirmed for now, the rider from Valladolid is expected to appear in many of the biggest events on the calendar, with one date almost certainly standing out above all others: the 2026 Tour de France.

Whether as a domestique, as Unzue suggests, as a stage hunter or as a pure time trial specialist, Ivan Romeo is already the present and future star of Movistar Team. However he ends up specialising, his engine backs him up, and he has already shown he can be exceptional in almost every type of race.

The main figure in the first episode of season five of El Dia Menos Pensado will be back on his bike in just a few days. Can he better his strong 2025 season in a 2026 where expectations and pressure will be even higher?