From Pogacar heartbreak to joining Pidcock - The rocky season of Great Britain’s time trial champion

Ethan Hayter sat in the hot seat in Monaco on 22 August with the first red jersey of the 2026 Vuelta waiting for him. He had set 10:57 on the 9-kilometre opening time trial, and only one rider was still on the course. Tadej Pogacar finished 0.09 seconds faster. That margin is a fair picture of Hayter’s year. The rider who finished a hair behind the best Grand Tour racer in the world is also the British time trial champion, and the one who won only one race all season. His second national title in a row in June was the only win in 2026 for a rider who had won five time trials the year before.

Around that single win there was a fine at Tirreno-Adriatico for a gesture to a TV motorbike, a UCI decision that erased points he had won in a cancelled Vuelta stage, and a summer without a contract for 2027.

The two-year deal he signed with Soudal Quick-Step in 2025 was ending, and for the first time in his career he had to look for a team in public. On 7 October Pinarello Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team announced that he will join them for the next two seasons, which reunites him with Tom Pidcock.

Hayter was born in London and came to road racing through the track. He won Olympic silver in the Madison at Tokyo and in the team pursuit at Paris 2024, and he won world titles in the team pursuit and the omnium. That background explains why he is so comfortable in time trials, where position and power over short distances decide everything.

He turned professional with INEOS in 2020 and built a road career there over five seasons. He won the Tour of Norway in 2021 and the Tour de Pologne in 2022, took two stages at the 2022 Tour de Romandie and won a stage at Itzulia Basque Country in 2023. He was British time trial champion in 2021 and 2022, and in 2024 he won the national road race title on Saltburn Bank.

At the end of 2024 he left INEOS for Soudal Quick-Step on a two-season contract. By his own account he wanted to recover the form of 2021 and 2022, when he was regularly competing with riders like Wout van Aert and Julian Alaphilippe and sometimes beating them.

On paper, 2025 went well. Hayter won five time trials, including the British title and the stage at the Tour of Belgium, where he also finished second overall. He led the Tour of Holland with one day to go before illness forced him out. Behind those numbers, though, he was struggling in longer races.

In January he explained that on-the-bike nutrition had hurt him. His problems showed up in long races and not in short efforts like time trials, and he said that at “a long way off” the level he wanted in several races. He also admitted that he overdid it early in the year to prove himself to the new team and got sick a couple of times. At the Giro, stomach problems wrecked his first week, though he still took ninth in the Tirana time trial and third in the second one.

His plan for 2026 was to pay the team back. He had a different programme, built around week-long stage races with a time trial and hillier races where his sprint could count. That programme gave him very few chances to win, and it started slowly.

His first race of the year was the UAE Tour, where he finished fourth in the stage 2 time trial. That stayed his best result until June. In March he went to Tirreno-Adriatico as one of the favourites for the opening time trial and finished eighth, 32 seconds behind Filippo Ganna.

During that effort he took his left hand off the extensions and raised his middle finger towards a passing TV motorbike. The jury fined him 500 Swiss francs and removed 25 points from his UCI ranking, which sent his season total from 33 back to eight.

Hayter did not defend the gesture, but he explained it. He said it was “a bit of a childish reaction”, that he was frustrated because his intermediate time was not good, and that there are rules about how close a motorbike can ride to a time trialist. He added that he would pay the fine.

The spring brought little else. He was in the stage 2 breakaway at Itzulia Basque Country in April but did not finish the race, and he was tenth in the Boucles de la Mayenne prologue, ten seconds behind Julius Johansen.

His first and only win of the season came on 25 June at the British championships in Lampeter. He covered the 38.4-kilometre course at 52.15 km/h, beating Connor Swift by a minute and a half for his fourth national title and second in a row. He called it “survival” in the heat, and that was the only win he would take in 2026.

The Vuelta opened in Monaco, and Hayter went off early with the best time. He set 10:57 and held the lead as the favourites finished, including Josh Tarling, who ended third, four seconds behind. Hayter was three seconds ahead of Pogacar at the intermediate time check, but the Slovenian found the time in the closing section.

Pogacar admitted afterwards that he pushed harder when he heard that Hayter, and not Tarling, was the one in the lead. “I was nervous all day, to be honest”, Hayter said. He had missed what would have been his first stage win in a Grand Tour.

The next day he tried to make up for it. As second in the points classification, Hayter wore the green jersey, because Pogacar could only wear red. He got into a four-man breakaway on stage 2 and took six bonus seconds at the intermediate sprint, which put him as the virtual leader of the race.

The jersey they gave him was an extra-small size, so he cut the back of the shorts open during the stage with scissors. In the finale the peloton split on the final climb and he lost 31 seconds, finishing 80th, so the red jersey went away again.

On stage 3, hail cancelled the finish to Font-Romeu and the commissaires cancelled all results. Hayter had led the intermediate sprint and taken 20 points, which would have put him in the lead of the points classification. The jury removed them. “I don’t have a good explanation”, he said, and he still had to wear the green jersey the following day as the second of the standings.

The race then became a fight to survive. He was in several breakaways and took the combativity prize after stage 12 to Calar Alto, but the heat and humidity left him feeling delirious, hanging on to the team car, and he said he did not think he would make it. He reached the second rest day and was in the 11-man break on stage 15.

His last big chance was the stage 18 time trial in Jerez, where Pogacar and Tarling were no longer in the race. He started early and posted 35:54, but Callum Thornley beat him and Stefan Kung won the stage, leaving Hayter ninth at 32 seconds. He finished the Vuelta 12th in the points classification with 84 points.

The result mattered more than usual, because Hayter still did not know where he would race in 2027. He said that “it’s the first time I’ve been in this situation”, and that in the past he was always signed or almost sure. He also said that one result can change things, even if it does not change what he can do over the next two years.

Pinarello-Q36.5 had shown interest during the summer, and the deal was confirmed on 7 October. Hayter signed a two-year contract through the end of 2028. Team principal Doug Ryder said “Ethan is a racer”, and that the team believes there is more to come from him. Hayter said Pinarello-Q36.5 was one of the teams he really wanted to join. He describes himself as “a bit of an all-rounder”, and the team has told him it sees the same: a time trial specialist who can also sprint from small groups.

At Pinarello-Q36.5 he joins Pidcock, with whom he raced four seasons at INEOS between 2021 and 2024, and the British riders Fred Wright and Tom Gloag. The team is a Swiss ProTeam, so a step down from the WorldTour, but it ended 2026 with Pidcock fifth in the UCI rankings and has recruited heavily for 2027. Hayter has said before that his Tour de France debut is one of his remaining ambitions, and the 2027 race starts in Britain, though the team would need an invitation.

His season ended in Montreal, where he rode the Worlds time trial a week after finishing the Vuelta. He was 18th, a little more than two minutes behind Remco Evenepoel, and said he never recovered fully from the Vuelta: “I couldn’t really go any faster”. It was a quiet end to a season in which he won once, lost a stage by 0.09 seconds and found a new team.