OPINION | 5 reasons to be excited for cycling in 2026

Some of the big teams didn’t just shuffle riders, they moved whole plans. Some of it is transfer politics, some of it is ego, and some of it is simply two or three riders trying to work out who gets to be the main character. Here are the five things I can’t stop thinking about as the new season creeps closer.

The Evenepoel move is real, official, and massive: Soudal Quick-Step confirmed he’ll leave at the end of 2025 to join Red Bull–BORA–hansgrohe. The line that sticks with me is the bluntest version of the whole idea: “I want to be better than Pogačar... that's why I came here”.

Now that, is fighting talk. That’s not a rider asking for “support”; that’s a rider asking for a new ceiling.

Why jump? Quick-Step was built around Remco, but Red Bull–BORA is trying to build something bigger than one rider: deeper climbing support, more science, more resources, more everything. Evenepoel himself pointed to “all the scientific aspects involved” and “a lot of room for improvement,” which reads like a polite way of saying he thinks he can level up in places he couldn’t fully attack before.

But the pressure doesn’t disappear, it mutates. Evenepoel walks into a team that already has Florian Lipowitz as a serious GC pillar, as well as five time grand tour winner Primoz Roglic, and it’s a squad that has lived through the “two leaders” problem often enough to know how messy it can get (just think of the tension in the final week of the 2025 Tour de France).

If Remco wants to be the undisputed number one, he’ll have to earn it on the road, not in a press release. And if he really does dabble with a Tour of Flanders debut, that’s another kind of test: not just watts, but positioning, patience, and nerve on the tightest stage in cycling. I for one would love to see the double Olympic champion on the cobbles!

I’ll say it plainly: I enjoyed the 2025 Classics more than the Grand Tours. Not because the Tours were bad, but because the Classics felt like a weekly showdown where nobody could hide, especially once it became Pogacar vs Van der Poel season again. Milano-Sanremo was the perfect example: Pogacar lit the fuse, Van der Poel refused to blink, and the race turned into a three-man knife fight all the way to the Via Roma with Filippo Ganna tagging along.

What I love is how their rivalry forces both of them to race “wrong.” Pogacar is built to turn climbs into a slow-motion demolition, yet he’s coming back to San Remo and Roubaix because the gap between “almost” and “Monument winner” bothers him. After San Remo, he didn’t dress it up, he basically promised a rerun: “We will come back next year for more”. And on Roubaix, the questions get even louder because he’s openly talked about how much that first win would mean.

Van der Poel, meanwhile, has reached the scary phase of greatness where the history book starts calling. After winning Roubaix for a third time in a row, he framed it in pain, not poetry: “It has been the Roubaix I’ve suffered the most in my career”. That’s the thing, he’s not “talented” there, he’s hardened there. And Pogacar pushed him harder than ever in 2025. So yes, I’m obsessed with the 2026 versions of the questions: can Pogacar win Roubaix on the second attempt, and can Van der Poel actually pull off a fourth Flanders and a fourth Roubaix?

If they both show up healthy, the sport gets its purest product: two geniuses trying to out-stubborn each other. Sorry Vingegaard, but this is now the best rivalry in the sport.

Vingegaard already has the Tour de France (twice) and, now, the Vuelta a España. The Giro is the missing piece, the one that would turn a brilliant career into a neat set.

And he’s basically admitted the pull. Cyclingnews reported him saying, “I think I'd prefer to win all three Grand Tours,” while still acknowledging the Tour remains the “biggest objective.” I read that as a rider trying to negotiate with his own legacy in public: he knows what he’s supposed to say, but he also knows what would actually satisfy him. Yes he wants the yellow jersey back, but what about the Maglia Rosa?

The Giro organisers are pushing too, and you can feel the sales pitch. Mauro Vegni put it about as directly as you ever hear in modern cycling: “If I was Jonas Vingegaard I wouldn't let a chance like this escape him. If he won the 2026 Giro, he'd complete the Grand Tour set.”

So what’s the tension? The Giro is May, the Tour is July, and the modern Tour is a brutal, specialised machine that teams plan around all year. A Giro–Tour double is possible, but it’s a gamble with form, fatigue, and crashes. But… Tadej Pogacar did actually reclaim the Tour de France right after winning the Giro in 2024.

Oscar Onley finishing fourth at the 2025 Tour de France still feels slightly unreal to me, partly because it didn’t come with the usual superstar noise. It was just this calm, steady accumulation of time, and then suddenly you’re staring at a Brit in fourth on GC. That result is exactly why INEOS interest has turned into a full-on transfer saga, and one of the best signings in recent years too.

To be clear: as of mid-December 2025, it’s still not formally announced as completed. But the logic of the link is obvious. INEOS needs a new pillar for its Grand Tour ambitions, and Onley is suddenly the most convincing British GC bet of his generation. Yes, I think even above Tom Pidcock. If you’re Onley, you’re looking at the biggest home team, bigger resources, and a clearer long-term platform.

And then there’s the part I’m personally fascinated by: Geraint Thomas moving into management at INEOS, specifically as Director of Racing. Thomas described the role in a way that sounded like a rider who still thinks like a rider: “This team has been my home since day one, and stepping into this role feels like a natural next step.” If Onley lands there, I can imagine that relationship working, not because Thomas will “mentor” him in a cheesy way, but because Thomas understands the daily realities of defending GC: the boring bits, the stress bits, and the parts where your legs are fine but your head is fried.

Could Onley podium a Grand Tour in 2026? At the Tour, maybe it’s still too stacked if everyone is on top form. But at the Giro or Vuelta, with the right route and the right support, I genuinely think it’s on the table, and I want to see how INEOS handles having a GC talent who isn’t trying to act like a celebrity.

Ayuso to Lidl-Trek is confirmed, and it’s the kind of move that raises as many questions as it answers. The exit from UAE wasn’t brushed off as “timing” or “opportunity”, in fact, Cycling Weekly reported the contract was terminated after “differences in alignment with team's sporting philosophy”. That phrase is doing a lot of work. It suggests tension about role, direction, maybe even internal hierarchy, all the stuff that’s hard to prove from the outside, but never fully disappears inside a team bus.

Ayuso, for his part, leaned into the reset: “Joining Lidl-Trek is the start of an important new chapter in my career”. That’s the clean PR version, but the underlying question is the one I can’t wait to see answered: how does a GC project live inside a team that already has huge, fully-formed identities around Mads Pedersen and Jonathan Milan?

Because Lidl-Trek doesn’t do quiet. They race hard, they race for wins, and their Classics/sprint core is already one of the most defined in the sport. That’s why Ayuso is so intriguing there: he isn’t joining a blank canvas, he’s joining a painting that’s already half finished. The upside is obvious, a team with serious engines, serious organisation, and now a long-term GC spearhead.

The risk is equally obvious: Grand Tour GC requires a kind of selfishness that can clash with a squad built to light up stages and Monuments. And does Ayuso have the sort of temperament that could disrupt the harmony at Lidl-Trek?

If it clicks, Lidl-Trek suddenly becomes the most interesting “two-team teams” in the peloton: a Classics/sprint monster that can also play the three-week game. If it doesn’t, you’ll feel it fast, in who gets protected, who gets asked to work, and who starts drifting to the edges of the plan.

Which of the five scenarios listed above are you must excited for in 2026?