Five fantasy picks for the World Championships men's road race

Our selections are based on our partner Cycling Fantasy, where players have a 5,000 credit budget to build a nine-rider team.

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The best value on this list, and the one with the clearest route to a result. Ireland bring almost nothing around him, which suits a rider whose entire method is going early and going alone. Healy won a Tour de France stage in 2025 and became the first Irishman since Stephen Roche to wear yellow, holding it for two days. He won at the 2023 Giro and has a Liège-Bastogne-Liège podium.

His 2026 has been broken up. He fractured his sacrum crashing on a time trial recon at the Itzulia Basque Country in April, raced on anyway to sixth in the mountains classification, then missed the Ardennes entirely and did not return for almost two months. He rode the Tour in service of Richard Carapaz, working over the Col du Galibier on stage 20 to help secure the polka dot jersey, and was in the large chase group at Québec last week. Nothing about that suggests a rider short of form, and everything about the course suggests one who will not wait.

The same logic, more experience, lower price. Skujiņš is 35, has been at Lidl-Trek since 2018, and has built a career on attacking from distance and committing fully. He is a multiple Latvian champion and made the group of favourites at Québec, where 34 per cent of the Worlds startlist was racing.

His season has been unusual. Illness forced him out of the spring Classics for the first time in more than a decade after he abandoned Paris-Nice, ending a run of consecutive campaigns going back years. That means fresher legs than most in September and a rider with something to prove. Latvia's squad is minimal, so there is no leader to work for.

Andreas Leknessund won stage 7 of the Vuelta at Aramón Valdelinares from the break, his first Grand Tour stage after four second places at the Giro. He was also in the break repeatedly through the final week in Spain.

The additional value is Norway's shape. Tobias Halland Johannessen was second at Valdelinares and second again to Mikel Landa on the queen stage at the Collado del Alguacil, and Uno-X put six riders into the 14-man break that day. Norway can send two men up the road and force the favourites to pick one. Either could return the points, and both are cheap.

Jan Christen is 22, rides for UAE Team Emirates-XRG and is a puncheur by classification rather than a climber, which matters on a circuit decided more often on the Polytechnique and its pitches beyond 11 per cent than on Camillien-Houde.

He has had the best season of his career, winning the AlUla Tour overall and both Swiss national titles, the road race and the time trial. He rode the Giro, San Sebastián and the Bretagne Classic before Canada. Switzerland can build around him and Stefan Küng, who won the Vuelta time trial in Jerez six months after breaking his femur, which is a stronger platform than most riders at this price get.

Rode most of the Vuelta with a broken rib and attacked through it anyway. He took the combativity prize on stage 16, won the mountains sprint on the Puerto de Granada on stage 13, and was in the break on more days than almost anyone in the final ten days.

The United States have no leader carrying the weight of Evenepoel or Van der Poel, and no team obliged to chase on their behalf, which is the whole case for him. Three weeks of hard racing in Spain is either the perfect preparation or a rider who arrives empty, and at this price that gamble is worth taking.