2026 WorldTour one-day review: UAE dominate as Visma and Lidl-Trek struggle to convert

Five wins. That is UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s total from the 21 WorldTour one-day races this season, almost a quarter of the calendar and one more than anyone else.

Four of them came from Tadej Pogačar, who won Strade Bianche, Milan-San Remo, the Tour of Flanders and Liège-Bastogne-Liège before a crash at the Vuelta brought his season to a premature end. His only other top ten in a WorldTour one-day race was second at Paris-Roubaix. Isaac del Toro added the fifth win at the Grand Prix de Montréal in September.

UAE were strong well beyond their leader. They recorded 11 podium finishes and 19 individual top-ten results, both the highest totals of any team. At Strade Bianche alone they had three riders in the top six, with Del Toro third and Jan Christen sixth behind Pogačar.

All three of UAE’s Monument wins were Pogačar’s. Wout van Aert’s victory at Roubaix for Visma and Paul Seixas’ win at Il Lombardia for Decathlon CMA CGM were the only Monuments to go elsewhere.

Alpecin-Premier Tech had the next-best tally with four wins, all of them from two riders. Mathieu van der Poel won Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and the E3 Saxo Classic, and Jasper Philipsen won Gent-Wevelgem and the Copenhagen Sprint. Their four wins came from just six podiums, but Van der Poel’s second place at Flanders was the team’s only Monument podium.

Between them, UAE, Alpecin, Decathlon and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe won 15 of the 21 races. The other six went to six different teams.

Red Bull won three races, and Remco Evenepoel accounted for all of them, at the Amstel Gold Race, a record fourth Clásica San Sebastián and the Grand Prix de Québec. He also finished third at Flanders and Liège, and his seven top tens were the most of any rider in these races.

Red Bull were also remarkably consistent, with at least one rider in the top ten in 16 of the 21 races, more than any other team. Tim van Dijke’s second place at Omloop and Laurence Pithie’s third in Hamburg were among their other podium finishes.

Decathlon also won three times, with Tobias Lund Andresen at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race and Seixas at La Flèche Wallonne and Lombardia. Those two riders were responsible for all eight of the team’s podiums. Seixas finished in the top ten five times and was on the podium each time, including second places at Strade Bianche, Liège and Montréal, all before his 20th birthday.

Visma | Lease a Bike’s one win was a Monument. Wout van Aert won Paris-Roubaix at his seventh attempt, beating Pogačar in a two-up sprint in the velodrome, three months after breaking his ankle in a cyclo-cross race on 2 January. It was the only Monument Pogačar did not win in the spring.

Beyond Roubaix, though, Visma could not turn strong rides into wins. They finished on the podium nine times, second only to UAE, and had 18 top tens. Van Aert was also third at Milan-San Remo, second at Dwars door Vlaanderen and fourth at Flanders. Per Strand Hagenes was second at E3 and Christophe Laporte third at Gent-Wevelgem, while Ben Tulett finished third three times, at La Flèche Wallonne, Eschborn-Frankfurt and San Sebastián.

Lidl-Trek went the whole season without a WorldTour one-day win despite 16 top tens. Mattias Skjelmose was second at Amstel and Giulio Ciccone second in Québec and third at Lombardia. Mads Pedersen finished in the top ten five times, including fourth at Milan-San Remo and fifth at Flanders, without reaching the podium.

Together, the two teams recorded 34 top-ten finishes and 12 podiums, but just one victory. Only 3% of those top-ten results were wins, compared with 26% for UAE.

Tom Pidcock had a similar story at Pinarello-Q36.5. He finished in the top ten six times, a total only Evenepoel bettered, and was second at Milan-San Remo, by a matter of centimetres, and at Eschborn-Frankfurt.

Netcompany-Ineos had a different problem. The British team managed just three top-ten finishes, but unlike Lidl-Trek, they converted one of them into a victory, with Filippo Ganna winning Dwars door Vlaanderen.

Team Picnic PostNL were the least visible of the 18 WorldTeams. They had two top-ten finishes all season, both in sprints, with Pavel Bittner sixth at the Tour of Bruges and Frits Biesterbos seventh at the Copenhagen Sprint. It follows a Grand Tour season in which they did not win a stage or finish on a stage podium.

Groupama-FDJ United and Tudor also went without a podium. Romain Grégoire accounted for five of Groupama’s seven top tens, and Tudor had nine top tens with no finish better than fifth.

Several smaller teams did better from fewer chances. Unibet Rose Rockets had one top ten all season, and it was a win, with Dylan Groenewegen taking the team’s first WorldTour victory at the Tour of Bruges. Alex Aranburu won the Bretagne Classic for Cofidis and Georg Zimmermann won Eschborn-Frankfurt for Lotto-Intermarché.