Dark horses for the 2026 World Championships road race

Michael Valgren (Denmark) has the strongest Worlds record of anyone on this list. 

The EF Education-EasyPost rider took bronze in Leuven in 2021 behind Julian Alaphilippe and Dylan van Baarle, on a day he said he had saved for a Danish squad wrecked by crashes. 

He was sixth in Yorkshire in 2019 when Mads Pedersen won, having started that race as one of the team's leaders alongside Jakob Fuglsang. A year earlier in Innsbruck, he attacked over the top of the Igls and led by 30 seconds into the finale before the Höttinger Höll pulled him back. 

Valgren turns 34 next month and came through the Tour de France in July alongside Richard Carapaz and Ben Healy. With Pedersen and Mattias Skjelmose carrying Danish leadership, he is among the riders most likely to anticipate the favourites on a circuit where the decisive move has historically formed before the final lap.

Lorenzo Finn (Italy) makes his elite World Championships debut with two rainbow jerseys already. 

The 19-year-old won the junior title in Zürich in 2024 and the under-23 title in Kigali in 2025, beating Jan Huber and Marco Schrettl. 

This season he added the Giro Next Gen and the Tour de l'Avenir, taking the mountain time trial and the final stage at Lago Serrù to become the first Italian to win the Avenir since Gianbattista Baronchelli, with a final margin of 2:34 over Niels Driesen. He also won the Giro del Belvedere in April in the rainbow jersey, attacking 30 kilometres out and soloing to the line. 

Finn rides for the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe Rookies squad rather than a WorldTour team, and Italy bring ten riders including Giulio Ciccone, Alberto Bettiol, Matteo Trentin and Davide Piganzoli, which will probably leave him free to ride his own race.

Alex Baudin (France) produced the biggest win of his career in June, and did it an hour from where he grew up. 

The stage 1 route of the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, the race formerly known as the Critérium du Dauphiné, gave the riders five categorised climbs and 3,000 metres of climbing across 146 kilometres from Vizille to Saint-Ismier. 

Baudin got into a ten-man move, dropped George Bennett and Clément Braz Afonso on the category one Côte de Rousset, and held off a reduced peloton alone for the final 28 kilometres. He took the stage, the combativity prize and all four jerseys, having had food poisoning before the race. 

The 25-year-old from Albertville went on to ride his second Tour de France and has built a career on getting up the road rather than sitting back and waiting.

France head to Montréal with Paul Seixas as their leader, alongside Pavel Sivakov, Valentin Paret Peintre, Bruno Armirail, Nicolas Prodhomme, Louis Barré and Jordan Labrosse. That should leave Baudin with the freedom to ride his own race.

On a circuit with sixteen chances to make a move, that could matter a lot more than having the fastest finish.

Sean Quinn had perhaps the best three weeks of his career at this year’s Tour, even if the results sheet does not quite show it. The American was seventh from the breakaway on stage four and climbed to second overall, just 28 seconds behind Torstein Træen, the highest GC position of his career.

Two days later, the Col d’Aspin ended that run. Quinn finished 31st on the stage and slipped to twelfth overall, 9:35 down.

“I tried, and I can be proud of the effort, even though I’m not proud of the result,” he said afterwards.

There was still plenty in the ride to suggest Quinn is back where he wants to be. Earlier in his career, EF Education-EasyPost had described a knee injury as potentially career threatening. Since then, he has become US road champion, raced two Tours and established himself as the kind of rider willing to commit when a race opens up.

Montréal should suit that instinct. The United States arrive without one overwhelming favourite, giving Quinn more freedom than he might get in a team built entirely around a single leader. If a dangerous group goes early and the bigger nations hesitate, he is exactly the sort of rider who can find himself in it.

Pavel Novák is the least familiar name among these five and the only rider outside the WorldTour. The 21-year-old Czech climber races for MBH Bank CSB Telecom Fort, having previously spent time as a stagiaire with both Q36.5 and Jayco AlUla without either spell leading to a contract.

His results are modest rather than spectacular. He won the Czech junior road title in 2022 and had already shown some promise a year earlier by finishing second overall at the Medzinárodné dni cyklistiky in Dubnica nad Váhom.

What makes him interesting in Montréal is not his palmarès but his situation. The Czech Republic bring only three riders and none arrives as an obvious contender, leaving Novák with little reason to sit back and wait.

On a circuit raced sixteen times around Mount Royal, that freedom can be useful. Novák is unlikely to be among the names shaping the finale, but he is exactly the kind of rider who can disappear up the road early while the bigger nations watch each other.