Pogacar's dominance, Evenepoel's big move - 10 storylines to follow in the men's WorldTour in 2026

For most of 2025, Tadej Pogačar seemed to be competing in a different sport to the rest of the peloton, and that feeling was hammered home by his crushing victories over Remco Evenepoel on successive weekends at the World Championships, European Championships and Il Lombardia.

Although Pogačar suffered some notable defeats across the season – to Mattias Skjelmose at Amstel Gold Race, to Wout van Aert on the final day of the Tour, to Evenepoel in the Worlds time trial – Mathieu van der Poel was the only rider who proved a consistent rival in 2025.

Pogačar and Van der Poel went head-to-head at Milan-San Remo, the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix, with the Dutchman winning the series 2-1 thanks to his victories on the Via Roma and the Roubaix velodrome. 

The duo will clash in the same races once again in 2026, and their duel looks set to define the Classics campaign. Pogačar has been steadily divesting cycling of suspense in recent years. Perhaps only Van der Poel stands between him and a procession in the Spring. 

The transfer saga of 2025 will be one of the most compelling stories of 2026. Remco Evenepoel’s decision to sign for Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe marks a new phase in his career, and it also adds considerably to the pressure on the Belgian’s shoulders.

If Soudal-QuickStep’s Grand Tour squad was a perennial work in progress, then Red Bull is rather closer to the finished article. The expectation from Evenepoel’s new employer is that he will improve sufficiently in his new environment to become a genuine challenger to Tadej Pogačar at the Tour de France.

Despite a Giro d’Italia route tailored to his specifications, Evenepoel has opted to go all-in for the Tour, where he is likely to be flanked by Florian Lipowitz, Jai Hindley and Daniel Martinez. Red Bull believe that Evenepoel still has margin for improvement and that their considerable resources can help him bridge the gap to Pogačar. Their jousts, in the Ardennes, at the Tour and at the Worlds, will be among the stories of the season.

While most of the peloton’s big hitters outlined their racing programmes at training camps in December, Jonas Vingegaard and Visma | Lease a Bike have delayed any announcement until their media day in Benidorm on January 13.

Ever since winning the Vuelta a España last September, Vingegaard has been teasing the idea of making his Giro debut in a bid to complete a full set of Grand Tour victories. With Pogačar seemingly unbeatable in July, there is a clear logic to sending Vingegaard to the Giro, not least because the 2026 course seems expressly designed to allow him to double up at the Tour.

And yet there is no guarantee that Vingegaard and Visma will take the bait, given the importance of the Tour in their cosmos. Vingegaard has raced the Tour for the past five years, winning twice and never finishing lower than second. If Pogačar were to falter in 2026, then a fresh Vingegaard would be the clear favourite to win the Tour. That might yet tip the scales against Vingegaard’s Giro dream.

Speaking of rivalries, Vingegaard is the only man to have beaten Pogačar at the Tour – twice, in 2022 and 2023 – and the Dane remains the rider most likely to challenge his hegemony in July, Red Bull’s reinforcements notwithstanding.

Even so, Pogačar will set out from Barcelona as the overwhelming favourite for Tour victory, and the most intriguing subplot might well come from within his UAE Team Emirates-XRG squad, with Isaac del Toro set to make his Tour debut after placing second at the 2025 Giro.

Del Toro will set out as a deluxe domestique, but Tour history is dotted with riders who unexpectedly overshadowed their leaders in July. The Rwanda Worlds suggested that Del Toro is still some way off Pogačar’s exalted level, of course, but the Mexican is developing rapidly.

It’s hardly Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault just yet – but expect Pogačar to look to lay down an early marker on the climb to Montjuïc in the opening team time trial. On the same note, Evenepoel and Lipowitz’s displays on the same stage will be crucial in defining the Red Bull hierarchy.

Juan Ayuso highlighted his ability when he placed on the podium of the 2022 Vuelta when he was still a teenager, but the Spaniard has never quite lived up to that potential since. He would argue – with considerable justification – that his path was blocked somewhat at UAE Team Emirates, where everything revolves around Pogačar.

There will be no such excuses in 2026, with Ayuso now in situ as Lidl-Trek’s Grand Tour leader following his fractious departure from UAE. Ayuso signed off on his time at the team with two stage wins at the Vuelta either side of labelling management a “dictatorship,” and he was still walking those comments back when he met the press at Lidl-Trek’s training camp three weeks ago.

But the talking stops now, as Ayuso faces into his new challenge at the helm of a team with the highest of ambitions. The Spaniard will lead the line at the Tour, where he will target a podium finish, but he will also be expected to pick off stage race wins throughout the year. Like Evenepoel at Red Bull, there are no more excuses for Ayuso.

Ineos Grenadiers have been drifting for much of the 2020s. Egan Bernal’s career-altering crash in January 2022 had obvious repercussions for the team’s Tour ambitions, but their recruitment and planning in the years since have left much to be desired. The team’s results have been far from commensurate with their budget, while they have steadily slipped from relevance at the Tour, the race that has always been their raison d’être.

The malaise has been underscored by the steady exodus of managerial and coaching knowledge (most notably to Red Bull), but Ineos will hope they have taken measures this winter to turn the tide. Geraint Thomas has been appointed as Head of Racing after hanging up his wheels in September, while the British squad has also prised Oscar Onley away from his contract at Picnic-PostNL.

Onley was fourth at last year’s Tour at just 22 years of age, but he is still a long way off Pogačar, Vingegaard et al. That gap certainly won’t be closed in one year, but the Scot gives Ineos a narrative once again as they start their reboot. They won’t win the Tour in 2026, but they will expect to be more relevant than they have been in recent years.

Paul Seixas only turned 19 in September, but he highlighted his potential with a most assured debut season in the WorldTour. After placing eighth at the Critérium du Dauphiné, he won the Tour de l’Avenir and then took a fine bronze medal at the European Championships. For good measure, he was seventh in his Monument debut at Il Lombardia a week later.

Those displays have raised hopes in France that Seixas can be the man to end the long home drought that followed Bernard Hinault’s final Tour victory in 1985, and the youngster’s 2026 racing programme has been one of the talking points of the winter.

Decathlon have signalled that Seixas will make his Grand Tour debut in 2026, but the jury is out as to whether he should be dispatched to the Vuelta or thrown straight in at the deep end at the Tour. Either way, the expectations around Seixas are mounting, and his progress will be one of the stories of the season.

When Van Aert moved deftly from cyclocross to the road in the Spring of 2018, the expectation was that Monument victories aplenty would follow, but his career hasn’t quite panned out that way. Although the Belgian has delivered some of the most astonishing displays of cycling’s high-octane 2020s – witness his repeated onslaughts on the 2022 Tour – he has never quite added up to the sum of his parts in the Monuments.

Indeed, Van Aert’s lone Monument victory is the pandemic-delayed Milan-San Remo of 2020. At the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix, he has repeatedly come up short, while his old rival Mathieu van der Poel has remorselessly lifted his own tally of Monuments to seven.

Van Aert was still recovering from a crash-marred 2024 campaign last Spring, but after a full season and a winter free of interruptions, he will hope for better in 2026. The problem, of course, is that the game has moved on over the past two years. Van der Poel and Pogačar are operating a level that Van Aert has never reached in the Spring. If he is finally to win the Tour of Flanders or Paris-Roubaix, he will need to be inventive.

During the 2025 Tour, technical director Thierry Gouvenou suggested that bunch sprints were an endangered species at the race. And, indeed, across the calendar, it feels as though mass finishes are at a premium, certainly in comparison with the salad days of the 1990s and 2000s. 

Yet against that backdrop, the peloton is still blessed with a generation of considerable sprint talent. Jonathan Milan (Lidl-Trek), Tim Merlier (Soudal-QuickStep) and Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) are the leading lights, though it’s not clear how often the Big Three of sprinting will compete against one another in 2026.

Milan will miss the big rendezvous at the Tour de France, although he tags in another formidable finisher in Mads Pedersen, who is vying to complete a full set of Grand Tour points classifications.

Meanwhile, Paul Magnier (Soudal-QuickStep) scorched the earth in the final months of 2025, and the Frenchman will have obvious ambitions in both sprints and Classics this season. Elsewhere, men like Biniam Girmay (NSN Cycling Team) and Arnaud De Lie (Lotto-Intermarché) will look to hit their old heights on certain sprint finales. 

In an era of Pogačar domination, the idea of fraught sprint battles is something to savour.

Throughout cycling history, some teams have been wealthier than others, but the demarcation between the haves and the have-nots has seemed to be growing ever clearer in recent years. The team with the biggest budget in cycling, UAE Team Emirates-XRG, reeled in a record haul of victories in 2025, and the best talent in the peloton is being hoarded by a select group of so-called ‘super teams.’ Decathlon, Red Bull and Lidl-Trek are among the squads whose budgets have been reinforced by ambitious sponsors for 2026.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, smaller squads are struggling to keep pace. Arkéa-B&B Hotels disbanded at the end of 2025 after they failed to find a sponsor with the resources needed to back a WorldTour team, while Lotto and Intermarché have merged in order to secure their future in the peloton. 

Meanwhile, there are whispers that some teams at WorldTour and Pro Continental level are already concerned about their prospects of surviving into 2027. On the other hand, of course, there are teams in the World Tour who have been in existence for over three decades, which has been cited by many as own argument against the notion that cycling’s financial model is especially precarious. Sometimes it’s all in the eye of the beholder. 

UCI president David Lappartient claimed this winter that the teams themselves rejected the idea of a budget cap in cycling, but expect the idea – or a variation on it – to resurface at some point in 2026. And while the UCI rejected the OneCycling project, Lappartient has declared himself willing to hold talks with the proposal’s Saudi backers.