The 2026 season is almost upon us, so what better moment to look back at the past 12 months in men’s road cycling?

The sport follows a reassuringly seasonal pattern, from warm-weather early-season races in Australia and the Middle East, to the spring classics in northern Europe and then the three Grand Tours, in May, July and August/September. Increasingly, the early-winter close-season is dominated by big-money rider trades, as cycling’s transfer market begins to resemble that of football.

Here then are 12 snapshots from a memorable year.

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January

There’s a shimmering optimism about the first WorldTour race of the season, The Tour Down Under — which is held each January in and around Adelaide in the state of South Australia. For European and North American riders, it’s a warm (often too warm) escape from winter training, and a first chance for fans to see them in new kit, on new bikes and, for many, in new teams. Sometimes, though, that view can be a bit too close for comfort…

(Sarah Reed/Getty Images)

February

Tadej Pogacar, alone. A familiar sight throughout the year that followed but pictured here during the queen stage of the UAE Tour — the unsettlingly-wide climb to Jebel Hafeet. Victory here on the final day wrapped up the Slovenian’s first stage-race win of the season.

(Dario Belingheri/Getty Images)

March

The unofficial campaign to make Strade Bianche — held each March on the white-gravel roads of Italy’s Tuscany region — the sport’s sixth Monument grows louder each year. It is one of the most anticipated events of the season, and the 2025 edition did not disappoint, with Pogacar (twice) and Tom Pidcock, its winners over the previous three years, duking it out. Pogacar crashed on a descent but recovered to catch and then drop the British rider, winning by nearly a minute and a half.

(Marco Bertorello/AFP via Getty Images)

April

Bike racing is a numbers game. Normally, if one team has three riders in a race’s finale and another has just one, there is only a tiny chance the solo competitor will win — but it doesn’t always work out that way.

That was the case in this month at Dwars door Vlaanderen (Across Flanders), a WorldTour race in Belgium, when Neilson Powless of EF Education-EasyPost outwitted three Visma–Lease a Bike riders, including fellow American Matteo Jorgenson and home superstar Wout van Aert.

Instead of working the EF Education-EasyPost rider over in turn in the closing kilometres, Van Aert had been confident of winning a sprint against Powless. He was wrong, and teammate Tiesj Benoot’s hand on his helmet in the background shows just how badly they messed up a golden opportunity. Van Aert later apologized to his colleagues, saying, “I was just too selfish.”

(Jasper Jacobs/Belma Mag/AFP via Getty Images)

May

Stage 20 of the Giro d’Italia was arguably the best single day of Grand Tour racing in 2025.

Simon Yates’ redemption arc on the gravel slopes of the Colle delle Finestre, the same climb where he collapsed seven years earlier, saw him turn a deficit of 1:21 on erstwhile leader Isaac del Toro into an unassailable lead of almost four minutes. And spare a thought for the stage winner Chris Harper, whose victory rarely gets mentioned, such was the GC carnage taking place a few kilometres behind him.

(Luca Bettini/AFP via Getty Images)

June

The opening stage of the Criterium du Dauphine in southeast France witnessed the cycling equivalent of a solar eclipse — the sport’s four biggest names off the front battling each other, mano-a-mano.

On a lumpy stage that everyone expected to be a day for the race’s few sprinters, Jonas Vingegaard instead instigated a deluxe breakaway in the latter stages — one that also included former or reigning world champions Pogacar, Mathieu van der Poel and Remco Evenepoel, and which stayed away from the chasing pack, with Pogacar outsprinting Vingegaard to take the win.

(Dario Belingheri/Getty Images)

July

Roadside fans cheer as Dylan Groenewegen passes by during the stage-five time trial at the Tour de France.

Road cycling remains one of the only major sports that’s almost completely free to attend, though there are some working in it who want that to change. The ASO, organizer of its biggest and most famous race, does not agree — for now, at least.

(Dario Belingheri/Getty Images)

August

Matthew Brennan is a name to monitor in 2026.

The young Englishman — who only turned 20 in August — won 14 races this year, shattering numerous historic records along the way. And despite the image below — which shows him outsprinting arguably the peloton’s strongest man, Lidl-Trek’s Jonathan Milan, on stage one of the Deutschland Tour in this month — Brennan is a versatile rider, who is capable of winning on cobbles and hilly courses too.

His team, Visma-Lease a Bike, wisely extended and enhanced Brennan’s contract earlier this month, tying him up until 2029.

(Federico Gambarini/picture alliance via Getty Images)

September

Remco Evenepoel celebrates his third successive time-trial victory at the UCI Road World Championships — held in the African nation of Rwanda in 2025. The Belgian now only needs one more victory to equal the record, shared by Fabian Cancellara and Tony Martin, but a bigger target in 2026 will be performing for new team Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe after a big-money transfer over the winter.

Peerless in time trials on flat terrain, the rider nicknamed ‘Aero-bullet’ needs to improve his climbing if he is to compete with the likes of Pogacar and Vingegaard at the Tour de France.

(Dirk Waem/Belga Mag/AFP via Getty Images)

October

Pogacar sticks his tongue out as he rides to victory in Italy’s Il Lombardia for the fifth successive year.

The 27-year-old — arguably even more impressive in one-day races like this than he is in multi-stage events — needs wins at Milan-Sanremo and Paris-Roubaix to complete his set of the sport’s Monuments.

That fact makes those two races must-watch TV (as if they weren’t already) in 2026.

(Luca Bettini/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

November

Geraint Thomas — pictured here being honored by his fellow professionals at the Tour of Britain, his final race, in September — officially retired in November. Wales’ 2018 Tour de France winner was immediately appointed as INEOS Grenadiers’ director of racing, and has since been given a shiny new signing to play with in 2026.

(Alex Livesey/Getty Images)

December

Pogacar exits a Benidorm hotel on two wheels on December 13.

That area of eastern Spain remains the pre-season training venue of choice for the WorldTour peloton, and while the meet-ups there in the final month of the calendar year used to have more of a gentle, social-gathering vibe, these days the training is considerably more competitive.

As if to prove the point, Pogacar set a new best time up the nearby Coll de Rates climb on December 19, during a ride that totalled more than 200km (125 miles).

Welcome to 2026.

(Jose Jordan/AFP via Getty Images)