Less than two weeks after the 2026 Volta a Catalunya, cycling’s latest top-level reminder that there is much more to bike racing than the Classics each spring arrives in the shape of Itzulia Basque Country. Neither of the top two stage racers of the current peloton, Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) nor 2023 Itzulia winner Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease Bike) will be present this year.

But for anybody seeking to remind the world that there is life beyond the Slovenian and Dane, the 2026 Itzulia Basque Country is an excellent place to start. For one thing, if there’s always been one golden rule of the Itzulia Basque Country in its previous 64 editions, it’s been that it has always been anything but flat.

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Juan Ayuso (Lidl-Trek) to Ion Izagirre (Cofidis), both former winners. There are also double Itzulia champion Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) to breakaway specialist Ben Healy (EF Education-EasyPost). The Irishman was the protagonist of what is considered the longest successful breaks in Itzulia’s race history – over 120 kilometres, 55 of them alone – last year on stage 5.

What all of these, and more, have in common is that they will have to stop Isaac del Toro (UAE Team Emirates-XRG). The Mexican’s track record this spring of week-long World Tour stage race victories, at UAE and then Tirreno, places him in pole position to claim a third, and arguably the hardest, in Itzulia Basque Country. If Del Toro does so, he’ll be well on track to taking over from last year’s Itzulia winner and teammate, João Almeida, as the new standout name in the week-long stage race speciality.

The other big conditioning factor to Itzulia in 2026 will be, as ever, the weather and arguably the most notoriously gnarly, technical stage racing route of the entire season. Most recent editions have been run off in the dry. But as soon as there’s even a drop of rain in Itzulia Basque Country, on more occasions the roads – narrow, wooded, twisting and severely technical – become much harder to negotiate.

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With or without the poor weather, Izulia’s already high potential for ambushes and surprises in a race supported by one of the noisiest, most passionate cycling fanbases in the world outside Belgium, can quickly and unpredictably morph into a tense, claustrophobic cauldron of non-stop drama. If Del Toro can handle all that and win, then it’d be a huge step for the Mexican in his non-stop rise to greatness.

he hit the rain-soaked ground at speed on a perilous descent on stage 4, just when he was leading and looking more than set to give Jonas Vingegaard a run for his money, Juan Ayuso returns to the fray in Itzulia. He’s doing so on home soil and in a race he’s already won, back in 2024, too.

But if his victory two years ago was overshadowed by the terrible mass crash in Itzulia a few days earlier, this time Ayuso will be determined to set the record straight without any such incidents overshadowing his success. Getting his first opportunity this season to take on his former teammate Del Toro, the rider who eclipsed him completely in the Giro d’Italia last year, too, may well compound any lingering sense of unfinished business.

Ayuso’s trump card could well be on day one in the 13-kilometre time trial in Bilbao, where – on paper – he’ll be one of the big favourites. Brandon McNulty (UAE Team Emirates-XRG) and, possibly, Roglič, Itzulia’s time trial champion par excellence, will likely give him a run for his money. But if Ayuso gets a good enough head start, there’s every chance he could lead the race from beginning to end, no matter what Del Toro throws at him.

Second in the Volta ao Algarve in February, including a stage win on the Alto do Fóia, is already another big step up, particularly given that victory was taken against the likes of Ayuso and Almeida. But on the other hand, Itzulia is an exceptionally unforgiving, intricate kind of race, much more complex to handle than Algarve. So Seixas’ youth and inexperience on the roads of the Basque Country could form a real counter-argument to those predicting France’s first success in Itzulia since Laurent Jalabert in 1999.

Still, Seixas has the habit of punching above his weight time and again, and his explosive uphill finishes are just what’s needed to succeed in Itzulia. And at 20 years of age, and with nothing to lose, even a crack at a stage win would be a major triumph and bode well for his chances in two more races where he’ll be making his debut this spring: La Flèche Wallonne and Liége-Bastogne-Liège.

Primož Roglič has never lost a time trial in the Itzulia Basque Country. Ever since 2017, he’s won no less than five, the most recent the opening stage in 2024. Could it be six times lucky?

All good things come to an end and it’s not looking great for the Slovenian, to be honest, despite having some solid recent results like fifth in Tirreno-Adriatico to boost his confidence. The Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe leader has the second half of the season, in particular the Vuelta a España, as his overriding goal of 2026, and whilst never one just to go through the motions, on paper a lot more riders will be in a lot better form than him right now.

And yet. Quite apart from Roglič’s track record in the setpiece battles in the time trials, his victory in the 2021 Itzulia Basque Country, tearing apart Pogačar’s UAE team and leaving the Slovenian reeling himself with a long-distance break on the final day, was one for the ages. What’s more, Roglič’s ability to suddenly turn the tables remained intact all the way through to the Volta a Catalunya last year, too, when he destroyed Ayuso’s lead at the last moment possible.

So if Roglič is on anything near his top form, that TT record in Itzulia might just hold for yet another year. And who knows what could happen after that?

Brandon McNulty briefly held the race lead of the Itzulia Basque Country and teammate Pogačar declared himself to work as a domestique de luxe, it had all the feel of a breakthrough moment. The lead itself went up in smoke, though, after Roglič went on the rampage on the final day. Not even Pogačar himself could stop McNulty plummeting from the top spot on GC to 17th overall by the finish.

Fast forward five years and McNulty’s now notched up a seventh and a fifth place overall at Itzulia, as well as helping teammate João Almeida take the outright win last year. But it’d be only human if he still had something of a sense of unfinished business about the race, and on top of that he’s clearly in great form.

A chance of a second podium finish at Paris-Nice unravelled for him in the big crash on stage 4 and he’d already had a crash in the Volta ao Algarve on its key mountain stage to the Foia, too, just at the wrong moment. But he was up there giving Pogačar key support at San Remo on the Cipressa in his debut participation and was again in the thick of it on the last day of Catalunya en route to Montjuic. After the success of San Remo for Pogačar, Itzulia, then, could be where it finally goes right for him on a personal level in 2026, too.

Ion Izagirre doesn’t manage to win the Itzulia Basque Country than actually succeeds in repeating his 2019 overall victory. But in a sense, it doesn’t matter.

With no less than seven podium finishes in his palmares in his home event – four third places, the most recent in 2024, two seconds and a win, as well as two stage victories – there can be no doubt that Izagirre’s participation in Itzulia Basque Country for one last time has a very special feel to it.

There’ll almost certainly be homages in start or finishing podiums along the way. But as one of the peloton’s sharpest racers and a rider with no less than 12 participations in the race – the first with Euskaltel-Euskadi back in the former ProTour team’s glory days in 2013 – Izagirre won’t miss out on any chances to shine for one last time on his home roads. It’ll certainly be worth keeping your eyes open for those, because Izagirre will be determined to make them count.

ne of the two toughest stages of the UAE Tour at Jebel Mobrah culminated with a second overall behind Del Toro, and was preceded by a fourth place in the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana and followed by a third place in the Trofeo Laigueglia, too. Tirreno-Adriatico, though, was when the italian went off the boil in terms of stand-out performances – in an interview midrace he blamed poor recovery after UAE, although there may have been other reasons – and so how he performs in Itzulia, his next race, will be something of a voyage into the unknown.

Still, we’ll know a lot more about his real state of form, after the opening ‘race of truth’ time trial, and it’ll become clear if he’s still on something of a recovery path, in which case a stage win is the most likely option, or aiming much higher. Either way, as we saw in the Tour de Pologne‘s similarly hilly terrain last year, where he took second overall, Itzulia is the kind of race that favours him well.