2026 Pro Cycling Calendar

Here’s the pro cycling calendar for 2026, free to download for your diary or phone.

It’s packed with all the men’s and women’s pro road races. So whether you’re scouting for some points-rich 1.Pro race or want to plan some sofa time here are all the races in a user-friendly format.

You can view the 2026 race calendar on the page here or at inrng.com/calendar… once this year’s season is finished this weekend.

You can also download it for your phone, desktop organiser etc. You can save the ical file but the best way is to subscribe so that any updates are quietly pushed out automatically to your diary. Every time this calendar comes out from the UCI changes happen with races swapping dates and others being cancelled.

Here is the iCal link to copy-paste into your device:

https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/5c9dc1a627cf55f1653d17573c2df58075d949559ec87e484b0cf90fa78bbf6d%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics

By the way it’s a Google service, you’re not downloading anything from a random blog. Google/Android users can click on Google Calendar link on the calendar frame above. For tech tips and suggestions for how to subscribe across different devices, see inrng.com/calendar.

As ever it’s all the pro road races. So if you see two events on the same day it’s probably not a typo but one for the women and the other for men. All races have their UCI labels, these are explained over at inrng.com/calendar too.

What’s Different?
There are plenty of new races, a good number in Asia among them but also the intriguing Lyon-Torino stage race at the start of July and several in Italy including a revived Tour of Sardinia and the new Giro della Magnia Grecia in the heel of the Italian peninsula too, the ancient Greek-speaking area which brings us to some new races in Greece itself.

There’s more racing in the US too with the Maryland Cycling Classic turning from a one day event into a three day stage race, while Philadelphia Cycling Classic making a comeback. The Tour Colombia is back too while the Herald Sun Tour’s comeback had been announced… but it’s already vanished from the UCI calendar.

Some stage races like the Al Ula Tour, the Région Pays de La Loire Tour and the Czech Tour get promoted from 2.1 to 2.Pro races, so more UCI points on offer and the ability to invite more World Tour teams.

Arguably the big change is the women’s Giro which moves to June and so doesn’t try to compete for attention while the men’s Tour de France is on. If you see June’s Tour of the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes in the men’s World Tour, remember this is the rebranded Critérium du Dauphiné.

Meanwhile rival race the Tour de Suisse sees the men’s and women’s races will run concurrently. The women’s race goes from four to five days but this means the men’s event shrinks from eight to five days and it’ll be interesting to see what kind of a field the men’s version attracts in this shorter format ahead of the Tour de France.

27 thoughts on “2026 Pro Cycling Calendar”

  1. I wonder how long it will take for the race name to revert to the Critérium du Dauphiné (maybe never, although Paris-Tours returned to its original name after a name change). I always think it is a mistake for a race-name with such wide name recognition to change. And for me at least, I find it a bit sad to lose the name.

    • It’s a small wish that won’t happen but that the Dauphiné name is revived and the race spends the week, or at least most of it, just in the old Dauphiné area. But the recently merged Auverge and Rhone-Alpes region has been hosting the race for several years so it gets to call the tune.

      So much of the French calendar is branded by local and regional government, the old Tour du Poitou-Charentes is now the TPC in Nouvelle Aquitaine, the Circuit de la Sarthe is the Région Pays de Loire Tour and some race names got edited for the calendar, eg the 4 Days of Dunkerque rather than the “4 Days of Dunkerque – Classic des Hauts de France”.

        • It was originally used to mean a “selection”, from the Greek κριτήριον as in after a week of racing a hierarchy is established and a winner emerges and used for other sports events too, for example the ski world cup in Val d’Isère (coincidentally in the Dauphiné area), the actual event’s name is the “critérium de la première neige”. Somewhere along the way it’s been diverted in cycling to mean a race on a short circuit with many laps.

      • I understand your point (Inner Ring) about the reasons for the Dauphine to change its name. Everything you say is on point and sensible.

        It is nevertheless interesting that Paris-Roubaix is not called Compiegne-Roubaix, and that Milan-San Remo is not Pavia-San Remo, and that Paris-Tours is not Chartres-Tours. The last race did change its name for a while before reverting back to its original name. I live in hope that the Dauphine will get its name back one day.

  2. aside – incredible that Louis Meintjes is retiring with so little fanfare?

    surprised he can’t find a ride having finished 18th and 20th at the Giro and Tour in the last two years and been top10 previously but it’s a little tragic that riders as good as Meintjes get completely forgotten in the grand scheme of things when he’s been as high as 7th in the TDF.

    It’s a cruel sport sometimes.

    Also funny having had the ‘this domestique is too good’ debate again in recent INRNG posts as Meintjes is probably the exact kind of rider that people would have been surprised to see performing excellent domestique duties had his career gone that way and yet he’s clearly been an elite rider since his earliest races.

    With so few South African riders just wanted to say farewell Louis, I always enjoyed you efforts to hang on and climb with the best and multiple top10s at the TDF is an incredible achievement.

    • A question mark at the end of your first sentence, so I’ll bite with a counterpoint.

      Good riders who have been more or less anonymous for a few years tend to fade away in the public consciousness as well as in their careers.

      Second place as the first loser is going too far along the spectrum of winning vs. taking part if converted into dogma but at the same time a rider finishing 18th and 20th in races, even GTs, is always going to be seen more positively if it’s a youngster, projected as part of an upward career curve, than a 30-something obviously on the way down. Meintjes has been famous [or notorious, if you prefer] for years as a consistent modern-day Zubeldia. He has placed Top 10 in WT stage races and the TdF as recently as 2022 without ever putting his nose in the wind. There is merit in that, of course, but it’s never going to consistently butter most people’s parsnips.

      There are two things that I remember most in his racing career. One is those years when the leaders group in a GT got thinned down to eight or nine riders and there, regular as clockwork, was Meintjes sitting unobtrusively on the back, keeping up but not having any real impact on the race and nobody being in the least bit concerned about him as a threat.
      The other was his long can-he-really-do-this? solo ride to win Coppi/Bartali, was it ten years ago now?

      I watch bike racing, get excited watching bike racing, enjoy the sport, far more for the latter than the former. Thanks Louis, a good career, but mostly a muted one and perhaps that’s why its ending is also rather muted in its public appreciation.

      • I remember Meintjes in exactly the same way. On the back of a small group of favourites on a mountain stage in a GT. He was always curiously crabby I thought, in an era of riders who were generally unaesthetic. A sort of lesser Pozzovivo.

    • I always found Meintjes fascinating because he was sort of an obscure rider on relatively obscure teams, even though he was regularly “there or thereabouts” in pretty prominent stages of big races. I think of Riccitello like that now (also from a country that doesn’t follow cycling like true cycling nations do), although he is going to be asked to step up at Decathlon. I think if Meintjes’ prime came a little bit later he would have been called into a team like Astana as a world-class UCI points farmer.

    • Like clock work there would be an occasional reference in Grand Tours by commentators to Meintjes still being in the wilted down group. And then oceans of silence. More famous for being South African than for results. Didn’t leave much of a sporting finger print.

    • @oldDAVE If you ride mostly without fanfare, you can expect to retire without much fanfare. As someone else said he was often in the leading group on a big mountain day but was never considered a threat by the big guns.

    • It’s organised by Italians but don’t know anything more. Is it a men’s or women’s race? Is it linked to the high speed rail link that’s being built, who knows? Odds on it goes via Mont Cenis/Moncenisio where the Dauphiné finished this year.

      As we’ve seen with the Herald Sun Tour and other races before, it’s easy to register a race on the calendar, pulling it off is another challenge.

      If you like to see Alpe d’Huez you should get to see it later in July 😉

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