State of the Peloton 2026

[Rou]

View: https://youtu.be/ABIP9GE4Bm4?si=nQ-IMsb63K0FFGgO

After all this time there he is!
The LEGEND - Uncle Cycling himself!

 

[Ilmaestro99]

View: https://youtu.be/ABIP9GE4Bm4?si=nQ-IMsb63K0FFGgO

After all this time there he is!
The LEGEND - Uncle Cycling himself!

I did not expect the guy who knew about lazkano before the rest of us to look like the guitarist in a mastodon cover band.

 

[YellowSocks]

I did not expect the guy who knew about lazkano before the rest of us to look like the guitarist in a mastodon cover band.

Drummer, actually. Drum set on the left.

Where can I find this purple paint?

 

[Rob5091]

If I remember correctly, PCS had done the math on the overall speed of WT races during 2025, and it was the fastest ever. Well folks, hold onto your hats as it looks like that record will not last long -

https://velo.outsideonline.com/road...are-crumbling-and-pogacar-hasnt-even-started/

The Pro Peloton Has Gotten Even Faster in 2026 — Just Wait until Pogačar Starts Racing​

Cycling's hyper performance era isn't slowing down: Prestigious records are falling and 6.5w/kg is nowhere near enough in wild start to season.

 

[Red Rick]

but if correct, why is this the case now and not before? I can't imagine the topic scoring badly in the clickbaiting environment of today.

Doping talk is 'good' clickbait for unpopular champions. So when you suddenly have a fast turnover of the cohort of top riders, and most of them are very popular, doping is not going to be a very popular subject.

It's also simply that omerta is a way bigger influence than the need for engagement farming. Journalists will just get frozen out pretty hard by the rest of the cycling community if they're gonna make any serious innuendo. I would argue even the likes of Armstrong and stuff like that are only tolerated with their podcast because they're just glazing the new generation of riders rather than saying "lmao he's on better sauce than I was"

Cycling, more than maybe any other sport, learned the hard way to not catch your champions for PEDs. It got years of struggles for sponsors at the height of the anti doping fight. Then you got Sky, which was basically Armstrong all over again but in an era with the blood passport so performances were more believable altogether. You don't catch any big dogs for slightly long enough and then when some new nuclear fuel hits the peloton and you don't catch it you may as well look away.

And however ridiculous Armstrong and the likes of Froome were at the time, they got plenty of believers and defenders. Then you get guys as superficially likeable as Pogacar, and people will naturally want to believe. Evenepoel, Van der Poel and Van Aert being from traditional cycling nations also helps a lot. Roglic might have been perceived to be way more suss but he bottled the Tour the moment he looked like he was about to dominate.

As a rule, when people get emotionally invested into something, they won't think rationally, they'll think emotionally first. Pogacar comes in and basically boils the frog, so people slowly get conditioned to his dominance after they probably liked his first Tour win and the novelty of him also being a great classics rider. By the time he becomes completely unbelievable they're probably already completely invested in gargling his balls.

I would also add that especially Pogacar probably drags in a lot of new viewers from a demographic that likes cycling superficially and is likely invested into Pogacar first more than cycling as a whole.

It also takes way too much mental effort for absolutely no reward to consistently argue against the propaganda machine of "yeah we do 50 watts more now because we discovered food"

 

[topcat]

... completely invested in gargling his balls ...

A risky investment.