No Pogačar, No Ayuso At Full Health, And An Evenepoel Who Has At Last Won A Sprint Finish — The 2026 Flèche Wallonne Favourites Board Reshuffles On Sunday Evening Three Days Out From Wednesday's Mur De Huy
Sunday 19:15 CET. With the 2026 Amstel Gold Race decided and the Monday morning markets about to open, the Wednesday 22 April Flèche Wallonne favourites board has been reshuffled on the basis of two hard facts and one evolving unknown. The hard facts: Tadej Pogacar has already been confirmed as a single-race Ardennes start at Liège only, and Juan Ayuso's viral infection has ruled him out of the Mur de Huy for the second consecutive year. The evolving unknown: Sunday evening's status of Mattias Skjelmose, who has just lost a sprint finish he had banked on winning, and the full medical update on Matteo Jorgenson and Kévin Vauquelin following their kilometre-148 crash at Amstel. The Wednesday board is narrower than it was on Saturday morning, and the rider sitting at the top of it is now the Belgian Amstel Gold winner.
Remco Evenepoel arrives at the Mur de Huy with a CV that reads two second-place finishes (2022 and 2023) and no Flèche Wallonne victories. The Mur — 1.3 kilometres at 9.6% average, peaking at close to 20% on the final corner — is the single climb that has consistently refused to open for him. The 2022 finish was a Julian Alaphilippe win by half a bike length; the 2023 finish was a Pogačar demolition in which Evenepoel held second at 3 seconds. In 2024 and 2025, Evenepoel skipped the race entirely to train for Liège. The 2026 start is his first return to the Mur de Huy in three years — and the first Flèche start of his career in which his sprint finish is not the pre-race question mark.
The competitive landscape below Evenepoel is thinner than it has been in a decade. Pogačar absent. Ayuso absent. Tom Pidcock has confirmed he will prioritise the Tour of the Alps week and a Saturday transfer back to Liège for Sunday's Monument. Ben Healy remains out with the Itzulia sacrum fracture. Mattias Skjelmose — second today and the 2025 Amstel winner — arrives with form but the Mur de Huy finish is a specialist's climb and Skjelmose has never finished inside the top ten at Flèche. That leaves Evenepoel, Skjelmose, Paul Seixas (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale), Giulio Ciccone (Lidl-Trek) and possibly Benoit Cosnefroy — the surprise Amstel bronze medallist — as the pre-Wednesday top of the board.
Paul Seixas is the name to watch. The 19-year-old Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale climber, who has been signposted across the French press as the most-discussed second-year pro since Evenepoel himself, has ridden an extraordinary spring that includes a top-ten at Volta a Catalunya, an eighth-place at Strade Bianche, and a fourteenth today at Amstel despite riding in full support of Cosnefroy. His team has publicly stated since February that the Mur de Huy is his breakthrough target for 2026, and the numbers from his VO2-max testing in February — published by L'Équipe on 1 April — suggest a rider with the 1,200-1,500-watt one-minute power curve that the Mur rewards. If Seixas is going to win his first Monument-level podium in 2026, Wednesday afternoon is the day it happens.
Giulio Ciccone's position is complicated. The Italian was Tour de France King of the Mountains in 2023, a Liège-Bastogne-Liège runner-up in 2025 at 3 seconds to Pogačar, and a rider whose best Ardennes form has always been deliberately targeted at Liège rather than Flèche. The Flèche Wallonne is a start-list formality for him in the sense that Lidl-Trek prefer him to race than to rest ahead of Liège, but the Mur de Huy has never been his climb. The expectation is a top-ten with no active chase for the win, and a conservation effort aimed at the Sunday objective.
Women's Flèche Wallonne is a different story. Demi Vollering — who today won Amstel Gold Ladies — has already confirmed via FDJ-Suez she will skip the Wednesday Mur de Huy, leaving Puck Pieterse (Fenix-Deceuninck) as the clear 3/1 pre-race favourite. Pieterse won Flèche in 2024 and was second in 2025, and her cyclo-cross-background climbing style is close to perfect for a one-kilometre punchy finish. The race behind her is likely to feature Lotte Kopecky, Elisa Longo Borghini and Marlen Reusser as the chasing card. The Ladies' Ardennes triple is now tilted towards Pieterse being the second Monument winner of the women's spring — a role she would take after a quiet 2025 in which she podiumed six races without winning a Monument-level event.
The Wednesday morning Brussels markets, which open at 08:00 CET on Monday, will now price Evenepoel as the clear favourite with odds expected to open at around 6/4. The prevailing market story on Sunday evening is that the Flèche Wallonne 2026 is, for the first time in a decade, an open race with a clear pre-race favourite from the opening Monument of the season. The week's full outlook now reads: Evenepoel favourite on Wednesday, Pogačar favourite on Sunday, and a three-day decompression window between the two Belgians that will decide whether the Belgian rider has the legs to arrive in Liège with a Flèche win on his palmarès or whether he has emptied the tank on the Mur de Huy and handed Liège to Pogačar. The Ardennes chapter is open. The pages now turn towards Huy.