Liège-Bastogne-Liège 2026 Provisional Startlist Released: Pogačar Headlines The Deepest La Doyenne Field In A Decade As The Five-Monument Chase Reaches Its Final Possible Stop
At 16:30 on Thursday afternoon, ASO's Liège office released the provisional 175-rider startlist for the 112th edition of Liège-Bastogne-Liège on Sunday 26 April 2026. The release lands ten days from the rolling 11:25 départ at the Place Saint-Lambert in central Liège and seventeen days from a race that — for the first time since 2022 — has every plausible Ardennes contender on its provisional sheet. UCI WorldTeam selections are now locked. Two ProTeam wildcards (Tudor Pro Cycling and the resurgent Israel-PT successor NSN Pro Cycling) round out the 25-team field.
The headline name, predictably, is Tadej Pogačar. The Slovenian world champion arrives at La Doyenne hunting his fourth career win on the Côte de Saint-Nicolas finish — after victories in 2021, 2024 and 2025 — and a fourth Ardennes monument that would put him within one of Eddy Merckx's five-win record. The UAE Team Emirates-XRG selection sheet released alongside the ASO startlist confirms Adam Yates, João Almeida, Marc Hirschi, Brandon McNulty, Igor Arrieta and Pavel Sivakov in support of the world champion. Notably absent from the seven-rider list is Isaac del Toro, whose Thursday morning grade-two rectus femoris MRI result ruled him out of all three Ardennes classics with the same single signature. Almeida's name on the Liège sheet is the bigger shock: the Portuguese climber rides Liège seventeen days before he is due in Bulgaria for his Giro d'Italia GC bid, and the dual entry has the look of an emergency Ardennes deepening rather than a sentimental gesture.
The second name on the favourites list is Remco Evenepoel. The two-time Liège winner (2022, 2023) has now formally committed to a full Ardennes campaign with new team Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe and the team's selection sheet has Evenepoel in the company of Aleksandr Vlasov, Florian Lipowitz, Jai Hindley, Giovanni Aleotti, Danny van Poppel and Ide Schelling. The selection is the first time Evenepoel has lined up for a monument in red rather than blue, and Red Bull's communications director Ralph Denk told De Telegraaf on Thursday that the team has been preparing for this exact race for the entire winter. "Remco came to Red Bull for the right to ride this race as the team's leader and not as an extension of someone else's team. We are giving him exactly that on 26 April."
The third name — and perhaps the most interesting — is Primož Roglič. The 36-year-old has not won La Doyenne since his 2020 victory and has not finished on the podium since 2021, but his queen-stage victory at the Itzulia Basque Country on Wednesday and Decathlon-AG2R sporting director Stéphane Goubert's Thursday-morning briefing indicate Roglič is in his best Ardennes shape since 2020. Roglič himself dismissed the Liège question in his post-stage press conference yesterday afternoon with the now-trademark "ask me about Amstel in ten days", but his Decathlon-AG2R team-mates have privately briefed Spanish reporters that the Slovenian veteran will arrive at La Doyenne with "every gram of form he was carrying through the Pyrenees this week".
The startlist includes a number of late-breaking confirmations. Tom Pidcock — whose Q36.5 team has been waiting on a final medical clearance after his Volta a Catalunya knee ligament strain — has been entered as one of seven Q36.5 riders on the provisional list with the asterisk "subject to fitness". Pidcock's manager Andrew McQuaid told Cycling Lookout this morning that "Tom is on the bike again as of yesterday and is targeting a 12-day window to be Liège-fit. The ASO entry is the team's vote of confidence". Mikel Landa, cleared on Thursday evening by his second clean MRI scan, is also confirmed on the provisional list as Soudal Quick-Step's protected leader, and the Wolfpack team will have Dries Devenyns as road captain for what is widely expected to be the Belgian veteran's last spring classic.
The Ineos Grenadiers selection — released independently by team manager John Allert at the same time as the ASO sheet — confirms Carlos Rodríguez as the leader, with Thymen Arensman, Tobias Foss, Laurens De Plus, Josh Tarling, Connor Swift and Axel Laurance in support. The 25-year-old Spaniard has not been on the podium of an Ardennes classic in his career to date but the team's December planning document — leaked to The Guardian in February — explicitly identified Liège-Bastogne-Liège 2026 as the single race in which "Carlos must convert spring promise into a podium". Allert told Cycling Lookout this morning that "we have built the entire Ardennes block around 26 April. Today is the day the calendar starts to feel real".
One name absent from the men's list is Wout van Aert. The Belgian, who has never won La Doyenne and has never finished on the podium, has been left off the seven-rider Visma-Lease a Bike sheet entirely — the team will be led by Matteo Jorgenson and Cian Uijtdebroeks in a selection built around the long final climb of the Côte de la Roche-aux-Faucons. Van Aert's absence is the second consecutive Liège he has missed and follows his repeated insistence through the spring that "the Ardennes have never been a race for me, and pretending otherwise has cost me too many days in the wrong type of training".
The provisional list will be locked, name by name, at 18:00 on Friday 24 April after a 48-hour final medical confirmation window. Race director Christian Prudhomme will deliver the final road-book briefing at 11:00 on Saturday 25 April in the Liège Palais des Congrès. Sunday 26 April will be the 112th edition of the oldest of the five Monuments and, for the first time since the post-war era, every plausible Ardennes contender named on the provisional sheet is healthy. La Doyenne has not had a startlist this deep since at least 2017.