Movistar Confirm Paris-Roubaix Men's Squad: García Cortina Leads Spanish Hopes Into the Hell of the North
Movistar Team confirmed their seven-man Paris-Roubaix line-up on Wednesday afternoon, completing what has been a quietly busy 24 hours for the Spanish squad after they also confirmed their women's team for Saturday's Hell of the North earlier in the day. The men's selection sees experienced Spanish puncheur Iván García Cortina installed as the unquestioned leader, with American rouleur Will Barta and 22-year-old Spanish prodigy Iván Romeo providing the rest of the cobbled muscle.
Joining García Cortina, Barta and Romeo are Movistar lifer Imanol Erviti — back at Roubaix at the age of 41 for what will almost certainly be his last appearance at the cobbled Monument — Belgian classics specialist Lorenzo Manzin, Norwegian breakaway artist Søren Wærenskjold and 21-year-old French neo-pro Léo Bisiaux, signed from the team's development squad over the winter. It is a typically Movistar selection: short on big names by Roubaix standards, but built around a pair of riders (García Cortina and Erviti) who between them have nine top-twenty finishes at Paris-Roubaix on their career CVs.
"This is our most experienced Paris-Roubaix team in years," head sports director Patxi Vila told Movistar's media channel. "Iván [García Cortina] is in the best shape of his classics career. Imanol is here for one more dance on the cobbles he loves. And Will and Iván [Romeo] are riders who will absolutely be at the front of the race when it explodes. We are not going to win it on Sunday. But we are going to do everything we can to put a Movistar rider in the top ten — and after that, anything can happen."
García Cortina's leadership has been long anticipated within the Spanish squad. The 30-year-old finished an outstanding 11th at Roubaix last year and has built his entire spring around peaking for Sunday's race. He was a quiet presence in the front group at the Tour of Flanders on Sunday until being caught up in a mid-race crash, and his sports directors have been at pains to stress that the lessons of his missed opportunity in De Ronde have only sharpened his focus for Roubaix.
"The crash on Sunday was hard to accept," García Cortina himself said at the team's pre-race press conference. "I had the legs to be in the front group with the favourites and I lost it through bad luck. But Roubaix is a race that does not care about your previous week. You start fresh on the cobbles. I have done my recovery, I have done my recon, my bike is ready, and on Sunday I will be ready too. I want to give the Spanish fans something to celebrate."
The most poignant element of the squad announcement is undoubtedly the inclusion of Erviti, the 41-year-old Spanish veteran who is now in his 21st professional season and has long been regarded as one of the most loyal domestiques in the WorldTour. He has finished Paris-Roubaix nine times and finished a stunning sixth in 2018 — still the best Movistar finish in the race in over twenty years. His selection for Sunday is widely understood within the team to be his Roubaix farewell, and team manager Eusebio Unzué confirmed in a separate statement that Erviti will retire at the end of the 2026 season.
"Imanol asked me at the start of the year if he could come back to Roubaix one more time, and we looked at each other and there was no other answer than yes," Unzué said. "He has earned this. He is one of the great cobbled riders of his generation that the wider world never quite recognised, and on Sunday he will ride into the velodrome one last time and the entire Spanish peloton will salute him."
Tactically, the Movistar plan is built around protecting García Cortina until the second half of the race, with Erviti and Barta closing gaps and Wærenskjold given license to follow long-distance attacks. Romeo, the squad's youngest member, will likely be deployed as a bottle carrier through the early kilometres before being given freedom to attack from medium-distance once the race begins to fragment. It is not a strategy that will trouble Pogacar or Van der Poel, but it is — like every Movistar Roubaix squad of the last decade — a perfectly disciplined Spanish unit aiming to extract the absolute maximum out of a hand that everybody else has already discounted.