Vargas And Stephens Open The 2026 Tour Of The Gila In Tyrone — Two Time-Trial Demolitions Set The Tone For America's Toughest UCI Stage Race Of The Spring
The 2026 Tour of the Gila opened in the New Mexico desert on Wednesday with two emphatic statements of intent. Walter Vargas of Team Medellín-EPM blasted the 26-kilometre Tyrone time trial in 32 minutes 30 seconds to take the men's stage win and the first leader's jersey by a stunning 37-second margin, while Lauren Stephens rode the same course on a different gear of pure veteran calculation to win the women's race ahead of Emily Ehrlich by just six seconds.
Stephens, riding in the colours of Aegis x Leaders of Enchantment in what may well be her final season at the top level, has now won the opening time trial of the Tour of the Gila in three different decades. The 39-year-old Texan put 24 seconds into a top-five field that read like a who's who of the North American peloton, and she did it on a course that climbs more than 300 metres on a 16-mile stretch of high desert tarmac that punishes any rider who lets the front-end aero discipline slip in the gusting cross-wind.
"Tyrone is the kind of test where you can't fake it," Stephens said at the finish. "If you go too hard in the first ten minutes you pay for the rest. If you go too easy you can't ever claw it back. I just tried to ride my numbers and trust the pacing." Ehrlich, of Virginia's Blue Ridge TWENTY28, gave her the closest fight she has had on the course in years.
In the men's race the picture was less of a fight and more of a beat-down. Vargas, the 31-year-old Colombian who has built his entire 2026 around the Tour of the Gila in the absence of a UCI stage-race calendar that suits him, was 24 seconds clear at the first time-check and then continued to widen the gap. The closest his rivals came was an opening-kilometre split that briefly suggested the gap might be on his side of the road. By the finish line he had put 37 seconds into the second-placed rider and 50-plus into the entire podium chase.
The Gila has quietly become the most consequential UCI stage race on the North American calendar after the collapse of the Tour of California, and the depth of its 2026 startlist reflects that. Several Continental teams have built their entire spring programme around the race, and the GC battle expected over the four remaining stages — including the brutal Mogollon mountain finish on Saturday — will play out in front of the largest U.S. broadcast audience the race has ever drawn.
For Vargas, the 37-second cushion is a luxury he intends to defend rather than press. Team Medellín-EPM came into the race with a plan to control from the front from stage two, and a winning margin of more than half a minute lets them ride to that script without forcing the issue early. The bigger question is whether the climbing-heavy parcours of the queen stage will erode that buffer faster than the team's domestiques can ride to keep it.
Stephens is in a different position entirely. Six seconds is barely a long sprint's worth of advantage, and the women's GC across the next four stages will turn on bonus seconds, breakaway tactics and the climb to Pinos Altos as much as on raw legs. Aegis x Leaders of Enchantment will not be able to ride a defensive race for four straight days; they will need Stephens to take time on the climbing days, not simply hold what she has.
The race continues on Thursday with the Mogollon road stage — 130 kilometres of rolling desert before a brutal final climb that has decided more Gilas than every other stage combined. On the evidence of Tyrone, it will be Vargas defending and Stephens looking for more.