Uijtdebroeks Back In The Top Ten At Itzulia: The Quiet Movistar Comeback Nobody Was Writing About Three Months Ago
Ten weeks ago, a 23-year-old Belgian sat in a hospital waiting room in Valencia staring at a CT scan of a fissure in the head of his left radius and wondering whether his first season at Movistar was already over before it had really started. On Wednesday evening in Basauri, the same rider crossed the line inside the first peloton on stage 3 of the Itzulia Basque Country, shook hands with Primož Roglič at the team bus, climbed calmly into tenth place overall and then — for the first time in 2026 — actually smiled for a team photographer. Cian Uijtdebroeks is back inside the top ten of a WorldTour stage race, and inside Movistar's Eusebio Unzué-led bus on Wednesday night, the mood was closer to relief than celebration.
Nobody was talking about Uijtdebroeks at the start of this race. In a field containing Paul Seixas in the yellow jersey, Roglič second on GC, Felix Gall third and both UAE Team Emirates-XRG and Visma-Lease a Bike running fully-loaded squads, a Belgian climber riding his third stage race back from an elbow fracture was not supposed to be a storyline. Unzué himself set expectations low before the Bilbao time trial, telling Basque television simply: "We want Cian to finish the week racing, nothing more." The phrase, deliberately modest and very Movistar, was widely read as code for "we will take whatever we can get."
What they got on stage 3 was the best climbing ride from a Movistar rider in a stage race since the opening week of the 2024 Vuelta a España. Uijtdebroeks sat comfortably in the front group over all three categorised climbs, was visible on television covering moves on the Bikotx-Gane ascent, and crucially was still there when Juan Ayuso's UAE squad launched their desperate, post-Del Toro late-race attack inside the final three kilometres. He did not chase, because he did not need to. He simply clung to Felix Gall's wheel while the gap closed, rolled across the line 42 seconds down on Axel Laurance and moved up from thirteenth to tenth overall at 3:58 from Seixas's yellow jersey. For a rider who in February was not sure he would ride a bike outside again before May, it is the kind of result Unzué has been waiting for since the moment his signature put pen to paper in October.
The story of how the Belgian got here is a slow one, and Movistar are very deliberately not turning it into a marketing campaign. Uijtdebroeks was back on the indoor trainer on February 8, four days after his Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana crash. He missed Paris-Nice entirely because the radius fissure was not healing quickly enough to risk a descent-heavy French stage race. He then made a quiet return to competition at Milan-Turin in mid-March, finished in the bunch at Volta a Catalunya without ever showing his face on the GC, and arrived at the Basque Country on a training volume that Movistar's medical staff described privately as "basically a six-week spring camp condensed into three weeks of racing." The calculation was simple: if the elbow held, the climbing form was always going to come. The elbow has held. The climbing form came on stage 3.
The context for what this means to Movistar is hard to overstate. The Spanish team opened 2026 with precisely two wins and a press narrative that oscillated between "the Uijtdebroeks signing will change everything" and "Movistar cannot keep pace with the modern WorldTour." The Belgian's fracture at his debut race landed inside both narratives at once. It confirmed that the star signing the team had built its 2026 season around could not be relied upon, and it confirmed that Unzué's medical and coaching structure was again going to have to rebuild a rider who had arrived from Visma-Lease a Bike on a four-year contract worth a reported figure close to three million euros a season. The ten weeks since have been Unzué's quietest and most careful — and, on the evidence of Wednesday, also his most productive.
Uijtdebroeks himself is refusing to let his comeback become a headline. Asked after stage 3 whether he felt a top-ten finish at the Itzulia Basque Country would mean the season had been salvaged, he smiled the same small, slightly crooked smile he used to wear at Visma and answered in perfect, clipped English: "It means the week is going well. It does not mean anything more than that. Tomorrow we have the queen stage. I would like to finish the queen stage. After the queen stage I will have a proper answer to this question." Pressed on whether he believes a Tour de France debut in July is still on the table — Movistar confirmed the plan at their January launch, then went silent on it after Valencia — he was almost dismissive. "The Tour is the Tour. I am thinking about Thursday. Eight climbs tomorrow. That is enough to think about."
Thursday's queen stage through Galdakao will not be kind to any rider who is not fully healed. Four categorised climbs in the final 50 kilometres, including the brutal uphill finish at the 12% ramps of Ugao, will expose anyone whose climbing legs are operating at anything less than WorldTour specification. If Uijtdebroeks finishes the day inside the top ten he will be the fourth Movistar rider in five years to do so at a Basque Country queen stage — and the only one of the four whose name was on the injury list ten weeks earlier. More importantly for the team, it would be the clearest possible indication that the Tour de France debut plan, parked in February, can now be quietly reactivated. Unzué, asked in the team car on Wednesday whether the July conversation was back on the table, looked at the interviewer for a moment before replying: "We are not having that conversation yet. But we are beginning to have the conversation about having that conversation. For now, that is enough."
Beyond Movistar, the implication of Wednesday's ride is straightforward. The WorldTour peloton spent the first ten weeks of 2026 operating as though Cian Uijtdebroeks had effectively missed the spring and would not be a factor until the Tour de Suisse at the earliest. The Belgian's stage 3 at the Itzulia suggests that assumption has already expired. It is too early to say the comeback is complete — a calm and calm top-ten ride is not the same as a stage-winning attack at altitude — but the quiet version of this recovery, the one Movistar never wanted to talk about because they were not sure how it would end, has turned into the most interesting under-the-radar storyline of a Basque Country week everybody else is still watching for the teenage Frenchman in yellow.