The 2026 Domestic Calendar

 

These are the races I hope to follow in 2026

2026 Valley of the Sun Stage Race Preview and Start List

Preview

The 34^th running of the Valley of the Sun Stage Race, also known as the John Earely Memorial, is set to take place from Friday, 13^th February through Sunday, 15^th February, with riders taking on the traditional time trial, road race, and criterium as stages raced for cumulative time. This year’s pro fields are significantly smaller than last year’s, with just 48 women and 77 men registered to start Friday’s time trial, down from 66 and 115 last year.

 

Much of that thirty percent drop in overall numbers is due to an unfortunate coincidence in scheduling. The 2026 Pan American Track Championships begin next weekend in Santiago, Chile, and both of last year’s general classification winners are finishing preparations for that event, with Carson Mattern riding for Team Canada and four-times-running VotS champion Emily Ehrlich for Team USA. Ehrlich rides professionally for the UCI Continental Women’s team, Virginia's Blue Ridge TWENTY28, and while they have returned with a strong four-women squad, only two of their riders were here last year (and one of those was then riding for another team). Of the seven women who took the start in TWENTY28 colors in Buckeye, Arizona for the time trial last year, at least five are riding the boards in South America next weekend, including Cuban track star Marlies Meijias Garcia, who was second overall here in 2025 behind teammate Ehrlich.

 

That leaves a wide-open field. The only returning general classification winner for either the women or the men is Cory Lockwood, once again riding for L39ION of Los Angeles, who took the overall back in 2019 and was second in Phoenix last year in the kit of the Miami Blazers. With Ehrlich and Meijias Garcia absent, last year’s women’s podium is represented only by third place finisher Marjorie Rinaldo, likewise riding for a new team, having stepped up from the Domestic Elite Fount Cycling Guild to Virginia's Blue Ridge TWENTY28. Lockwood and Rinaldo must be said to be strong favorites for the overall.

 

Time Trial

The first rider off the ramp for the pros on Friday will be Gabby Allong, late of the on-hiatus LA SWEAT Domestic Elite Team and riding here unsupported, who is set to roll at 12:32 PM local time in Buckeye. The forecast calls for a prevailing wind of around 8 mph from the SE all afternoon, with chances of rain around 50% over the course of the day.

 

Last year, Rinaldo took the 10-mile L-shaped out-and-back course with a time of 21:10.760 (finishing second behind stage and eventual overall winner Ehrlich), and with only two other riders from last year’s TT top ten present this year, she’s in a strong position to take the win. The story is similar on the men’s side, with last year’s winner, the aforementioned Lockwood, only facing one other returning top ten rider from 2025 (his teammate of this year, Tyler Williams, who, like Lockwood, is riding for L39ION after racing for another team in the 33^rd edition).

 

Road Race

Saturday will see the riders face stage two in the form of the Silverhawk Private Wealth/Arizona, The Grand Canyon State Road Race. None of the VotS stages offer much in the way of climbing, and this 16-mile loop running partly through the lands of the Keli Akimel Oʼotham, or the Gila River People, is no exception. Each loop of 3 straights and 3 right hand corners features only 470 feet of climbing. The men will push off at 11:30 am local time to ride 94 miles over 5.8 circuits, with the women following 20 minutes later racing 62 miles over 3.8 trips around the course. The forecast is for perfect racing conditions, mostly clear skies and temperatures around 70º F.

 

Three men from last year’s top ten in the road race are competing: Stephen Schaefer (Landis/Trek) was fifth last year, fifteen seconds off the winning time, while Tyler Williams (L39ION of Los Angeles) and Alejandro Che (Kelly Benefits) finished ninth and tenth, respectively, coming in a further 24 seconds back. 

 

The women’s race presents an interesting case study in the team-hopping nature of American domestic cyling. Five of the women racing Saturday were present in last year’s top ten, but none of them were wearing the team kit they will be in 2026. They are: Cara O’Neill (who is registered as riding for the Team S&M cyclocross team) who placed second last year, Elisa Luo (now Monarch Racing), who came fourth, Marjorie Rinaldo (now Virginia's Blue Ridge TWENTY28), Emmi Gilbert (now Virginia's Blue Ridge TWENTY28) was eighth, and Minori Minagawa (now Speedblock p/b Terún) was tenth. As with the men, this stage seems wider open than the time trial and criterium stages.

 

Criterium

Turning to that criterium, which constitutes Sunday’s closing stage, racers will navigate an uncrossed figure eight course in downtown Phoenix under partly cloudy skies. The men’s race is L39ION’s to lose, with multiple threats on their roster. Last year, Cory Williams, Tyler Williams, and Justin Williams went first, second, sixth, and they are all here for 2026. The best placed 2025 criterium finisher on the women’s side here this year is Ellexi Snover (Speedblock p/b Terún), who came fifth in the previous edition, while women whose names we’ve already seen, Minagawa and Rinaldo, came seventh and eighth respectively.

 

As the first race of the year for many riders, the Valley of the Sun Stage Race isn’t necessarily predictable. Many of the riders, including some named above, have yet to turn pedals in anger in 2026. Nevertheless, it seems likely that the best-known teams in the race, L39ION of Los Angeles for the men and Virginia's Blue Ridge TWENTY28 for the women, have excellent prospects for producing both stage and overall winners.

 

Start List

The Domestic Domestique most closely follows national racing as it is run by athletes riding for the fourteen American UCI-registered professional teams and forty-five USA cycling-registered Domestic Elite teams. As such, the start list below, with one exception, only includes riders from the five professional and seventeen Domestic Elite teams racing in Arizona this weekend. The exception is Canada’s TaG Cycling Team, who collectively put in a very strong performance here last year, including winning the men’s general classification.

 

The complete list of registered riders may be viewed by navigating to the appropriate categories at this page on the BikeReg website, or by downloading the time trial start list from the race organizers, here.

 

There may be annotations to some of what follows in the form of notes. Readers are encouraged to submit such material as they may believe to be of interest to others in the comments, and I will update the post as is appropriate.