Brandon McNulty

Brandon McNulty is an American road cyclist who rides for UAE Team Emirates XRG and is the 2026 world road race champion. He was born on 2 April 1998 and grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, where he started in mountain biking before moving to the road. In 2016 he won the junior world time trial title by 35 seconds, the fourth American junior world champion after Greg LeMond, Jeff Evanshine and Taylor Phinney.

He turned professional in 2017 with the American team Rally Cycling, won the national under-23 time trial title and was second at the under-23 world championships that year. In 2019 he took his first professional win on the penultimate stage of the Giro di Sicilia and won the race overall. He joined UAE Team Emirates in 2020 and rode his first Grand Tour at that year’s Giro d’Italia, finishing 15th. At the Tokyo Olympic road race he attacked with about 15 miles to go and only Richard Carapaz could follow, until Carapaz rode away alone near the end.

McNulty has often worked for Tadej Pogačar. On stage 17 of the 2022 Tour de France he set a pace that left only Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard with him, finished third on the stage and received the stage’s combativity award. He won stage 5 of Paris–Nice that year and stage 15 of the 2023 Giro, and became US time trial champion in 2023. In 2024 he won the Volta a la Comunitat Valenciana and the GP Miguel Induráin and finished third at Paris–Nice. In 2025 he won the Tour de Pologne, the Tour de Luxembourg, the CRO Race and the Grand Prix Cycliste de Montréal.

In 2026 he helped lead out Pogačar at Milano–Sanremo and was sixth at the Tour de Suisse, but did not finish the Tour de France. On 27 September in Montreal he won the world road race, attacking about 30 km from the finish and finishing 13 seconds ahead of Michael Matthews and Mathieu van der Poel. He was the first American men’s world champion since Lance Armstrong in 1993. He was fourth in the world time trial a week earlier, fifth at Il Lombardia and won the Veneto Classic on 18 October.