The 2026 Para-cycling Track World Championships will award 48 rainbow jerseys across four days of racing in Apeldoorn. Separate C1–C5 titles are available in sprint, kilometre, scratch and elimination for men and women, alongside the tandem and mixed team events. By the time those riders reach Los Angeles in August 2028, the Paralympic programme will offer just 18 track medal opportunities, with classifications combined and several of the disciplines contested in Apeldoorn absent altogether.
The disparity is considerable, although the number of world titles is not necessarily the problem. The World Championships can recognise the best athlete in each classification, while the Paralympics must operate within a much smaller medal programme. Both have legitimate purposes, but national federations preparing riders for Los Angeles cannot treat the two competitions as though success in one automatically translates into success in the other.
For some athletes, a world title in Apeldoorn will remain the principal objective of their season. Others may already be approaching the championships with rather different priorities, particularly where preparing for a World Championship event competes with the work required to become competitive in Los Angeles.
With less than two years remaining, the choices being made around training, selection and event participation are becoming increasingly important.
The pursuit rider who no longer has a pursuit
The UCI removed the C-class individual pursuit and omnium from the World Championships in 2025, introducing individual sprint and elimination racing in their place. The decision attracted criticism from established riders, some of whom had spent years developing around the pursuit and suddenly found that their principal championship event had disappeared.
For those athletes, the change was not simply a reduction in medal opportunities. It required them to reconsider what sort of track cyclist they needed to become, particularly when the LA28 programme subsequently confirmed that the C-class individual pursuit would not return at the Paralympics.
The 2025 World Championships in Rio provided the first opportunity to see the revised programme in competition. Apeldoorn comes another year into that process, with the LA28 events now confirmed and the period available for adapting becoming progressively shorter.
For an established pursuit rider, the challenge extends well beyond learning the rules of an elimination race.
Individual pursuit rewards a controlled performance. The start can be rehearsed repeatedly, the pacing established through testing and the equipment refined around maintaining a particular speed for a known distance. A rider can devote considerable attention to aerodynamic position, power delivery and managing fatigue without needing to consider where another competitor might be positioned on the track.
Bunch racing removes much of that certainty. An elimination rider can arrive with the physiological ability to win but spend the race recovering from poor positioning, accelerating unnecessarily or being forced to ride further up the banking than intended. A strong final sprint is of little use if the rider has already been eliminated, while the scratch can be decided by recognising an attack early enough to follow it rather than producing the greatest power over the final lap.
The physical qualities developed through pursuit remain useful, but the ability to apply them in a bunch becomes just as important. For riders whose impairments affect balance, coordination, movement or confidence when surrounded by other competitors, the transition can present additional challenges which were largely absent from racing alone against the clock.
An athlete who was internationally competitive in the pursuit during the Paris cycle may still possess precisely the same physical capabilities today. Whether those capabilities can be converted into success in scratch or elimination racing depends on skills which may never previously have been central to their preparation.
Developing a bunch racer takes racing
The shortage of international Para-track competition makes that transition particularly difficult.
A pursuit rider can complete much of their preparation through controlled training, with performance measured against times, power outputs and established benchmarks. International competition remains important, but the ability to produce a competitive pursuit can be assessed reasonably accurately without repeatedly racing the world's best.
A coach preparing a rider for scratch or elimination can measure repeated accelerations, practise tactical situations with teammates and develop the capacity to respond to changes in speed. None entirely reproduces an international bunch in which competitors have different strengths, impairments, tactical preferences and levels of experience.
The rider who consistently finds themselves trapped before an elimination sprint may not need more power. They may need a season of racing against opponents capable of exposing the same weakness until they learn to anticipate the movement rather than respond to it.
Yet the international calendar provides relatively few opportunities for that education, particularly when compared with the regular competition available to able-bodied track riders.
A national programme cannot necessarily compensate for limited racing by increasing training volume or producing better physiological test results. The rider may be improving against every measurable benchmark while continuing to make the same mistakes in competition.
Apeldoorn should begin to reveal whether the transition is progressing beyond simply entering former pursuit riders into the new events. Their ability to move through traffic, conserve energy and anticipate the decisive moments of a race may tell us more about their Paralympic development than a single finishing position.
When is a world title worth the preparation?
Individual C sprint remains part of the World Championship programme despite having no direct Paralympic equivalent. For riders targeting the kilometre or mixed team sprint, much of the physical preparation remains relevant, particularly the development of starting ability, acceleration and maximum speed.
Match sprinting can also provide competitive experience which is difficult to reproduce in training. Responding to another rider, accelerating from an unfavourable position and maintaining control during a tactical sprint all have potential value beyond the pursuit of the rainbow jersey itself.
The calculation becomes more difficult when preparing for an additional World Championship event begins to compromise the development required for a Paralympic discipline.
A rider targeting the kilometre might reasonably continue contesting individual sprint throughout the LA cycle because the two disciplines share substantial physical demands. A former pursuit specialist who needs to become a competitive elimination rider faces a different allocation of training time, particularly if their existing strengths encourage continued emphasis on sustained power rather than the repeated tactical demands of bunch racing.
Tandem combinations have similar decisions to make. Apeldoorn retains the men's and women's tandem kilometre, while Los Angeles offers tandem sprint and individual pursuit. The kilometre remains a valuable World Championship event and its preparation can support the starting and speed qualities needed in sprint racing, but a tandem combination targeting Paralympic success must eventually decide how much emphasis to place on an event which will not be contested in 2028.
The mixed tandem team sprint also remains on the Apeldoorn programme without a corresponding LA medal event. Its value to individual tandem combinations may extend beyond the race itself, although the time devoted to preparing for it must still be considered alongside their principal Paralympic objectives.
A rider with realistic opportunities to win several world titles may continue pursuing them, while another with a more narrowly defined Paralympic objective may decide that the additional racing and preparation are no longer worthwhile. The absence of an event from LA28 does not make it meaningless, but it changes the justification for devoting scarce development time to it.
A different opponent in Los Angeles
At the World Championships, each C classification contests its own titles. Los Angeles combines classifications in ways which vary between disciplines, changing the competitive comparison facing athletes who have previously raced exclusively against others within their own class.
A C4 rider can win a world title against other C4 athletes in Apeldoorn before facing a combined C4–5 field at the Paralympics. Assessing the implications requires more care than simply placing the two classifications' raw performances alongside each other, particularly where classification factoring or event-specific competition regulations affect how results are determined.
In bunch racing, the composition of the field introduces further considerations because riders must respond directly to competitors whose physical capabilities and racing characteristics may differ from those encountered in their individual World Championship classification.
A rider dominating their class in Apeldoorn may therefore still have considerable development work ahead to become competitive in the relevant Paralympic grouping. Another who finishes without a medal could nevertheless be progressing well against the standard required for Los Angeles.
This complicates the assessment of national performance. A federation collecting several rainbow jerseys may be enjoying an excellent World Championships while still having unresolved questions about the competitiveness of its riders in the combined events awaiting them in 2028.
The World Championship medal table will remain an entirely legitimate record of achievement, although national programmes will need a more detailed assessment of their riders' performances to understand what those results suggest about LA28.
Are national programmes developing the right riders?
Changes to the medal programme eventually affect which athletes are selected and developed, not simply the events they enter.
A system built around timed endurance performances can identify potential through relatively controlled testing. Riders can be assessed against power targets, pursuit times and measurable improvements in position or equipment, providing coaches with considerable information before they reach international competition.
Bunch racing places greater emphasis on qualities which are less easily measured. A rider who anticipates movement well, conserves energy through positioning and responds intelligently to attacks may be more competitive than another with superior physiological test results. Those skills become particularly valuable in elimination racing, where a moment of poor judgement can end the event regardless of the rider's physical condition.
This could increase the importance of experience gained through Para-road racing, where riders already encounter tactical decisions, changes in pace and the need to manage position around competitors. The demands of an elimination race on a 250-metre velodrome remain very different, but the experience may provide a useful foundation for athletes moving into the revised track programme.
It also creates questions for programmes which previously invested heavily in developing pursuit specialists. Coaches who have become exceptionally good at improving aerodynamic efficiency, pacing and sustained power may now need additional expertise in racecraft and tactical development, while selection processes which once favoured the strongest timed performers may need to consider riders whose advantages are less obvious in controlled testing.
Australia's published Para-track selection standards illustrate how extensively performance can be quantified, including benchmarks for timed events and bunch disciplines. The federation has also acknowledged the difficulty of producing reliable standards for elimination racing, where results are particularly sensitive to the competitive circumstances.
That difficulty will not disappear as Los Angeles approaches. Programmes still need to identify athletes capable of winning medals, but some of the qualities which determine success now require more competitive observation and judgement than the pursuit-focused pathway previously demanded.
The riders who emerge through that process may not necessarily be those who dominated the previous Paralympic cycle.
Reading Apeldoorn beyond the medal table
The championship results will provide the obvious measure of performance, although the development towards LA28 may be more apparent in how riders race and which events their programmes choose to prioritise.
Former pursuit specialists will be particularly interesting to follow in scratch and elimination. Their finishing positions matter, but so does the manner in which they achieve them. A rider repeatedly arriving in the correct position before an elimination sprint may be showing development which would be missed by looking only at the final classification, particularly if they remain short of the physical level required to win.
The individual C sprint could offer another indication of how national programmes are organising their preparation. Where leading kilometre and team-sprint riders continue contesting it, the event may form a useful part of a wider speed programme rather than a competing objective.
Tandem entries could be similarly instructive, especially where established combinations begin narrowing their championship programmes around the disciplines retained in Los Angeles.
None of these decisions should be interpreted too confidently from a start list alone. Riders miss events for numerous reasons, including injury, recovery, scheduling and selection, while some national programmes will quite reasonably continue treating World Championship medals as important objectives in their own right.
Apeldoorn's entry lists may consequently be as interesting as its results. Some riders will arrive chasing as many rainbow jerseys as possible, while others may already have narrowed their programmes around the events they expect to contest in 2028. With less than two years remaining, a rider choosing not to defend a world title could tell us considerably more about the direction of Para track than another victory would.