The cycling podcast space in 2026 looks nothing like it did five years ago. There are now over 200 active English-language shows, covering everything from Belgian kermesse results to VO2 max protocols to bikepacking across Mongolia. Download counts are up, but so is the noise.
The problem for listeners is not choice. It is matching. Most "best of" lists rank by popularity or recency, which is useless if you're a time-crunched age-grouper who needs training content, not three hours of Tour de France gossip.
This list categorises 20 shows by listener need. Each category names the two or three strongest options, what they do well, and what they leave out. Roadman is one entry of twenty, placed where it fits.
How we evaluated the 20
Four criteria drove the shortlist. First, editorial consistency — shows that publish on a predictable schedule, not ghost feeds with six-month gaps. Second, guest quality and sourcing. A podcast that interviews World Tour coaches, published sports scientists, or active pros carries more weight than one recycling the same five influencers.
Third, signal-to-noise. Episode length is not the metric; information density is. A tight 40-minute show often beats a rambling two-hour one. We penalised shows with more than 15% of runtime on sponsor reads, banter, or housekeeping.
Fourth, listener outcome. Does the show make you a better rider, a better-informed fan, or a more entertained commuter? Each of those is a valid use case, but they're different products. We refused to rank them against each other and instead built categories.
Two filters we deliberately did not apply: download count and social media following. The biggest shows are often the safest, and safe shows rarely teach you anything new. Several entries below sit under 50,000 downloads per episode but punch above their weight on technical depth.
Finally, we drew on our guest archive of over 1,400 interviews to cross-reference how other hosts handle the same subjects. When Dan Lorang or Prof. Stephen Seiler appears on multiple shows, you can compare how different interviewers extract — or fail to extract — the real coaching detail from the same guest.
Best for training science
Two shows lead this category and barely overlap.
Empirical Cycling (Kolie Moore and Kyle Helson) is the most technically rigorous cycling podcast in operation. Episodes run long, often 90 minutes to two hours, and cover topics like lactate kinetics, critical power modelling, and threshold test validity with the kind of precision most podcasts avoid. Moore coaches at the top amateur level, and his breakdowns of FTP testing error margins have become reference material in coaching forums. Not for beginners. If you don't know what W' is, start elsewhere.
Fast Talk Labs (Trevor Connor, Chris Case, and rotating guests) is broader and more approachable. Connor's background as a physiologist shows in how he structures interviews — he pushes guests for specifics and catches vague claims. The show regularly features names like Iñigo San Millán, Stephen Seiler, and Sebastian Weber. Fast Talk's weakness is length inconsistency; some episodes wander.
A third option worth naming here is The Endurance Experience with Tony Gentilcore and colleagues, which bridges cycling, running, and triathlon physiology. Solid on strength training and ageing athlete protocols.
What these shows share: they cite studies, they feature actual scientists, and they resist the temptation to turn every episode into a sponsor-friendly "top five tips". What they lack: practical application for riders without a power meter, structured plan, or existing training literacy. Podcasts cannot coach you. They can teach you the vocabulary and logic you need to work with a coach effectively. That gap is why the Not Done Yet coaching programme exists alongside The Roadman Cycling Podcast — the show does concepts, the coaching does execution.
Best for pro-racing coverage
The Cycling Podcast (Richard Moore's legacy show, now hosted by Daniel Friebe, Lionel Birnie and rotating correspondents) remains the default for Grand Tour coverage. Daily episodes during the Giro, Tour and Vuelta. Strong access, literary tone, and a deep roster of guests including former pros and DSs. Some listeners find the cultural digressions slow. Others consider them the point.
Lanterne Rouge (Benji Naesen) started on YouTube and migrated strongly into audio. Naesen's tactical and data-driven race analysis — climb wattage estimates, team strategy breakdowns — is the sharpest in the sport. Episodes are shorter and more focused than The Cycling Podcast. Weaker on stories and personalities, stronger on the "why" of race outcomes.
Velo Podcast (formerly VeloNews) covers the full calendar from a North American vantage with good rider access. Useful counterweight to the European-heavy coverage elsewhere.
A fourth worth mentioning: The Wheel Talk Podcast for women's racing, which has become the most consistent voice on the Women's WorldTour.
The honest assessment: during an active Grand Tour, you cannot listen to all four daily. Pick one as your primary — most serious race fans choose The Cycling Podcast — and dip into the others for specific stages or analysis you want a second opinion on. Outside the three-week races, Lanterne Rouge's classics coverage is the strongest single-episode product in cycling.
Best for gravel and adventure
The gravel scene now has its own podcast ecosystem, separate from road racing media.
The Gravel Ride Podcast (Craig Dalton) is the longest-running and most consistent. Weekly interviews with gravel athletes, event organisers, and bike industry figures. Low-key tone, good questions, minimal hype. Dalton avoids the "gravel is a lifestyle" cliché that sinks lesser shows.
Life in the Peloton (Mitch Docker) straddles road and gravel with Docker's ex-pro perspective. Episodes are storytelling-forward rather than training-focused, which suits long drives or easy rides.
The Adventure Stache (Payson McElveen) focuses on off-road endurance and adventure racing. McElveen is an active pro, so his interviews with riders like Keegan Swenson carry practitioner weight.
What the category lacks: rigorous training content specific to gravel demands. Seven-hour events have different fuelling, pacing and equipment problems than a three-hour road race, and the podcast space has not fully caught up. Most training discussion on these shows is generic endurance advice wrapped in gravel aesthetics.
If you race gravel seriously, use these shows for culture and equipment, but go to Empirical Cycling or Fast Talk Labs for the physiology. The best gravel performers — Swenson, Sofia Gomez Villafañe, Ted King — train with road-racing rigour. The podcasts sometimes obscure that with lifestyle framing.
Best for short-form daily updates
Not every listener wants 90 minutes. Some want ten.
The Cycling News Podcast delivers tight daily race updates during Grand Tours, rarely over 20 minutes. Good for commutes and catching up on a stage you missed.
Velo Podcast's daily Tour coverage falls into the same slot with a more North American lens.
Escape Collective's podcast feed spins off multiple short formats alongside their longer flagship, including tech-focused and women's-racing episodes that run 25-40 minutes.
Short-form is under-served in cycling relative to other sports. Football, NBA and NFL all have dominant daily five-to-fifteen-minute briefings. Cycling's closest equivalent is still Twitter and Instagram. The shows above fill the gap partially, but none has fully productised a daily 10-minute cycling news brief. That remains an open lane for 2026.
The trade-off with short-form: you get informed, not educated. Use daily shows to stay current during racing blocks, then switch to long-form for off-season depth.
Best for long-form interviews
This is the most crowded category, and the one where host craft matters most.
The Move (Lance Armstrong, George Hincapie, Johan Bruyneel) polarises listeners for obvious reasons. On craft, the access is real and the race-week tactical breakdowns from Bruyneel are among the best in the medium. Whether you want to give that team your listening time is a separate question.
The Roadman Cycling Podcast is our show. Over 1,400 guest interviews, monthly listenership above 1 million, with guests including Prof. Stephen Seiler, Dan Lorang, Joe Friel, Dan Bigham, Tim Spector, and John Wakefield. Format is long-form — 60 to 120 minutes — built around extracting applicable detail from coaches and scientists rather than celebrity chat. We place it here honestly, as one of several good options in the interview category.
The Rich Roll Podcast sits adjacent to cycling rather than in it, but Roll's cycling and endurance episodes — particularly with figures like Lachlan Morton — are among the best long-form endurance conversations published.
Matt Stephens' Sigma Sports Podcast deserves mention for its balance of pro access and bike-industry depth.
The strength of long-form, done well, is that coaches and scientists need time to explain reasoning. A good 90-minute interview with Dan Lorang on how he periodised Jan Frodeno's build to Kona reveals more about coaching than ten quick-hit shows combined. The weakness is time cost. Most listeners can handle two long-form episodes per week, not seven.
Best for triathletes
Triathletes listening to pure cycling podcasts eventually hit a wall: none of them account for protecting the run.
That Triathlon Show (Mikael Eriksson) is the most technical triathlon podcast in operation. Frequent episodes on bike pacing by power, aero setup, and fuelling across disciplines. Eriksson is a coach and interviews other coaches, so the content is practitioner-grade.
The Feed Podcast and The Real Coaching Podcast (Matt Dixon's Purple Patch) are the other two worth subscribing to.
For cyclists crossing into triathlon or triathletes wanting bike-specific depth, the Roadman episodes with Dan Lorang are the closest thing in cycling media to a dedicated triathlon-bike coaching resource. Lorang coached Frodeno, Gustav Iden and Anne Haug while working at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe — his framework for treating the bike leg as a controlled effort that sets up the run, rather than a race in itself, is specific to triathlon and under-represented elsewhere in cycling media.
This is why triathlon bike coaching sits as a specialism within our programme rather than a bolt-on. The demands are different, the pacing discipline is different, and the podcast landscape doesn't fully cover it.
The full ranked list
One to twenty, with the caveat that ranking across categories is partly arbitrary. Use the categories above for matching to your needs.
- The Cycling Podcast
- Empirical Cycling
- Fast Talk Labs
- The Roadman Cycling Podcast
- Lanterne Rouge
- That Triathlon Show
- The Gravel Ride Podcast
- Velo Podcast
- Escape Collective Podcast
- The Move
- The Rich Roll Podcast
- Life in the Peloton
- The Adventure Stache
- Wheel Talk Podcast
- Sigma Sports Podcast
- The Cycling News Podcast
- The Endurance Experience
- The Feed Podcast
- The Real Coaching Podcast
- Beyond The Peloton
Three practical notes on using this list. Subscribe to no more than five at once — stacked unplayed episodes create guilt and dilute attention. Rotate seasonally: heavier on racing shows during Grand Tours, heavier on training shows in base phase. And test a podcast with three episodes before committing. Host voice either works for you or it doesn't, and one episode isn't enough to tell.
Pick one show from the training category, one from pro-racing, and one long-form interview show for this week. Listen to a full episode of each before the weekend. That's the concrete next step — not a longer list.
