Ben Wiggins follows his own road to the WorldTour with Jayco AlUla
Ben Wiggins has signed his first professional contract with Australian team Jayco AlUla and will race in the WorldTour — the top tier of men's road racing — from 2027.
The 21-year-old Briton is the son of Sir Bradley Wiggins, Britain's first Tour de France winner in 2012 and a five-time Olympic champion, BBC Sport reported.
Wiggins called the move a dream come true. He said he has wanted to ride for the team since he visited its bus at the 2019 Tour de France on the day Matteo Trentin won the stage into Gap.
That visit came when he was 14. He started racing properly three years later, in 2022, as a junior with Fensham Howes-MAS Design. A year after that he took silver in the junior individual time trial — a solo race against the clock — at the 2023 world championships.
In 2024 he moved to Hagens Berman-Jayco, the United States-based development team managed by Axel Merckx. Merckx is the son of Eddy Merckx, himself a five-time Tour de France champion. It was a neat link. Two sons of champions, learning the trade together.
The results kept coming. Wiggins won the British Under-23 time trial title in 2026. He was part of a striking day for the wider GreenEDGE set-up, with Nadia Gontova, Erin Boothman, Wiggins and Adam Rafferty delivering four national time trial titles in a day. In September he finished inside the top 10 overall at the Tour of Britain, the country's biggest stage race.
He will step up alongside three other young riders, with GreenEDGE Cycling confirming that Wiggins, Holmes, Smithson and Rafferty will graduate to the WorldTour with Team Jayco AlUla. Rafferty and Jed Smithson were already familiar faces, having raced with Wiggins at Hagens Berman Jayco.
For fans, this means a familiar name back in the bunch. The surname brings attention. The road does the rest. Time trials, hard weeks of stage racing and that Tour of Britain top 10 point to a rider finding his own pace.
