Abu Dhabi to host 2028 Road World Championships

The 2028 Road World Championships will take place in Abu Dhabi, while Saudi Arabia will host that year’s Gravel World Championships. The assignment of the events was announced in Glasgow on Thursday during the UCI Congress.

The Abu Dhabi Worlds will mark the third time the event has been held in Asia after Utsunomiya in 1990 and Doha in 2016. The precise date of the 2028 Worlds is not yet known, but the 2016 edition in Qatar was delayed until October in a bid to avoid extreme temperatures.

The Worlds will thus take place on three different continents in the next five years. Next year’s event will be in Zurich, Switzerland before Kigali, Rwanda hosts the first road Worlds in Africa in 2025.

The event goes to Canada in 2026, with Montreal serving as the host site, before the Worlds bridges a 27-year gap and returns to France in 2027, with the races taking place in the Haute-Savoie.

As well as hosting the Road Worlds in 2028, Abu Dhabi has also been confirmed as the site of the Track World Championships in 2029.

The UCI Congress also saw Alula in Saudi Arabia named as the host of the 2028 Gravel World Championships. The Saudi capital Riyadh will host the 2025 and 2026 Urban Cycling Worlds.

The second edition of the Gravel Worlds takes place in the Veneto in October, with Flemish Brabant (2024), Nice (2025), Nannup (2026) and Haute Savoie (2027) hosting the event before Alula.

The 2023 Road Worlds take place this coming week in Glasgow as part of the UCI's inaugural multi-discipline World Championships.