Cycle-ball Worlds in Ludwigsburg: no defending champions in the men's event
According to the UCI, the indoor cycling world championships in Ludwigsburg mark the 89th edition of the event, with seven world titles awarded from 30 October to 1 November and two of them in cycle-ball. Since 2025 the men's competition has been split into an Elite League for the eight best-ranked teams and a Challenger League in which the other nations play for promotion. There are no defending champions on the men's side: Bernd Mlady and Raphael Kopp, who took gold in 2024 and 2025, have retired. Their last world final, in Göppingen in 2025, ended in a 6-2 win over Austria's Patrick Schnetzer and Stefan Feurstein.
The Austrian pair finished as runners-up in both 2024 and 2025. Schnetzer, the goalkeeper from Dornbirn, has won eight world titles since 2011, partnered first by Dietmar Schneider, then Markus Bröll and, from 2021, Feurstein. Victory in Ludwigsburg would give him a ninth and Austria its first since 2022.
Women have competed for the world title since 2023, and Germany has taken every one of the three editions. Judith Wolf and Danielle Holzer go into the home championships as defending champions. In Göppingen in 2025 they did not lose a game, conceded three times in four outings and won the final 6-1 against the Swiss duo Sava Baumann and Chiara Dotoli, while bronze went to Sayaka Tokuhiro and Nana Yamashita of Japan. This year, women are also competing in a UCI World Cup of their own for the first time.
Tradition holds that Nick Kaufmann, an artistic cyclist born in Germany, staged the first match in Rochester in the United States in 1883 with John Featherly, using a polo ball, and that Berlin artistic cyclists Paul and Otto Lüders brought the game to Germany in 1901. At the first world championships, held in Leipzig in 1930, Germany won the two-a-side indoor event and France the six-a-side event on grass; today the UCI recognises only the indoor version played by two. The record belongs to Jan and Jindřich Pospíšil of Czechoslovakia, world champions 20 times from 1965 to 1988, while Germany has collected 35 gold medals, more than any other nation. Players control the ball with either wheel or the head on a 14 by 11 metre court with goals measuring 2 by 2 metres, over two halves of seven minutes.