With the Vuelta done plenty of UCI ranking points have been added. To save you a click the story though remains the same with Lotto-Dstny and IPT set for promotion back to the World Tour in 2026, and Astana and Arkéa-B&B Hotels facing the drop.
If you want more details and some speculation and the sound of an alarm bell or two, read on.
Promotion-relegation? A reminder teams are ranked on the basis of their points haul from 2023, 2024 and 2025 and the top-18 teams make the cut for the World Tour in 2026 and beyond, at least in sporting terms as they have to prove they’ve got their finances and admin in order too.
You can see Cofidis in 18th place but note the gap as they’re 1,723 points ahead of rivals Arkéa. That’s no guarantee for Cofidis though as they’re having a terrible season this year and will lose two of their top-three points scorers in Axel Zingle and Guillaume Martin, the pair have scored almost a third of the team’s points this season. Still they’ve made new signings like Alex Aranburu, Emanuel Buchmann and Simon Carr but they’ll be required to score from the spring onwards. To reprise the old joke about the two hikers worried about encountering a bear, one turns to the other and says “I don’t have to outrun the bear, I just have to out run you”. For now Cofidis just need to keep clear of Arkéa who so far haven’t announced any signings.
DSM Firmenich-Post NL have had a good Vuelta and Tour of Britain to get 726 points clear of Cofidis. Intermarché-Wanty though are having a bad season and having recently highlighted their financial woes, it is only speculation but these might have persisted as the team is still not making any big signings. Now they’ve got a star in Girmay and got it all right at the Tour de France… but that’s the point, he’s scored a third of their points and injury or illness at the wrong time year could be costly. Bahrain are the surprise flop of the season – Uno-X have scored more than them this year – but insulated from relegation worries thanks to a strong 2023 score.
Meanwhile Astana are so behind that relegation looks like a formality but they’ve responded by going on a shopping spree. The big question is whether the likes of Wout Poels, Sergio Higuita, Aaron Gate and Diego Ulissi can pull it off next year. In crude terms Astana are over 4,000 points behind Cofidis today so they need these new signings to deliver 1,000 points each just pull level. It’ll be a story to watch next year. All this assumes the new sponsor and investor XDS is on board and the licence renewal goes smoothly…
Talking of which it’s mid-September and has anyone heard any news about a replacement sponsor for Dstny? As well as the three year promotion and relegation cycle, all teams are vetted annually for their finances and admin and the short version is that Lotto-Your Name Here need to supply the UCI’s Licence Commission with their 2025 budget plans in the coming weeks, normally something you’d work once a new sponsor is on board. Only there’s no news, Belgian state lottery Lotto has said it can’t afford to carry the whole team. There’s a soft October deadline for tidy admin but things can go to December, as we’ve seen with other teams before. The problem here is that riders on the team don’t want to wait until December to find out they’re free to sign elsewhere. Hopefully everything’s in place as this is a decent team with good prospects… but we’ve all seen this story before.
Not to push the Lotto worries too far, but to pre-empt the inevitable question: if the team did vanish then only IPT would be promoted and Arkéa go from 19th place to 18th and safety, but just based on today’s numbers as the French team is 334 points above Uno-X and the Norwegian team seem to keep improving.
Back to things as they look today and Uno-X might not make the World Tour by 2025 but look good for regular invitations to the grand tours. Likewise Tudor Pro Cycling which has been big in the transfer market signing Julian Alaphilippe and Marc Hirschi. Both are great signings but will require clever management not to tread on each other’s toes as they’re both very similar riders. With Tudor scoring more and more points it’s increasingly looking likely that Total Energies are in a bind when it comes to invitations, especially for the Tour de France and if they’re not visible at the Tour then don’t expect the sponsor to stay for long.
Finally it’s worth putting away the magnifying glass and calculator just to look at the haul of UAE so far this season as they’ve already beaten their tally from last year and Tadej Pogačar is about to resume racing. He’s their top scorer with 9105 points, more than several teams have managed but this kind of thing happens in a winner-takes-all domain like sport. The team’s next best scorer is Marc Hirschi.
Hard to see much changing next season, save Ineos possibly falling down the table a couple of spaces. Cofidis look quite weak, but will anyone be able to take advantage? Tudor and Uno-X won’t be in the mix this time, but they should be fun to watch on their way toward the next cycle.
I´m not a betting man, but if absolutely necessary, I could stake my reputation of Uno-X gaining on Cofidis and maybe, just maybe – it may all depend on one lucky day in the breakaway – edging ahead after the Tour in 2025.
Cofidis are also going to have a big shake-up in staff too. Uno-X’s big asset is also a big weight on them, in that their identity as a Norwegian-Danish team obliges them to recruit only from these two countries (for now, the women’s team isn’t as dogmatic) and this can limit options, potentially cost more and means some riders can cruise to contract renewals when they might have to work that bit harder if they were on another team. But so far the project is working, they are on the up and the likes of Cofidis don’t have the same sense of purpose.
Well, yes, Cofidis struggling to make the cut would be about as predictable as Astana’s and Arkea’s current struggles. But, well, no, the predictions that Lotto and IPT would go into a positive feedback loop of the bad kind after relegation did not exactly pan out. And AG2R looked dead in the water and clueless this time last year.
At the other end of the table UAE are killing it even without Pog (who’s only done 6 events all year). They’re doing even better than JV all of last year, and JV swept the GTs.
Tudor have a decent – and expensive – looking roster for 2025 with Hirschi, Alaphilippe, Trentin and plenty of solid support. I am surprised that the ‘economy’ brand of Rolex have the means to fund the team and, from a commercial point of view, does it make sense? The luxury watch fad seems less buoyant with the additional threat from smart watches. A good friend has his Rolex and Blancpain in the sock drawer as a smartwatch is more convenient. He can’t be the only one.
It’s an exciting team. As for the costs, I imagine the cycling team is little more than a rounding error in their marketing budget which includes sponsoring F1 and wider motorsports, sailing, and David Beckham.
I’m being facetious. Hirschi and Alaphilippe won’t come cheap, but in comparison to the above endorsement deals surely title sponsor of their home team is great value. Hope it’s a continued success.
Morgan Stanley have a business review of luxury watch brands suggesting that Tudor in 2023 sold 255k units for a turnover of CHF545 million or slightly over CHF2k/watch. That’s a lot of money – and margin – but sponsorship of F1, sailing and Beckham can’t come cheap and if the cycling team becomes WT then the current budget (CHF 10 million??) will need to increase and/or further sponsors be found.
Alaphilippe is a name who will bring lots of visibility here in France. Good luck to them.
Tudor have too much of a…what´s the antonym of head start? A handicap in the form of starting (for the 2025 season) too far behind the teams it is fighting against.
As for the so called luxury watches, my impression is that while they may indeed no longer be what every man purchases as soon as he can afford one, there are still enough men who don´t find it silly to own more than one watch or who could buy a Tudor despite wearing an Apple or a Garmin as their every day – or 24/7 🙂 – watch.
I thought that what everyone purchases as soon as Santa Claus can afford one was a bicycle!
(Some 2 to 15 K for a bicycle or for a watch? Who’d go for the latter? I acknowledge of course that it’s the sort of people who don’t have to choose :-P)
There are people who splash it on say a mechanical Leica first, and buy a bike later. Watches? Handy for the bulb mode, perhaps…
First the bike, then the watch. The latter holds value better. A 15k watch will be worth 7-10k after 5 years while the bike will be 1.5-2k.
I’m not a watch collector but have wondered just the same about Tudor’s backing. The short answer is people have been predicting the end of Swiss watch sales for some time, since the rise of LCD digital watches. Yet surprisingly they keep flying off the shelves because they’re small trophies and status symbols. Sales have soared in India, China etc but also doubled in France, quadrupled in the UK in recent years. Tudor is part of Rolex and so in a strong position; but the luxury market is also volatile, sales are sliding China. But for now Tudor the team is on the up, the other day they were recruiting for someone whose job is to measure the aero effect of clothing: not a general aero coach but a textiles specialist. This kind of detail is interesting, it shows the ambition.
“Yet surprisingly they keep flying off the shelves because they’re small trophies and status symbols.”
What’s the surprise? Same guy blows $15K on a bike just like his hero rides without batting an eye. It’s all fashion.
The watch can be a nice strategic touch because even with a relatively cheap one (among the luxury brands) the result can implicitly communicate high spending power precisely because of the contrast between the amount, weighed against what “commoners” might expect to spend for that, and the tiny nearly useless object… like, “wow, this man is ready to spend say 4K for a simple wrist watch”. At the end of the day, 4K can be what a family spends in holidays… just sacrifice your holidays for one year and you’ll impress your acquaintances for a good while, or at least have an impact in first meetings. Note that nowadays 4K would buy you a mediocre road bike which wouldn’t impress anyone 😛
(Disclaimer: no need to say that all the above social dynamic which I was explained as such by several watch-buying “Julian Sorel”-s looks to me one of the many good reasons why our societies deserve to drive slowly down into the eternal sunset ^____^)
That’s 4k watch is now 8k, too – as are the family holidays.
@gabriele – I think I’ll stick with the holidays!
There is another aspect… some of us appreaciate the timeless quality of craft, or pure mechanical gadget, which will survive for decades and more – while a fast fashion / fast technology smart watch (or camera etc.) don’t hold much (if any) value even after a mere year of use.
Also, niche luxury brands generaly thrive nowadays, as gabriele implies, because we are perhaps a bit moronic species of ape.
I love mechanical crafts, too, but price factor isn’t all about being top quality etc. The bikes which now cost twice the price you had to pay for 10 years ago are essentially the same very fine object… a huge part of that price is just a bubble.
If you can turn a bubble into a brand or get codified as luxury, things change completely, of course, and that’s the part I’m not interested in anymore (notwithstanding several cycling producers trying to going down, or up, that path), i.e., when you just enjoy paying a lot without any production-related sense, just to show the world that you don’t care to pay as much as you are required to.
Fashion/luxury = separating rich morons from their money.
@Anon
It would be all good and fine wasn’t it because “competition” doesn’t really work in capitalism as well as “greed”, which means that as soon as one producer or two decide to label an item or material or quality level as luxury, you’ll soon get a couple of undesirable effects on commodity market, i.e.: middle range product will be made deliberately worse just to justify the price of the top level; entire kinds of products will go from widely available to niche and extremely expensive.
According to neoliberal and classic capitalist theory, somebody should take advantage selling the good product for a “honest” price tag, reality shows that it doesn’t happen at all both for individual reasons (everybody will try to maximise profit riding the inflation/lower avg. quality wave) and systemic ones (impacts on the production system and raw materials).
I guess we’re all familiar with recent events in the bike market (including a luxury Colnago frame for those who prefer rim brakes, but Campagnolo and Shimano both provide excellent example of rocketing prices and declining middle range quality). However, just think textile, beyond cycling I mean. Woolen blankets were the standard in Italy 40 years ago, now go and try to buy one… with woolen jerseys going down the same path. The fruit juice you bought in a supermarket 30 years ago in Italy was exclusively 100% fruit, now you’ve got two price segments – the same real money as before, which now is like 40% fruit plus water, sugar and addictives, or the same old one… for twice the price.
“pure mechanical gadget, which will survive for decades and more”
Indeed, I’ve owned same Rolex watch since about 1970 (gift from mother) … 54 yrs old. I’ve not owned anything else that long.
It’s needed servicing every 15 yrs or so, and isn’t as accurate as a modern, electronic watch or gadget. But the Rolex just works, it’s self-winding, and nothing electrical inside it.
And you’d love it just as much if it said “Lolex” on it, right?
Part of the love will be the fact his mother bought it for him, and I doubt that she would have bought him Lolex, and if she had, it would still be working today for him to still have it.
Nice to hear, does China make Tudor knockoffs?
Then how do you explain those stickers on a few stems that say “Richard Mille”? Do the pros just put them on the bikes as a favor? Rumors are that ROLEX might be the team’s name soon.
Cav’s got a lot to do with that fashion trend (admittedly, he was a fan of those watches before the series of events which further expanded RM presence in cycling).
So are you saying Cavendish provides promo for Richard Mille for nothing? I seem to remember stickers on the stems of bikes ridden by Pogacar and some others as well. Maybe they just comp ’em a watch in return for putting the stickers on?
No, no… Pogi is being paid as others, but Cav was a fan and bought several watches before, until one day R. Mille himself went and gifted one to him in person. Then I suppose things took the path of more normal sponsorships especially with other riders without that same background story. Before Cav, Mille was more into F1 I think, and in fact if I remember correctly… the gift for Cav was a “Massa special edition” which always made me smile as Cav’s overall sporting value is do much above Massa’s (don’t know if the latter is worth more in terms of money as he was in a richer sport, but I’d say no, at least as a “long seller”).
So that’s what the robbers were after when they invaded Cav’s home? I wonder if these people ever think what might happen when they go around flaunting stuff like this…like the guy who had his expensive time-keeper yanked off his wrist somewhere in Italy.
Richard Mille is definitely still into motorsport far more than cycling.
A quick count on https://www.richardmille.com/friends-and-partners shows 13 motorsport drivers, 6 teams, 2 manufacturers (counting Ferrari as both a team and a manufacturer) and a circuit.
For cycling there is one team and two riders.
Motorsport isn’t the only sport outnumbering cycling there either.
Along with all the sponsorships in F1 and other motorsport categories, Richard Mille himself has a significant leadership role in the sport as the President of the FIA Endurance Commission and his wife Amanda runs a program helping fund test drives for talented female drivers at major teams.
Only people deeply enclosed within the cycling bubble could think that Richard Mille’s dabbling in cycling signifies a swing away from motorsport, or that Cav is a bigger name to the rest of the world than Massa.
@DaveRides
That’s what I’m saying, i.e. Mille’s presence in cycling is essentially due to that personal story which is a consequence of rather than the reverse.
As for the relative impacts of the two sportsmen, in this last couple of decades Felipe Massa has surely been appearing more on the standard media and institutional press which are heavily skewed in favour of F1 at least in a couple of countries I’m more familiar with, for obvious reasons (some among the biggest of those media were literally owned by the same property of Ferrari, just to name an example, or think the effect of the biggest Spanish bank having a direct interest in the promotion of Fernando Alonso).
Yet, as you can easily imagine, on UK newspapers Cavendish’s all time presence is already greater, particularly (you also can expect that) on The Guardian. Same for France, for equally obvious reasons.
In Germany Cavendish slightly prevails on Die Zeit, Massa notably on Der Spiegel.
That said, Google estimates for both a similar number of worldwide webpages naming them, and the social media metrics look similar despite Massa having like the double of activity.
However, both checking *in the last 5 years* and *in the last 10 years* on a global level Cavendish has a 3 times greater number of Google results than Massa.
And I suspect (with no proof, just conjecturing about the fact that the Englishman will be quoted in a lot of “historical” records & surveys) that advantage Cav will grow more and more as years go by.
So, all in all, I’d say F1 fans have got their good bubble within which their sport matters so much more than figures can back… but you’re more justified by the fact that so many media have been ready to inflate that bubble well beyond actual popular interest or backup.
(And, yes @Anon I think the robbers were after the watches.)
Never thought I would become aware of a luxury watch brand from this blog. Sounds like the Campagnolo Delta of wrist jewelry. Don’t the street theft reports put people off and, if you can’t show the thing off, what’s the point? Meanwhile my worn daily Omega from the early sixties inherited from my father keeps ticking along.
Was it the kind of gold watch which got hidden by a POW under dire circumstances? 😉
Wow, I was proud of my daily Citizen having been ticking for 30 years, but 60 years is… well, doubling that figure!
(Though I must add that in my case it was with no need ever to recharge or change batteries thanks to its solar cells; yet, for this very same reason, I also have no idea about how often people usually need to do that)
Read somewhere about hotels in Italy loaning fake ones to morons who show up with these silly things on their wrists.
I call ’em morons when you think they’re out there flaunting what is a fake version of something they spent piles of money on -that is back in the hotel safe.
Hotels should issue ’em a t-shirt too, with “My other watch is a real (insert fancy brand name here)” printed on it.
If UAE sponsor Richard Mille can convince people to buy extremely ugly watches for more than €500,000, even after Succession made fun of that by having “king of cringe” Kendall Roy consistently wear them, Tudor should be able to make a profit with €5,000 less ugly watches.
It really does sink in how much TotalEnergies were banking on Alaphillipe, and why him going to Tudor really hurts them as the main rival for a TdF wildcard. Jeannière’s a nice sprinter but turns out he’s responsible for almost 20% of their UCI points this season. Take out Cras’s top 20 at the TdF and the Turgis win and it’s fallow stuff without much prospect of a shift upwards next season.
Walking in Paris in a ritzy area north of Tuileries Gardens I saw a Grand Seiko watch for 80,000 Euros and Rolexes without price tags. Clearly there are people who travel in economic circles beyond my means. Thus elite brands can afford advertising in ways that appeal to those travelers: a bike team, F1, soccer club, things I like to watch but sponsors I don’t support with my wallet.
A recent result of the massive expansion of the haves/have nots gulf is that the number of people with “silly money” has actually increased substantially in the past 20 years. This is especially true in developing nations where having the right contacts is essentially a blank check. These people don’t blink at a $100,000 shopping trip, so throwing a couple of luxury watches in the bag is barely worth a thought. Entire industries are built on this reality, for better or worse…
This is especially true in advanced economies where the net worth of the billionaires has grown faster both in absolute and relative terms than in so-called emerging markets from 2010 on, whereas the latter had a slightly faster growth in the 2003-2007 period.
The pandemic has supposed a further acceleration in China and North America.
Some more detailed info (albeit until 2016 only) for example here:
https://towardsdatascience.com/what-data-tells-us-about-the-worlds-wealthiest-a8c54e6ddb84?gi=89840f33822a
Boiled down it’s the usual: “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer.”
At least until the poor get the pitchforks out, either literally or figuratively.
As IPT and Lotto have shown, relegation can be less than catastrophic (barely noticeable even) provided a team secures that all-important 19th / 20th place guaranteeing invites to all the WT races. With their new Chinese money, Astana ought to be able to achieve at least that next year, surely?
You need a plan, but also patient sponsors. XDS as a sponsor is interesting because presumably they want visibility and prestige as part of the reason. From the outside a lot of their sponsorship seems odd, they could take their pick of other teams at the moment too instead of the one struggling.
https://xds-bicycles.com/history/
Oddly this hasn’t been updated since 2019.
One can assume Wilier will be replaced as bicycle supplier/sponsor? Could it be just a paint/decal change…if XDS is the OEM supplier to Wilier?
My understanding is that brands like Wilier operate their own R&D / design departments, do their own wind tunnel and material stress testing etc., even if the actual frames are made in China or Taiwan. So, they own the intellectual property, and it wouldn’t simply be a matter of “rebranding” the bikes as XDS. That said, according to the official Astana press release (https://www.astana-qazaqstan.com/xds-company-invests-in-astana-qazaqstan-team/), part of the XDS investment will include “…a new bicycle brand.” Presumably this means the bikes will not be “XDS,” but something entirely new.
“My understanding is that brands like Wilier operate their own R&D / design departments, do their own wind tunnel and material stress testing etc., even if the actual frames are made in China or Taiwan.”
Sure, what ELSE would their advertising people say? I don’t think, “Yeah, it’s just another Chinese-made bike we paint nicely and slap our decals on” would sell very well.
“Astana’s new sponsors are big players the Western world is about to meet for the first time. It has been said that X-Lab, and XDS brand, will supply the team’s bikes, replacing current provider Wilier, while unconfirmed reports suggest that XDS will have title sponsorship and the team will be Chinese-registered.”
From: https://www.rouleur.it/blogs/the-rouleur-journal/all-change-at-astana-does-new-investment-spell-a-revival
Don’t we have to hope that as well as watches, some buy teams?
We have our host to thank for all the analysis into team ownership, proving procycling to be a rich man’s sport that we get to watch largely for free.
To all team owners:
Whatever your preferred brand of timepiece, honestly I’m happy. Collect them by the yacht-full!
“…proving procycling to be a rich man’s sport that we get to watch largely for free.”
Yep, as they say “cycling’s the new golf”. Who can we blame for that?
INRNG: Come for the cycling analysis, stay for the discourse on the psychology of luxury goods and the rise of wealth inequality.
Well, they say cycling was farmers’ and workers’ sport.
Debout, les damnés de la terre
Debout, les forçats de la route !
Yes, there are some races going on in Canada, not to mention the Euro championship stuff…but our host is busy with boring promotion/relegation issues? Maybe he’s turned the thing over to AI? That would explain his absence during what many might call the most interesting of the 3 GT’s this season?
Don’t read, don’t comment if you’re not interested 🙂 Nobody cares…
And if you think this blog is written by AI, maybe you never really read it – AI would have some problem to keep this light humourous tone.
No one hinders you from opening your cycling blog, where you can read exactly what you want.
INRNG is not obliged to deliver you content for every race YOU want. What you’re searching for is a cycling news outlet. And there you have to pay for and then you can demand content. Not here.
HTH
Didn’t DEMAND anything, just an opinion/comment about a blog who claims to be “about cycling and cycle sport, especially pro cycling. News, comment, opinion and chat feature here.”
being AWOL during La Vuelta compared to the other GT’s this season and posting something so boring the discussion devolved into arguments about rich vs poor and luxury watches.
Note OPINION is one of the things “featured here” in that bit cut-and-pasted from “ABOUT” on this blog.
Get a grip guy.
Having a watch sponsor always ends well in cycling doesnt it ! 🙂
@James – yes. At least you know what time the end is.
Had to end on a good laugh. Thanks.