The Tour of Guangxi is on and it’s a parade of sprint finishes on massive boulevards so far. Tomorrow sees the summit finish stage so look out for that to determine the GC.
Guangxi has been dubbed the “punishment tour” inside the peloton as riders who have not had a good season or are leaving their team get sent there just when they’d prefer to start the off-season but team management is not so sympathetic towards riders they’re not in charge of next year. It’s a caricature of course but look at the share of riders taking part who are leaving their team and you can see where the label came from.
It’s unfair to the race but such is pro cycling where new races take years to establish roots and the final race of the year is when many just want to be on holiday; an plenty of others are by now. What’s also notable is how the Asian calendar doesn’t tie up. The Tour de Kyushu and this weekend’s Utsunomiya Japan Cup offer a Japanese option, at literally the same time as the Chinese World Tour race. Race dates can’t be moved at the stroke of a pen or click of a mouse but some coordination would be sensible and could benefit both paths. Likewise for the recent Gravel Worlds and Paris-Tours.
One rider Ineos may have wanted to send to China is Tom Pidcock as he might be leaving. Snark aside, he’s in form and the uphill finish does suit. But there’s obviously been a big internal row culminating in him being dropped from Lombardia at the last minute and now increasing transfer speculation. This is keeping the rider merry-go-round spinning more than usual with plenty of deals yet to be struck. Some riders are left like jigsaw pieces that can fill places once the main players are in position. See the domino move of Mike Teunissen to Astana which has meant Visma-LAB have picked up Dan McLay from Arkéa. Others are not waiting, Lilian Calmejane has announced his retirement. Pidcock would be the latest rider to break a supposed long term contract… and also a further sign of troubles at Ineos. Can they afford to lose him, can they afford to keep him?
To moves of a different kind now, and Dutch Pro Conti team TDT-Unibet will ride under a French flag in 2025 and also change name to Unibet Tietema Rockets. Why the French flag? No mention in the team’s press release yesterday but coincidentally the Netherlands is banning sports sponsorship by gambling companies in 2025 and Belgium is following too which probably explains things.
2.15.052 The members of a UCI WorldTeam may have no link with the members of another UCI WorldTeam, with a UCI ProTeam or with an organiser of a UCI WorldTour event likely to influence the sporting course of events or to be perceived as so doing. In exceptional cases, which do not challenge the integrity of the competition or the sporting fairness, the UCI Management Committee may grant an exception.
Only they may not yet have found a safe haven. Loyal readers will remember the blog post from January when FDJ the company said it wanted to buy Unibet. The takeover has gone ahead so the speculative questions are now real questions. As the UCI rule quoted above shows the issue is that no World Tour or ProTeam are meant to be linked. There might be ways around this but how much of Unibet’s corporate structure will be defined by the need to keep one cycling team away from the other remains to be seen.
Talking of flag changes, French team managers Marc Madiot, Emmanuel Hubert and Cédric Vasseur spoke to L’Equipe about their shared problem of France’s payroll taxes, a problem explored here before. Put simply when they hire a rider they must pay 40% on top of the salary in taxes and so their wage bill is structurally higher, and significantly so which means things like budget caps are won’t alone level conditions. The managers were even speculating for some kind of tax breaks but given France is having an emergency budget to raise revenue to plug the public finances, cutting taxes for sports teams and millionaire athletes may not be a priority shared by politicians.
French teams do all benefit from a massive advantage: the Tour de France. It’s this that entices corporate sponsors and consumer brands to back teams because of the vast publicity available in July, something Italian or Belgium teams just don’t get on the same scale. One work-around could be to change jurisdiction on the quiet but this might prove politically problematic and bring publicity the sponsors don’t want. Still if actual national projects like Astana and UAE can be quietly run out of Luxembourg and Switzerland…
One of the team managers complaining in L’Equipe was Arkéa-B&B Hotel’s Hubert. He’s got an exodus with Vincenzo Albanese and Clément Champoussin reportedly leaving the team. He says they have release clauses activated because the team’s title sponsorship deals don’t go beyond the end of 2025 but that sounds odd: if the team is valid for next year then normally so are the contracts. So there’s a small alarm bell ringing in the background here about the team’s resources today, especially as other core riders are out. Arnaud Démare’s valued lead out Dan McLay is out as mentioned already and Louis Barré is joining Intermarché. While Astana have been facing relegation because of a poor points haul in 2023 and 2024 they’ve gone on a shopping spree, Arkéa faces relegation and is now losing some of its best points scorers. Relegation is unwanted but if it happens it’ll mean the team is still on the road for 2026 and beyond.
This week saw migrants taken by the Italian navy to an internment camp in Albania for the first time. It’s a controversial scheme in Italy and beyond because the migrants are held in detention centres run by Italian penitentiary staff on Albanian soil. But you’re not reading a cycling blog for that, instead the cycling connection is here because the Giro d’Italia is set to start in Albania next year, marking the cooperation between Rome and Tirana. How political the Giro’s grande partenza will be remains to be seen, look out to see if the race visits sites linked to the scheme and tries to broadcast what jolly places they are, plus whether Italian government ministers take part.
Staying with grand tour routes, only no controversy. The Tour de France 2025 route gets unveiled soon with the presentation on Tuesday 29 October. As ever almost the entire route has leaked out via France’s prodigious regional press – regional newspapers outsell national dailies – and most often the news is about start and finish towns, most of which sound very familiar, to the point it feels like a repeat. All grand tours reuse roads but this seems particularly likely. We’ll see at the presentation what comes in between such as time trials and which climbs feature along the way before several famous summit finishes, including the Col de la Loze where Tadej Pogačar famously radioed in “I’m gone, I’m dead“.
Pogačar’s is duty-bound to do the Tour de France next year but the rest of his race program will be closely watched by everyone from fans to rivals, with some teams bound to take particular interest in the events where he isn’t racing and probably to an extent we’ve not seen before. How much of this will be openly discussed remains to be seen.
Finally a thought for the weekend… Will Pogačar fare better or worse next year? On one side, some regression to the mean feels likely and many a rider with a stellar season has looked more ordinary the following year. But another reflection is that his wins were born out of defeat at the Tour and Worlds in 2023. Racing the Giro was in part a way to win a grand tour away from Jonas Vingegaard based on ideas this time a year ago. Above all there was a sense of dejection that led to several changes, notably his training methods, his position, coaching staff and we’ve seen the results, see his time trialling. Remember a year ago his weakness was supposed to be long climbs on long days, especially on hot days; now recall Plateau de Beille. Anyway 2024 was just the first season for a lot of these changes which suggests there’s room to optimise with lessons learned… so he could well improve further.
That’s quite the bombshell to leave it on: ‘so he could well improve further’.
Seems fairly likely he’ll go for the Tour-Vuelta double next year but no Paris-Roubaix (but another crack at Milan San Remo I assume). He doesn’t have an Itzulia in his palmares either does he, or a San Sebastian. Interesting to see if he’s bothered or not.
I think Teunissen has gone to Astana from Intermarche, but I might be wrong.
On Pog, Grand Tours are hard to predict but its not hard to imagine him winning the Tour and Vuelta next year. Or deciding the Giro was such good prep for the Tour to do that again. It’s almost nearly impossible to imagine him getting beaten in Liege or Lombardia unless they drastically flatten out the courses. The worlds is very course dependent. So my bet is he’ll win 2 grand tours again and swap the worlds for one of MSR and Flanders, most likely MSR if he does the Giro again.
Teunissen was due to sign for Visma but a late change happened and it’s Astana now.
I’d find it impossible to pick a TdF winner between Vingegaard and Pogačar right now. People seem to have very short memories and think that Pog will walk everything next season. At the end of last season, he had ‘no chance’ against Vin. Hopefully, they’re both fit, and we actually see a contest. And, equally hopefully if Pog does the Ronde, WVA and MVDP are fit too.