A look at the standings this week, plus a look at the victory rankings to see how many wins teams have and which ones are still chasing a World Tour win.
Promotion
Lotto and Israel-PremierTech are still on course for promotion but so far neither is having a great season. Lotto in particular are not scoring many points, their haul this this season is comparable to Arkéa-B&B Hotels and TotalEnergies but have a good cushion from excellent 2023 and 2024 seasons.
If two teams move up then two must be relegated. This chart zooms in to show the teams above and below 18th place, indicated by the red line, in the three year rankings. As you can see XDS-Astana have scored 5,740 points this year, they’re now a good week’s racing away from scoring as many points as they did for the whole of 2024. The Kazakh team is now only 1,314 points behind Picnic-PostNL and at this rate it’s possible they catch by the end of the month.
Cofidis had a decent week in Itzulia Basque Country and the Scheldeprijs taking 461 points, while Picnic-PostNL got only 172 and the French team is now opening up a gap on the Dutch team.
This chart shows the progress across the season. XDS-Astana now pull out ahead of Uno-X. Arkéa-B&B had a good week thanks to Kévin Vaquelin winning the Région Pays de La Loire Tour (ex Circuit de la Sarthe) but they’re well behind. To repeat the point, they might be delighted to be relegated because it means the team exists next year, there’s a meeting due soon with Arkéa management while B&B Hotels ominously say it’s for team management to communicate the news, implying a decision has been taken.
As a wider observation the last three year cycle of 2020-2021-2022 saw more movement with teams surging then slipping, this time
Team victory rankings
Now let’s step away from the points scoring to look at the absolute number of wins. In the chart below you can see UAE Emirates top the table with 27 wins so far this season. In fact they’ve scored more World Tour wins the total of all wins for the next team Lidl-Trek.
João Almeida got two stages and the GC in the Itzulia Basque Country, his biggest stage race win to date. Interestingly on the final stage he was away with Enric Mas and certain of winning GC could have done a deal with Mas but refused, Almedia said the UAE team had been working so hard for him that no gifts were possible; it’s something we’ve heard before from the UAE team.
Look mid-table and XDS-Astana have had a great start to the season but just six wins, as many Arkéa-Samsic. The fate of the two teams tells us plenty with the Kazakh team often placing multiple riders in the top-10 while the French team has struggled.
Surprisingly Alpecin-Deceuninck come after these two teams and so serve as the exemplar for the quantity vs quality debate a leap in quality, indeed if Mathieu van der Poel was a team he’d be 14th in the UCI rankings this season, ahead of the likes of EF and Groupama-FDJ. But it does show the team’s reliance on Van der Poel. They’re looking for a replacement sponsor for Deceuninck, you’d think they’ll find one given they can ace the classics and with Philipsen win in the Tour de France but there’s no news yet and it’s getting late.
Groupama-FDJ are struggling with three wins, even the Coupe de France wins seem elusive. But Intermarché-Wanty are faring worse. Dion Smith won the modest Volta NXT in the Netherlands but they’ll take it as they’d been the last WorldTeam without a win until then.
Five teams are still without a World Tour win. Picnic and Groupama-FDJ had stage wins in the Vuelta last year; while Arkéa-B&B, Astana and Intermarché had wins in the Tour de France. Technically Arkéa have the longest spell without a World Tour given Vauquelin won Stage 2.
Conclusion
XDS-Astana’s plan is still on course. As we’ve seen above they haven’t won many races but score big by placing. Remaining in the World Tour isn’t certain but they’re close to doing all they can. Picnic-PostNL by contrast look in trouble, they’ve been particularly hit by injuries but Cofidis aren’t out of danger, far from it from a team prone to hiccups.
Thank you for this. Great article and a fascinating subplot to the season. I’m wondering whether teams in the battle will focus their teams away from the GTs to pick up ‘easier’ points elsewhere. I’m sure the Astana numbers man has made the calculation…
We’re almost at the point where stage races take over the calendar and the one day races recede. It’s not one or the other of course but this changes the points on offer until the one day races come back in the autumn.
Would like to work out how many points are on offer in the season in total and the distribution across the season but it’s a job to count up each race, each stage, the points for leading a stage per per day etc. But we’ve had a lot of the races this season already and with them a lot of points, especially if we deduct GC in the grand tours which Astana have said they’ll avoid, part of their plan is to deliberately find races without Pogačar, Roglič etc who will almost always take points leaving them with crumbs.
I have historically cheered against Astana given their checkered past but the ferocity at which they are racing in the early part of the season has provided me personally a great entertainment value.
Federov, Ballerini, and Teunissen have made them visible in the big cobbled races and I feel like the underdog status suits them.
UNO-X and Tudor have also been punching above their weight with established riders (Trentin, Kristoff) in tandem with relatively new rising stars (Hoelgaard, Pluimers, Wærenskjold) have made them very easy to cheer for as well. Abra has definitely become a fan favorite with his TDF performance last year but now appears to be a marked rider ala Tony Martin
Picnic look dead in the water, hard to see where the points come from. Cofidis might be less than comfortable, but I feel like their point farming doesn’t really ramp up until the summer. Astana appear to an absolute lock to save themselves, barring their performance suddenly falling off a cliff.
Also Astana travelling a lot to farm points- using cash from the new sponsor I guess. Difficult not to root for them when so many had already written them off. I suspect both Astana and UNO-x will get a world tour place. I guess the other question is what will happen to lotto- have they got money problems? Could that prevent them from accepting a world tour place?