Sponsorship has flooded in, team budgets expanded, rider pay soared and real gains have been made in safety, ethics and institutions. Today riders enjoy longer contracts while teams have become multi-decade franchises, some are even outlasting their founders. And yet…
Pro teams are brittle, what looks strong today could snap tomorrow. First EF the other day and now Visma-Lease A Bike are reportedly looking for new sponsors. Others are having doing the same in private.
We’ve started the first year of a three year promotion and relegation cycle. As a result the urgency and desperation is gone. Keep an eye on two things instead: financial health of the World Tour teams and the jostling teams in the second division.
Here the the UCI points tables for the women and like the men’s tables, their tucked inside a PDF on the UCI’s website so this blog post isn’t a gripping read but just puts all the scales on one page for reference.
The women’s rankings system changes for 2026 and copies the same scales as the men but with fewer races on the calendar and stage races that often have shorter durations, there are less points on offer during the season.
Do rankings and points matter in cycling? Demonstrably not as they’re hard to find. You need to get to the regulations page on the UCI website then scroll to road races and find the right PDF to download. Manage that and 87 pages into a 400 page document come the badly-formatted tables.
Anyway this blog post is just to put the UCI points scales all on one page for handy reference during the year. So if you want something to read today… try something else.