It’s too early to draw conclusions for the three year promotion and relegation cycle but here’s a look at the latest standings in chart form.
UAE are running away with almost 2,500 points on Red Bull and Tadej Pogačar has only raced once. Isaac Del Toro, Jan Christen, Jay Vine and Antonio Morgado have scored more so far.
XDS-Astana continue to grab points galore and are ahead of Visma-LAB and Decathlon-CMA CGM. The French team’s top scorer is Tobias Lund on 865 points, just with five points more than Paul Seixas. They are among the big budget teams now but remember that if they spend 80% of their budget on rider wages, a quarter of this goes on French payroll taxes. So whatever the headline, the actual spending power is about a fifth less. Today’s L’Equipe mentions they’re trying to extent title sponsorship from their existing backers until 2035 and quotes team manager Dominique Serieys saying that were Paul Seixas ever to leave the team it won’t be because of money.
Jayco have had a good start thanks in part to Mauro Schmid bringing in over 1,000 points or a third of their haul. Newly promoted Uno-X are settling in well so far.
Soudal-Quickstep sit lower than would be expected. Filippo Zana has 442 points for them thanks to the Giro di Sardegna win and 8th overall Down Under. Paul Magnier their next best scorer on 222.
Groupama-FDJ see almost half their points coming from Romain Grégoire’s strong start to the season. Off all the teams they have the biggest ratio of top rider divided by team score.
The red bars in the chart mark ProTeams, the second tier. Here Tudor, Cofidis, Pinarello-Q36.5 all sit above the line to mark 18th place and so are virtual promotion candidates. Yes there’s a long way to go but they’re doing what they need to so far.
Lidl-Trek are hardly relegation candidates but linger in 17th place. Injury and illness explains plenty with Mads Pedersen out, Thibau Nys needing surgery and Juan Ayuso leaving Paris-Nice which Mattias Skjelmose could not start. Jonathan Milan has six wins this season but they’re stage wins and he hasn’t hit the jackpot of an overall win.
The dark horizontal line marks 18th place. Lotto-Intermarché could get a boost next week from their results in the Tour de Taiwan with two stage wins so far. Alpecin-PremierTech have less to worry about given Matthew Van der Poel should score big but they’re obviously reliant on him and even Jasper Philipsen is only on 41 points.
Picnic-PostNL stand out for their struggles. A year ago they were relegation candidates but had at least scored around a thousand points to keep them in contention. Now they’re already about a thousand points adrift of relegation and are the only WorldTeam without a win so far this season.
Elsewhere…
Bardiani-CSF-7 Saber, Euskaltel-Euskadi, Flanders-Baloise, SolutionTech-Nippo-Rali and Team Novo Nordisk don’t feature on the chart as they’re outside the top-30. Eligibility for a grand tour wildcard depends on being inside.
Cycling’s second tier is shrinking and set to get smaller. There’s still no news on a replacement sponsor for Total Energies and the deal needs to be done in the coming weeks otherwise their best riders will start to sign elsewhere which in turn makes the team less attractive for a potential sponsor, creating a vicious cycle. We know Flanders-Baloise is stopping. Now Kern Pharma announced it will end its seven year sponsorship and the team barely mentioned the search for a replacement, only saying “now is an ideal team”.
Conclusion
If a picture says a 1,000 words then having seen the UCI rankings tables which come out every Tuesday it was about time to see what it looks like as a bar chart and share it. UAE have a huge gap already and Picnic-PostNL are already in trouble.
UAE could have been even further ahead if Narváez had not crashed out of the Tour Down Under from second place – not just from the 400 points lost from not finishing the race, but also for all the racing lost while he recovers from his concussion and fractured vertebrae.
But with the way the race went for UAE, surviving his encounter with the inanimate roadside kerbing on stage 4 probably would have just resulted in him getting caught in the kangaroo crash the next day along with Vine, Bjerg and Molano.
The big worry is the disappearance of more Pro-teams. We are already down to 16 Pro-teams (there were 27 in 2018), and it looks like three more teams could disappear. It may end up resulting in too few teams to see a full roster of teams at some European world tour races.
Wow, 27 to 16 in 8 years? I appreciate how the many absurdities of the sport can make it loveable but that’s a pretty discouraging statistic.
One was added this year, Modern Adventure, the US-based, Hincapie-led ProTeam. Their points are in the basement, of course, as they did not exist last year. They have had a handful of top 10 finishes in UWT and ProSeries races. Their plan is to focus on ProTeam and Elite races this year, with some UWT races as well, and not look for wild card UWT entries. Keep an eye on them.
Last year three Pro-Teams were promoted to World Tour, but only one team was demoted (Intermarche merged with Lotto, Arkea folded). Wagner WB also folded. Modern Adventure are a new Pro-Team, led by Hincapie. And MBH Bank Ballan upgraded to Pro-Team from Conti. Overall we are down one compared to last year.
Next year we will definitely lose Flanders-Baloise from the Pro-Team ranks. We know that TotalEnergies and Kern Pharma need to find new sponsors to continue.
Flanders Baloise and Wagner WB were teams who largely existed to develop young Belgian riders for the World Tour. They have pretty much lost their purpose now that WT teams run their own development squads. The remaining French, Italian and Spanish Pro-Tour teams really need to get a Grand Tour invitation to be viable.
Mauro has indeed been good for Jayco and I am expecting that to continue. He always looked as though he could get some results and now he is.
Picnic PostNL are in desperate need of points, results and signs of hope though it’s very hard to see from where they might come. Can Jakobsen recover his speed of old, has Degenkolb one last big win..? Both, sadly, look unlikely. Bittner should provide some points but not enough.
Those contracts are absolutely insane. When you look at the talent they have paid vs. the talent they have lost, it’s not surprising to see them in trouble.
@INRNG
“Off all the teams they have the biggest ratio of top rider divided by team score.”
I may have missed this one, but what constitutes a “top rider”? I assume individual rating points, but where to draw the line? And who decided on that line?
It is indeed and interesting – and logical – metric but I don’t recall having heard about it before.
I think “top rider” is the individual rider with the most points for the their team. The paragraph refers to how Gregoire compares to the rest of his Groupama team mates. As “top rider” is singular, it is only one rider.
Exactly that. Some teams rely on one rider for a lot, like Van der Poel at Alpecin, Pidcock at Pinarello-Q3.65 but right now it’s Grégoire at FDJ. Using “top scorer” instead of “top rider” probably would have made it clearer.
I believe that the definition in this case is simple: the rider who has scored the largest amount of points this season.
Grégoire has, so to speak, single-handedly accumulated 811 points out of Groupama – FDJ United’s 1964 points.