A New Year, a new season and several news items to sift. We’ll start with Simon Yates and go via the Giro’s uncertain TV rights to Cofidis with more in-between.
Simon Yates has announced his sudden retirement. It’s so sudden that last week his team had him pose with other leaders to present their 2026 kit, something that would have been unlikely if they knew he was departing.
A year ago this blog’s Predictions for 2025 had rider retirements as an issue where rather than seeing riders racing on almost until they’re dropped and holding out for one more contract, many now have financial security and don’t fancy weighing their food. It’s all happened today so right now the exact motivation isn’t know.
This leaves a big vacancy at Visma-LAB where Yates was both a GC contender – the whisper around the Giro presentation he would go for the Vuelta this year – and invaluable help to Jonas Vingegaard in July. Having had a surplus of GC riders to the point where Cian Uijtdebroeks felt he had to break his contract to leave, the Dutch team now have a shortage. Indeed this might prompt more hesitation about Jonas Vingegaard going to the Giro given they have fewer resources. So plenty to come out in the coming days and an impact on the rest of the season.
Meanwhile Derek Gee-West (it’s Gee-West after marriage to Ruby West in November) has joined Lidl-Trek and we have the opposite scenario. An extra GC rider means they’re less dependent on Juan Ayuso, can play extra tactics and have cover for injuries. Having numbers like this is obviously a luxury few teams can afford – see Visma-LAB unloading Cian Uijtdebroeks – so it’s a sign of the now German squad’s credit line where they can have an extra rider at this level. It also means the litigation threat is over and the UCI’s arbitration panel settled the exit from IPT/NSN Cycling.
Can you guess the team from the accounts above? The French wording is a clue but it would have been hard even in the Christmas Quiz. It’s a screengrab from the Intermarché-Wanty team books from 2024. The entity behind the team tended to publish these every September or October but this time they appeared in December. You can imagine why they were not in a hurry to share with merger negotiations happening. The left column is 2024, the right is 2023 where the accounts were covered in more detail. Loyal readers will remember team had racked up debts in 2022 and 2023 and was promising to cut costs and balance the books by avoiding big name recruits and shrinking their race program too. The result? More losses alas, although down from €927k in 2023 to €595k but still in the wrong direction. The team has now merged with Lotto and we can see why: it had become financially unsustainable and surely had to merge to survive. The unknown part for now is what happens with the debt, written off by past sponsors or is Lotto now on the hook for this? Probably the former as the legal entity behind the merged team is Lotto and the Intermarché side has halted and is effectively an empty shell now.
Talking of financial woes Picnic-Post NL only have a World Tour licence for one year. In reality every team does as there’s an annual review. But the UCI decided to go beyond this and remark in their press release:
The UCI Licence Commission has decided to limit the duration of the licence to one year and to set conditions related to the financial criterion that must be met in order to permit its extension to the 2027 and 2028 seasons.
This implies the team only has sponsorship until the end of 2026. There’s time to renew but selling Oscar Onley to Ineos makes even more sense if the team won’t be able to command a price later this year.
Ruben Guerreiro has been dropped by Movistar. Normal, he was signed after some good results and did not deliver much. But in parting newspaper AS mentions issues with his Whereabouts, the anti-doping requirement to log a location in order to be tested each day. This is a bit sneaky, if he’s committed an offence then it’s for the UCI or other agencies to act (or even who over is giving the info to tip-off the testers). If not then it’s a private matter, plenty of athletes have a missed moment here or there.
Staying with riders dropped by Spanish teams, Francisco Galván has retired aged 27. He rode Kern Pharma last year and was their sixth best scorer which matters for team that needs to stay in the UCI top-30 in order to qualify for a Vuelta wildcard and they made it in 29th place. The reason he was dropped was he was filmed riding downhill and slaloming between divider posts and across solid white road markings, in breach of traffic rules and all to spice up his Instagram account where he’d been pulling stunts on his bike for some time as well as scoring UCI points. It’s an example of algorithmic vassalage and it’s cost him his job.
Now to other apps and above is an ad in L’Equipe newspaper yesterday where you can get L’Equipe and Eurosport bundled bungled together, and at just €5.99 a month. Nice. But notice anything else? Only the Tour and Vuelta are there for cycling. No Giro. An omission to leave space for tennis and the winter Olympics logos? Perhaps. But in 2020 Warner Bros-Discovery-Eurosport bought the international rights to the Giro for 2021 to 2025. That deal has expired and there’s no news on an extension or renewal.
Indeed recently Sportbusiness.com reported that Iris Media had been mandated to go and sell the rights. Is there a buyer yet? It could well be Eurosport or whatever it’s called this year but Iris has brokered many deals with the streaming platform DAZN (“da zone”) so there’s a good chance the Giro and RCS’s portfolio of races goes there too. Which might explain why Eurosport isn’t touting the race. Or not, but we’ll see.
Finally talking of schedules and Italian races, Cofidis won’t be riding the Giro. The race didn’t appear on the team’s schedule on their website, now the website cyclingpro.com confirms this. As they’re outside the World Tour they’re not obliged to race but have an automatic invite which they’ve elected not to take. They’re a French team but Cofidis the money lender has business interests in Italy so it’s a minor surprise.
Will another team take their place? It’s not obvious as the rule (2.1.007 bis) states Cofidis gets an invitation but if they decline then “the organiser may issue an additional wild card” but it’s not obligatory. Indeed with only teams among the top-30 on the UCI rankings available to be invited this means the likes of Kern and Burgos are eligible but do they want to race when the Giro isn’t on TV in Spain? Ditto Total Energies in France. Rose Rockets could but they’re also aiming for a Tour start, is two grand tours too much too soon? The point here is that there are few teams to spare these days.
Yates is just the latest of Visma’s losses after Kooij, Benoot, Uijdteboeks, Van Baarle…Gloag. There’s the basis of an outstanding team there. That must at least help the budget. Is there a worthwhile replacement available and allowed at this very late stage?
As for S Yates, he’s been my rider to follow since his debut with Orica. I hope it’s no more than tiredness of the endless travel, altitude, training and pressure. The praise from Visma seems to indicate an absence of scandal.
Not in the shorts but Attila Valter has done an interview with Eurosport lamenting some of his time on the team and saying he didn’t feel as supported as he wanted to be, as if atmosphere is not what is was.
As for conspiracies, a decade or more ago a sudden retirement – Denis Menchov got a “knee problem”, later he was revealed to have a biopassport case/2 year ban in PDF uploaded to the UCI website – would have evoked more suspicion, now it would involve a broad conspiracy across several agencies so harder to imagine.
I recall when Valter went to Jumbo he was pretty highly touted, then had some decent performances before being relegated to a lesser role. Similar to Uijtdebroeks, but really different from Laporte or Jorgenson. Seems to me that if you come to V-LAB and immediately win, you get a lot of support, but if not they move on pretty quickly. Campenaerts seems to be having a pretty good time as well, so it might just be about fit for each individual rider.
If Yates had a scandal waiting to emerge the compliments from Visma, Lappartient and the UCI wouldn’t have been so effusive. That’s a relief.
Is a decent replacement available and allowed at this late date?
The transfer window is 1-15 August and then end of season-1 January so no moves normally allowed. Jørgen Nordhagen is promising but a lot to ask.
I assume that they could add someone who is out of contract. Is there anyone like that out there? Maybe they could offer enough to pull Meintjes out of retirement!
Unsigned riders can join a team at any time, and there’s also the Petacchi loophole.
Not many names around to replace Yates or just pull late into a crucial stage in a grand tour. Domenico Pozzovivo is still rustling Strava KOMs but not in the UCI anti-doping testing pool so ineligible for another Giro. Hugh Carthy is out of EF with no news on what he’s doing next.
Chris Froome is still available … .
They missed Gee for one week…
As a long time follower of greenedge and therefore S Yates it seemed to me in his last year at greenedge he was not the motivated rider he had been in previous years.
I was greatly surprised he had a decent form reversal last year. Not particularly surprised he has retired.
About Intermarché, “créances” is what is owed to the entity. The degradation of the financial situation is mentioned in the accounting document (passif du bilan in the French version) with a new financial loss in 2024 to add to previous ones.
Thanks, there is a separate page of debts, I’ll revise the image and wording above and insert this instead. My fault for keeping a bunch of screengrabs and not looking at the actual PDF in the whole.
We’ll probably never know the reason but I am sure I recall Simon Yates being on a semi-permanent TUE for asthma medication, because there was much drama once when the paperwork wasn’t in order and there was a technical doping violation because the medication was taken but TUE not in place. I remember his father telling the anti doping authorities that he wouldn’t say where Simon was in a very macho way that probably created more suspicion than it quelled. That was all made to disappear and we never got to know whether Yates stayed on a TUE and I know the TUE system has since been revised. But it’s hard not to remember it, especially in the light of the Menchov retirement you note above.
My impression of that time was that half of the peleton was asthmatic.
Has that changed?
Do we have any way of knowing?
That’s a vast and unjustifiable exaggeration. See eg. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7392493/ and https://www.uci.org/therapeutic-use-exemption-tue/4nKy0SG3arDMW5fxagCjEI
If Simon Yates was my favourite rider, Picnic PostNL is my favourite team (though I don’t really know why). It’s hard to see where their 2026 points and results will come from. Maybe Poole will escape injury and illness and enjoy a miraculous season such as that of Onley in 2025, or even a final classics fling from Degenkolb – that would be a surprise. Without secure funding it can’t be easy to recruit promising young riders either who will have offers from teams with an agreed budget for 2027 and beyond.
Thinking of “riders to watch for 2026” and Max Poole is on the long list, both for his talent but also because the team really need him. He had Epstein Barr last season but yesterday he set a great time on a climb in training so things look up right now.
Algorithmic vassalage.
This is the critique we need. But here lies an interesting point related the team income and broadcast rights mentioned above – it will be increasingly lucrative for athletes to monetise their personal engagement through platforms like YouTube Instagram or even (why not?) Only Fans. Racing, races and teams might serve as a route to market, the shop window to build recognition and personal brands which may gradually out-earn whatever they get through traditional means and outlive any sporting peak.
Surely there’s already some blurring going on – Average Rob’s pro-celeb cross racing, the origins of Tietma Rockets, those videos of Pidcock descending in the US with the person I have forgotten the name of. Maybe if I’m weighing up my future subscription spend I’d like to see more of that, than more of the same old races. Who knows. And even those races seem to be subject to a form of, or precursor to, algorithmic vassalage. Those now common short climbs-before-a-sprint to retain jeopardy and eyeballs are an example.
If cycling does go down that route, they’ll lose their largely middle-aged viewership, because we’re not interested in all that shite.
To be fair, I don’t think anybody wants to see the likes of this on OnlyFans … https://stevetilford.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/michaelrasmussenuncovered-500×333.jpg
How much can any rider really make from social media? Salaries in the World Tour peloton are so big these days that a Youtube channel or posting to Instagram won’t be so much of a direct incentive, it’s more a complimentary channel. Some riders do use it them to share and communicate, some other times it’s branding and product placement run by their agent/staff.
A rider on a smaller team may have a smaller salary can do it but hard to see it paying much? I was thinking more how people without a following or much of an income perform these tasks, whether it’s gonzo descending or dancing to this month’s viral tune, because the algo is tuned in ways to reward these things. Brian “Safa” is the descender BTW.
There’s a piece to do on cycling as the six hour event in an era of 35 second Tiktok and Reels video but the sport’s value is that it can capture attention for hours on end (and serve ads whether on TV or on the jersey) along the way.
Sports viewing apps “bundled bungled together” is an apposite phrase whether intentionally or otherwise.
Apparently Onley cost Ineos double what Red Bull paid QS – multiple year contracts seem to become meaningless if this carries on.