UAE Dominates Year-End Stats ... and It Locks Down Pogacar; Status of African Cycling; 2026 Promotion/Relegation Battle Already Over? No More Free Tour for UK ...

Key Takeaways:

●        UAE’s Total Dominance in 2024

●        Is the Next Promotion /Relegation Battle Already Over?

●        UAE Locks Down Pogačar For the Long-Term

●        The State of African Cycling – and Implications

●        No More Free Tour de France in the U.K.

●        Continuing Tough Times in the Industry

With the 2024 road season now firmly in the rearview mirror, we can reflect on some of the year’s most interesting competitive features and trends. Tadej Pogačar’s dominance was the story of the year, but if we look at the end-of-year UCI Points team standings, his UAE Team Emirates squad might have had an even more impressive showing. After narrowly topping Visma-Lease a Bike in 2023 to take the top spot in the UCI rankings for the first time, they blew second-place Visma out of the water in 2024, finishing just under 17,000 points ahead of them. Putting this dominance into perspective, the gulf between UAE and Visma is nearly the entire total of third-place Soudal-QuickStep. On top of this points haul, UAE racked up a staggering 81 total victories, nearly doubling second-place Lidl-Trek’s 42, which means that even if Pogačar had failed to win a single race this season, they still would have led in wins, highlighting the remarkable depth of their expensive roster. This kind of dominance from one of the sport’s richest teams will only fuel the fire under the UCI’s recent look into potential implementation of budget caps or other means of financial parity. And predictably, some of the richer teams have already indicated a hesitance about the viability or legality of a salary cap.

At the bottom end of the spectrum, the relegation/promotion situation is also beginning to clarify. Consistently strong performances among the top teams in the ProTeam division and unexpectedly poor performances from some of the lowest-ranking WorldTour teams over the past two seasons suggests that the 2025 season will probably lack the suspense-filled promotion/relegation battle that we saw towards the end of the 2022 season. The top two ProTeams, Israel-Premier Tech and Lotto-Dstny, are already safely above the promotion/relegation line. On the other hand, the bottom two WorldTeams,  Astana Qazaqstan, and Arkéa-B&B Hotels are already so far in arrears that they would have to more than double their points totals next year to stay in the game; indeed, they may even have a hard time qualifying for the top two ProTeam wildcard spots. In short, the 2026 WorldTour team list already seems to be settling in to place.

Cycling’s man of the year, Tadej Pogačar, has signed a six-year contract extension to remain at UAE. Although it may not be of quite the presumed duration of the recent lifetime contract signed by Wout Van Aert with his Visma-LAB team, this contract will likely see Pogačar through the peak of his still proliferating career. It also suggests that Pogačar could spend his entire career with a single team, contrary to the broader trend in the sport where many riders frequently jump teams and follow the best current contract offer. This development further reflects the growing tendency – particularly on the part of wealthier teams – to attempt to lock down their top talent for the long term. We have discussed how the actual enforceability of pro cycling contracts is constantly challenged – and several key contracts have been effectively nullified or broken – this shift may reflect proactive measures by teams to protect their interests as rumors of some form of spending cap come under consideration. We expect to see more teams firm up their contracts with top talent in the near future. On the women’s side, deeper investment and marketing exposure has led to a few major moves, none more important than Demi Vollering’s confirmed move to FDJ-Suez – but it may be too early in the women’s pro racing renaissance for “lifetime” contracts to be more than a whisper.

A recent opinion post on the declining state of African cycling highlights the often polarizing pathways for riders to reach the WorldTour level, and how this has actually led to a decline in African professional cycling. The author notes that various teams built around the Qhubeka mission provided exposure in Europe for talented African nation riders, leading to a high point of 23 contracts in the peloton in 2014; however, there are now currently only 10 and the number will fall significantly when the Q36.5 development team folds at the end of the year. The African talent pipeline has stagnated in its current underfunded and under-supported state, and can’t sustain athlete development with the “right competition and in the right environment” across its strongest cycling nations. Significant investments in cycling infrastructure have made the sport more popular in many African nations and bolstered citizen mobility and local economies, but racing hasn’t developed in lockstep. And in the case of European programs which are polarizing around UCI points, there is no longer an appetite to take on talented African development “projects” when seasoned riders with existing UCI points are available to sustain sponsorship objectives (and avoid relegation). It is yet to be seen how the impact of Eritrean star Biniam Girmay will change this downturn – if at all – but there appears to be few riders ready to step up and diversify the presence of Africans across the UCI’s top licensed divisions.

In many ways, this African paradox mirrors the downturns in U.S. and British cycling – and may offer some clues on how those thin fortunes might be turned around. Fewer road events due to exorbitant organization costs have led to a consequent talent exodus to European teams, at the expense of exposing more young riders to the sport on home soil. In turn, this thins the overall potential talent pool. With the exception of U.S. women’s cycling and British track racing, much of the high-performance talent development in both the U.S. and Africa is now outsourced to European-funded programs. This is an important consideration as U.S. cycling turns towards 2025 with fewer road events on hand and the majority of its top riders already locked into European programs – depriving U.S. races of valuable name exposure and the presence of its “home” riders. African and U.S. racing calendars also present geographic challenges to their respective amateur riders, with long and expensive travel planning needed for the athletes to attend events consistently, especially races which are required for selection into prestigious national team development programs. While there is some hope here in the U.S. with criterium series diversification, the promise of grassroots racing investments, and more funding for track racing, the future is murkier for African growth – with or without a successful Rwanda road world championship in 2025.

The 2025 Tour de France route may be officially unveiled on Tuesday, but many of the details of the 2025 edition of the race have been an open secret for weeks. Most of the chatter has centered around the return of a true mountain time trial on Stage 13 in the Pyrenees, which will finish atop at the Peyragudes altiport after an ascent of the Col de Peyresourde. There are a few other brutal stages in the Alps during the final week, particularly a Mont Ventoux summit finish on Stage 16 and the brutal Col de la Loze on Stage 17. However, behind these blockbuster headliners, a downplayed but interesting trend is the return to a more traditional route, with the first week almost entirely taking place in the flatter northwest part of the country and a finish on the Champs-Élysées in Paris. This is likely at least partially due to logistical reasons; after all, ASO needs to rotate its non-mountain focus regions from year to year to build up demand from towns willing to pay pricey hosting fees. But, in addition to the financial bottom line, visiting more mild terrain and waiting until the 12th stage to feature much mountainous terrain may also be an attempt to defer yet another trouncing by Pogačar, maintaining the illusion of tension and competitiveness as late into the race as possible.

Conditions continue to be choppy and challenging in the cycling and related industrial markets. Rapha, the top-line cycling apparel manufacturer and long a leading spokesman for the worldwide growth of cycling, last week announced a whopping annual loss of 21 million British pounds – its seventh losing year in a row. Although the company noted that it had eked out a positive EBITDA, it also reported closure of regional distribution centers, significant drops in its web customers and in the number of registered members in its high-end cycling club, the RCC. Rapha’s struggling performance can be contrasted, however, with even weaker performance in many other cycling brands, such as Wiggle and The Pro’s Closet, which have disappeared entirely.

On the other hand, and perhaps at least marginally reflecting contrasting trends across the sport, LifeTime Group Holdings, the parent group of America’s largest gravel racing series, announced significantly stronger third-quarter results. The company saw quarterly revenues increase to almost $700 million. Although LifeTime’s business extends well beyond its cycling racing series – to a range of health and wellness activities and facilities, including 170 “athletic country clubs” across the country – it has become one of the most visible and well-funded bike racing series in the United States. As we have frequently reported in the past, gravel racing seems to be one of the few bright spots in the American cycling scene at the moment.

British cycling fortunes may have taken a serious hit when it was announced that ITV would no longer produce or carry a terrestrial free TV broadcast of the Tour de France after 2025. The race will instead be carried by Warner Bros-Discovery owned Eurosport. Cycling journalists were quick to point out how influential freely available Tour coverage has been for the sport throughout the region, how it has exposed millions of fans to the sport over the years and influenced young riders to take up competitive cycling. A similar parallel can be drawn to the death of terrestrial coverage of the race in the U.S., which ran its course (CBS and ABC) in the early ‘00s before becoming a staple of cable and streaming subscriptions. U.S. cycling did not experience an immediate drop-off in participation when race coverage gravitated to specialty cable channels, but at face-value the more recent downturn coincided with the higher expense and thin availability of coverage for consumers on premium-tier cable and streaming networks over the last ten years.  Eurosport has broad reach but the new exclusivity with ASO could backfire; in the realignment of regional sports networks in the U.S., many pro league teams chose to go back to free-to-air game broadcasts because subscription channel exclusivities depressed fan interest and engagement in their home markets. Given British Cycling’s ongoing downturn, could it experience additional collateral damage from reduced broadcast reach?