Battle for 2023-2025 WT licenses

[Samamba]

It should happen every year! Or atleast every second year. Then it wouldn’t be such a disaster to be relegated as you quite quickly could bounce back. Now with a 3 year perspective I think that looks more overwhelming for teams and sponsors getting relegated.

You would just have even more good riders signing for top 5 teams. Noone wants to ride in a team that might be having a relegation battle. You think there's a single rider in of the teams that were in danger the last couple of months who liked what was going in? They can't rest, have to ride *** races, have too ride way to many races, need to make sure certain teams don't go ahead, might ride to make another team lose instead of win themselves, ...

 

[Valv.Piti]

You would just have even more good riders signing for top 5 teams. Noone wants to ride in a team that might be having a relegation battle. You think there's a single rider in of the teams that were in danger the last couple of months who liked what was going in? They can't rest, have to ride *** races, have too ride way to many races, need to make sure certain teams don't go ahead, might ride to make another team lose instead of win themselves, ...

Yeah, and Arsenal also have to play at Stoke away on rainy day, and cannot just face Tottenham at Emirates each and every week!

 

[Kaptain Kool]

IMHO the relation system should be top 2 Pro teams move up every year. Bottom World team automatically drops. World Team that finishes with most points gets to choose the second team relegated. That way there would be excitement at both the top and bottom. So, for example, Ineos would need to get the points to finish first or hope that Jumbo-Visma doesn't choose them to go down. And vice versa.

 

[Valv.Piti]

So surely Movistar is chilling now?

 

[tobydawq]

Yeah, and Arsenal also have to play at Stoke away on rainy day, and cannot just face Tottenham at Emirates each and every week!

Actually they don't since Stoke are not in the Premier League.

QED

 

[Lexman]

Cofidis in a critical situation...Lotto might still have a chance, Movistar is save...

 

[perico]

Movistar jumps to 14th after La Vuelta. They can relax a bit. I don't think anyone is going to be caught with the gap between 18th and 19th.

 

[Eddy Evenepoel]

What’s the gap between Lotto and Cofidis, EF and BEX?

 

[Samamba]

What’s the gap between Lotto and Cofidis, EF and BEX?

EF 14984 + 849
BEX 14962 + 827
COF 14812 + 677
LTS 14135
ISN 13436

It's a bit less bad than I thought before this week (I thought Cofidis would've been the only one below 1000 points ahead). But still borderline impossible for Lotto to save themselves with Cofidis taking in the small races too (and probably 200+ points coming up with Thomas in Luxembourg), BEX having Groenewegen, who just needs to keep sprinting to top 3s, and Matthews, who will take points in Worlds, and EF who keep dissapointing but 850 points in huge gap knowing Lotto can only take points in Belgian or sprint races (with Cras, Wellens, Kron and Van Gils out for the hilly Italian ones).

Israel is basically out of it. Started with 5 top 10 scorers this weekend in Israel and rode Fourmies and came out with like 100 points total. That's just horrible. Best thing they can hope for is catching Total on the yearly ranking or Lotto overtaking EF (I would honestly help Lotto if I were them lmao).

Movistar (thanks to Mas) and Arkea (thanks to Capiot, Barguil and Louvel) are safe.

 

[Ranagazoo]

https://www.cyclingnews.com/features/sylvan-adams-worldtour-relegation-is-destructive-to-the-sport/

Lol

Perhaps Sylvain you shouldn't have blown your entire team budget on Froome?

 

[Eddy Evenepoel]

https://www.cyclingnews.com/features/sylvan-adams-worldtour-relegation-is-destructive-to-the-sport/

Lol

Perhaps Sylvain you shouldn't have blown your entire team budget on Froome?

The fu**** wants to ban relegation forever. Why does his not very good team/organization deserve eternal World Tour license? Why is it correct to lock the situation now and not give other teams the chance to become World Tour teams? The level of entitlement is ridiculous. Spoilt little kid.

 

[Valv.Piti]

Hahaha, what a lunatic! Signed over the hill riders like Froome, and to some extent guys like Fuglsang on such long deals, is probably not a very good recipe. Everyone knew that though, apart from him..

 

[Bolder]

I sympathize with the riders like Woods who are way better than the pro conti level, but it's a bad team that couldn't get results.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

I mocked Jonathan Vaughters' dressing up self-serving propositions as 'progress', locking off the top level to guarantee his team a position at the top table, but at least his reasoning was sound; as one of the smaller budget top tier teams (who at the time he presented that idea had been overachieving relative to that budget) and with a number of moneyed new teams appearing at the top level in short order (Radioshack, Leopard, BMC) his team's position was vulnerable so he proposed something that would safeguard it.

I also mocked Rick Delaney's tantrum that his team didn't get treated like a bigger deal than it deserved to be, and after he got more invites than most first year ProTeams do thanks to a paucity of alternatives, he couldn't deal with having to take a smaller slice of the pie when there were more teams sharing those invites around, and so threw his toys out the pram, took his ball home and did whatever other hackneyed metaphor for childish sulking you want to add, going from "we might be signing Richie Porte" to "we are folding not at the end of the season but RIGHT NOW" in a matter of days.

Sylvain Adams has a bit of both really. He is proposing a change of the rules to avoid relegation because his team hasn't been good enough to avoid it, and presumably because his team is less tied to an identity that can survive beyond the WT, in the same way as how HTC couldn't find a sponsor to take on the team but teams like Skil-Shimano, NetApp, Caisse d'Epargne and Rabobank, which had a certain identity based on location or type of races, could. Lotto have a much better chance of doing a 'Europcar' or a 'Cofidis' (or a 2010 Vacansoleil for that matter), settling in as a top ProTeam and working back to the top table by focusing on the calendar available to them domestically and regionally via sprinters, classics men and stagehunters, than Israel do, because their identity is far more scattershot; they also probably have a few high-cost millstone contracts for older riders who aren't getting any better and whose name value was as big a factor in their signing as their expected results. They're probably therefore much more dependent on the invites to big races than Lotto are; although looking at the various options at the ProTeam level they ought not to have too much trouble securing invites if they are able to keep the majority of their roster intact - but I'm sure that presenting his case for wildcards to various organisers was not what Sylvain expected to be doing based on the roster he assembled at the time he assembled it.

I wonder how much Dylan Teuns' contract cost to break.

 

[Eddy Evenepoel]

I sympathize with the riders like Woods who are way better than the pro conti level, but it's a bad team that couldn't get results.

Woods have 1 single top 5 result on WT-level this season. He is 35 yo and his lack of top results in the big races this season is part of the reason of why his team will relegate.

And let's not forget that a relegated team will also get to ride a lot of WT-races next season, so the best riders of these teams, which clearly are good enough to compete at the highest level, will get to race (most of) the big races. Relegation is only a disaster if the team decides to make it a disaster.

 

[search]

He seems to be a funny dude. The whole thing reads like he was on coke tbh

"We’ve all seen what’s happening with LIV golf, right? I'll make a competing Tour de France. I'll get all the World Tour teams in my Tour de France, I'll make the €100 million a year profit."

I think I'll do my own Tour de France as well next year, by the way.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

He seems to be a funny dude. The whole thing reads like he was on coke tbh

"We’ve all seen what’s happening with LIV golf, right? I'll make a competing Tour de France. I'll get all the World Tour teams in my Tour de France, I'll make the €100 million a year profit."

I think I'll do my own Tour de France as well next year, by the way.

He needs to look more at what happened with AOWR when Tony George split CART and IRL. Even having the best drivers, cars, circuits and more fans couldn't help CART survive, because IRL had the one race that mattered to everybody in AOWR, the Indy 500, and no alternative replacement would ever be able to match that because of the name recognition value to people that didn't follow the rest of the season.

I know he's just going off on a rant, but the idea is objectively dumb. He'd have to run outside of UCI rules to make the race long enough to serve as a replacement GT, he'd need to find a calendar spot for it, he'd need to find towns in France willing to host it (and ASO could always threaten to blacklist certain places if they did, if they felt threatened) and he'd need to find sponsors willing to sponsor cycling but run the risk of alienating the biggest possible sponsor payday in the sport. And it'd probably have to be a sponsor name tour to help it break even, now I'm not suggesting something as egregious as the Tour de Trump, but certainly the best possible scenario is to be an equivalent of, like, the Clásico RCN or the Vuelta por un Chile Lidér. Only they were not that much younger than the national tours they ran alongside, whereas here he'd be going up against the biggest and most established trademark in the sport's history.

We'd all talk about it in the same manner as Pegasus Cycling got people's tongues wagging though, so if he did get a title sponsor it would still probably not be a bigger waste of money in terms of return on investment than some of the contracts he's been handing out.

 

[Mayomaniac]

He needs to look more at what happened with AOWR when Tony George split CART and IRL. Even having the best drivers, cars, circuits and more fans couldn't help CART survive, because IRL had the one race that mattered to everybody in AOWR, the Indy 500, and no alternative replacement would ever be able to match that because of the name recognition value to people that didn't follow the rest of the season.

I know he's just going off on a rant, but the idea is objectively dumb. He'd have to run outside of UCI rules to make the race long enough to serve as a replacement GT, he'd need to find a calendar spot for it, he'd need to find towns in France willing to host it (and ASO could always threaten to blacklist certain places if they did, if they felt threatened) and he'd need to find sponsors willing to sponsor cycling but run the risk of alienating the biggest possible sponsor payday in the sport. And it'd probably have to be a sponsor name tour to help it break even, now I'm not suggesting something as egregious as the Tour de Trump, but certainly the best possible scenario is to be an equivalent of, like, the Clásico RCN or the Vuelta por un Chile Lidér. Only they were not that much younger than the national tours they ran alongside, whereas here he'd be going up against the biggest and most established trademark in the sport's history.

We'd all talk about it in the same manner as Pegasus Cycling got people's tongues wagging though, so if he did get a title sponsor it would still probably not be a bigger waste of money in terms of return on investment than some of the contracts he's been handing out.

Lol, the way he talked about it really reminded me of the Tour de Tump talk back in the day. The problem is that ASO would probably throw it's weight around and use all of his influence to sabotage another gt like race that takes place in France...

 

[Mayomaniac]

He seems to be a funny dude. The whole thing reads like he was on coke tbh

"We’ve all seen what’s happening with LIV golf, right? I'll make a competing Tour de France. I'll get all the World Tour teams in my Tour de France, I'll make the €100 million a year profit."

I think I'll do my own Tour de France as well next year, by the way.

"I'll make my own Tour de France, with blackjack and hookers!"

 

[Mayomaniac]

The riders union would probably protest if the Israeli anglo retirement home got relegated...

 

[Extinction]

Lol, the way he talked about it really reminded me of the Tour de Tump talk back in the day. The problem is that ASO would probably throw it's weight around and use all of his influence to sabotage another gt like race that takes place in France...

Apart from this the Tour is too historical upon which the legendary "convicts of the road" was built. He is only a businessman who discounts history. Va bene rethinking the points system, which is not historical, but thinking something can replace the French race is unadulterated hubris. The myth of the Fall of Icarus teaches otherwise, but what does he know about that?

 

[FroomeWagon]

He seems to be a funny dude. The whole thing reads like he was on coke tbh

"We’ve all seen what’s happening with LIV golf, right? I'll make a competing Tour de France. I'll get all the World Tour teams in my Tour de France, I'll make the €100 million a year profit."

I think I'll do my own Tour de France as well next year, by the way.

Here is what I don't understand. Instead of getting in a pissing match with the UCI and ASO in the media, why not just make a donation (bribe) to the UCI? We all know how historically corrupt the UCI is. I bet a 1,000,000 euro donation would allow the UCI to reassess it's position and make a one time exception to the relegation rule due to "circumstances stemming from COVID. "

Based on all the money he has wasted on washed up riders, it appears money would not an issue.

 

[Extinction]

I mocked Jonathan Vaughters' dressing up self-serving propositions as 'progress', locking off the top level to guarantee his team a position at the top table, but at least his reasoning was sound; as one of the smaller budget top tier teams (who at the time he presented that idea had been overachieving relative to that budget) and with a number of moneyed new teams appearing at the top level in short order (Radioshack, Leopard, BMC) his team's position was vulnerable so he proposed something that would safeguard it.

I also mocked Rick Delaney's tantrum that his team didn't get treated like a bigger deal than it deserved to be, and after he got more invites than most first year ProTeams do thanks to a paucity of alternatives, he couldn't deal with having to take a smaller slice of the pie when there were more teams sharing those invites around, and so threw his toys out the pram, took his ball home and did whatever other hackneyed metaphor for childish sulking you want to add, going from "we might be signing Richie Porte" to "we are folding not at the end of the season but RIGHT NOW" in a matter of days.

Sylvain Adams has a bit of both really. He is proposing a change of the rules to avoid relegation because his team hasn't been good enough to avoid it, and presumably because his team is less tied to an identity that can survive beyond the WT, in the same way as how HTC couldn't find a sponsor to take on the team but teams like Skil-Shimano, NetApp, Caisse d'Epargne and Rabobank, which had a certain identity based on location or type of races, could. Lotto have a much better chance of doing a 'Europcar' or a 'Cofidis' (or a 2010 Vacansoleil for that matter), settling in as a top ProTeam and working back to the top table by focusing on the calendar available to them domestically and regionally via sprinters, classics men and stagehunters, than Israel do, because their identity is far more scattershot; they also probably have a few high-cost millstone contracts for older riders who aren't getting any better and whose name value was as big a factor in their signing as their expected results. They're probably therefore much more dependent on the invites to big races than Lotto are; although looking at the various options at the ProTeam level they ought not to have too much trouble securing invites if they are able to keep the majority of their roster intact - but I'm sure that presenting his case for wildcards to various organisers was not what Sylvain expected to be doing based on the roster he assembled at the time he assembled it.

I wonder how much Dylan Teuns' contract cost to break.

I think cycling has simply evolved, inevitably, from its grass roots to have to accomodate a global demand. The solution, as ever in the European system, has been a cut-throat pass/fail praxis (no grade inflation here). The downside, of course, has been untoward instability. Although, in principle, I prefer results over moneyed privilege. At any rate, big investors who spend unwisely get the shaft and, deviously, I'm all for it.

 

[FroomeWagon]

Lol, the way he talked about it really reminded me of the Tour de Tump talk back in the day. The problem is that ASO would probably throw it's weight around and use all of his influence to sabotage another gt like race that takes place in France...

The Tour de Trump was bigly. The greatest race ever on the planet.

When he was asked why it wasn't called the Tour of America, Trump said, according to Sports Illustrated, "We could, if we wanted to have a less successful race. If we wanted to down-scale it."

On a televised NBC News interview, he said his name had brought in "a lot of the racers."

He also told NBC News he wanted it to become the equivalent of the Tour de France.

"I can't say we're going to make it more. Although, in theory, you could say we have many more people so you, in theory, could make it more. But I would like to make this to be equivalent to the Tour de France," he said.

Sounds like to me Trump has already worked through the model to de-throne the TDF as the greatest bicycle race in the world. Maybe Adams should get "the Donald" on the phone ASAP.

https://www.businessinsider.com/tour-de-trump-bike-race-atlantic-city-history-photos?op=1

 

[nedhill]

Attached is some data that one may find interesting.


2022 Calendar - Location of One-day races (1.1, 1.Pro, 1.WT)

Belgium 36
France 28
Italy 19 (12 upcoming)
Spain 12 (0 upcoming)
Germany, Netherlands 4
Canada 2
Switzerland, US, Japan - 1
Australia, Norway, Denmark, UK - 0

Separately - The results of 2021 were reviewed (across all the 1.1 and 1.Pro races)

• French Teams won 72% of the French races and 63% of the top three were from French Teams
• Belgium Teams won 72% of the Belgium races and 61% of the top three were from Belgium teams

• Italy - Italian riders were about 50% of the top 10 (teams were insignificant)
• Spain - Spanish teams got 20% of the top 3, and 30% of the top 10 were Spanish riders.

This data was sourced from PCS.