Re: Re:
PCT teams are for sure favoured by this reform, if you are in the top two you can ride all GTs and monuments if you want, it's like being WT without WT obligations.
But only Tour of California has such autoimposed rule, some other WT races has less than 20 teams but is for other reason, like logistical problems for Tour Down Under or political problem for Tour of Turkey.Koronin said:Nirvana said:It's a concatenation of decisions. Bugno asked to rise the minimum number of riders per team because riders felt that the teams were reducing that with the reduction of team sizes in the races, to allow more riders to have a proper program teams need all WT races mandatory, otherwise with 27/30 riders some teams couldn't guarantee a proper number of race days for all the riders but all the WT races mandatory for all WT teams reduce the number of WC for Procontinental teams so UCI was forced to guarantee the right to race the GT for the two best PCT teams and the monuments for the three best, if they wanted.
I don't think it's a big change for the sport, probably the cancellation of WT ranking, the new one day series and pro series are a way bigger change, the races left out of this two new series could easily end up lengthening the already very long list of disappeared races.
Thus making the Pro Conti title/license 100% worthless to most teams as many races won't even bother to give out wildcards because they have a cap of 18 teams to begin with and with this WT teams will CUT the number of continental races they go to thus having continental race organizers scrap races if they can't count on around 4-8 WT teams showing up for those races. If you are a team in a non traditional country the pro conti license won't mean anything to you. I can there being no US pro conti team at all within 2 years based on this because they won't get ANY WT events. I can see a lot more current pro conti teams dropping down to the Conti level because the Pro Conti license isn't worth it to them. I also see more teams and races folding due to this. This is going to hurt the sport as teams and races fold due to these specific rules. The races the WT teams don't want to be at, they definitely won't be sending riders to do anything more than get experience or train. It will then make those races much worse to watch because you will have teams that don't want to be there in the first place and you'll have a major lack of Pro Conti teams to spice things up to even no Pro Conti teams because some of those races have capped the number of teams they want at 18.
PCT teams are for sure favoured by this reform, if you are in the top two you can ride all GTs and monuments if you want, it's like being WT without WT obligations.