The UCI announced the allocation of 15 Women’s WorldTour licences for the 2024-2025 seasons. AG Insurance-Soudal QuickStep and Ceratizit-WNT Pro Cycling move up to the top tier for the first time.
The UCI also confirmed that the current 18 men’s WorldTour teams have been given licences for 2024, with 16 men’s ProTeams also awarded licences. These include Israel-Premier Tech, Lotto Dstny and Uno-X. The only new men’s ProTeam for 2024 is the TDT-Unibet team created by Bas Tietema and his friends after a year at Continental level.
Based on the 2023 team rankings, Israel-Premier Tech and Lotto Dstny are automatically invited to all UCI WorldTour events for the 2024 season, while Uno-X are automatically invited to all the UCI WorldTour one-day races. The other ProTeams will have to contend for wild card invitations to the 2024 WorldTour races.
A total of 16 women’s teams applied for the 15 Women’s WorldTour spots available, leaving Laboral Kutxa-Fundación Euskadi for another season at the Continental level, subject to the agreement of their Spanish cycling federation.
Of the three Continental squads which applied for the two available licences, Ceratizit-WNT performed the best of the trio this past season, finishing 11th overall in the UCI team ranking, and AG Insurance in 13th. The Basque team was ranked 25th last year.
Two slots opened for 2024 when several teams did not apply to continue at the top level, one of which was the recently-folded EF Education-TIBCO-SVB. Then Jayco AlUla and Liv-TeqFind merged to form Liv-AlUla-Jayco, creating a second opening.
For Ceratizit-WNT, it has been 10 years in the making for the squad.
“We are proud of the team’s growth and achievements over the last decade, and we’re excited to be starting the next part of our story. We’re thrilled to announce that we start our 10th year in the peloton as part of the UCI Women’s WorldTour,” the German-based team posted to social media after the UCI announcement on Tuesday.
“In 2018, we started with a solid foundation and the underlying thoughts of helping women’s cycling to grow. Now it is time to put the roof on and give young riders opportunities to grow at their own pace. We are ready for the next step, we are ready for the World Tour,” was the celebratory post made by AG Insurance-Soudal QuickStep.
Four of the returning WorldTour squads will race under different names in the new year – Jumbo-Visma women now Team Visma-Lease a Bike, Israel-Premier Tech Roland just…
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