EF Education-EasyPost head sports director Charly Wegelius has predicted that the fight for ranking points to remain in the UCI WorldTour will start immediately, in January 2023, after teams became acutely aware of the danger of WorldTour relegation.
EF Education-EasyPost was among the teams to stay in the top-ranked 18 teams at the end of the 2022 season, satisfying the sporting criteria to obtain a WorldTour licence for 2023-2025. Lotto Soudal and Israel- Premier Tech are set to be relegated to ProTeam status, while Alpecin-Deceuninck and Arkea-Samsic scored enough points to step up to the WorldTour.
Now the battle begins to score points during the next three seasons to obtain a licence for 2026. Wegelius says that many of the WorldTour teams, including his own, have learned a vital lesson about the importance of scoring points.
“It’s clearly something that we’re happy to have got through in a positive way, but the clock starts again on January 1st,” Wegelius told Cyclingnews last week.
“Another three year cycle starts, so the points will count until the next licence application round.”
“I think quite a few teams got spooked this year. And our situation and those of other teams shows that if you have a rough patch in the wrong part of the season or you have a lean year because of injuries to key riders, it could quite quickly slide in the wrong direction.”
Wegelius argued that the battle for UCI points could affect teams’ race strategy and not just in the short-term as happened in 2022. He claimed that even if EF Education-EasyPost had no intention of altering its general race philosophy, the events of this season showed the UCI points battle was now an element that mattered, right from January 1st.
“I’d love to see the team stay true to itself, of racing the way we’ve always raced and what we’ve always tried to do regardless of the points. Chasing points is not always the most entertaining way of racing, by a long shot,” he suggested.
“But it’s obviously something we have to keep chipping away at and from now on I think everybody will be at that.”
Wegelius admitted there was no escaping the points battle, given the risks of ignoring it. As he put it: “the cat is out of the bag”.
“Obviously, it remains to be seen if the teams are going to approach that question with the same intensity as they did over the last months of the 2022 season.”
“Because there are other things that push teams in other directions, be it…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at CyclingNews RSS Feed…