The final World Rankings are now official, with the UCI publishing the team standings for the 2022 season to complete the 2020-2022 Team Rankings. What has been suspected for several weeks now can be confirmed: Alpecin-Deceuninck and Arkéa-Samsic have satisfied the sporting criteria towards their aim of joining the 2023-2025 UCI WorldTour, while Lotto Soudal and Israel-Premier Tech have not.
All teams still must meet the other criteria in terms of finances, administration, ethics and organisation, and the UCI’s final decisions to award the WorldTour licences for the next three seasons will be made later this year.
In this final edition of the “relegation watch” for 2022, we follow the explanation of the UCI WorldTour points system and weeks of speculation about who will be promoted and which team will miss out on the next three years in the WorldTour with a look at how the promotees made it and how the demotees missed it.
The tortoise and the hare
The two promotees, Alpecin-Deceuninck and Arkéa-Samsic, made the rankings at different paces, the former rocketing from nowhere in 2018 to being one of the top 10 teams by 2022 while the latter have kept steadily on the throttle in a gradual ascent.
Alpecin-Deceuninck’s explosive growth came in large part thanks to the results and prodigious talent of Mathieu van der Poel but the team has also benefited greatly from the vision, ambition and shrewd dealings of Christophe and Philip Roodhooft. The team started as a Continental outfit and cyclo-cross team, with Niels Albert the first big name in the squad.
Van der Poel’s older brother David was the first to join in 2011, with Mathieu joining the next year when the team raced as BKCP-Powerplus. They gained Beobank and Corendon as title sponsors in 2016. When Van der Poel finally decided to turn his focus to the road after his hugely successful years in cyclo-cross, the team stepped up to the ProTeam level in 2019 and secured wildcard invitations for the team to do the Classics.
That first year, Van der Poel finished 4th in Gent-Wevelgem and Tour of Flanders, won De Brabantse Pijl and the Amstel Gold Race and set the team up for their successful 2020-2022 ranking. Since then, top scorers have included Jasper Philipsen, Tim Merlier, Driers De Bondt, Stefano Oldani and Jay Vine – all Grand Tour stage winners – in an outfit with as much if not more depth than some WorldTeams.
Arkéa-Samsic’s rise to the WorldTour was less stratospheric than Alpecin-Deceuninck’s but was…
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