The past week of racing did not affect the rankings towards the 2023 UCI WorldTour, with the top teams fully focused on the Vuelta a España and not taking part in the only two races that had final scores tallied – Tour du Doubs and the Maryland Cycling Classic. But what has become increasingly clear is the stress and confusion over the new promotion/relegation system has teams on edge.
BikeExchange-Jayco director Matt White watched as his team’s high hopes for Maryland went up in smoke. The UCI only counts the points of the top 10 scorers from each team per season towards the 2020-2022 rankings that will decide which 18 squads remain in the WorldTour next year. When the breakaway went clear far outside the circuits in Baltimore, neither Dylan Groenewegen nor Michael Matthews made the move.
Although Alexandre Balmer finished ninth, his 40 points won’t count towards the team’s total. Nick Schultz’s 30 points for 11th will, which helped the team slightly in their quest to keep both Movistar and Lotto Soudal from overtaking them.
BikeExchange-Jayco, still 17th in the three-year rankings, have around 100 points (pending penalty deductions) over Movistar and almost 400 on Lotto Soudal, but they lost Vuelta a España contender Simon Yates due to COVID-19 and his potential haul of points evaporated with that lateral flow test.
The top rider on GC is Lawson Craddock, 92 minutes behind and unlikely to score more than a handful of points in Spain, while Movistar are likely to surge ahead if Enric Mas holds his podium position.
White told Cyclingnews in no uncertain terms that he disagrees with the UCI points system.
“I don’t agree with the system in general,” White told Cyclingnews before the Maryland Cycling Classic. “If there are 20 teams with the budget to join the WorldTour, why are we removing teams? If you look at the last 10 years, we’ve struggled to keep enough teams in the WorldTour, and for the first time that I can ever remember we’ve got 20 teams who have the budget to be a viable addition to the WorldTour. So why are we keeping teams out?”
The team are looking for Matthews or Groenewegen to score in the upcoming WorldTour one-day races in Québec and Montréal, but unlike a Grand Tour where riders can make up for a bad day or a crash, one-day races are both heavily weighted in the UCI points system and riders are subject to more misfortune. White thinks it’s unfair considering the amount of work that goes into a Grand Tour compared with a one-day race.
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