With the release of the World Championship schedule, we can finally calculate the most important stat on the UCI MTB tour; the Champagne budget.
Why Champagne?
The tradition goes way back to 1950 in car racing during the French Grand Prix at the Reims-Gueux circuit. This track was smack in the middle of Champagne country, near Reims, the unofficial capital of the world’s most famous sparkling wine.
When Juan Manuel Fangio won that race, he was awarded a bottle of Champagne from Moët & Chandon. Back then, drivers sipped it politely and that was that. But over time, things got messier.
Birth of the spray
The turning point happened in 1966 at Le Mans. Jo Siffert and Colin Davis had just won the Index of Performance class, and their victory magnum of Champagne had been sitting in the sun too long. The pressure built up and when the cork popped, Siffert accidentally doused everyone nearby.
The crowd loved it and apparently so did Ford’s Dan Gurney. The next year, after his win at Le Mans with A.J. Foyt, Gurney deliberately sprayed Champagne all over his team and anyone else within range. That moment sealed the deal, and the celebratory spray became tradition.
From then on the spraying of Champagne has cross-pollinated throughout a range of sports. Mountain biking was not immune to it.
2025 tour
The World Cup tour has a lot of races this year. The 2025 season unfolds over seven months, featuring 16 race weekends. There are 10 UCI cross-country and downhill World Cup events and seven UCI enduro World Cup rounds. The World Championships in Valais features eight more classes: enduro, e-enduro, eMTB, pumptrack, XCM, DH, XCC and XCO.
Pseudomathematics
With podiums often expanding to five riders these days (when and why did that happen?), we can assume that’s five bottles per podium. If there are 10 XC events that include both XCC and XCO, plus a women’s and men’s elite division, we can figure that’s 40 podiums at five bottles per podium. That’s 200 bottles of bubbly for XC. The DH class has another 10 events. If you add men and women’s classes you get 20 podiums with five people per podium for a total of 100 bottles for the DH. Now we add the enduro class. Seven events with men and women give us 14 podiums with five people each. That math adds up to 70 more bottles. That’s a total of 370 bottles for the World Cup. Adding in the World Championships we assume eight classes times two (for men and women) for 16 total podiums. Five times that is…
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