The UCI announced their teams ranking for 2018 today leading to celebratory tweets from Astana who have managed to find their way into the top 15 places. Why is this the magic number?
UCI Women’s WorldTour events are open to both national teams and UCI women’s trade teams up to a maximum of 24 squads per event. For those teams battling for entry into the top tier of events, however, the crucial section of Rule 2.13.004 on Participation is:
“The first 15 UCI women’s teams in the first elite women’s classification by team published in the year of the event must be invited by organisers of UCI Women’s WorldTour events. This ranking is calculated on the second Sunday of January. This ranking is the only one used during the season for the invitation.”
Theoretically, an Australian championship result could make the difference between a team being outside the top 15 slots at the start of January and suddenly finding itself with a ticket to all the top tier events just a fortnight later.
The points scored by all the riders in a team are aggregated to give teams their rankings, and, not surprisingly, Boels-Dolmans, led by Anna van der Breggen (above) finished top, but by a smaller margin (61 points) than might be expected over Michelton-Scott thanks to Annemiek Van Vleuten’s 1521 points, with Sunweb not too far back in third.
These three squads form – by points rankings, at least – a clear top tier, and they hogged the top three places in 2017, too, albeit with Michelton-Scott and Sunweb swapping slots.
Cervelo-Bigla and Canyon-SRAM are tightly bound in fourth and fifth, Wiggle-High5 are something of an outlier in sixth and while they have big points coming in through Kirsten Wild and Lisa Brennauer, they lose the massive haul that the now-retired Emma Johansson offered them.
There is a significant drop to Waowdeals in seventh who lost Kasia Niewiadoma and her 999 points to Canyon-SRAM, enough to have placed them fourth if she’d stayed.
Generally, not a lot has changed from the 2017 ranking with the top 11 teams all retaining their places in 2018, even if some move up or down a place or two, and WM3 Pro Cycling have changed their name and sponsor to Waowdeals Pro Cycling.
Hitec are now 12th, whereas last year’s 12th-placed squad United HealthCare fall away to 20th. Astana climb up to 13th, Virtu Cycling move up to 14th as Tibco-Silicon Valley drop to 18th, and the British Trek-Drops squad who were 15th last year (as Drops) are replaced by Valcar PBM. The Italians rocket up from 28th last season, thanks to consistent points scoring by new signing Maria Giulia Confalonieri who comes over from the defunct Lensworld-Kuota team.
There is a little wiggle room with the invites, as teams can use discretion. It might be that a race that is logistically and financially challenging to participate in will see a top-15 team opt out offering another team a slot. But any race organiser receiving a ‘Yes, please’ from an invited team has to accept them. Some big names will be reliant on invites, but it is impossible to imagine that Movistar, Lotto-Soudal Ladies and Trek-Drops will be short of races, and it will be fascinating to see how Movistar perform in their debut season.
Sports directors will keep a watchful eye on where their riders place regardless of the event, if points are on offer. Where you or I might think finishing 15th or 35th isn’t going to make too much difference if a win is out of reach, there are points to be won all the way down to 40th in a final classification. The six points by which FDJ Nouvelle-Aquitaine Futuroscope finished clear of BTC City Ljubljana could have been overturned by a solitary eighth-place finish on a stage of a multi-day event for one of the Slovenian team’s riders. Among the top 15-ranked squads for 2018, there was no other gap so small, so such a calculation might not seem critical.
However, if the women’s sport continues to grow, and the commercial rewards that come with increased sponsor visibility hang tantalisingly at the finish line, each and every placing will be a scrap.