A New Year, a new season and several news items to sift. We’ll start with Simon Yates and go via the Giro’s uncertain TV rights to Cofidis with more in-between.
Simon Yates has announced his sudden retirement. It’s so sudden that last week his team had him pose with other leaders to present their 2026 kit, something that would have been unlikely if they knew he was departing.
A year ago this blog’s Predictions for 2025 had rider retirements as an issue where rather than seeing riders racing on almost until they’re dropped and holding out for one more contract, many now have financial security and don’t fancy weighing their food. It’s all happened today so right now the exact motivation isn’t know.
This leaves a big vacancy at Visma-LAB where Yates was both a GC contender – the whisper around the Giro presentation he would go for the Vuelta this year – and invaluable help to Jonas Vingegaard in July. Having had a surplus of GC riders to the point where Cian Uijtdebroeks felt he had to break his contract to leave, the Dutch team now have a shortage. Indeed this might prompt more hesitation about Jonas Vingegaard going to the Giro given they have fewer resources. So plenty to come out in the coming days and an impact on the rest of the season.
Meanwhile Derek Gee-West (it’s Gee-West after marriage to Ruby West in November) has joined Lidl-Trek and we have the opposite scenario. An extra GC rider means they’re less dependent on Juan Ayuso, can play extra tactics and have cover for injuries. Having numbers like this is obviously a luxury few teams can afford – see Visma-LAB unloading Cian Uijtdebroeks – so it’s a sign of the now German squad’s credit line where they can have an extra rider at this level. It also means the litigation threat is over and the UCI’s arbitration panel settled the exit from IPT/NSN Cycling.
Can you guess the team from the accounts above? The French wording is a clue but it would have been hard even in the Christmas Quiz. It’s a screengrab from the Intermarché-Wanty team books from 2024. The entity behind the team tended to publish these every September or October but this time they appeared in December. You can imagine why they were not in a hurry to share with merger negotiations happening. The left column is 2024, the right is 2023 where the accounts were covered in more detail. Loyal readers will remember team had racked up debts in 2022 and 2023 and was promising to cut costs and balance the books by avoiding big name recruits and shrinking their race program too. The result? More losses alas, although down from €927k in 2023 to €595k but still in the wrong direction. The team has now merged with Lotto and we can see why: it had become financially unsustainable and surely had to merge to survive. The unknown part for now is what happens with the debt, written off by past sponsors or is Lotto now on the hook for this? Probably the former as the legal entity behind the merged team is Lotto and the Intermarché side has halted and is effectively an empty shell now.
Talking of financial woes Picnic-Post NL only have a World Tour licence for one year. In reality every team does as there’s an annual review. But the UCI decided to go beyond this and remark in their press release:
The UCI Licence Commission has decided to limit the duration of the licence to one year and to set conditions related to the financial criterion that must be met in order to permit its extension to the 2027 and 2028 seasons.
This implies the team only has sponsorship until the end of 2026. There’s time to renew but selling Oscar Onley to Ineos makes even more sense if the team won’t be able to command a price later this year.
Ruben Guerreiro has been dropped by Movistar. Normal, he was signed after some good results and did not deliver much. But in parting newspaper AS mentions issues with his Whereabouts, the anti-doping requirement to log a location in order to be tested each day. This is a bit sneaky, if he’s committed an offence then it’s for the UCI or other agencies to act (or even who over is giving the info to tip-off the testers). If not then it’s a private matter, plenty of athletes have a missed moment here or there.
Staying with riders dropped by Spanish teams, Francisco Galván has retired aged 27. He rode Kern Pharma last year and was their sixth best scorer which matters for team that needs to stay in the UCI top-30 in order to qualify for a Vuelta wildcard and they made it in 29th place. The reason he was dropped was he was filmed riding downhill and slaloming between divider posts and across solid white road markings, in breach of traffic rules and all to spice up his Instagram account where he’d been pulling stunts on his bike for some time as well as scoring UCI points. It’s an example of algorithmic vassalage and it’s cost him his job.
Now to other apps and above is an ad in L’Equipe newspaper yesterday where you can get L’Equipe and Eurosport bundled bungled together, and at just €5.99 a month. Nice. But notice anything else? Only the Tour and Vuelta are there for cycling. No Giro. An omission to leave space for tennis and the winter Olympics logos? Perhaps. But in 2020 Warner Bros-Discovery-Eurosport bought the international rights to the Giro for 2021 to 2025. That deal has expired and there’s no news on an extension or renewal.
Indeed recently Sportbusiness.com reported that Iris Media had been mandated to go and sell the rights. Is there a buyer yet? It could well be Eurosport or whatever it’s called this year but Iris has brokered many deals with the streaming platform DAZN (“da zone”) so there’s a good chance the Giro and RCS’s portfolio of races goes there too. Which might explain why Eurosport isn’t touting the race. Or not, but we’ll see.
Finally talking of schedules and Italian races, Cofidis won’t be riding the Giro. The race didn’t appear on the team’s schedule on their website, now the website cyclingpro.com confirms this. As they’re outside the World Tour they’re not obliged to race but have an automatic invite which they’ve elected not to take. They’re a French team but Cofidis the money lender has business interests in Italy so it’s a minor surprise.
Will another team take their place? It’s not obvious as the rule (2.1.007 bis) states Cofidis gets an invitation but if they decline then “the organiser may issue an additional wild card” but it’s not obligatory. Indeed with only teams among the top-30 on the UCI rankings available to be invited this means the likes of Kern and Burgos are eligible but do they want to race when the Giro isn’t on TV in Spain? Ditto Total Energies in France. Rose Rockets could but they’re also aiming for a Tour start, is two grand tours too much too soon? The point here is that there are few teams to spare these days.