The latest UCI rankings came out today, and they show a couple of big changes in the men’s and women’s rankings.
America’s Christopher Blevins, who was the 2025 World Cup series champion, and who was ranked third in the UCI last week, has now dropped from third to sixth place in the latest Elite Men’s Cross-Country rankings. Meanwhile, Sweden’s Jenny Rissveds has jumped up one place to the top spot in the Elite Women’s rankings, knocking New Zealand’s Samara Maxwell down to second place.
The UCI points rankings change every Tuesday, and they reflect the total number of UCI points earned by all the racers at all the UCI races all over the world in the past 52 weeks.
Here are the latest rankings, as shown on the UCI website:
Farther down the rankings, America’s Riley Amos, who placed 7th in the 2024 Olympic mountain bike race, has moved up two places to 28th place in the latest rankings:
Farther down the list, we see that Nino Schurter has dropped from 40th to 55th in the new rankings:
America’s Bjorn Riley has moved up two places to 63rd in the overall Elite Men’s rankings:
Here are the new Elite Women’s rankings:
Savilia Blunk is the top American in the latest rankings, now ranking eighth, after dropping one place this week.
The first World Cup Cross-Country race of this year will be taking place in the first weekend of May, which is only three and a half weeks away.
One thing that we’ve noticed in the past is that riders who have to travel across a lot of time zones to compete in a race tend to be at a disadvantage if they don’t get to the race location early enough to get acclimated to the time change.
As we write this, it’s currently 9:15 AM in Los Angeles, California; while it’s 6:15 PM in Paris, France; and it’s 1:15 AM in Seoul, South Korea.
We don’t know who will face the bigger disadvantage in South Korea, the Americans or the Europeans.
We expect that the riders from Australia and New Zealand will have the biggest advantage, since their time zones are only one hour different from Korea’s time zones.
In reading about Paola Pezzo’s battle to win the first Olympic gold medal in mountain biking, in 1996, when that first Olympic race was held in Atlanta, Georgia, we recently read that Paola Pezzo changed her training schedule at home in Italy so that she was training at or around midnight in Italy, so that her body would be better adjusted to the demands of the change to a different time zone in Atlanta.
One of the guidelines that we’ve heard in the past is that it takes one full day to adjust to a one-hour time change from changing time zones, and it takes 8 days to adjust to an eight hour changes in time zones.
“After having flown from California to Europe to cover the BMX World Championships in Norway in the late 1980s,” MBA’s John Ker recalls, ” I know from experience what it’s like to try to adjust to an eight- or nine-hour time change.
“I remember arriving at my hotel in Norway at 4 PM in the afternoon and feeling like I needed to lie down to take a short nap before dinner. I slept like a rock and woke up eight hours later, at midnight in Norway, ready to jump out of bed and start my day. I was wide awake, and I knew I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I got up and started writing my article for BMX Plus! Magazine.
“I then stayed wide awake for the next 16 hours, until 4 PM, when I suddenly started feeling very sleepy again, feeling like I needed to go to bed again, even though I was at the World Championship race course, covering the BMX racing that was going on. Fortunately, I was able to force myself to stay awake until I could get back to my hotel, eat some dinner, and go back to bed as early as I could. I remember that my internal time clock was still a few hours off for the rest of the trip.”
It can be very hard to adjust to major time changes, so we hope that the American XC racers will go to Korea, Japan, Australia, or New Zealand before the race in order to get adjusted to the time change the riders will face in Korea. We would suggest they go to one of those places at least a week before next month’s Korean World Cup race if they want to be able to adjust to the time change before racing in Korea.
In looking over the home countries of the top riders in the UCI, we’d guess that Samara Maxwell will have the best shot among the women in the race, since she’s from New Zealand and will have one of the smallest time changes when it’s time for her to race. We’re not sure who will have the best shot among the men.