Earlier today we reported on the latest UCI’s Men’s Downhill rankings, which show that America’s Luca Shaw has now moved up to second overall in the Men’s Downhill rankings in the UCI.
In revisiting the UCI’s website, we also saw that two U.S. companies top the team rankings in the UCI for cross-country racing and downhill racing. Those teams are Specialized in XC racing, and Santa Cruz in downhill racing.
Most of the race categories are topped by racers from other countries, with France, Switzerland and Italy looking like they have most success in mountain biking.
The UCI rankings page is a little confusing if you’re not used to it. You have to scroll down to find the graphics and the rankings. When you find a category that you want to examine, you can click on the top rider in the category, and it will open up the full list of riders.
Here are some of the points leaders in the many categories shared on the UCI Rankings page:
If you want to see the full UCI rankings for one of the groups, you just click on one of the blue headlines with the word “Ranking” in it, and you’ll open the full ranking list for that category.
For example, here are the top ten riders in the Elite Men’s Cross-country Ranking list:
Just out of curiosity, we also checked out the last people in the Elite Men’s Cross-country rankings, which lists 1612 riders, and we found these riders at the bottom of the list:
They may be at the bottom of the list, but at least they’re on there.
If you want to check out a favorite rider’s current points ranking, you can go to the UCI Rankings list for their race category and go through the list, looking for the person. We would guess that the riders themselves would be the ones who would be most likely to do that. We don’t know how many other people would want to take the time to go through a list of over a thousand riders, looking for one name.
While we were checking out the Men’s Cross-country Rankings we spotted the name of Nino Schurter, who is currently ranked in 40th place.
Since Nino quit racing cross-country mountain bikes about six months ago, we expect that he’ll keep dropping farther down the list until at least a year has passed since his last XC race. After that, he probably won’t appear on the list again unless he competes in another XC race and earns some more UCI cross-country points.
We don’t know how much it costs to support an international team of riders and have them compete all over the world in order to get the team to the top of the UCI points rankings. As we recall, Nino Schurter was said to be earning around a million dollars a year a few years ago, when he was the top rider in the world, and several other top riders were reportedly making around $500,000 a year for racing downhill and cross-country, so we’d guess that it must cost close to five or ten million dollars a year to finance a team that has a good shot at being the top team in the world.
Here’s the link to the full UCI rankings for mountain bike competition: