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The 2023 Men's and Women's WorldTour is a wrap and Cyclingnews dug deep into the data, pulling out a wide variety of statistics, notes and oddball facts.
First, let's get to the basic stats of which teams and riders were the most successful before digging deeper into the data from the season.
We'll start with the UCI's World Rankings. The individual rankings are based on a rolling 12-month window of results, with riders earning points for everything from stage or one-day race finishes, overall classifications of stage races, leading a stage race, and for Grand Tours, winning the points or mountains classification. It also includes national, continental, and world championships and regional games.
There are also team rankings which, for men, are based on each team's top 20 scoring riders, and for women are based on each team's top 8 riders.
With wide-ranging success from the Tour of Flanders, Amstel Gold Race and Flèche Wallonne and Il Lombardia to podiums at the Tour de France and Worlds, Tadej Pogačar topped the men's individual rankings.
Demi Vollering and her SD Worx teammates wrote the definition of the word dominance in 2023. Vollering walked away with the most individual wins and points after hardly putting a foot wrong all year.
Team rankings
We focused on the top 22 teams in the men's World Rankings - these are the teams most likely to be seeking a place in the WorldTour in the next promotion/relegation round at the end of 2025 - and the top 18 women's teams, most of which are seeking WorldTour status in 2024.
UAE Team Emirates topped the UCI World Rankings for teams in 2023, scoring a massive 30,958 points. They finished ahead of Jumbo-Visma, who won the Tour de France, Giro d'Italia and swept the podium in the Vuelta a España, largely due to Pogačar's victories in the Monuments and podiums at the Tour de France and UCI Road World Championships. Soudal-Quickstep were the next best with 18,698.
This season represented the first year of the three-year UCI promotion/relegation cycle for men, and a couple of teams will have grave concerns about their future, being outside the top 18 teams and not meeting the sporting requirement to remain in the WorldTour in 2026 so far.
Astana Qazaqstan finished a dismal 20th and are almost 2,000 points adrift of Team dsm-firmenich, who are in 18th. Arkéa-Samsic didn't fare much better, earning only 185 points more.
Currently ProTeams after being relegated, Lotto-Dstny and Israel-Premier Tech can feel quite a bit more confident after landing firmly inside the top 16. They will earn automatic entry into the WorldTour races next season. Uno-X were the next-best ProTeam and will be automatically invited to WorldTour one-day races in 2024.
This season was the end of the promotion/relegation cycle for the Women's WorldTour, and there are 18 applicants for 15 Women's WorldTour licences available for the 2024 and 2025 seasons.
This is the first season that the women's teams have faced a relegation system as the sport governing body introduced a new 'sporting' requirement, which adds together each team's UCI points across the 2022 and 2023 seasons. This new points requirement will be taken into consideration alongside the other four criteria: administrative, ethical, financial, and organisational.
Because of the demise of the EF Education-Tibco-SVB team and the merger between Liv Racing Teqfind and Team Jayco-Alula, all of the teams currently in the top tier should be able to remain put.
AG Soudal-Insurance-Quickstep should join the WorldTour along with Ceratizit-WNT. Cofidis, along with most of the other lower-ranked teams, did not opt to apply. The Basque Laboral Kutxa-Fundacion Euskadi team applied but are well outside the top 15 teams.
Individual Rankings
Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates) dominated the men's individual rankings - a 12-month rolling window of points gained. He earned 7,695.86 points. Tour de France winner Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo-Visma) was next with 6,307, and Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-Quickstep) third with 5,631.71.
Demi Vollering (SD Worx) was equally dominant, taking home 6,038.86 points with second placed teammate, World Champion Lotte Kopecky earning 4,367. Marlen Reusser and Lorena Wiebes made it an SD Worx sweep of the top four spots, with Annemiek van Vleuten the best non-SD Worx rider in fifth.
Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) brought home the most wins in 2023 at 19. The Belgian's four Tour de France stages and the green jersey were the most prestigious, but he also claimed the Classic Brugge-De Panne and Scheldeprijs, among other fine results.
Pogačar was next with 17 wins, rounding out the individual winner's podium. Primož Roglič and Vingegaard claimed 15.
Vollering won the most in the women's peloton with 17, Kopecky claimed 14 wins including the coveted rainbow jersey in Glasgow, and Charlotte Kool nudged Lorena Wiebes off the podium, getting one more victory than the Dutch rider at 13.
Jumbo-Visma won the most as a team with 66 victories, Soudal-Quickstep had 58, and UAE Team Emirates 57.
SD Worx dominated the women's season with 60 wins, FDJ-Suez were next at 19 and Movistar Team at 18.
Oddball facts
In 2023, the riders of the top 22 teams raced an average of 57 race days, with some of them competing across many more. The women's top 18 teams raced an average of 36 days. Cyclingnews ranked riders based on points earned per days raced to put a quality figure on each rider's season.
The world's top ranked rider Pogačar only raced 48, making his racing days the highest quality at more than 160 points per day. Second-ranked Jonas Vingegaard gained an average of 95.5 points per day.
Wout van Aert, racing 51 days, had the third-highest quality factor at 93.3 points per race day, and Mathieu van der Poel earned 92.5 average over 45 days.
Of the results that factored into each team's rankings, Vingegaard had the highest average finishing position at 2.7 and the most results earning points - 64 different finishes from stages, GC, wearing the maillot jaune etc. Vingegaard only had a handful of finishes outside the points, mainly on sprint stages at Paris-Nice, Itzulia Basque Country, the Criterium du Dauphiné, Tour de France and Vuelta a España.
Remco Evenepoel was next with 56 results and an average rank of 3.375.
Demi Vollering, Lotte Kopecky, and Puck Pieterse had the highest quality seasons in the women's peloton. Vollering raced 46 days and earned an average of 131.6 points per day. Kopecky was not far behind with 129 points average across her 34 days of racing.
Pieterse made a very brief road appearance before turning to mountain bike racing, and her fifth place in Strade Bianche was worth 180 points.
Lanterne Rouge
The domestiques of the peloton work in the shadows of the star riders, often competing in many more races than a rider like Pogačar or Vingegaard. They're called into service to fill out rosters for the sick or injured and to support leaders. Their job isn't to score points but to bury themselves for the riders that do.
It can look fruitless to race all season and barely score a point, but it's a badge of honour. Larry Warbasse wins the Lanterne Rouge prize for the 2023 season.
Warbasse completed 87 race days, and the most kilometres of racing at 13,787 (according to FirstCycling.com) - second only to Luis Léon Sanchez (Astana), who raced 88 days. During that time Warbasse only accumulated 80 points, but helped his team to 17th place in the UCI rankings.
In the women's peloton, Elizabeth Stannard (Israel-Premier Tech Roland) raced 58 days and earned just 112 points, her hard work not counting directly toward the team's rankings, making her the women's Lanterne Rouge.
Claire Steels and Barbara Malcotti raced the most days with 63 but earned enough points to make their team's top 8.
Penalties
Riders are penalized UCI points for a variety of rule violations, for anything as innocuous as tossing their bidons and trash outside designated zones to the far more egregious endangering fellow riders. Intermarché-Circus-Wanty were penalized the most on the men's side, while FDJ-Suez were docked the most points in the women's peloton.
Fair play award:
AG2R Citroën - the only team of the top 22 to go the entire season without a penalty. The women's peloton was much better behaved and had 13 of the 18 top teams go without penalties.
Red cards:
Niccolo Bonifazio got the most penalties in 2023, 100 of which came from an incident at the Giro d'Italia for "improper conduct or behaviour that is indecent and that endangers others (directed at a rider)" and 25 points for tossing a bidon.
On the women's side, FDJ-Suez had 70 penalty points, 55 of which came from Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig.
Bad boy team:
Not considering Bonifazio, who brought Intermarché-Circus-Wanty's penalty tally from 100 points to 225, the Ineos Grenadiers were the team that flouted the rules the most, racking up 190 points from five different riders: Tom Pidcock lost 50 points, Filippo Ganna 40 and Egan Bernal, Jonathan Castroviejo, Magnus Sheffield and Geraint Thomas all were docked 25 for various minor offences.
Costliest penalty:
On stage 16 of the Giro d'Italia, Marius Mayrhofer (Team dsm-firmenich) ran afoul of the UCI's rules on littering, dropping his waste outside of the designated zone. That offence cost him 25 UCI points - which doesn't seem like a lot until you consider that the penalty dropped his team behind AG2R Citroën into 18th place, putting them closer to the relegation zone.
WorldTour outlook
The UCI expanded the World Ranking team classification to the top 20 riders' points after the last relegation round in 2022 after teams complained the system too heavily weighted the one-day races, among other complaints.
Cyclingnews gathered all of the riders' results and calculated their points from this year as if the 2020-2022 points system was still in place.
The end result was the top 18 did not change, the same four teams were at the bottom of the rankings, but the order changed significantly.
Under the old rules, Jumbo-Visma would have been the top team but UAE Team Emirates got a boost under the new rules thanks largely to Tadej Pogačar's supreme performance in the Monuments, which now are worth 300 more points for the win compared with last year.
The team that benefitted the most, however, was Bahrain-Victorious, who put almost all of their efforts into WorldTour races, more specifically the Grand Tours. The team gained a whopping 85% of their points from the WorldTour, about half of those came in the Grand Tours.
Those races had a significant boost in point-earning power compared with the Pro Series, championships and lower-ranked races whose point values didn't change at all. Bahrain Victorious ended up sixth this year but would have been ninth under the old rules.
The team that lost the most under the change was Cofidis, who would have been 11th under the old rules, ahead of Bora-Hansgrohe, Jayco-Alula, Movistar and Intermarché but ended up in 15th, mainly due to their results at the ProSeries and x.1 races being a relatively larger portion of their palmares for the year and worth more in the old system.
Transfer impact
The move of Primož Roglič from Jumbo-Visma to Bora-Hansgrohe was one of the biggest transfers of the year and will have a big impact on the rankings next season, if his record holds or improves.
Roglič earned 5,604 points and if the points transferred with him (they don't), his total would move Bora-Hansgrohe into fourth in the team rankings ahead of Soudal-Quickstep and Ineos Grenadiers.
However, since Jumbo-Visma were so far above Soudal-Quickstep, the departure of Roglič wouldn't have affected their standing.
It's too soon to say how the already announced transfers will impact the ranking dynamics next year, as only a few teams have announced their final rosters.
Lidl-Trek have made a huge bid with their acquisition of 10 riders including Andrea Bagioli, Tao Geoghegan Hart, and Jonathan Milan. Their point tallies would have pushed Lidl-Trek into third in the rankings and could have a big impact in 2024.
Bahrain-Victorious, losing Mikel Landa to Ineos, and Groupama-FDJ with Thibaut Pinot's retirement, were the biggest transfer losers so far. Both would have been good for five lost spots in the team rankings.
Astana's signing of a dozen riders, most notably Davide Ballerini and Michael Mørkøv from Quickstep, Ide Schelling from Bora and Max Kanter from Movistar might be enough to lift them out of the relegation zone.
*per Procyclingstats.com
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