So when Arnaud De Lie won a stage of the Tour de Wallonie yesterday in Rochefort, the first thought of “ he’s won on his home roads, great result” was chased immediately with “ another handy 20 points“. Now we’re back to smaller races whose significance and existence is partly predicated on being part of the UCI calendar. Watching Houle, Cort or Matthews winning in the Tour just marked fine racing and a noble result, the points were a secondary consideration. EF Education, Lotto-Soudal and BikeExchange kept a clean sheet.
Movistar, Cofidis and DSM all lost 50 points during the Tour de France and Israel 25.
During the Tour Jumbo-Visma had 145 points subtracted, Ineos and UAE 100 each, in part because Jumbo-Visma and UAE didn’t appear at the signing-on podium day but it shows how big teams can afford professional fouls while the smaller teams facing relegation just dare not make a mistake. So Hugo Houle took 120 points for his stage win in Foix but as the screengrab above shows, he lost 25 points for littering, the Israel team’s only deduction. Points are won from results but can be deducted as well. Enric Mas was on his way to 11th place overall and 150 points before leaving the race and this will sting Movistar’s management who are sounding downbeat at the moment with a current sponsorship deal only in place until the end of next year. So a big result is all that counts although this does include a top-20 on GC. There are some crafty ways and means to get points during the season but not at the Tour de France where only the top-5 on a stage earn points (120, 50, 25, 15, 5) and on the GC a rider must finish 20th or higher to earn more than 50 points. You can see Lotto-Soudal’s red line is almost flat for July (Harm Vanhoucke did score for them in the Sibiu Tour) while Bike Exchange bound away from bother thanks to a bonzer bonanza.Īs the cliché goes, “the Tour is the Tour” and teams did their best this month to race without stressing too much about the points.
The chart above zooms in teams battling to avoid relegation. Low scorers among the World Tour teams were Movistar (170 points), Cofidis (110), Bahrain (55) and Lotto-Soudal (15).Arkéa-Samsic and Alpecin-Deceuninck both scored well, 480 points and 425 respectively.But BikeExchange-Jayco were fifth with 681 points, 21% their 2022 points haul thanks to Matthews and Groenewegen winning and placing Jumbo-Visma, UAE, Ineos and Groupama-FDJ scored the most points from the Tour de France, a match with their 1-2-3-4 overall.Lotto-Soudal and TotalEnergies would get wildcard invites to the grand tours next year.Lotto-Soudal and Israel-PremierTech face relegation No change to the promotion and relegation teams: Alpecin-Deceuninck and Arkéa-Samsic are both on course for promotion.You don’t need a spreadsheet to know which teams had a great Tour de France and which ones had a rough time but here’s a look at the latest UCI points situation and the data show BikeExchange-Jayco thrived.