It's no surprise that Tour de France and Giro d'Italia champion Tadej Pogačar and his team UAE Team Emirates sit atop the UCI World Rankings following the Slovenian's triumph in Nice on Sunday.
Pogačar has been the world's number one rider since 2021, with results such as two Grand Tour victories, six stage wins in each the Giro and the Tour, and victories in Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Strade Bianche and Il Lombardia padding out his current 12-month rolling tally of points.
Remco Evenepoel (Soudal-Quickstep) surged into second in the individual rankings, climbing ahead of Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease a Bike). Along with third place in the Tour de France, Evenepoel won stage 7 and three stages of last year's Vuelta a España and the UCI Road World Championships time trial to earn his spot atop the rankings.
Vingegaard lies third ahead of Jasper Philipsen and Mathieu van der Poel (both Alpecin-Deceuninck) after finishing second in the Tour de France and winning one stage.
Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) abandoned the Tour after two crashes but remains in the top 10 thanks to his overall win at the Critérium du Dauphiné. Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek), Aleksandr Vlasov (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe), Marc Hirschi (UAE Team Emirates) and Wout van Aert (Visma-Lease a Bike) round out the top 10.
2024 Individual Rankings
Team Rankings
UAE Team Emirates also sit atop the 2024 Team Rankings by a whopping 13,438 points ahead of Visma-Lease a Bike and Ineos Grenadiers.
Soudal-Quickstep, previously second at the end of the 2020-2022 rankings, are lagging behind as they refocus on building a Grand Tour squad for Evenepoel and losing much of their Classics dominance. They're sixth this year after the Tour de France, up from eighth and fourth in the 2023-2024 standings.
Lidl-Trek have made great strides since finishing ninth in the last round of promotion/relegation. They're fourth this year and fifth-best over two seasons.
Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale have been a major success story, too. The French team were 18th last season but rallied this year to fifth, bringing them to 11th in the two-year standings.
The bigger battle, however, is happening at the other end of the rankings at the dreaded 'relegation zone'.
The next round of promotion/relegation for the UCI WorldTour will come at the end of the 2025 season.
Every three years, the teams must meet the sporting criteria of being in the top 18 of the three-year UCI Team Rankings, along with all the other financial, administrative and ethical criteria to get a WorldTour license.
Lotto Dstny and Israel-Premier Tech, who lost their WorldTour status at the end of 2022 because of this rule, are currently 9th and 10th, respectively, for the 2024 season and 9th and 13th in the combined points tally for 2023 and 2024.
The peloton are currently halfway through the battle for points toward the 2023-2025 rankings and so far, Astana Qazaqstan and Arkéa-B&B Hotels are in the most danger of relegation.
Astana are a distant 21st in both this year's and the two-year rankings, well below the top 18 needed to remain in the sport's top tier. The team from Kazakhstan are 3,364 points behind DSM-Firmenich-PostNL who are 18th in the 2023-2024 standings. Mark Cavendish's historic record-setting Tour de France stage win was worth just 210 points, for reference.
Uno-X, who are looking to move into the WorldTour, still have work to do toward that goal. They're 18th this year, a vast improvement on last year's 21st place. But, combined, their total brings them only to 20th, below the promotion line.
There is still plenty of time for teams to scramble to move up, but some teams are flirting with relegation, being consistently on the cusp of falling below 18th place.
Arkéa-B&B Hotels were the 18th team to make the WorldTour in 2022 but dropped to 19th in 2023 and haven't made up any ground for the two-year rankings. They're 1,554 points behind 18th place, held by Team DSM-Firmenich-PostNL.
Team DSM were 16th in the 2020-2022 rankings and dropped to 17th in 2023. So far this season, they're 19th, and combined, they're in 18th place but are 595 points shy of moving ahead of 17th-placed Cofidis and still with a comfortable advantage on Arkéa.
Cofidis, meanwhile, have a buffer of 2,061 points over Arkéa and lie in 17th over the past two years.
