Relegation watch: Alpecin-Deceuninck, Arkéa-Samsic meet WorldTour standards

The final World Rankings are now official, with the UCI publishing the team standings for the 2022 season to complete the 2020-2022 Team Rankings. What has been suspected for several weeks now can be confirmed: Alpecin-Deceuninck and Arkéa-Samsic have satisfied the sporting criteria towards their aim of joining the 2023-2025 UCI WorldTour, while Lotto Soudal and Israel-Premier Tech have not.

All teams still must meet the other criteria in terms of finances, administration, ethics and organisation, and the UCI's final decisions to award the WorldTour licences for the next three seasons will be made later this year.

In this final edition of the "relegation watch" for 2022, we follow the explanation of the UCI WorldTour points system and weeks of speculation about who will be promoted and which team will miss out on the next three years in the WorldTour with a look at how the promotees made it and how the demotees missed it.

The tortoise and the hare

The two promotees, Alpecin-Deceuninck and Arkéa-Samsic, made the rankings at different paces, the former rocketing from nowhere in 2018 to being one of the top 10 teams by 2022 while the latter have kept steadily on the throttle in a gradual ascent.

Alpecin-Deceuninck's explosive growth came in large part thanks to the results and prodigious talent of Mathieu van der Poel but the team has also benefited greatly from the vision, ambition and shrewd dealings of Christophe and Philip Roodhooft. The team started as a Continental outfit and cyclo-cross team, with Niels Albert the first big name in the squad.

Van der Poel's older brother David was the first to join in 2011, with Mathieu joining the next year when the team raced as BKCP-Powerplus. They gained Beobank and Corendon as title sponsors in 2016. When Van der Poel finally decided to turn his focus to the road after his hugely successful years in cyclo-cross, the team stepped up to the ProTeam level in 2019 and secured wildcard invitations for the team to do the Classics.

That first year, Van der Poel finished 4th in Gent-Wevelgem and Tour of Flanders, won De Brabantse Pijl and the Amstel Gold Race and set the team up for their successful 2020-2022 ranking. Since then, top scorers have included Jasper Philipsen, Tim Merlier, Driers De Bondt, Stefano Oldani and Jay Vine - all Grand Tour stage winners - in an outfit with as much if not more depth than some WorldTeams.

Arkéa-Samsic's rise to the WorldTour was less stratospheric than Alpecin-Deceuninck's but was built on a solid foundation of 12 years in the ProTeam ranks. Starting as Bretagne-Schuller in 2011, the team has long been a wildcard team in the Tour de France. Warren Barguil joined from Team Sunweb in 2018 as the team began to raise its ambitions.

The new UCI rules post-WorldTour reforms that awarded automatic invitations to the top ProTeams helped them somewhat but their main Grand Tour focus stayed on the Tour de France, and they only added the Vuelta a España to their calendar for the first time in 2022. They reportedly declined an opportunity to race the Giro d'Italia, preferring to scrape points in lower-level races during May to secure enough points toward the sporting criteria.

The effort paid off, not helped by the disqualification of Nairo Quintana's points from the Tour de France. Instead, it was new recruit Hugo Hofstetter, brought on from Israel this year, who topped the points tally with a strong early season Classics campaign and a victory in the Tro-Bro Léon. Barguil and Quintana were also major contributors to their total.

Relegated teams and DNQs

Teams in yellow, Alpecin-Deceuninck and Arkéa-Samsic, will be promoted. Teams in green - Lotto Soudal and TotalEnergies - finished as the top teams next to the WorldTour/promoted teams, while Uno-X and Israel-PremierTech will not earn automatic invitations.

On the sadder side of the rankings, the promotion/relegation system landed hard on two teams, Lotto Soudal and Israel-Premier Tech, while TotalEnergies' and Uno-X Pro Cycling's ambitions to move up to the WorldTour did not pan out.

The two relegated WorldTeams had very different seasons, with Lotto Soudal charging up the annual rankings and finishing the year in 14th overall, while Israel-Premier Tech struggled in 19th in 2022.

Lotto Soudal's strong showing did not manage to make up for their poor showings in the past two seasons, and Arkéa-Samsic in 18th place held an unassailable 995-point margin ahead of the Belgian team in the final three-year standings.

Lotto Soudal have committed to continuing as a ProTeam, and - thanks in large part to their young sprinter Arnaud De Lie - if they do, they will enter as the top-ranked ProTeam of 2022, a designation that earns automatic invitations to GrandTours and other major WorldTour races.

Israel-Premier Tech's future is less certain amid owner Sylvan Adams' bluster about suing the UCI. 

The team made their way into the WorldTour in 2020 by buying out Katusha's management company after Katusha lost Alpecin and bike sponsor Canyon to Mathieu van der Poel's team. 

Israel-Premier Tech struggled to prove themselves competitive with the top WorldTeams. They finished 20th in 2020 before having a more solid season last year with top results from Dan Martin, who subsequently retired, Michael Woods, Hugo Hofstetter, and Alessandro De Marchi.

But the team was hit hard by COVID-19 this year and several key riders had rough seasons. Chris Froome was nowhere near the team's top 10 scoring riders and did not contribute to their three-year points tally. His third place on the Alpe d'Huez stage of the Tour de France was the first glimmer of promise that his former glory might return, but more results never materialised.

The team's desperate mid-season hiring of Dylan Teuns away from Bahrain Victorious did not pay off, as he too didn't make the top 10 and his points from the GP de Wallonie and Tour of Britain didn't factor in.

Whether the team will continue as a ProTeam is uncertain, although the news that Israel-Premier Tech will become the title sponsor for a women's WorldTeam next season seems foreboding.

Two other teams intended to apply for WorldTour licences but have not made the sporting criteria. TotalEnergies' major investments in Peter Sagan and Daniel Oss this season didn't quite pay off, and they were never really in contention for promotion. Neither were Uno-X, who did not get enough race invitations to realistically overtake any of the top teams. The latter will rely on the arrival of Alexander Kristoff in 2023 to build a competitive roster for the next cycle.

TotalEnergies will benefit from the UCI rules for top ProTeams, however, as they're next in line after Lotto Soudal. They may not get automatic bids for the Grand Tours, but will get invitations to the Classics.

Big teams dominate, Cofidis and Intermarché surprise

Jumbo-Visma, QuickStep-AlphaVinyl, Ineos Grenadiers and UAE Team Emirates dominated the three-year rankings, earning double the points of some of the lower-ranked WorldTeams. Even QuickStep's poor start to 2022 had little effect - they were only sixth best this year even with Remco Evenepoel's victories in the Vuelta a España and World Championships.

The main movement within the mid-level WorldTeams came from Cofidis and Intermarché-Wanty-Gobert. The French team was predicted to be fighting the relegation zone all season but instead, they claimed 19 victories including a stage of the Vuelta with Jesus Herrada.

Guillaume Martin was Cofidis' best scoring rider, producing results throughout the season from one-day ProSeries race podiums like the Drôme Classic and Coppa Sabatini to WorldTour top 10s in Paris-Nice and Volta a Catalunya. Had he not been forced to leave the Tour de France after contracting COVID-19, he may have scored even higher.

The team relied on its depth, with solid hauls from Axel Zingle, Herrada, Benjamin Thomas, Simone Consonni, Ion Izagirre, Max Walscheid, Piet Allegaert, Bryan Coquard and Simon Geschke all helping to pull them way up from the danger zone into 14th in the three-year rankings.

Intermarché, the newest WorldTeam, were only in the WorldTour in 2021 and 2022, but after buying the licence from the CCC Team, who went under in the pandemic in 2020, they quickly established themselves as worthy of the top level of pro cycling.

Signing Alexander Kristoff was a shrewd move, and the Norwegian's huge haul from ProSeries races like the Scheldeprijs surely helped them move from 17th after 2021 to 10th. But it was Eritrean Biniam Girmay who provided the most excitement, with a historic victory in Gent-Wevelgem and a stage win in the Giro d'Italia, a podium in the GP de Québec and a win in Mallorca making him the team's next-best scorer.

The renaissance of riders like Louis Meintjes and Domenico Pozzovivo and reliable results from Quinten Hermans, Jan Hirt, Loïc Vliegen and Andrea Pasqualon, and the emergence of young sprinter Gerben Thijssen all contributed to the team's strong showing.

On the other end of the spectrum, Team DSM have faded from 5th in 2020 (largely due to Jai Hindley and Wilco Kelderman's Giro d'Italia podiums) to 11th in 2021, and down to 15th in the 2020-2022 rankings. Their 20th place this year has to be worrying the team as they head into the off-season.

Astana also should be worrying: they have struggled with their financial model of being supported by state investment interests, are losing Vincenzo Nibali to retirement and were a concerning 21st in the 2022 team rankings.

After briefly falling near the relegation zone, Movistar Team, BikeExchange-Jayco and EF Education-EasyPost pulled out all the stops, packing on results in the last weeks of the season.

Movistar closed with a win in Tour de Langkawi thanks to Ivan Sosa, EF-EasyPost took home the Japan Cup with Neilson Powless, while BikeExchange-Jayco relied on sprinter Dylan Groenewegen to shore up their total in the late-season one-day races.