'They’ve destroyed cycling' - Bardiani-CSF-7 Saber boss gives scathing assessment of the UCI after Italian team unable to race Giro d’Italia in 2027

Veteran team boss Bruno Reverberi has called the UCI “incompetent” after his Bardiani-CSF-7 Saber team finished outside of the UCI’s top-30 rankings in 2026, making them ineligible to race a Grand Tour next season.

Reverberi said that it is likely that Bardiani-CSF-7 Saber will shutter due to the current regulations, which he says is making teams at the ProTeam level increasingly fragile, with no guarantees of invitation to the world’s biggest races.

The long-standing team has raced every edition of the Giro d’Italia since 1982 and is well known for its attacking style. Bardiani-CSF-7 Saber has been a fruitful breeding ground for Italian talent over the years, including the team’s last Giro stage-winner, Giulio Ciccone, who won in Sestola in 2016. Sonny Colbrelli and Giulio Pellizzarri are two other names to have emerged through this system.

The team has also been involved in several doping scandals over the years, with the likes of Emanuele Sella and Stefano Pirazzi banned during their time on the team.

“Our project is to stop,” Reverberi told the TriCiclo Podcast. “How can you spend €5 million and not have the right to race? There is no future, and cycling has no future. We have already thought about closing in two years. In fact, we have taken four or five new riders and made them sign for only one year.”

“You don’t even have the courage to go to the sponsor and ask for money,” he said, despite signing a “multi-year agreement” with Uzbek clothing company 7 Saber at the start of this season.

Reverberi’s main charge towards the UCI is its points system, which he believes is encouraging teams to race for top-10s rather than chase glory in the breakaway.

It is perhaps the team’s reticence to play the game as other teams have done which left them languishing down the UCI points rankings, 121 below Euskaltel-Euskadi, who travelled to Algeria and Panama in the last weeks of the 2026 season in their search for points.

“Our way of racing was to break away,” he said. “Now you don’t even break away, because you try to keep the rider there to sprint for tenth place for those damned UCI points,” he said.

“The UCI is incompetent. They’ve destroyed cycling,” he concluded, suggesting that while the top of the sport explodes in its popularity and financial investment, the lower-level is breaking apart.

“We’ve reached a bit of a peak with Pogačar in some ways, but everything is falling apart underneath,” he said. “Cycling is disappearing, and nobody’s looking at it.”