At the start of the 2025 season, everyone in cycling had written off XDS Astana. They might have new funding from China and recruited heavily in the winter, but relegation from the WorldTour was deemed a near-certainty, with the Kazakh team sitting 4,720 UCI points adrift of Cofidis in the battle to be one of the 18 teams to be awarded a WorldTour licence for the 2026-2028 seasons. To reduce that gap, Astana would have to win, win, and win again, something they’ve not been very good at doing for a number of years – aside from that Mark Cavendish victory at the Tour de France last year.
But while everybody else was writing Alexander Vinokourov’s team off, the former Olympic champion and his staff were plotting the great escape, snapping up points-scoring riders like Diego Ulissi, Clément Champoussin and Aaron Gate, and hiring a data analyst to prepare a calendar that would take them to Australia, Asia, Africa and Europe in their relentless pursuit of chasing that golden WorldTour ticket. Remarkably, it appears to be working.
Just over three months into the 2025 campaign, only UAE Team Emirates-XRG and Lidl-Trek have scored more UCI points this season than XDS-Astana, and crucially, the team in blue have reduced their gap to the team in 18th place (now Picnic PostNL) to under 900 points. What once seemed unattainable is now only plausible, but likely.
It's not even like Astana have been prolific in winning bike races so far this season, with eight victories below WorldTour level before finally grabbing a stage win in the UCI's top tier at the Tour de Romandie. What they have been doing, however, race after race, is placing riders in the top-10, and often multiple at a time.
“Why shouldn’t we be confident? We’re a better quality team now. We don’t have a big, big star, but we have riders with the capacity to win races, experienced riders who’ve won in the past, and it’s up to us to adapt the strategy,” the team’s sports director Dmitriy Fofonov told Rouleur. “The team is working well, is motivated from the beginning of the season – we’ve shown that in races – and when we go to races we’re there to be in the best position to win, otherwise we stay at home. When you’re in the front, you have no problem scoring points."
Astana aren't naive: they know they don't have a superstar within their ranks. But that doesn't mean thousands of points cannot be harvested each month. “If you look at the composition of the team, if you don’t have a Remco [Evenepoel], [Jonas] Vingegaard or [Mathieu] Van der Poel, you need to adapt, to be realistic," Fofonov went on. "We have some data and a data analyst who works with the team more and more and tells us which races are easier to take points in. In some races, they say: ‘OK, put our best riders there to collect points and then we will have more chances to win.’ As directors we need to adapt in the race as well when you’re racing for points – the strategy is a little different. If you race for victory, you take the responsibility to take a risk, but sometimes we prefer to be seventh or eighth."
Astana have been scoring points on various continents. (Photo: AlUla Tour/Pauline Ballet)
Dutch veteran Wout Poels joined Astana on a one-year contract, with the specific task of ensuring that his fifth top-tier team of his career retains their WorldTour licence. “I knew when I signed for the team that they needed points, and in the end it’s pretty simple: as a bike rider you want to get good results, and by getting good results you get points, so not a lot has changed for me,” the 37-year-old said. “At the beginning of the year the team scored a lot of points and in quite a lot of one-day races we finished with two or three riders in the top-10." This fixation on points is new to Poels. “To be honest, I never looked at the points before – I didn’t know what points you got for what race, but now I’m like, ‘ooo points!’ I look at the dynamics of it all, and see there’s points there or there. It makes it a little bit more interesting.”
Before the Grand Tour season gets underway with the Giro d’Italia – a good GC result and a few stage wins would significantly bolster any team – Astana wanted to position themselves as close as possible to 18th place. That job has been successfully completed. “We’re confident we’re moving forward," Fofonov said. "Let’s go like we’re going now and there’s not a reason why it won’t work. The other teams aren’t sleeping – it's a competition – but we try to show ourselves in the best way.”
Should Astana not pull off the salvation job, they can look to Lotto and Israel-Premier Tech as recent examples of teams who were relegated but bounced back, with both teams almost guaranteed to return to the WorldTour in the next cycle; what’s more, their regular wins have meant that they’ve had an automatic invite to all three Grand Tours. But Fofonov won’t even entertain that thought. “If we don’t do it, what?” Fofonov said. “To be honest, I don't think about that. We’re thinking that we’re going to do it.”
Cover image: Getty Images
