Change is afoot at Astana Qazaqstan. With the short-lived but ultimately successful Mark Cavendish era coming to an end, the team are facing an uphill battle to retain their WorldTour licence – and to do so they’ve been forced into pressing the radical button.
The current cycle of the UCI’s controversial three-season points system that determines which teams will be awarded the 18 WorldTour licences will reach its conclusion at the end of the 2025 season, and currently Astana are the 21st-ranked team, 4,100 points adrift of Cofidis in 18th.
For those who don’t keep regular abreast of what a win or high placing is worth, Cavendish’s 35th stage win at the Tour de France in July earned his team 210 points, while his early-season victory at Tour Colombia netted 14 points. Had an Astana rider won a WorldTour stage race, however – don’t forget, GC racing was what they were about until Cavendish veered them towards sprinting – then they’d have earned 500 points, and more than double that for winning a Grand Tour. Do the basic maths, and for Astana to reduce their seismic deficit to the top 18, they’d need to win around 20 Grand Tour stages next year just to draw parity. That’s five more than UAE Team Emirates, 2024’s dominators, have managed this season. You can see the problem facing Astana.
The team of Alexander Vinokourov is aware that demotion to the second division would not guarantee them selection in the three Grand Tours – only the best two teams from the ProTeams tier are given a wildcard – and thus the Kazakh team have been on a necessary and eye-catching spending spree.
With new Chinese investment arriving from bike manufacturer XDS Carbon-Tech in 2025, and the company promising to finance the team to “the level of leading WorldTour teams”, Astana have already recruited former Tour of Flanders winner Alberto Bettiol (1,528 points this season, and 678 points per season on average over the past five years) in a mid-season transfer, and announced the signings of fellow point-baggers Diego Ulissi (1,423 points this season, and a season average of 1,203), Sergio Higuita (412 points this season, and a season average of 803), and Wout Poels (518 points this season, and a season average of 531) for 2025 and beyond.
If the quartet’s average season point tallies were to be replicated next year, it would provide a combined estimated points total of 3,215. Add in the reliable points accrued by the Italians Simone Velasco (533 this season), Lorenzo Fortunato (486 this season) and Christiani Scarono (479 this season), as well as maybe the signing of a sprinter such as Caleb Ewan from Jayco Alula to replace the retiring Cavendish, and all of a sudden Vinokourov’s team is back in the game, on the path towards a heavily-funded great escape.
Should Astana lose their top-tier licence, it would naturally cast doubt on the commitment of their new Chinese backers who claim that they produce in excess of 10 million bikes per year; Trek are said to manufacture 1.7 million, and Giant one million. If the figures are correct, Astana’s new sponsors are big players the Western world is about to meet for the first time. It has been said that X-Lab, and XDS brand, will supply the team’s bikes, replacing current provider Wilier, while unconfirmed reports suggest that XDS will have title sponsorship and the team will be Chinese-registered.
Alongside providing yuan to fund the team’s spending, XDS should also put an end to Astana’s financial ailments that have previously afflicted them, with wages often left unpaid for several months, especially in the 2022 season. But there’s reason to be cautious about XDS: their English website is limited and basic, and there is very little online about the X-Lab bikes. One has to use Baidu, the preferred Chinese search engine, to find more information – but the amount of XDS-related articles is still low in comparison to content featuring Specialized, Cervélo, Pinarello, and other more long-established bike brands.
And so Astana are left in a similar position to the last few autumns: question marks and intrigue surrounding their future, an internal dilemma to determine their identity. Do they stick with being a sprinting team or twist back to their tried-and-tested GC days, scrapping around for points? If the new investment is as forthcoming as promised, a return to the years when Astana regularly competed for Grand Tours could be on the horizon, but first of all, they must arrest their slide into the ProTeams ranks. Their transfer business suggests they understand the task.
