In full fight to stay in world Tour, the elite of world cycling, the Astana team has been opting since the start of the season for an original strategy in order to glean UCI points. And it works since the training of Alexandre Vinokourov continues victories, often on exotic races where competition is not present.
Astana’s sky blue jerseys shine again. After two seasons clearly in the shadows, only saved by Mark Cavendish’s stage victory on the Tour de France last summer, the Kazakhe team launched a maintenance operation this winter. Present everywhere but especially where competition is not going, Astana therefore stacks successes, already thirteen this season. Only UAE (37) and Lidl-Trek (15) training are better.
Everything starts from a constant without appeal. At the end of 2025, you will have to be among the 18 best teams in the world in the cumulation of the last three seasons to keep its place in the World Tour, the elite of international cycling. However, this winter, the situation was critical: Astana pointed to 21st place in the ranking, almost 5,000 points behind Cofidis, 18th and first non-relief. It was almost necessary to change everything.
Recruits and software to choose the races
Recruitments have set the tone. Astana signed the aging Wout Poels (37) and Diego Ulissi (35), the former hope Sergio Higuita, the French climber Clément Champoussin and the Classicmen Mike Teunissen and Fausto Masnada, runners above all capable of scoring UCI points and supporting the few headliners of the team, Alberto Bettiol Lorenzo or Davide Ballerini.
Behind the scenes, the boss Alexandre Vinokourov also tried new things. “We have worked a lot on the choices of profitable races thanks to software created by our data-analyst, which guides us on this or that test according to the competition and therefore the probabilities of recovering or not UCI points,” he explained in the end of January.
Clearly, Astana does not necessarily send her best runners fighting with Tadej Pogacar, Mathieu Van der Poel, Jonas Vingegaard or Remco Evenepoel. The team targets less prestigious races. Of the thirteen victories of the Kazakhe training this season, there are five at the turn of Turkey, two by Hainan’s turn, in China, one on the Tour de Greece and one on the Famenne Ardenne Classic, in Belgium.
-Almost as many points in one day by winning the Giro
Just this Sunday, the men of Vinokourov scored 966 points, thanks in particular to a double of Wout Poels and Harold Lopez in Turkey and another from Max Kanter and Cees Bol in Belgium. For comparison, the final winner of the Tour of Italy, who will start this Friday, will win 1,100 points for his team.
But Astana is not only shining far from the spotlight: on the big events of the calendar, the sky blue jerseys also truse the first positions, which has not been in recent years. The climber Lorenzo Fortunato finished 4th in the Tour de Romandie, winning a stage in passing. The Frenchman Clément Champoussin impressed him in the spring, 7th in Paris-Nice, then 10th in the Tour of the Basque Country.
Even the usual team member Simone Velasco won an unexpected 4th place during Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and Christian Scaroni became a real scarecrow for a few days at the end of February, with three victories in three days on the Classic Var and the Tour of the Alpes-Maritimes.
In the UCI classification spread from 2023 to 2025, Astana therefore went back to 19th place. The Picnic Postnl team from Romain Bardet, 18th, is only 160 points, and Cofidis, 17th, is less than 700 points. In three months of competition, the Kazakhe training, which joined a Chinese sponsor during the winter, found colors and a perennial hope of staying in World Tour. What undoubtedly encourage Alexandre Vinokourov to continue with the same strategy.
Robin Wattraint RMC Sport journalist
