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. 

This article was published by Rouleur in May 2025. You can read the full article here.