Switch on the cycling this week and you’ll be greeted with two prestigious WorldTour stages taking place at the same time: Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico.

In a few weeks’ time, when riders like Remco Evenepoel and Jonas Vingegaard compete at the Volta a Catalunya, there’ll be three famous one-day WorldTour races happening on different days in Belgium. It’s a bit like having multiple Formula One races staged simultaneously.

In December 2022, the International Cycling Union’s (UCI) director of sports, Peter Van den Abeele, promised an end to an era of eyes and attention having to be scattered across various places at the same time. “We’ll no longer allow overlaps and there will be fewer races,” he promised on the Cross van Play Sports podcast.

His superior, UCI president David Lappartient, went a step further, vowing to streamline cycling’s congested calendar. “Within the WorldTour, each year we’d have a number of races, maybe 15 one-day races and four to six stage races,” he said in a video following the UCI WorldTour Seminar in 2002.

There was finally, after over a decade of on-off pressure from teams, a realisation within the UCI that professional cycling was too confusing to follow for both newcomers and even seasoned followers. “The idea is to strengthen the attractiveness of our sport so that we can market it even better,” Lappartient said.

However, despite multiple ventures and projects to change the sport’s structure, nothing has been done about it.

This article was published by The Athletic/New York Times in March 2026. To read the full article click here.