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What have XDS-Astana got so right?

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What have XDS-Astana got so right?

At the end of 2024, XDS-Astana lurked in the doldrums of the UCI rankings, sat miles adrift of their WorldTour rivals, looking a dreary shadow of themselves and a far cry from the team that once championed Grand Tours and Monuments during their heyday in the 2010s. With Mark Cavendish having retired and a new sponsor on board, the team had reached a pivotal point in their 20-year history.

Fast forward to the present, and with the spring Classics and early season coming to an end things couldn’t look any different for XDS-Astana in 2025. They’ve re-emerged towards the top tier of the UCI rankings, returning to the top five of the standings for the first time since the pandemic. As of the time of writing, XDS-Astana sit in third place in the UCI team rankings ahead of Grand Tour juggernauts Ineos Grenadiers and Visma-Lease a Bike. The squad even briefly topped the UCI individual rankings at the start of spring, courtesy of Christian Scaroni. Most importantly of all, their 2025 form has massively helped their chances of avoiding UCI relegation, which is decided over points accumulated over the past three seasons. Astana are now a mere 1,000 points behind their nearest rival Picnic-PostNL, who currently sit 18th, the final place to earn WorldTour status for the next three-year cycle.

XDS-Astana have been the biggest improvers of the season so far, having already scored over 80% as many points as they did over the entirety of 2024. The next best performers are Tom Pidcock’s Q36.5, who have accumulated a still impressive 65% of their total score from the entirety of last year. Most other teams sit around the 20-35% marker, which is to be expected given where we are in the year.

For Astana, this rampant start to the season has led to considerable hope that the team will survive the relegation cycle, and could remain among the top-performing teams of 2025 if they maintain their trajectory throughout the rest of the calendar.

So, what’s changed at XDS-Astana, and what’s the secret behind their success so far in 2025?

A new look and a new approach

XDS Astana

XDS-Astana changed guises at the beginning of 2025. Last summer, it was announced that Chinese carbon fibre giant XDS would come on board as the squad’s new title sponsor, leaving behind an almost two-decade-long stint under the Kazakhstan capital’s name. The partnership offered several things: a long-term financial deal to secure big budget funding, a new bike sponsor and the scope to bring the Chinese market into the WorldTour.

The formal unveiling of the new kit and X-Lab bikes came in Shenzhen at the beginning of the year, with some of the team’s star riders flown out to China to showcase the new colours and the brand-new bikes.

These changes came at a crucial point for Astana. At the team, the team sat around 3,000 points behind their nearest rivals in the UCI relegation battle, following a disappointing set of results in 2023 and 2024. The squad’s big name over that period, Cavendish, had retired, leaving a gaping void to be filled given how much resources and energy had been devoted to helping Cavendish win that historic 35th Tour stage last July.

Team director Alexander Vinokourov told the press last year that ‘the team and the entire project as a whole will face some significant changes’, but he was keen to point out that they were ‘ready for this’. After several years of financial uncertainty and a stagnation in results, the investment appeared as an important part of transforming and revitalising Astana’s fortunes.

A transfer market sweep

Tim de Waele/Getty Images

In the face of relegation, XDS-Astana were particularly active in last year’s transfer window. With Cavendish off their books and Alexey Lutsenko, the team’s top scorer since 2020, departing after a decade with the team, half of Astana’s roster was switched up for 2025.

Their first move was made last summer with the signature of Alberto Bettiol on a mid-season deal from EF Education-EasyPost after the Tour de France. From then, the transfers came thick and fast as they secured the contracts of 14 other riders. Among them were experienced names with expertise across sprinting, Classics and GC. Wout Poels, Diego Ulissi and Sergio Higuita were the headline incomers, with Mike Teunissen, Clément Champoussin and Fausto Masnada other notable signings.

Sports director Stefano Zanini, who has been with the team since 2013, pointed out the importance of the new riders in an interview with Italian news site Bici Pro. ‘We had the impression of a change in mentality since December. The environment for the riders was different. The arrival of new guys brought something more and you could see it,’ he said. ‘There was a lot of motivation and we had feedback right away. With the mix of experienced and young riders, I am convinced that we will be able to do great things.’

DEI TOUR OF HELLAS 2025, STAGE 2 AGRINIO-ARACHOVA Photos: Petros Gkotsis
Tour of Hellas/Petros Gkotsis

That has become quite evident in the UCI standings after the first four months of the year. Among the team’s top riders so far in 2025, three newcomers have emerged among the team’s top five scorers in UCI rankings: Champoussin (2nd), Aaron Gate (3rd) and Teunissen (5th). Looking further back, the new signings of Higuita, Ulissi, Bettiol and Poels are also strong UCI points scorers if you consider their three previous seasons, able to make the top ten of any team’s yearly UCI points score.

One particularly lucrative signing for the team in terms of points is Matteo Malucelli. The Italian sprinter moved up from the third division after a strong season last year, only to better it within the opening four months of 2025, already racking up 150 UCI points. In terms of talent scouting, his signing can be seen as a real triumph, as he’s enjoying his best season to date at the age of 31.

Although none of these riders are big names, they’ve consistently captured UCI points hauls well within the triple digits, which will be needed for the team to avoid relegation at the end of 2025. In comparison, Arkéa-B&B Hotels and Picnic-PostNL have failed to bring any riders in with a 2024 points score above the 100 mark.

‘The UCI points always motivate us’

Billy Ceusters/Getty Images

What’s key to XDS-Astana’s annus mirabilus is the squad’s crafty points strategy and a revised race programme that appears far more efficient in terms of potential points scoring.

‘The chase for points led everyone to make a leap in mentality and approach to racing,’ Zanini told Bici Pro. ‘This year, XDS-Astana has a different spirit. It was clear from the first races in Spain.’

Unlike in 2024, XDS-Astana signed up for a set of points-heavy races in the early phase of the season, notably in smaller races in Spain and France. In January and February, they were very present in Mallorca and mainland Spain, with a heap of podium finishes and a total of 500 points accumulated during a three-week period.

In February the team made a return to the French circuit having skipped it since the pandemic. There, Christian Scaroni won the Classic Var and the GC at the Tour des Alpes-Maritimes et du Var, adding 250 points through those two wins, the equivalent of a top five overall finish at a WorldTour stage race or Monument. Scaroni has admitted that his early-season success was down to a change in direction from his coaches, who were looking to maximise UCI points in 2025.

XDS-Astana have also learnt to maximise their points by working for several leaders in the same race. Rider Ide Schelling told IDLCycling that ‘Astana wants to send strong guys to smaller races to scoop up as many points as possible. It is a strategic game. We are at the point now where not everyone can even get a start in those races.’

Staff member Dmitriy Fofonov echoed this to French outlet Cyclism’ Actu ahead of Paris-Nice last month: ‘We have new objectives. The UCI points always motivate us, but the strategy is not the same [as before]. We race in a different way,’ he said. ‘Until now, the team liked to ride for the win, but now we have to adapt the tactics to chase points. Sometimes we no longer prioritise the win but on having two or three riders in the top ten.’

This strategy has been displayed already on both the WorldTour level and at smaller races so far this year. Of course it isn’t an unheard of strategy – Arkéa took a similar approach in 2022 when they were in the relegation battle that time around, but by learning from those teams three years ago, XDS-Astana have already gained an early jump on their relegation rivals this year.

Changes in the staff room

A.S.O./Billy Ceusters

Along with the raft of new signings, the XDS-Astana staff room was bulked up ahead of the 2025 season. Although staff members can’t score points themselves, their influence on team performance has been more widely recognised in recent years, especially with teams that have enjoyed a notable improvement in results. Think about Intermarché-Wanty’s incredible 2022 season or, on the other end of the spectrum, Ineos’s slump with the departure of key team directors since 2023.

‘Quite a few staff members have changed and while some key things are still the same, you can see a lot has changed in the details,’ Schelling, who’s in his second year at Astana, says. ‘Things run a lot smoother and everything feels just a bit more serious.’

Although Cavendish retired last year, the team is experiencing a bit of a ‘Cav effect’ in its staff room. Certain staff were brought in to support Cavendish in his record bid, with some staying on the team’s payroll even after his departure. With sprinting now a focus for the team, a long-term plan to stay in the mix on flat stages has been at the helm of the squad’s new strategy thanks in part to these recruitments.

Greek sprinting guru Vasilis Anastopoulos was hired at the end of 2023 as head of performance, having worked with Cavendish at QuickStep in his big comeback year and before that at the SEG Racing team, which is the former home of Fabio Jakobsen, Jordi Meeus, Kaden Groves, Alberto Dainese and Cees Bol during their late teenage years. Likewise, Mark Renshaw has stuck with the squad, having been promoted to a fully-fledged sports director role this year.

Cavendish’s former teammates and friends Dario Cataldo and Pete Kennaugh have also joined the team, allowing for a new generation of directors to influence the racing, with recent peloton experience infused into their approach.

DEI TOUR OF HELLAS 2025, STAGE 4 CHALKIDA-OLYMPIC VILLAGE Photos: Petros Gkotsis
Tour of Hellas/ Petros Gkotsis

Alex Dowsett also joined the squad in the winter as a performance engineer. After a decade embedded in the WorldTour with Team Sky, Movistar and Israel-Premier Tech, he’s offloading some blue-sky thinking into Astana. At Paris-Nice, he introduced colour-coded socks and gloves for their team time-trial setup, allowing riders to quickly identify each other when tucked in the aero position. His expertise has also been adapted to the team’s in-house aerodynamic research, reflected in the considerable increase in UCI points garnered through time-trials.

Another new face in the team car is Laurenzo Lapage. The experienced Belgian sports director worked on Intermarché for several seasons, serving in the team car behind Biniam Girmay at last year’s Tour de France. Before that, Lapage was an integral figure at GreenEdge, serving as a sports director there until 2022. His highlight there: piloting Mat Hayman to Paris-Roubaix glory in 2016. Given that he was on the ground for the Classics, this might help explain how the squad managed their best cobbled campaign in well over a decade, culminating in top ten finishes at the Tour of Flanders, Gent-Wevelgem and Brugge De Panne.

These experienced names have certainly helped XDS-Astana receive a new lease of life, with a new style that feels more up-to-date than their previous traditional default since the departure of big GC names in the early 2020s. Although a lot of the remaining staff members remain influential in the team’s decisions on the road and behind the scenes, five of the twelve sports directors on the team have been there since 2024 or 2025.

The future is bright

DEI TOUR OF HELLAS 2025, STAGE 4 CHALKIDA-OLYMPIC VILLAGE Photos: Petros Gkotsis
Tour of Hellas/Petros Gkotsis

It’s clear that XDS-Astana are doing something right in 2025. They’ve worked on their flaws from the 2023 and 2024 seasons to become the stand-out performers of the year so far, especially in comparison to the likes of Arkéa-B&B Hotels, Cofidis and Picnic-PostNL, who are digging their feet in towards the relegation zone.

It’ll be interesting to see how the team perform in the seasons to come. Given they’ve angled their approach towards UCI points, will this urgency to fight relegation bleed into 2026 and beyond? Will their riders be receptive to a long-term strategy of scoring points, instead of focussing purely n winning? Some pros have already lamented this approach, but the security of being on the WorldTour level could counteract these woes.

Who knows – the squad may become the new place for experienced riders to enjoy a lift in results towards the end of their career. Younger hopefuls may also see an exciting opportunity to grow, with the chance to hoover up points and become more lucrative in transfer markets to come.

They have six months to keep up the good work. The Grand Tours may stunt their progress once the likes of Visma-Lease a Bike and Ineos gain steam, but the groundwork has certainly been laid to keep them alive for three more years on the WorldTour. Mix in a probable injection of extra cash from XDS and Astana may even stand a chance of returning to their former glory days.

The post What have XDS-Astana got so right? appeared first on Cyclist.


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