"French cycling is in decline" - Former French national coach sees no salvation for Arkéa and Cofidis

One look at the UCI rankings and it's clear that French cycling is through a rough period. Decathlon AG2R was unable to expand on its excellent 2024 campaign, Cofidis is directly threatened by a relegation while Arkéa - B&B Hotels have already given up on hope. And the best ranked French cyclist? 42nd Romain Grégoire.

"Since the beginning of the year I find that French cycling is a little bit in decline. And the figures also demonstrate this," confirms former French national coach and pundit Cyrille Guimard in an interview with Cyclism'Actu. "The various UCI rankings, whether individual or collective, mean that today we can be worried about the evolution of French cycling and especially the presence of the French."

"If we look closely we might risk having next season only two teams in the WorldTour, that is to say Decathlon and Groupama. Cofidis is threatened, they still have a 250-point lead over Astana, and about the same over Picnic PostNL. I don't know if Cofidis will be able to stay in the WorldTour. All the arrows are pointing down, there isn't one going up."

The situation is quite dire, especially as both Picnic PostNL and XDS Astana are more than likely to jump over the French team at the end of Giro d'Italia. Seeing the struggles of both Cofidis and Arkéa, Guimard can't resist to question whether they really belonged into WorldTour in the first place.

"Are they in their place as World Teams? That's the question we can ask ourselves. Today, no, it's obvious, even if there's a slight surge at Cofidis. Especially linked to their Belgian sprinter (Milan Fretin, editor's note) who scored a maximum number of points that kept them in the group of 18 teams. But Fretin, will he single-handedly save the team? I don't think so."

One of the main constraints the French team's face comes from within France itself as the teams are forced to pay extra percentage for every single rider, making it impossible to match the market strength of even teams with similar budget, let alone super teams like UAE with bottomless funds. Is there a solution for Guimard?

"Yes, no problem," he says. "Either we go to a country where the costs are lower, which allows us to have more budget to go and find players of a different calibre in the transfer window, or simply try to loosen the purse strings and then say, well, how much do we need to be in the top five, or even the top three? We need 40, 45, 50 million. We put in or we don't put in. But if we want to compete at the top, there aren't 50 solutions," he concludes.