Jonathan Vaughters slams UCI once again over points system: "It's absurd, the whole ranking system"
Cycling
Jonathan Vaughters, boss of the EF Education-EasyPost team, found himself having to fight for UCI points in 2022 and recalls how unmotivating of an experience it was. Although the team is heading into 2025 (the last year of this cycle) in a relatively comfortable position, Vaughters was not shy to devote an entire segment at Rouleur Live to criticize the points system and how it negatively affects the spectacle in racing.
"Talking about UCI points, I never want to see this team have one guy finish fourth, one guy 11th and another in 19th just so we get a bunch of points. To me, that's just so anticlimactic and boring and really sort of a cynical way of racing," he said at Rouleur Live. "What I want to see is that the entire team is behind someone, or a plan to get someone to win the race".
Vaughters wishes to appeal to exciting racing and what would please the fans. "Even if the odds are totally against this, and even if it completely explodes the entire team and we get zero UCI points because we blew ourselves to bits and our best rider was 84th place, that's OK. At least we went in with a plan to win and tried to execute that. It didn't work out for whatever reason, but we did everything we could."
The team lacks the big budget increases of teams such as UAE Team Emirates and Red Bull - BORA - hansgrohe had over the past few years, or the attention to detail and focus of Team Visma | Lease a Bike. The American team however finished the second of three years of this points cycle in 12th place and have over 7000 points over Arkéa - B&B Hotels who sit below the red line.
"The way we're constructing this team and the objectives that we have, are going to be different than a team like UAE. But from the metrics that we wanted to achieve, for instance, winning the polka-dot jersey in the Tour de France. That's been a long-term dream objective of ours but I think it symbolizes how we focus on doing things for our team," he says. "Do we have a sprinter? No. Do we have somebody who's truly capable of challenging to win the Tour de France on GC? No. We didn't have that either".
"So then you go into the race and say 'What can we achieve? What I really try to avoid with this team is saying, 'OK, we're gonna go in and gonna get sixth on GC'. Sixth place on GC for the majority of sponsors, financial backers and fans, it's totally meaningless," Vaughters believes, and so at the Tour de France for example Carapaz was on full stage hunting mode, eventually succeeding in the one day where the breakaway was 'allowed' to win in the mountains on stage 17.
"I couldn't care less. I think it's absurd, the whole ranking system, and designed by people that don't really know what they're doing," he launched another hit at the UCI. "I don't care what we're ranked, just as long as we're not ranked 19th, right? But what I do care about is doing things like winning the polka-dot jersey at the Tour de France, winning a stage at the Tour de France, winning a stage in the Giro d'Italia, that's stuff that makes the team different."
"In that last relegation cycle, we had to spend the second half of that year racing in a very cynical way and just collecting points. And man did that turn me off. It just felt wrong. I mean, it just felt like we were not even there to win. We're just there to grift off of the other teams and finish fourth and eighth".
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