UCI rulebook includes these changes in 2025: Yellow cards, no WT and PT riders at U23 Worlds and longer races for women
Cycling
The 2025 cycling season, among several positive things, brings along a bunch of changes to UCI rulebook. Some are welcome with open arms, others sparked heated debates. But one thing they have in common is that UCI verified all of them to apply this season.
Yellow cards
To start from the most talked point, yellow cards have underwent testing from August of last year and UCI approved the rule change from 2025 onwards. You can read more on this subject in our previous articles. So just a quick reminder:
- Two yellow cards in the same event = DQ + 7-day suspension
- Three yellow cards in the span of 30 days = 14-day suspension
- Six yellow cards in the span of 365 days = 30-day suspension
In case the penalty falls on the off-season period, the suspension will be served from January 1st of next season.
The UCI closed a loophole in the previous rules that eliminated yellow cards as punishment for a rider who could not be properly identified by officials. The rules now force Sport Directors to identify the rider (persecuted for urinating in public, littering, etc.) or face a hefty CHF 2,000 fine.
No WT and PT riders at men's U23 Worlds
This is perhaps the most influential change we'll see take effect in 2025. For the past years, it was mostly riders who have already competed at the highest level coming down to race at the U23 Road World championships. And dominate. While in the road race, the situation didn't really call for it with only Yevgeniy Fedorov (2022) winning in recent years, the time trials were exclusively dominated by WorldTeam and ProTeam riders for six editions in a row since 2018.
There might be many reasons, but the obvious one is the long-time access to top-end material and training methods, in particular for WorldTeam riders. The other being that the biggest time trial talents are often among first scouted to join big teams and not everyone is Joshua Tarling to go and immediately compete for medals out of juniors.
The elephant in the room is that riders of large development programmes will still be massively advantaged, but there's not much that can be done in that aspect...
WWT riders however won't be restricted by this change as UCI aims to promote the debut of separate U23 category at the World Championships in Rwanda in 2025. However any riders who have once started in elite category won't be allowed to step back to race at U23-level anymore from this point onwards.
Race distances
Furthermore, women also get to compete over longer distances as the UCI raised the maximum distance for Worlds and Olympics to 180km, from current limit 160km. At the same time, UCI lowered the maximum distance range for U23 men to 150-180km.
Both U23 women and junior men races at Worlds will be 110-140km long while junior women's races become up to 20km longer with the change to 70-100km.
Among other changes, teams feeding riders outside of designated feed zones has been struck through and races are now required to have feed zones every 30-40km.
Sprint zone
The UCI allows for the 3km rule on sprint stages to be expanded to 5km and issued a more thorough "Sprint Zone protocol". The protocol has to be requested by race organisers for a certain stage or race in advance of the start.
Under the sprint zone protocol, riders who finish within three seconds, rather than the standard one-second gap, will be given the same time as the winner. The time is measured from the back wheel of one rider and the front wheel of the following rider. This doesn't apply for irregular sprint finishes such as breakaway riders arriving in front of peloton.
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- Cannot blaim him with those 2 super humansspock12309-01-2025
- Hopefully she won't be a male goat...vappaxbipmv09-01-2025
- Can you name a few others to see of there's a rule? Also, he wasn't an indoor cyclist, he was a normal cyclist that also did Zwift and that's how he got his chance at the highest levelvappaxbipmv09-01-2025
- MVP has already benefited from this rule at a MTB World Championships. The UCI amended the rules a day or two before the 2023 MTB XCO World Champs in Glasgow, Scotland. The rule was changed at the last minute so that MVP and Sagan started further up the grid to supposedly make for a better race for the fans. However, it made little difference as MVP crashed about 3 turns in on the start loop and withdrew from the race.MTBScot09-01-2025
- well she’s only been a pro for 4 years, and even without “figuring out” cycling yet she’s won the tour de france (twice), the vuelta, liége-bastogne-liége (twice), strade bianchi, amstel gold, fleche-wallone, dwars door vlaandren, and a bunch of individual stages. i agree that her undeveloped tactical IQ is a “ weakness” (obviously a byproduct of her enormous strength that has allowed her to get away with tactical blunders and still be a big winner), but there’s still time to change that. in the men’s side sometime like mathieu van der poel was still a bit of a tactical knucklehead as late as age 26 or so, and he was born into pro cycling. he finally got tired of blowing opportunities when he realized that they don’t present themselves all that often. vollering may come to the same conclusion. i hope so. greatness like she’s capable of would be a shame to squander to any unnecessary degree.OCexile09-01-2025
- She appears as dominant among the women as Pogacar is in the men's peloton. But she doesn't appear to have even a basic understanding of racing tactics. Moreover, it seems like the entire field races against her, including her own team. This is odd, as she seems like a nice person in interviews, but something is clearly going on. If she just wants to go hard, she might do better switching to triathlon, or just running. It doesn't seem like she is going to figure out bike racing.
Barney09-01-2025 - i have MASSIVE respect for vollering as an athlete. how can you not? but i do agree about the limits of her tactical and interpersonal skills. if she had both to the same degree as someone like kasia niewiadoma, she would end her career someday as one of the greatest cyclists of all time — male, female, whatever…OCexile08-01-2025
- Completely agree.Mistermaumau08-01-2025
- i’m pretty sure mathieu has never spent a moment of his adult life dreaming of winning the Tour. he’s known for a very long time that that’s not the kind of rider he is. I’m also pretty sure he’s known for a very long time that TDF stages count for a lot in the palmares of big puncheurs like him and wout. he hasn’t decided he doesn’t care about racking up stage wins at the tour because they wouldn’t matter in terms of his legacy. he KNOWS they would. so it’s more interesting than that. he doesn’t care about stages IN SPITE of knowing how much they “matter.” he doesn’t care because he just DOESN’T CARE about anyone else’s standards or judgments. he decides what he’s interested in, what captures his imagination, and he just does THAT (within the WIDE parameters of free choice he’s allowed at Alpecin, which are certainly wider and freer than anyone else in the peloton).OCexile08-01-2025
- Isn't the riders comming from indoor e-sport cycling crashing a lot?Jkolner12308-01-2025