With Tashkent City Women Professional Cycling Team being the third best continental team at the UCI ranking at the end of 2023, we are seemingly cruising towards a huge upset in regards of the WorldTour wildcards distribution for 2024.
Especially traditional women teams such as Cofidis and St. Michel Auber 93 don't accept these news easily, having appealed numerous protests to UCI since the summer. But even after UCI deduced some of the points racked up by Uzbek team, the team still holds more than a 200-point margin over their opponents.
"As we had the 2024 wildcard as the main goal for our 2023 season, we always had an eye on the UCI World Ranking," St Michel-Mavic-Auber 93's Charlie Nerzic, told Cyclingnews. "Mid-season, we started to see that Tashkent was getting many points on races that did not match UCI minimum requirement regarding participants or with both the national team with Tashkent riders and Tashkent racing."
"The finance from the government is just for Olympic medals, not for the Tour de France or Giro d’Italia," the Uzbekistan team’s coach, Gleb Groysman, told Cyclingnews. "We have a very, very hard situation because there are not enough bikes, wheels, anything…staff is problem number one. There are no professional staff there."
"We cannot race all WorldTour races because we don't have enough riders. We have maybe three or four girls ready to race in the WorldTour, and they are very young.
"We cannot win the Tour de France or Giro d’Italia. A good result for us in the first year would be to finish there with all our riders. Maybe on one stage a top-three, maybe. We cannot win right now, but if we can finish, it would be great for our first season racing in the WorldTour."
