Here are the tables showing how many UCI points are available in each road race. It’s not riveting but normally if you want to know how many points are on offer then you visit the UCI website, find the rules page, download the right PDF rulebook and scroll past 70 pages for the tables. Here they’re all on one page.
Last year saw big changes to the scales with the grand tours, monuments and world championships becoming even more lucrative. This year and in the coming seasons the difference is the participation rules, which Pro Team qualifies for what.
The table below is for the World Tour races, if it’s a stage race then it’s for the final overall classification. You can see the overall win in the Tour de France is the single biggest points haul in the sport, and among other things winning the Tour Down Under is more valuable that winning Itzulia Basque Country, according to the rankings:
Next comes the points per stage in the World Tour stage races. In 2023 this was doubled for the grand tours, plus across all stage races points get awarded well beyond first five or top three as before, it’s down to 15th place or 10th respectively. Win a stage race and stage wins and placings happen along the way so it reinforces the value of grand tours:
Next you can see points on offer for final place in the secondary competitions of a grand tour and other stage races, namely the mountains and points competition:
Next comes a daily award for leading a World Tour stage race, a nice bonus but one that’s surely worth more in publicity than points but again with the overall win and stage wins it helps compound things further, plus it just makes a day in the maillot jaune or maglia rosa more valuable points-wise:
Now comes arguably the most important table here because it’s for races outside the World Tour and this is where teams hunting points can find rewards thanks to the breadth of the calendar. We know the Tour de France has beaucoup points but the winner isn’t really targetting them, instead managers of teams trying stave off relegation or earn promotion will know the table below by heart. Here winning a stage race overall or winning a one day brings the same points haul, which makes one day races very important. The season-opening Challenge Majorca races are a good case study, they are each Class 1 races and so win one day’s racing and a rider banks 125 points, but if it was a stage race only the final overall would bring this many points:
The next two tables below shows the points on offer for stages in non-World Tour races and the daily points for leading the race too:
Below are the national championships, split into A and B groups, where A is defined as a nation that started at least one rider in the previous Men’s Elite world championship road race. These points matter because often when we look at the teams with few wins and placings in the year, several of their best results can be from national championships in smaller nations, the kind with only a few pros. Sometimes we’ve seen big name riders skip their national championships but smaller teams hunting points ought be paying business class returns for their riders to go and grab the jersey and points:
Now comes the Continental Championships, think the European championships for the best example. If these championships have a team time trial and/or a mixed relay time trial event, the small table further below also applies:
Now for the Worlds and Olympics, big events but the UCI is keen to big them up even more and they are the most lucrative one day races on the calendar in terms of points, 100 more than a Monument classic:
For the last of the tables, here’s the mixed relay time trial at the worlds which the UCI is keen on promoting, it’s 300 points but this is divided by the three men, so 100 points each (of course the women get 100 each too):
How to forfeit points
Riders can lose points too. The UCI rules include penalties for bad behaviour and some come with points deductions. They concern cheating like taking short-cut, to using sidewalks, ignoring level-crossing red lights, littering and other misdemeanours, right down to failing to sign on for the day’s racing or show up for the post-race press conference if invited. Any team manager worried about scoring points should remind riders of all of these.
Rankings and points don’t matter…
…if they did then they’d be readily available, easily understood and we’d talk about them more often. Still, promotion and relegation from the World Tour is a big deal as an “inside” topic. The one change for 2024 is that while invitations for the grand tours go to the two top-ranked Pro Teams of the previous season (Lotto-Dstny and IPT) and two discretionary “wildcards”, these two wildcards can only go to a team in the top-50 the previous season, in 2024 it’ll be top 40 and crucially in 2026 the top-30 which implies a stretch goal for the likes of current teams like Euskaltel-Euskadi or Corratec. In the coming days we’ll look at how these points are used to make individual and team rankings and the stakes in 2024 and beyond…
