So, can the currently 15th placed team (who may have signed contacts and spent £) be bumped down the list by a late announcement eg BC? Or have I misunderstood the calculus?
Long live The Union. A fraction of the budget and a bigger stack of results than so many high-dollar teams out there. Their absence tells the story of things to come.
The difference between the 2 is that Red Bull's events are private events, organised, produced & broadcast by them. They can invite whoever they want, no one can argue otherwise. WBD are organising World Cups on behalf of the UCI, the world governing body for competitive cycling events. They should be completely neutral & the only way to be free from bias/influence is to go off points for all teams. Personal opinion... I don't agree with handing control of the highest level of a sport to a TV production company to shape it how they want. I think I might've...
Am I the only one who thinks waiting so long to announce this stuff has actually kind of taken the excitement out of it? I was pretty pumped after the new years but the excitement has kind of wore off now.
I am really hoping for a barrage of announcements of good hearted riders on good hearted teams. After all of the 'goodbye" posts, I just really want that.
That's all good and well but lets face some facts here - Cube bikes are junk (I worked closely with the brand at a distribution level), the kinematics were average at best and the frame failure rate we saw was out of control, more than 50% of carbon bikes sold came back with cracked frames and they were horrendously slow with turnaround time on replacement frames, always looking for excuses. Saracen is a walmart/whatever brand so no matter the caliber of the rider you'll never get results riding a piece of crap down the hill. Personality or not, Danny Hart...
Kerry works for Bikeflights now. After Kona fired all the riders and team managers in June Bikeflights was nice enough to give Kerry a wrapped sprinter. They want him to actually enjoy bike racing in 2024, and they will be covering all his domestic travel and racing(he just has to be the face of Bikeflights and the events he heads to). His priority for race bikes next year are a superduper light FS bike for stage racing- and real CX bikes. Big ups to Bikeflights for supporting atheletes doing what they love.