As Jhonatan Narváez out-sprinted Oscar Onley atop Willunga Hill in South Australia on 25 January, to claim UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s first victory of 2025, perhaps we should have known something was up. At the first WorldTour race of the year, the world’s best cycling team opened their victory account, and there would be no let up. At another team, Narváez would be an out-and-out leader. At UAE, he is just one of many.
The victories have not stopped coming. There were four wins in January, before the season even really got going, eight in February, 11 in March, 12 in April, which was bookended by Tadej Pogačar winning the Tour of Flanders and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Only five victories followed in a fairly light May, before 15 in a golden June, the month of national championships. Thirteen wins followed in July, with the Tour de France on centre stage, before eight in August, and as of the morning of 9 September, five this month.
News editor at Cycling Weekly, Adam brings his weekly opinion on the goings on at the upper echelons of our sport. This piece is part of The Leadout, a newsletter series from Cycling Weekly and Cyclingnews. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. As ever, email adam.becket@futurenet.com – should you wish to add anything, or suggest a topic.
In total, that’s 81 victories. That’s already a staggering number, almost double the number of the next most winning team in 2025 – Lidl-Trek with 44 – while they’re closing in on HTC-Columbia’s 85 wins in 2009, the widely-understood record for a single year. It’s only 9 September. Last year, the team managed an incredible 81 wins all year; by this point of the season, they were on 70, so there could be another dozen to add onto that total.
It’s not a one-off year, and it’s not just Tadej Pogačar, either. While the Slovenian phenom has won 16 times this year, including the Tour, and those Monuments, there are 65 wins from 19 others riders, a remarkable amount of talent across the squad.
There’s Almeida, who has won 10 times, as has Isaac del Toro. The outgoing Ayuso has won eight times, while Jay Vine has triumphed on five occasions, and Narváez on four. The team has a strength in depth which seems an unbeatable level above everyone else. Even when Jumbo-Visma won all three Grand Tours in the same year, in 2023, they only won 69 times.
UAE’s victories aren’t padded out by a great sprinter, either, Juan Sebastián Molano only winning twice this season. When HTC-Columbia set the record, the majority of the victories came from Mark Cavendish and André Greipel, two fast men. In 2025, most of UAE’s victories have been in climbing or punchy circumstances, days for their impressive array of general classification riders.
The team is able to maintain its stable of potential GC leaders due to its immense wealth, although that wasn’t enough to satisfy Ayuso. Riders like Almeida, Del Toro, even Vine, Marc Soler, Adam Yates, Pavel Sivakov, that would have more prominent roles at other teams, are stacked up behind Pogačar in a ridiculous deck of cards which means UAE can just keep winning, any time, anywhere.
Even as they’re dominating the Vuelta for stage wins, Del Toro is winning the GP Industria & Artigianato Italian one-day Classic. Similarly, while Pogačar was streaking away at the Tour de France, Del Toro won three stages and the overall at the Tour of Austria. When other stars had time off, Brandon McNulty stepped up and won the Tour of Poland.
It’s too much. This isn’t about a generational talent like Pogačar winning too much, this is one team dominating like almost never before, hoovering up everything. The issue is money.
Cycling’s spending problem is not news; smaller teams cannot keep up with the money bigger teams have on tap, most of all the squad at the very top. There is a reason why larger and larger sponsors are needed, just to keep some teams afloat, while others who used to be the biggest players now hunt for more investment. Budgets which used to dwarf others are now dwarfed, in a race for survival.
It’s not sustainable, particularly in a sport with such shaky foundations as cycling anyway. The answer is legislation, and some kind of system for financial equity. Not a salary cap, but perhaps a budget cap. Here is how much money a team is allowed to spend up to, and it’s up to the team to work out how to divide that up; want to spend half of it on one big name? Fine. Want to try and Moneyball the system? Also fine. A salary cap is too hard and fast, but one which covers all outgoings allows for more autonomy.
Something needs to give, or we will continue down this road where teams backed by rich nation states continue to power along, while those backed by solid sponsors fall away. This is cycling in 2025, I know, but it doesn’t have to stay like this.
UAE Team Emirates-XRG will break the victory record this season, and they could extend it even further next year. This isn’t an aberration, it’s the new normal.
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