According to the latest UCI ranking update for the 2023/2025 three-year period, Cofidis arrived in China at the Tour of Guangxi as the twentieth team in the standings, with a 400-point gap to close against the nineteenth-placed Uno-X.

Well, unless there are remarkable results from now until Sunday, this gap will not be bridged by the French team, which in recent weeks has been overtaken by the Norwegians, dramatically seeing slip away what would have been the last valid placement to secure a World Tour spot for the next three-year period, especially with the merger between Lotto and Intermarchè-Wanty.

For a team and sponsor so deeply rooted in the world of cycling, a tough blow is on the horizon, a debacle that cannot be explained, as the team's sports director Gorka Gerrikagoitia told us, simply by a rather deficient 2025 in terms of points, but more generally by a collective performance over the past three years that has not delivered the hoped-for dividends.

"This has not been a good season for us. Currently, we are not among the top 18 teams in the three-year ranking, we have a gap of about 400 points from Uno-X, which occupies the 19th position, and I think it will be difficult to finish ahead of them when the season ends at the Japan Cup. At the moment, we are therefore out of the World Tour, and we certainly cannot be happy about this," commented the fifty-one-year-old Basque.

"However, we didn't end up here just because we performed poorly in this last year, because the ranking reflects in points what you've done over the three-year period. Leaving the top series is certainly bad news for us, but I think as a ProTeam we will manage to be more competitive," Gerrikagoitia reflected, not hiding that the final result of the efforts made in recent seasons will not satisfy any of the components orbiting around the team.

"Certainly, the main sponsor will not be happy about this, but I think we all must accept the situation that has arisen and fight in the next three years to regain a spot in the World Tour for the 2029-2031 period."

While waiting to understand with what lineup the next season will be approached ("Honestly, I do not handle contracts, so I am not sure, but I think the roster for next season has already been finalized"), at Cofidis there is nothing left to do but roll up their sleeves and lucidly analyze what went wrong this season to ensure the mistake is not repeated in the future.

"This year we tried to start the season very strongly, and perhaps, being the last year of the three-year period, it was not a good idea because we ended up in October with all riders needing rest. So I think that, if I could go back to the beginning of the year, I would have avoided starting at full throttle from the very beginning. In any case, now the only thing to do is maintain calm and try to develop a good strategy to best face 2026, 2027, and 2028," the Iberian sports director concluded realistically.