UAE Team Emirates and SD Worx top UCI world rankings

UAE Team Emirates and SD Worx have topped the respective UCI men’s and women’s team rankings for 2023, with both teams taking over 50 wins this season.

SD Worx’s victory – earnt through 61 team wins, including first and second at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift and various one-day races – is the seventh time they’ve topped the year-long team standings.

Whilst UAE Team Emirates missed out on a Grand Tour win this season, their 57 wins elsewhere, including two Monuments, earned them just enough to edge out Jumbo-Visma for the top spot, swapping around the top two teams from 2022.

Jumbo took more wins, with 69, as well as winning the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta a España, but were perhaps beaten out by the all-round prowess of Tadej Pogačar’s, who was second in the Tour de France but won 17 times, including the Tour of Flanders, Il Lombardia, and Paris-Nice.

This may be a slight source of disappointment for Jumbo-Visma, who told GCN at the Vuelta that topping the world rankings was one of their goals set at the start of the year.

Whilst the men’s standings were a close-run affair – for the top two spots, at least – the women’s saw a runaway victory for SD Worx, with the Dutch squad beating Canyon-SRAM by over 10,000 points, a bigger margin than the 9,007 total points the German team scored.

SD Worx also topped the slightly different Women’s WorldTour rankings, plus took a clean sweep of the top three positions on the individual WWT rankings, won by Demi Vollering ahead of Lotte Kopecky and Marlen Reusser.

The Women’s WorldTour youth ranking title went to Shirin van Anrooij of Lidl-Trek.

Though there are still a handful of point-scoring events remaining on the calendar before the end of the year, none of the big players in the overall rankings will be present at those races, and thus the top of the list is decided.