Friday Deep-Dive: Breaking Down XDS-Astana’s Shocking Turnaround

Looking at how XDS-Astana's incredible turnaround has them on the verge of saving their WorldTour spot, while threatening to spell the end for another top-tier team

XDS-Astana’s Clever Tactics Have Slowly Transformed Into a Full-Blown Miracle Season

With the Tour de Romandie slowly ramping up as it nears Saturday’s Queen Stage to Thyon 2000 and its final time trial in Geneva on Sunday (a full Key Takeaways breakdown is coming Monday), I wanted to take advantage of this calm period before the season’s first Grand Tour, the Giro d’Italia—which kicks off a week from today—to examine one of the most curious and extraordinary stories of the season: XDS-Astana’s miraculous run from near-certain WorldTour relegation to almost certainly guaranteeing themselves safety for the next three seasons in the sport’s top flight.

At the end of the 2024 season, I had completely written off XDS-Astana’s chances of holding on to their coveted WorldTour spot. Coming off a disastrous season where they scored just 6,563 UCI points—leaving them 4,670 points behind Cofidis in the promotion/relegation standings—a trip to the second-division, the ProTeam level, seemed inevitable, especially considering their gulf to the lowest-ranked teams were nearly the entire tally of their entire 2024 points haul.

But thanks to a significant off-season roster overhaul and a data-driven strategy that emphasized pure race volume over victory, the Chinese-backed Kazakhstani squad has not only clawed back thousands of points but now finds itself on the brink of an improbable turnaround.

• After coming out of the off-season swinging, they’ve racked up large points totals in the early-season races with a clever strategy of showing up to seemingly every race on the planet with UCI points on offer, and opting out of the fight for the race win, instead simply stuffing as many riders as possible into the top ten.

• While this strategy netted strong early progress in the first two months of the season, the long-term viability seemed limited, especially as the level of racing rises as the season goes on and the prestige of events increases. Also, making sure 90% of your team is in peak condition at the tail end of winter and willing to sprint for 7th instead of 1st has its limits, and isn’t enough to continue to rack up consistent points through the major spring and summer events.

  • But, as the season has progressed, a curious thing has happened: the team has started to do well at major races, like Simone Velasco’s 4th at Liège, and, recently, they’ve been winning an astonishing number of races. In fact, since Tuesday, they have won four races and racked up 230 UCI points in the process.

    • Astana Podiums Since Tuesday, April 29th

      • Tour of Romandie Stage 2

        • 1st: Lorenzo Fortunato - 60 points

      • Tour of Turkey Stage 3

        • 1st: Lev Gonov - 20 points

      • Tour of Turkey Stage 4

        • 1st: Wout Poels - 20 points

        • 2nd: Harold Martín López - 15 points

      • Tour of Turkey Stage 5

        • 1st: Harold Martín López - 20 points

        • 2nd: Wout Poels - 15 points

And, while it would be easy to dismiss these accomplishments as overly clever tactics and a top-tier team running up the score at lower-level events, the end result can’t be disputed.

• Through the first four months of the season, XDS-Astana is sitting in 3rd place in the UCI Teams Points Rankings, 18 spots higher than their finish last year, and ahead of Visma-Lease a Bike, a team that swept the sport’s three Grand Tours in 2023, and won the Team Points Rankings in 2022.

Current 2025 UCI Points Team Rankings

• This incredible feat is significant because they have reduced their 4,670 pre-season deficit to Cofidis to 1,605, and their 5,173 point deficit to Picnic-PostNL to less than 1,000.

2023-2025 Promotion/Relegation Standings

XDS-Astana’s Current Gaps to Lowest-Ranked WorldTour Teams

• Picnic PostNL: 896 points

• Cofidis: 1,585 points

• Intermarché-Wanty: 3,233 points

Looking at this list and considering Cofidis’ healthy schedule of lower-level French road cup races, it is likely that they will be able to hold off XDS-Astana despite the team’s surge of points. But, when we look at Picnic-PostNL, whose remaining races consist mainly of WorldTour events, their ability to score points has been so poor that it seems unlikely, even impossible, that they can hold off XDS-Astana.

In fact, at the pace both teams are scoring points, XDS-Astana is on pace to surpass Picnic-PostNL in the next two weeks.

UCI Points Gained in Last 28 Days:

• XDS-Astana: 2,043 points (73pts per day)

• Intermarché: 1,315 points (47pts per day)

• Cofidis: 1,205 points (43pts per day)

• Picnic PostNL: 531 points (19pts per day)

Perhaps the most damning component of Picnic-PostNL’s ability to hold onto their WorldTour spot is their remaining schedule.

• They are a first-division team that has historically put their limited resources toward chasing major wins, like Romain Bardet taking the opening stage and first Yellow Jersey of the 2024 Tour de France, and their 2025 schedule reflects with only ten of their remaining 26 races being outside the WorldTour, with only five of those being third-tier .1 events.

  • Picnic PostNL Remaining 2025 Schedule

• When contrasted with Cofidis, which has a healthy dose of second- and third-tier French races remaining, we can see the uphill battle Picnic-PostNL is facing.

  • Cofidis Remaining 2025 Schedule

• And, when we compare to XDS-Astana’s remaining schedule, which is clearly laid out in preparation for a full-force relegation push by packing their schedule with an absurd number of events, it becomes clear that even middle-of-the-road performances through the second half of the season will see them move into the final 2026 WorldTour slot.

  • XDS-Astana Remaining 2025 Schedule

Why This is Potentially Existentially Bad News for Picnic-PostNL