2024 Rider Projections
Projecting PCS Points for the third year
This is my third year producing rider-level and team projections for the upcoming professional cycling season. Again, the objective is the predict rider-level and team-level PCS Points.1
First, lets see how the projections for 2023 performed.
These were generally much better than the 2022 projections - which is unsurprising given the improved methodology (discussed here). The only two extremely egregious misses were on Lotto-Dstny and Arkea Samsic. Lotto-Dstny performed poorly in 2022 and were relegated out of the World Tour, but responded in 2023 by achieving the 8th best PCS Points total - 70% better than my projection. Arkea received the World Tour spot vacated by Lotto-Dstny’s relegation, but did not perform like a World Tour team and fell 29% short of my projection.
Beyond those two, I picked the top 4 and five of the top six which is reasonable. It doesn’t take a genius to design a system which says UAE and Jumbo will be the two best teams, but the system identified Quick Step bouncing back from 7th to 3rd.
2024 Rider Projections
I’m not going out on a limb with any of the top 20 projected riders. These are the stars of the sport who have performed the best over the last three years. In fact, the top 3 match perfectly the top 3 from the 2023 season and the top 6 are the same top 6 from 2023.
The biggest projected changes versus 2023 are riders like Richard Carapaz (101st to 46th), Enric Mas (52nd to 29th), and Juan Ayuso (45th to 22nd). The simple story-line here is riders who performed well when they raced, but because of injury or DNFs they missed accumulating points. Ayuso returned to racing only in the end of April while Carapaz/Mas both crashed out of the Tour de France on stage 1.
Other riders simply underperformed their established level; Biniam Girmay is projected to jump from 114th to 58th after a down 2023. Ethan Hayter (125th to 59th) and Daniel Martinez (273rd to 115th) are two others in this mold.
Moving in the other direction, Rui Costa is projected to decline the most from 28th in 2023 to 63rd in 2024. Sepp Kuss, Felix Gall, and Einer Rubio are three others who might take a step back in terms of points simply because the model doesn’t see multiple years of top-level point accumulations.
2024 Team Projections
The immediate takeaways for me here are
UAE and renamed Visma-LAB (formerly Jumbo Visma) will again be the two best teams. The model is naturally conservative and projects some regression to the mean here, but even significant regression will keep those two on top. Visma-LAB is projected to be a Tadej Pogacar-level season ahead of 3rd placed Bora!
INEOS and Quick Step are projected to be eclipsed by Bora and Trek. Both Bora and Trek have invested heavily in the transfer market over the off-season and enter as two of the four most improved projections vs 2023 performance. Inversely, Quick Step and INEOS project to decline by the most and 5th most vs 2023.
Jayco AlUla projects to improve from 14th in 2023 to 9th in 2024. They’ve brought in some very useful transfers (headlined by Caleb Ewan, Mauro Schmid, and Luke Plapp) with only a single significant departure.
Tudor Pro Cycling has done enough transfer business to put themselves in the tier of Pro Teams worth discussing in these projections. Four of their top six projected riders for 2024 (Trentin #1, Dainese #3, Storer #5, and Mayrhofer #6) are in-transfers.
Astana projects as having improved their squad the most for 2024 thanks to 14 in-transfers, headlined by Morkov and Ballerini from Quick Step to fill-out Mark Cavendish’s sprint train.
2024 Transfers
This table shows PCS Points for 2023 for both in-transfers and out-transfers2. As discussed, both Quick Step and INEOS are shipping out the most talent based on 2023 results and Trek, Bora, and Tudor are bringing in the most reinforcements.
Bora is bringing in #5 projected Primoz Roglic in the year’s most significant transfer. They’re also adding Sam Welsford to sprint (#87 projection), Daniel Martinez to support in mountains (#115 projection), and two other top 200 projected riders in Roger Adria and Matteo Sobrero.
Trek is adding #50 projected Andrea Bagioli, #53 projected Tao Geoghegan Hart, and #89 projected Jonathan Milan as well as solid domestiques Patrick Konrad and Carlos Verona. The projection for Geoghegan Hart is likely underestimating his 2024 prospects; his 2023 points total was significantly impacted by his Giro d’Italia crash and his missing the remainder of the season. He was sitting in 3rd in GC after a blistering spring campaign and he averaged the 19th most PCS points per raceday in 2023 among all riders. Bagioli is another rider who might have better 2024 prospects than his projection given he ended the season 3rd-1st-2nd in three major Italian classics.
Top Transfers
We’ve discussed Bora and Trek’s additions, as well as Jayco’s strong business to reunite with Caleb Ewan and add 24 year old Mauro Schmid. They also add Luke Plapp from INEOS; he’s flashed significant potential in recent years and just won the Australian national championship weekend in both the road race and time trial.
Visma-LAB is adding the third best transfer in Matteo Jorgenson - a rider who contended for a Tour de France mountain stage win as well as finished top 10 in Flanders and E3. Visma-LAB is also adding two other U23s with World Tour experience in Cian Uijtdebroeks (#11 best transfer) and Ben Tulett (#18 best transfer).
Visma-LAB is projected to receive the most points from riders who spend at least half the season at 23 or younger - with double that of UAE Team Emirates.
Groupama - FDJ is another team which will heavily rely on younger riders; Romain Gregoire projects as 62nd best in 2024, Paul Penhoet as 98th best, and Lenny Martinez as 107th best. Those are three of the nine best riders racing at least half the season under 23.
Lotto-Dstny has the lowest quality adjusted age which is just a weighted average of predicted points and age. Their top four riders will be 22.2 (Arnaud De Lie), 25.2 (Florian Vermeersch), 26.0 (Andreas Kron), and 24.5 (Maxim Van Gils) on July 1st.
On the flip-side, Bahrain Victorious is relying heavily on riders approaching or over 30.
The final column in this chart shows the percentage of racedays where a rider on that team was the top rider on their team. Eg, EF Education’s riders for 2024 were the team leader in 26% of their racedays in 2023 - largely because of adding a bunch of top level neo pros like Archie Ryan, Darren Rafferty, and Lukas Nerurkar. This can indicate riders being forced to accept smaller roles.
On the flip-side, no roster had fewer racedays as the leader than INEOS at 15.6%. They will be looking for riders like Tom Pidcock and Carlos Rodriguez to step up into leadership roles.
The last couple years have seen the proliferation of sites discussing UCI points given the new promotion/relegation system adopted by the UCI for World Tour licenses in 2023 (which will settle World Tour licenses again for the 2026 season). The obvious question is why not to predict UCI points instead. First, UCI points have changed in points scale year-to-year with heavier weighting for Grand Tours in 2023 and continuing this year. I want a consistent point scale. Second, the two scales correlate very strongly which large and quickly diminishing rewards to top finishers and a similar approximate strength of race feature.
These values look different than other sites because of how I’ve chosen to determine what qualifies as a transfer. For example, riders who transferred mid-season like Antonio Tiberi and Arnaud Demare do not count as transfers, nor do riders who participated significantly on an associated Pro/World Tour team while on that team’s development team (like a few riders on Visma-LAB).