Leaked document reveals MTB World Cup plans for 2025

In a leaked document titled ‘2025 MTB Reform, Evolution of Mountain Bike Racing’, the UCI and Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD) set out proposed changes …

By stwhannah

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Leaked document reveals MTB World Cup plans for 2025

OMG every single round in France!

Leaked document and no mention of taking away their bus passes

JFC. Another Project 2025? Is there some sort of tombola prize for this nonsense? Thanks for bringing this to wider attention, STW peeps. Good reporting.

Friday-night-just-got-back-from-local-cricket-prizegiving-grade(tm) analysis:

1)Way to turn the faffing sport into some sort of full-kit-w**ker F1-style dorkfest – unless, of course, this is some sort of intentional leak to soften the blow of something a bit less clipboardy and blazery. I feel sorry for the riders, mechanics, support staff and teams, mildly impressed for all the companies selling baseball caps, unimaginative open mould bikes and replica kit.

2) Two effing hours for a podcast? Life’s too short. Can we not just have the article(s) to read? That’s a quarter of my day. Seriously. I used to top out at 20 minutes per episode with the ones I ran – as a courtesy to my poor bloody listeners.

3) My bikes are 130mm travel. Can I ride my bike now, or do I need to set them all on fire and sit on a sofa?

4) There’s a thread on the forum about how, because no-one on the forum apparently watches DH, we must all hate it. I think there’s a ton of fatigue post-Red Bull, and a huge split between actual participation and passive viewing. I doubt I’ll ever buy a Discovery Channel sub, but I’ll sure as hell buy another bike.

5) Can we see the full document without it compromising the source?

I don’t see where the emphasis on a small number of teams comes from. The proposal is for 40 of them with between 3 and 10 riders plus the other ways to enter sounds like a lot of riders being able to compete.

The continental series are the critical part the plan to give privateers a route into the elite and get places on the world teams in a relatively affordable series, especially if the world cups go more global

The proposal is for 40 of them with between 3 and 10 riders plus the other ways to enter sounds like a lot of riders being able to compete.

That’s 40 over 4 disciplines, but not really as the ’15’ will all likely be mixed discipline big teams. Trek, Spec etc. They’ve left 5 places for others across DH and Enduro, and 5 XC and SC. The reality is it will be less than 30 teams across all mtb disciplines.

Some people might think that’s enough, but I think part of the appeal of dh Vs other big sports has always been it’s open nature. If you’re good enough as a racer you can race. Now if you’re good enough you’ll still have to find a place on one of 20-30 teams. Sure there’s other ways to get an entry, but without a team backing you every round, for most it’s just lip service, and given ews history of sponsor blackouts for racers that don’t ride for a team that paid the team tax, I expect they’d think it fine to extend that into the other disciplines meaning if you’re sponsored by someone outside the top teams you should expect almost zero coverage, no matter how well you do.

Cant see it mentioned in this article but Wideopenmag has a provisional schedule. If it’s true they’re running 14 DH races next year!

UCI Releases A Monster Provisional 2025 World Cup Schedule.

It’s problematic writing from a leak when you don’t know what its status is. Did the intern write to keep them busy or has a full UCI committee endorsed it?

Having to be in a team would mean no Candice Lille in the XC this year. That’s shooting themselves in the foot as she’s been on podiums and generates a good chunk of the interest

I do have a Discovery plus subscription. I watch the xc but not much downhill. I found the downhill confusing after the changes

Hard to interpret what the team changes mean at the lower level but I’m assuming this spells the end for an Adam Brayton type rider?

I really hope the suspension travel thing is just a guideline.  The last thing mountain bike racing needs is the UCI’s input (in the form of mandatory rules) on how bikes should be designed.

Hard to interpret what the team changes mean at the lower level but I’m assuming this spells the end for an Adam Brayton type rider?

In the top flight, yes. However if the changes are properly implemented, he’d have a chance of racing the continental series and potentially be at the sharp end.

I’m typing the following as someone who has finished in the bottom 5% of every race I’ve ever entered. We need to thin the field. Adam is a talented rider but with all due respect, doesn’t have what it takes to win a World Cup event. He’s raced year on year with the sole goal of qualifying. The World Cup needs to be filled with genuine contenders. All other professional sports have a tiered series and mtb is lacking this. We need the feeder series to give young riders time to mature and let the real talents come through. It does have the downside of losing the out of nowhere runs, such as Ronan Dunne’s meteoric rise but with the right continental series riders like him would still get their shot at the big time.

I think we’d all like more races, but with the current fields, the number of venues with infrastructure needed to accommodate everyone is very limited. Smaller fields would allow different places to host races that just wouldn’t be possible at the moment. We also need to make it a true World Series. Heading to the southern hemisphere cost a huge amount, but a smaller number of better funded big teams would mean this would be possible. Privateer’s could race their nearest continental series and keep costs down. If they are good enough, they’ll get picked up by a big team and move up. Unfortunately this all rests on series that don’t even exist yet. I can see a lot of pain and complaints in the short term and some riders may well fall between the cracks.

The XC travel has got longer as the courses have became more extreme makes no sense to limit travel to 100mm.
Totally agree about Candice Lill, she’s had a great season this year.

It all really depends what the brief was doesn’t it, if WDB/UCI told whoever drafted it that they wanted to drive more elitism and cost into the sport, whilst making things easier to package for broadcast then many of those proposals would work quite well.

The idea of ‘wildcard’ teams/riders being picked based on Social media profile is an interesting one, clearly they’ve taken note of how the Lifetime Grand Prix operates.

The tech regs setting travel limits are interesting, not necessarily an issue (I do note the image is headed “Sport and Product alignment“), but I wonder how that would affect national and regional series if it’s cascaded down, I for example happen to own a bike that doesn’t sit in any of those travel brackets, not that I would trouble the podium, but I can’t see it helping uptake if implemented further down the competitive tree.

Ultimately you have to wonder how it’s all going to shake out once there’s a shift in WBD management and they drop cycling and meddling with the UCI (as they inevitably will)…

We need to thin the field. Adam is a talented rider but with all due respect, doesn’t have what it takes to win a World Cup event.

While that is true, the sport has always had high profile riders that were never going to win a race series, yet their media presence was more than just winning races. A perfect example is Brendan Fairclough. A huge inspiration to kids and adults, yet as a racer. Only ever managed 3 podiums in his career, never finishing higher than 3rd, qualified outside the proposed top 30 a lot. A similar story for Brook MacDonald, Mark Wallace, Ben Cathro etc

Funnily enough, looking at Chris Ball’s race history, of the 26 world cups he raced, he only scraped into the top 30 qualifiers once.

This is a sport that’s more than just about race glory

Shaun Palmer is etched in the history of MTB racing, yet his actual race results aren’t the stuff of legend, it was his image and attitude that made him what he was. 

With these proposed changes, the characters that, for me at least, are the most interesting, will potentially be lost

@boardinbob qualification was top 80 when Chris ball was racing.

@brucewee this is nothing to do with the uci. It’s Warner brothers.

qualification was top 80 when Chris ball was racing.

I know that, I’m pointing out that the sport is more than just the top 30 riders

@brucewee this is nothing to do with the uci. It’s Warner brothers.

Did you read the article?

If there are going to be technical rules governing how mountain bikes are designed it’ll come from the UCI.

The travel stuff just seems… deranged? That’s just something that doesn’t need regulated whatsoever. What’s the benefit supposed to be? Just let the riding dictate the bikes and let people ride what works.

The travel stuff just seems… deranged? That’s just something that doesn’t need regulated whatsoever. What’s the benefit supposed to be? Just let the riding dictate the bikes and let people ride what works.

Definitely , I can’t see who this benefits. I would of thought the industry wouldn’t be to happy either , the specialized Enduro would have too much travel to be ridden in an Enduro .

It seems to assume that teams will be able to find the budget to do all this as well . My understanding was  the reason the Enduro season was all in Europe this year was at the request of the teams in order to keep costs down and I’d be surprised if a year later their budgets have grown much .

E-Enduro’s World Cup is to be ‘paused’, although it appears that the E-Enduro World Series may continue

I thought the World Series was the World Cup. This makes me realize how much I don’t understand mountain bike racing

The travel thing sort of makes sense if it is the UCI as they don’t want advantages that can be exploited. They are about the rider being the best and the bikes being very similar to not give an advantage.

They are about the rider being the best and the bikes being very similar to not give an advantage.

I’d disagree with that.  The road bikes you see on TV look the way they do because the UCI wrote the rules so that bikes still look like bikes and not Chris Boardman’s Lotus.

Travel would be such an arbitrary thing to police.  More travel comes with compromises and doesn’t always mean advantages.  If it did then all Enduro privateers would be riding modified Nicolai G1s with 210mm travel at each end.

I really hope this is just a guideline for track designers that has been badly worded.

Wideopenmag has a provisional schedule. If it’s true they’re running 14 DH races next year!

Sure I’ve read that every round of the DH and Enduro world cups will be in Europe

Having more travel doesn’t always mean better, some rounds are won on hardtails in the xc, varies on the course they are racing on to what some riders choose.

I really hope this is just a guideline for track designers that has been badly worded.

It reads more like a brief presentation of the bikes used in each discipline, for the benefit of somebody totally alien to the sport, but written five years ago.

Sure I’ve read that every round of the DH and Enduro world cups will be in Europe

That’s certainly what that WideOpenMag article (fixed link) suggests – all rounds of all disciplines bar the first 2 XCO in Europe. Pinkbike comments will be frothing!

What’s the benefit supposed to be?

Sell more bikes. The peadable dh bikes that some of the riders are using won’t be bought by many. A boat full of 150 ish travel bikes with good geo will sell well. The purpose of racing is to sell more bikes

Sell more bikes. The peadable dh bikes that some of the riders are using won’t be bought by many. A boat full of 150 ish travel bikes with good geo will sell well. The purpose of racing is to sell more bikes

for enduro I can see the logic (although I’d rather the courses changed to favour the smaller bikes rather than a blunt rule)

but making xc 100mm (or any other equipment rule) is going to undo everything great that has happened to XC over the past 5+ years.

I got as far as

There’s a clear expectation that DH will be ‘3 minutes of racing’. We already saw the Fort William track being sped up and straightened out to reduce the race times – will long courses like it be a thing of the past?

before my forehead hit the table.

Has Fort William really been “sped up” in that way? I mean, there’s a bunch of changes on the track that do make it faster but mostly they’re totally logical and in keeping with the track improvements that have been happening for years. Like, the big doon is far faster than the old line through the woods onto the road but not just to be faster. The section down to the river gap is straighter and faster but when the hoofer was first built the line into it was frankly bizarre, just slow and awkward, and some of the new options in the woods are slower than the classic lines (but more durable/less weather destroyable, for obvious reasons)

It seems to me that only the last bit above teh woods really feels like it’s been “straightened out” in this way but even that is largely about trail lifecycle things, it’s fresher than the old line so it’s smoother but in 5 years time it’ll be just as haggard. T

Two effing hours for a podcast? Life’s too short. Can we not just have the article(s) to read? That’s a quarter of my day. Seriously. I used to top out at 20 minutes per episode with the ones I ran – as a courtesy to my poor bloody listeners.

Whateveer happened to brevity being the soul of wit?

Lots of interesting points and lots of things to take into the future thoughts. I really do hope they still keep the sport open to the general riders, but i can sort of see why they won’t.. However this sadens me.

I Listened to the Chris Ball podcast the other week.

I could see where he was coming from on some of the issues with overall number of riders etc, 400 riders each for the DH & XC at Les Gets is an insane number.

But, what they don’t want to do is make it too small, agree with the above about some of the personalities who aren’t regular podium or even top 30 contenders – all sports need personalities that people can relate too.

No mention of the increased entry fees in that document though?

The Lou Ferguson interview sheds a bit of light on the fact that the teams don’t even know what’s going on, and that thing will be different for Elite teams and Non-Elite Teams.

All a bit of a mess really, you’d have thought that they’d have sorted this in time for teams/riders to know where they stand for next year.

Hoping that they keep Fort William (no way you could get that to a 3 minute course) – perhaps they could do what F1 does with Monaco and others for Historic purposes they’re kept on the calendar.

Thanks for posting this STW. The pod was a really interesting listen, great work George & co.

In that article, am I right in thinking you’ve posted the WB graphics with your own copy in between?

I can’t see a link to the actual doc anywhere? Did I miss it?

Looks like a mix of positive measures, things I could grudgingly accept and a good dose of bollocks as well. Particularly the little descriptions under each discipline on that graphic.

My interpretation, from listening to the pod, was that these are WB’s proposals to the UCI. Who may knock some of them back. Especially if this leak goes down like a cup of cold sick.

I think the suspension thing is likely to be part of a simpletons guide aimed at explaining the difference to higher ups within WBD rather than a proposed rule.

As for creating the “Continental Series”, Chris Ball recently said that’s not his responsibility and he’s only concerned with the World Series, effectively passing the buck when it all goes wrong. So he’s expecting others to pick up the bill for both the rider development and event management that he can then sell once they become “Elite”.

As for Fort William, it’s done and not happening next year according to locals in the know. Not only was the course sped up this year, but the Start and Finish lines were moved to cut the length as well.

As for Fort William, it’s done and not happening next year according to locals in the know.

That IMO is just a complete sodding disaster for the sport. Both as a whole and in terms of UK… Just a complete shit-show that

By the way, am I the only one who can’t find the podcast?

We took the podcast down at George’s request because there’s a bit he wants to edit, but he’s been away racing all weekend (he missed the track walk and Friday evening race prep rushing this podcast through for us!). It’ll be back up as soon as we get the new file from him.

And I haven’t shared the full document, because if I did that, then everyone could write a story about it, couldn’t they?! Then it wouldn’t be a scoop – I figured folks can go find their own secret sauces 🙂 For now, that seems to be working – I haven’t seen another site post anything about it.

I think he crashed in the race too 🙁

Possibly multiple times looking at his splits.

Travel would be such an arbitrary thing to police.

I don’t think they are. The wider plan for the UCI and Warner is to bring mountain bike racing to a wider audience, who probably don’t know the XC/Enduro/DH riders are on different bikes, or what the differences are and why. I can see them setting out categories (like weight classes in combat sports) to give folks who’re new to it all a ready reckoner to the sport they find themselves watching.