Novice

Fourth consecutive year at the top of the UCI rankings

Tadej and his team, UAE Team Emirates, ended the exceptional 2024 season where they started it, at the top of the world’s best rankings. With as many as 25 victories from March 2nd, when he was the best in his first race of the season, Strade Bianche, to October 12th, when he was the fastest in his last test of the year at Il Lombardia, Tadej won as many as 11,655 points on the UCI rankings.

Thus, he concluded the 2024 season with almost 4,000 points more than the 2023 season, and this is already the fourth consecutive year with Tadej at the top of the UCI rankings. Tadej has been at the top for 171 weeks, 161 of them consecutively, and it seems he will remain number one for a long time. His closest pursuer is two-time Olympic champion Remco Evenepoel, who has collected 6,072.6 UCI points.

»A big part of me is growing up, including my mental state, I have more experience. Many things have contributed to the improvement in form, including a different approach to training when I’m not on the bike. That’s why I felt most comfortable on it this year, I was a happier rider,« Tadej said about his progress this year, in which he achieved numerous historical milestones. He won 23 out of 25 victories in World Tour races, adding the world champion title in Zürich and a victory in the Giro dell’Emilia, which falls into the 1. Pro category. He is the first cyclist since Marco Pantani in 1998 to win both the Giro and the Tour in the same year, and the third in history to achieve the triple crown. He added the rainbow jersey to the pink and yellow ones, a feat only achieved before by Eddy Merckx (1974) and Stephen Roche (1987). It should be added that Tadej ended the season with his fourth consecutive victory at Il Lombardia, equaling the achievement of Fausto Coppi from 75 years ago.

The season was not only exceptional for Tadej but for the entire UAE Team Emirates, which celebrated 81 victories with as many as 20 different riders, 41 of the wins were in World Tour races. Thus, the UAE Team Emirates finished the season as the number one team in the world for the second consecutive time.

They will try to maintain this status in the future. Their riders and staff are currently at a team camp in the United Arab Emirates, and soon they will start planning for the 2025 season. »I will probably have to go to the Tour de France again, at the beginning of the season also to the UAE Tour, which I haven’t attended for two years. I will most likely compete in the Tour of Flanders, which I skipped this year, and I am also considering participating in the Vuelta,« Tadej said about his potential competition schedule in an interview for newspaper Nedelo.