Avoiding Pogacar, Chinese bikes, or improving nutrition: some keys to how XDS-Astana has moved out of the relegation zone

The last year of validity of the World Tour licenses started with XDS-Astana in a precarious situation and in need of accumulating all possible points to enter among the top 18 teams. It only took 5 months, with the extra budget boost from the Chinese manufacturer XDS and thanks to a change in mentality along with other details, for the Kazakh-Chinese team to reverse the situation by overtaking Picnic-PostNL.

XDS-Astana is steadily moving towards securing its place in the World Tour

In an interview with the well-known website Velo, the performance manager of XDS-Astana, Vasilis Anastopoulos revealed the keys to cutting the 5,000 points that separated them from the last team with a World Tour spot in the next three years, in just 5 months of the current 2025 season.

The first change the team made was related to the choice of calendar. Since the beginning of the season, we have seen XDS-Astana win races and make it into the Top10 of many competitions, but mostly in .Pro and .1 category races, the second and third levels in cycling.

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Anastopoulos explained that "It is more than clear that we cannot compete at the highest level with teams like UAE Team Emirates and cyclists like Pogacar. We had no choice but to choose races of a lower level." Apart from this alternative calendar, a thorough analysis of the characteristics of each rider was also important in selecting the optimal ones for each race.

The team's performance manager gave the example of Scaroni, who had a brilliant start to the season in European races. Anastopoulos points out that last year they made the mistake of sending him to the Tour Down Under, and it turns out he is a cyclist who doesn't perform well in the heat.

Within this calendar of second-level races, they realized that, for example, competing in the Volta ao Algarve, a 2.Pro category race, awarded the same points as the Tour of Hainan, of the same category. The former was won by a certain Jonas Vingegaard, while in Hainan, they were the only World Tour team and, despite having the entire peloton against them, they managed to take third and fourth place overall and win two stages to return with a good haul of points.

Anastopoulos also points out the importance of the new X-Lab bikes in improving the team's performance, the bike brand of their Chinese sponsor XDS. Last year, the team was testing the first units of the bike, which raised some doubts. However, the brand listened to the suggestions of Peter Kennaugh and Alex Dowsett, who joined the team this year as performance engineers, ensuring that the finished bike meets the requirements in terms of aerodynamics and stiffness.

By the way, the addition of these two names to the performance staff, who took the risk and accepted the challenge of training a team almost doomed to relegation from the World Tour, has also been one of the major changes in the performance of their cyclists. In fact, the core of the team continues to be riders who were already on the roster in previous years. Although there is still much to be done, the season was planned to start strong and earn points from the beginning, which, in turn, would boost the team's morale for the rest of the season.

Speaking of performance engineers, there has also been a shift in the planning of the cyclists, especially in terms of nutrition. This aspect has been completely revamped within the team, allowing them to realize the huge difference between optimal energy replenishment during races and what they were previously doing.

"In November, we started conducting tests with the University of Padua to determine the maximum amount of carbohydrates the cyclists could assimilate. We found that some cyclists could easily digest 170 or 180 grams of carbohydrates without gastrointestinal problems, while others could barely digest 90 grams." This allowed them to create optimal nutrition plans for both training and competition.

A lot of changes that, judging by the results, have proven to be successful decisions and are now putting pressure on the Picnic-PostNL team, which does not seem to have the necessary capacity to react, given the performances of the Dutch team so far this season, to fight for the spot that XDS-Astana has just taken from them after a dazzling start to the Giro d'Italia, where they have placed cyclists in the Top10 in all stages and currently have the leader of the mountain jersey in Lorenzo Fortunato.