Only Pogacar and co. perform better: Scaroni's victory is just one example of Astana’s mega start as points chaser

XDS Astana Team added a whole pile of names this winter to score many UCI points in 2025. This is how Alexandre Vinokourov's team intends to stay in the WorldTour in 2026, and the start of the year is encouraging. Christian Scaroni's win in the Classic Var on Friday was just one example of this.

With the new Chinese sponsor XDS, Vinokourov was very active in the transfer market this winter. After a dramatic 2024, his team had dropped to 21st place in the UCI Team Ranking, so help was needed. Fourteen new riders were brought in, including the Dutch riders Wout Poels, Mike Teunissen, and Darren van Bekkum. Well-known names such as Aaron Gate, Sergio Higuita, Diego Ulissi, and Clément Champoussin also joined the team.

The effect was extraordinary in the first weeks of 2025. Only UAE Team Emirates-XRG collected more UCI points in the first races of the year than XDS-Astana. The Kazakh cycling team earned 1,800 points, while the UAE earned 2,461. On February 21, 2025, Movistar is number three, with 1,560 points.

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Wout Poels was one of the new recruits this winter

One victory, but above all, many podium places for Astana

How could XDS-Astana have already collected so many points? Well, the team's performance is remarkably consistent across the board. Scaroni's victory in the Classic Var was only the team's first of the season. Still, also with Gate's second place in the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race, second place for Max Kanter in the Clasica de Almeria, second place for Scaroni in the Clàssica Comunitat Valenciana 1969 and Trofeo Calvià, and second place for Matteo Malucelli in stage 5 of the UAE Tour, the team scored lots of points.

Add to that a bunch of solid top-five rankings for Ulissi, Champoussin, and others, and Wout Poels' seventh place in the final ranking in Oman, and you can conclude that the light blue formation is on a roll. Scaroni was awarded 75 UCI points for his victory in the Classic Var, but that will be the last thing on the Italian's mind. In the French one-day race, he achieved his first professional victory for Astana after winning two stages in the Adriatica Ionica Race in 2022 on behalf of the Italian team.

Read more below the photo.

Christian Scaroni finally wins for Astana

Scaroni is already 27 years old, mainly because during his time with Gazprom-RusVelo, he suddenly found himself without a team in 2022 due to the war in Ukraine. This caused him to pause momentarily, but at Astana, he had already performed strongly in the previous two seasons. In 2023, he finished second in the Arctic Race of Norway, and in 2024, he began to achieve solid top-ten rankings, especially in one-day races regularly. In last year's Giro d'Italia, he was in a breakaway almost daily.

In 2025, Scaroni finished in the top three four times in seven one-day races. His victory in the Classic Var was a reward for his excellent form. "My legs felt great, but I waited for someone else to attack so I could respond with a counterattack 500 meters from the finish. I felt that everything was going perfectly and that I could take the first victory for our team this season. I am thrilled."

Sports director Bruno Cenghialta added in an Astana press release that there might have been more possible if Champoussin had not gotten a flat tire in the final. The French rider now finished seventh. "Christian has long waited for this victory, so the joy was enormous. He deserves this success after such a strong start to the season," said the Italian, who saw Scaroni finish with his finger pointing to the sky, a tribute to his recently deceased grandfather.

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