Observe biking’s flagship occasion, the Observe Champions League, has been axed after 4 years in a shock transfer by the game’s governing physique, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), and its broadcaster Warner Bros. Discovery.
The league was inaugurated in 2021 as an annual exhibition collection of 5 fast-paced rounds happening throughout Europe, with most of the world’s prime riders collaborating in both endurance and dash classes. The collection made tweaks to the Olympic format of some disciplines with the intention of constructing monitor biking interesting to a wider viewers, and it drew in giant crowds all through the 2025 version, with the ultimate spherical – held at London’s Lee Valley velodrome – offered out.
The 2024 ladies’s endurance class was gained by Scotland’s a number of Olympic and world champion , with Brits , Matthew Richardson, and Will Perrett all taking particular person victories over the course of the collection. Final yr’s version had no victory ceremony as a crash introduced the ultimate spherical to an abrupt finish, with Britain’s Katy Marchant and
A press release launched on Monday mentioned that the broadcaster WBD Sports activities would “redefine its involvement within the promotion of monitor biking,” with the choice spelling the top for the Observe Champions League.
The choice comes in the direction of the start of a brand new Olympic cycle, with riders beginning down the lengthy street to the Los Angeles Video games in 2028.
On the identical time, the UCI has introduced a revamp of the Observe Nations Cup, a season-long competitors happening over three rounds and itself a rebrand of the Observe Biking World Cup, which ran till 2021. This yr there was just one spherical, in Konya, Turkey, earlier in March.
The competitors will probably be renamed the Observe World Cup from 2026, with three rounds every season and factors accrued all through the collection figuring out qualification for the annual World Championships and the Olympics.
The choice seems to have been made to streamline the monitor calendar whereas sustaining TV protection, with Warner Bros. Discovery to cowl the renamed Observe World Cup instead of the Observe Champions League, because the UCI seeks to lift the profile of the collection and monitor biking as a sport.
The shelving of the Observe Champions League comes throughout a turbulent time for dwell protection of biking. to broadcast the from 2026 implies that this yr’s version to have free-to-view protection. Biking extra broadly has gone behind a costlier paywall for the reason that dissolution of Eurosport within the UK and transfer of Eurosport’s content material to TNT Sports activities – beneath the Warner Bros. umbrella – on the finish of February, with viewers hit with a 344% value hike.