Away from the domination of UAE Team Emirates-XRG and its collection of superstars, and the consistent brilliance of Mads Pedersen, Remco Evenepoel and Mathieu van der Poel, the 2025 cycling season ought to be remembered as the year in which XDS Astana pulled off the great escape. Though not that you have really noticed them doing so.
At the start of the season, the Kazakh team with fresh new Chinese backers were almost 5,000 UCI points adrift of Cofidis in the battle to be one of the 18 teams to earn WorldTour status in the next three seasons. In other words, they were as good as doomed, relegated to the second-tier.
But Alexander Vinokourov’s team have dumbfounded everyone, jumping from 21st in the rankings to 15th, comfortably ensuring that they’ll be a top division team again next year. They’ve only won two WorldTour races all season, but have triumphed in China (7 wins), Turkey (5 wins) Malaysia (4 wins), Kazakhstan (2 wins), Hungary (2 wins) and Greece. In other words, they’ve played the system and overtaken those who haven’t. Here’s how XDS Astana pulled off the unthinkable, led by a coder.
From Project 35 to Great Escape
In 2024, Astana hired a young Frenchman who had spent the previous 10 years working in the financial markets, using coding and programming to analyse and invest in companies, to the newly-created role of data scientist. His name was Morgan Saussine, he was 32, and he had no background in cycling apart from being a fan. “I kept the stats and coding part, but switched finance for my passion of cycling,” he tells Rouleur by phone from his home in Annecy. “It was really a dream job.”
Saussine previously worked in finance before joining XDS Astana.
He was initially hired to assist the team’s performance department, in particular with Project 35 - the goal of Mark Cavendish winning his 35th Tour de France stage. “The idea was to gather all the available data and then go much deeper, to analyse sprints, leadouts, altitude training, really anything the coaches wanted,” he said. “I was creating dashboards with all the data we have for the coaches, and from there the experts with many years of experience could make decisions based on the data I have pulled together.”
After the buzz of Cavendish’s triumph settled down, reality hit Astana that they were in big trouble. Last autumn, Vinokourov and the team’s head of performance, Vasilis Anastopoulos, sat down with Saussine. They had another task for him to work on – a far more consequential one than Project 35: he had to figure out a race calendar to get Astana out of near-certain relegation. “Let’s be honest, almost no one believed it at the beginning of the season when the team were so many thousands of points behind,” Saussine acknowledges. “But the goal was set: we needed to score as many points as possible in 2025.”
Over the course of the autumn and early winter, as preparations for the new season sprung into action and several new signings came on board, Saussine began to put together his strategy: alongside the team’s obligations to race all but one WorldTour event, Saussine proposed that the team race dozens of lower-level races, where their superiority would naturally produce more wins or top-five finishes.
As the season reaches its conclusion, Astana have raced in 121 different events all year – 31 more than Jayco-AlUla and Picnic PostNL have, two teams who have also been in a battle to ensure WorldTour status. Forty-two of those races have been .1 races – the lowest UCI category. Cofidis have raced more – 131 races and 51 .1 events – but their calendar has been almost entirely European-focused, while Astana have regularly dipped their toes into the Asian market to scoop up precious points.
“It was all about calendar optimisation for points,” Saussine explains. “If you take all the .1 races in the entire season, the calendar becomes so big and you cannot do all of them, so I needed to do an assessment with all the data I had to see which races we were most likely to score points in. I’d look at past results, parcours, training data from riders, everything we had internally to help find the most suitable riders for the races who could extract the most points. I’d then present my findings to the coaches and management.”
Reaping the rewards
In April, Astana decided against racing the Tour of the Alps, and instead sent a strong team to the Tour of Turkey, on the recommendation of Saussine. “Both races are 2.Pro-rated so they had exactly the same number of points,” he says. “I compared where the weakest field would be in each race and suggested we go to Turkey.” It was a wise move: Astana picked up 488 points – 300 more points than Christian Scaroni earned for winning stage 16 of the Giro d’Italia, Astana’s most prestigious and highest-profile victory of the season. Prioritising smaller races has paid dividends.
Lorenzo Fortunato won the Giro d'Italia's King of the Mountains classification, earning XDS Astana 180 points.
Astana will end the season fourth in the UCI points rankings, with 11 different riders winning races – only UAE, Lidl-Trek, Ineos Grenadiers and Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe can boast more race winners. No one represents their approach better than their winningest rider Matteo Malucelli. The 31-year-old Italian has won eight races, but none of them in continental Europe. Astana’s strategy has caused some disgruntlement among the sport, but ultimately they’ve played the system and they’ve reaped the benefits. Saussine’s report card gives the highest possible marks.
“I remember the meetings we had in December when no one gave us a chance, and I can't blame people for thinking that – when you looked at the ranking it didn’t look good,” he says. “But everyone in the team believed in it and everyone has worked so hard to make it happen. It’s not like we woke up in March and we said, ‘Ah, maybe we have a chance now’. No, at the end of last year we set the same goal as a team and everyone pulled in the same direction. But I don’t want to put myself into the light: I’m mostly sitting behind my computer at home, while it’s the riders, staff, mechanics, masseurs, everyone else at the races.” Saussine prefers to remain humble, but the former financier has been as crucial as anyone in steering Astana out of the abyss. “Surprised?” he asks rhetorically. “No. Proud? Really proud. It’s been an amazing season.”
