The stars who have illuminated the 2024 track season are ready for more spectacular battles as the fourth edition of the UCI Track Champions League kicks off this weekend in France. The Vélodrome National de Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, home of the track events of the 2024 Paris Olympic Games a few months ago, will host the opening round this Saturday.
With its intense and modern format, the series features 72 competitors, evenly spread across four leagues: Women Sprint, Men Sprint, Women Endurance and Men Endurance.
For each league, two events are raced at each round: individual sprint and keirin for the Sprint Leagues, elimination and scratch for the Endurance Leagues. The overall winners are crowned based on a points system over the five rounds that culminate with London’s Grand Finale on 7 December at the Lee Valley Velopark that hosted the track competitions of the 2012 Olympic Games.
Between the French opening round and the Grand Finale in Great Britain, the stars of the UCI Track Champions League will compete in two rounds in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands, a new host for the League. The Lee Valley Velopark will host round four the day before the Grand Finale.
A diverse field with a stellar record
All four defending champions - Great Britain’s Katie Archibald (Women Endurance), New Zealand’s Ellesse Andrews (Women Sprint), Canada’s Dylan Bibic (Men Endurance) and Dutchman Harrie Lavreysen (Men Sprint) - return to defend their crowns in a velodrome particularly dear to Andrews and Lavreysen, who claimed multiple Olympic Games gold medals this summer.
The three British women crowned Olympic Champions in the team sprint this year - Sophie Capewell, Emma Finucane and Katie Marchant - will be in action, as will one of Lavreysen’s partners in the team sprint, Jeffrey Hoogland. The Oranje duo also made history in the recent UCI Track World Championships, where the likes of Denmark’s Tobias Hansen and Belgium’s Lindsay De Vylder also claimed gold medals before turning to the UCI Track Champions League.
The 72 riders competing in the 2024 edition of the series have collectively amassed 14 Olympic titles, 55 titles of Elite UCI World Champion titles and 211 titles of Elite Continental Champion on the track.
Egypt’s Etbissam Zayed alone has claimed 40 African Championship gold medals on the track since 2016. She’s one of the 30 riders gearing up for a first participation, making Egypt the 39th nation to be represented in the history of the UCI Track Champions League.
Twenty-six nations will be represented this year, including 11 riders from Team GB. Among them, Matthew Richardson, who changed his sporting nationality this summer after representing Australia in the Olympic Games (two silver medals and a bronze).
A show of power
The 2024 field brings together established stars and youngsters ready to storm velodromes at the highest level of competition. Eyes notably turn to two rookies who illuminated the UCI Junior Track World Championships earlier this year: Australia’s Tayte Ryan, who set a new Junior world record in the 1km time trial (59’’875) and Colombia’s Stefany Cuadrado, the youngest of all contenders (born in May 2006), who has already won four rainbow jerseys.
The UCI Track Champions League will deliver unique insight into the athletes’ performances thanks to data collected and analysed with AWS (Amazon Web Services).
All the riders share physiological data (height, weight, resting heart rate, max heart rate, peak power) ahead of the competition and their values will be monitored and displayed during the races. Israel’s Mikhail Yakovlev had the biggest output on paper at last year’s UCI Track Champions League: 2,840 watts. And he’s also the tallest - 199cm - and the heaviest - 103kg - contender. But when it comes to watts/kg, Richardson hits the highest score: 31.8.
Raw talent, mighty power and supreme skills… The 2024 UCI Track Champions League brings it all together night in and night out.