Tashkent City, one of the most controversial women’s teams of the season, has seemingly folded with immediate effect just before the World Championships in Zurich. Dan Challis reported last week in his Global Peloton newsletter that a source said the team would not continue. Team officials did not respond to Escape Collective‘s request for comment, but Tashkent’s top rider, Yanina Kuskova – the only member of the team to finish the Giro d’Italia Women and Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift this summer – separately confirmed the news, stating on her Instagram stories that the team “existed for three years and it was a great time and now it’s over.”
The team made headlines when it automatically qualified to race the Tour de France Femmes and then saw four of its seven riders fail to finish the flat, 123 km opening stage. By the race’s halfway point, stage 4, only Kuskova was left. While Tashkent City overall was clearly out of its depth, the 22-year-old Kuskova was not. Her 47th-place overall finish was impressive, given the circumstances; even WorldTeams like Roland and Human Powered Health struggled at the Tour, with just two finishers each and all well below Kuskova on the general classification.
Tashkent City landed on the biggest stage in cycling because of UCI points gathered throughout the 2023 season, using a successful – if controversial – strategy of scoring points mostly at small UCI-ranked events and races like the Uzbek national championships, sometimes without the required 40 participants and with rumours of fabricated results. Even after the UCI deducted points from the team’s ranking at the end of the season, the haul secured it an automatic qualifier spot in WorldTour level races like the Tour, Giro and Tour de Suisse.
The team’s three-year stint, supposedly focused on developing female cyclists in Uzbekistan, was “successful” in that it did land them a highly coveted start at the Tour de France Femmes, but the methods to get there raised questions around the UCI’s system for awarding those spots, and its abrupt collapse raises questions about whether it was a cynical effort that failed both its stated purpose and the broader development of women’s pro cycling.
A shallow team in the deep end
Tashkent City had already copped some negative press when it was announced they’d been tapped to race the Tour, a race that every UCI team hopes to score a spot at. Participating in the French Tour can make or break a team. Only last season, Coop-Hitec Products saw a huge boost in support and interest after they raced the Tour. But with Tashkent City taking one of the few non-WorldTour spots, the Scandinavian team did not receive a wildcard invite in 2024, and neither did the Dutch VolkerWessels (formerly Parkhotel Valkenburg) team or Lifeplus-Wahoo, two other former participants in the Tour.
The red flags were visible long before the season even started, but when none of the team’s riders could finish the four-stage Tour de Suisse it was clear the Tour de France Femmes, twice that length, would be a stretch. Still, at the Tour, the team defended its participation. The team’s manager Gleb Groysman told Rouleur at the Tour that rules were rules, and his team had acquired enough UCI points to make it to the Tour. He maintained that they didn’t break any rules in the process, and said if people didn’t like their participation in the race the UCI should change its rules for entry.
Groysman claimed that the whole goal was to develop cycling in Uzbekistan, and that when the team started in 2021 “only seven women cyclists existed in the country” and by 2024 there were 10 riders on UCI teams, seven of whom were at the Tour. But he also admitted that the riders were paid only €200-€300 (presumably monthly, although he didn’t specify), a wild disparity from the rest of the teams racing the Tour.
The team’s spartan budget was readily apparent at the race. While other teams at the Tour – even fellow Continental-level outfits like St Michel-Mavic-Auber93 – had sponsor-wrapped team buses lining the start paddock, Tashkent City operated out of a plain rented motor home. At the stage 3 time trial the three remaining riders wore mismatched gear and bikes, a stark contrast to the meticulous equipment and setups found elsewhere.
A project with a premature end
Groysman’s claim that Tashkent City was a project to develop Uzbek women’s cycling is in question the week leading into the World Championships. As Global Peloton‘s Challis reported, one of the reasons the team is shutting down was it accomplished one of its main goals: to get Uzbek riders into the Paris Olympics. Its 2023 campaign also yielded two start spots in the road race and one in the time trial. But Challis’ source also blamed corruption as an issue. Add to that retaliation; after her post about the team’s demise, Kuskova also chronicled her experience simply trying to get to Switzerland in the face of apparent hostility from her national federation.
“We didn’t take part in other European races because our team broke up and we probably won’t have any more trips,” Kuskova wrote in one post. “Still I didn’t stop training because I hoped to go to the World Championships WT – road race. My country promised to pay for the trip, but in the end, they bought tickets so that I have less than 24 hours before the start.”
Soon after she posted an emotional follow-up alongside a selfie, saying she had bought another ticket to Worlds but that the cycling federation was not allowing her to have her race bike and wheels “because I wrote an Instagram post a few days ago and they didn’t like it.”
A messy aftermath
The only good news is that Kuskova will race the women’s road race at Worlds on Saturday, albeit with her training bike. As of Wednesday, she was out pre-riding the course and preparing for the big day and hopefully a chance to land herself on another team for the 2025 season.
Come 2025, the UCI have also changed their rules to try to prevent a situation like that of Tashkent City qualifying for the Tour from happening again. The biggest shift is the introduction of a middle tier of women’s teams between WorldTeam and Continental that will make it impossible for a team that only pays its riders €200-€300 (monthly or otherwise) to race a WorldTour event.
Groysman admitted at the Tour that the team would likely not race any WorldTour races in 2025; nine of the 16 UCI-rated events on its 2024 schedule were WorldTour events (compared to just two the year prior), and against that level of competition the team did not secure enough points in 2024 to rank high enough to qualify for automatic invites. In the end, that wouldn’t have mattered anyway because the Uzbekistan Cycling Federation was apparently unwilling to spend significant money on the project.
The whole saga of Tashkent City, and how they were able to race the Tour among other WorldTour races without a proper team or equipment, is another example of the issue with development within women’s cycling. Even as the top tier of the sport continues to rise, with riders making more in 2025 than ever before, the rest of the sport is floundering.
Non-WorldTeams are folding left and right. The long-running American team DNA Pro Cycling announced it would shut its doors after this season, and Lifeplus-Wahoo is also done. Luckily St Michel-Mavic-Auber 93 looks like it will continue despite prior reports that the French team would close. And it’s not only teams; outside the WorldTour other races are struggling. Without that foundation the growth of the top level means little.
The spot Tashkent City occupied at the Tour de France Femmes would likely have secured any other team another year of operation. That in and of itself isn’t necessarily how the sport should run, especially when sponsor interest in a team like Lifeplus-Wahoo hinges on whether or not the team is picked to race, but it’s the way cycling works at the moment. Had Tashkent CIty had a better run at the race, it may have saved the team for another year, although it’s unclear to what degree that would have factored in the Uzbek federation’s decision. The 2023 points-scoring strategy was centred more on securing multiple spots for the Olympic Games; getting into the Tour was a bonus.
Tashkent’s difficult 2024 also puts in question the team’s stated ambition of developing Uzbek women in cycling, since it took them to races they couldn’t finish and then shut down before the season was even over. At the Tour, Groysman said the riders couldn’t speak English but were using apps to translate the negative attention they were getting, and that all the girls would be in tears afterwards.
No rider deserves abuse, especially for circumstances beyond their control. But when Groysman said openly that Tashkent City’s riders were largely not ready for the Tour, he implicitly admitted that the team set them up for failure, which is at best a highly questionable way to develop riders. The result is predictable: A few days before the women’s road race at the Worlds, not a single rider from Uzbekistan has a confirmed contract with a Continental or higher level team for 2025.
Having a team from outside of the regular cycling nations compete at the Tour should have been a huge win for the sport, but when most of its roster struggles to even finish the first stage, it’s the Tour, other Continental teams, and women’s cycling itself that loses. Normally, a Conti team at the Tour will go out of their way to make an impact on the race by jumping into breakaways and racing aggressively to make sure their jersey is seen. Tashkent City got more press than some other teams at the race, but not for making the race more interesting, and it’s hard to imagine a similar scenario happening at the men’s Tour.
In the coming years it will be clear if the introduction of a ProTeam tier, with minimum wages and other safeguards for professionalism in place, will help the development problem, but unless more thought is given to Continental teams, similar issues will continue and it will be both fans of the sport and the young riders in it who need competent, sincere development who will lose out.
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