Before this year, WorldTour teams didn’t have to come to Cadel’s Race or the women’s Tour Down Under. Now they do.
When the Santos Tour Down Under gets underway later this week it will usher in a new era for the race, and for Australia’s international road races more generally. For the first time ever, the women’s Tour Down Under will feature the entire contingent of WorldTour teams – 14 in all. That’s a significant step up from the previous record of 10, set at last year’s edition.
It will be a similar story at the Mapei Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race at the end of the month. In 2026, for the first time ever, the women’s race will have all WorldTour teams in attendance. The men’s race, too, will have all 18 WorldTour teams on the startline for the first time – a step up from the previous record of 15, set in 2019.
So what’s responsible for the sudden surge in the world’s best teams coming to Australia? And what’s the significance of that for the Tour Down Under and Cadel’s Race, and for the teams?
New rules
In February 2025, the UCI announced a change to the rules that dictate which races men’s and women’s WorldTour teams (“WorldTeams”) must participate in from 2026 onward. Previously, a handful of WorldTour races (like Cadel’s Race) weren’t compulsory for WorldTour teams, but from this point on, all WorldTeams must effectively take part in all WorldTour events. The goal of this change, according to the UCI, was “ensuring the participation of the world’s best teams in all the most prestigious road events.”
Under the new rule, WorldTeams may now choose only one WorldTour event to skip each season, so long as that one event isn’t one of the biggest races on the calendar* and so long as they don’t skip the same race more than once every three years.
Given there are two WorldTour events in Australia for men and women – the Tour Down Under and Cadel’s Race – and given teams can only miss one WorldTour event per season, all WorldTour teams are now priced into coming to Australia, whether they want to or not.
(*For men, the unskippable races are the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France, Vuelta a España and the five Monuments: Milan-San Remo, Ronde van Vlaanderen, Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and Il Lombardia. For women, the unskippable races are the Vuelta España Femenina, Giro d’Italia Women, and the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. You can read more in section 2.15.127 of the UCI’s regulations for road races.)
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