In the end, the difference between promotion and relegation was 398, and for a while it looked even closer – until Sakarias Løland won the season-ending Veneto Classic.
Jonas Abrahamsen celebrates his Tour de France stage win, Uno-X Mobility’s biggest triumph in a spectacular 2025 season.
Cor Vos
For the second year in a row, the season-ending Veneto Classic was won by a rider wearing a Uno-X Mobility jersey, this time in the form of Sakarias Koller Løland. It was a hard-fought thing on the jagged terrain of the northeastern Italian region, but Løland dug deep to regain contact after being dropped from the fractured lead group, ultimately out-punching Florian Vermeersch and Diego Ulissi to take what looked in the end like a confident victory.
A first-ever pro win is always something to be celebrated, but Løland’s bears heightened significance given what it means for his team, poised now for promotion to the WorldTour from 2026.
“Am I allowed to curse? Fucking hell, that was a crazy ride,” said a very excited Emil Vinjebo, team DS and former pro, on the team’s social media. “In the morning everyone was so nervous about the points, I could feel they had the weight on their shoulders, and in the end? They just raced.”
After a defiant late effort from promotion rival Cofidis in Guangxi and Japan, and the Lotto-Intermarché merger gathering momentum, the gap between the two teams vying for the 18th WorldTour spot had narrowed going into the final weekend, meaning it was all to play for on the last Sunday of the road season. At the start of the Veneto Classic, both squads will have been acutely aware of the value of the prize pot, that is, victory would carry 200 UCI points, which was greater than the margin between them (174, by this author’s calculations at around lunchtime).
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