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Tour de Romandie

"I Don't Mind If A Few Teams Don't Show Up, But Right Now It Really Is A Lot" — Tour De Romandie Director Chassot Goes Public Over Five WorldTour No-Shows And The UCI's New Once-A-Year Skip Rule

CYCLING LOOKOUT • 30 APRIL 2026

Thursday Lausanne. Twenty-four hours after acknowledging publicly that the Tour de Romandie is running at a 10 per cent budget shortfall and racing without a yellow-jersey title sponsor for the first time in 32 years, race director Richard Chassot has gone on record over what he calls the bigger structural problem: a startlist that for the first time in its WorldTour era is missing five of the eighteen top-tier teams. Speaking to the Swiss broadcaster RTS at Wednesday night's stage finish in Ovronnaz, Chassot said the new UCI rule allowing WorldTour squads to skip one non-Monument race per season "made sense as a flexibility tool but is being used as a budget tool, and the calendar middleweights are paying for it".

The teams missing in 2026 are Cofidis, Decathlon CMA CGM, Uno-X Mobility, Lotto-Intermarché and Alpecin-Premier Tech, with the latter pair pointing to a packed Spring schedule and the Eschborn-Frankfurt commitment on Friday May 1 as the reason. The other three have been more direct, citing a need to free up rest days before the Giro d'Italia and the Critérium du Dauphiné. The result is fourteen WorldTour squads, four ProTeam invitees including the Swiss-registered Tudor Pro Cycling and the home Q36.5, and a startlist quality score that has slipped 60 points relative to 2025 even with the world champion in the race.

Chassot's comments mark a tonal shift from a race director who has been notably diplomatic over the years. "I don't mind if a few teams don't show up, but right now it really is a lot," he told RTS. "When you have a calendar where five WorldTour teams quietly decide that one of the best mountain weeks of the spring is the day they take off, the system has a problem — and it's not a problem the smaller race can solve." Asked whether the Romandie organisers were considering joining a wider organiser front against the rule, Chassot said the conversation was already being had: "The Volta a Catalunya, the Itzulia, the Romandie — we are not in competition with each other, we are the same kind of race, and we have the same conversation".

The UCI's once-a-year skip rule, introduced for 2026, was sold to the riders as a relief valve in an increasingly compressed calendar. WorldTour teams may decline one race — one-day or stage race, excluding Monuments and Grand Tours — and forfeit no ranking points. In practice, the rule has clustered around a handful of events in the late-spring corridor between Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Giro start, where teams with a Giro GC squad and a separate Spring Classics block face the worst rider-load arithmetic. Romandie has taken the brunt of it. The Itzulia in early April lost three teams. The Catalunya in March lost two.

For the Romandie organisation, the financial hit is real and stacks on top of Wednesday's sponsor shortfall. Five WorldTour teams missing means roughly 35 fewer riders in the bunch, fewer team buses on the road, and a hospitality footprint that has shrunk by roughly the same percentage as the budget. Chassot confirmed that ticketing and TV-rights numbers had so far held up — "Tadej Pogačar on the startline solves a lot of problems" — but that the structural number that worries the foundation is the long-term contract with the regional Vaud, Fribourg and Valais cantons, which is renegotiated in 2027 against startlist quality.

The riders' union, the CPA, has so far been quiet on the rule's downstream effects. Adam Hansen, the CPA president, told Eschborn-Frankfurt's pre-race press call on Wednesday that the rest-day relief value to riders had been "broadly positive" but acknowledged the redistribution of those rest days had landed disproportionately on the Romandie and Itzulia weeks. "We did not anticipate the cluster effect," Hansen said. The CPA is expected to revisit the rule with the UCI ahead of next winter's calendar workshop.

For now, the Romandie races on. The four invited ProTeams — Tudor, Q36.5 Pro Cycling, Israel-Premier Tech and Tour de Tietema-Unibet — have stepped up the level of the bunch where they can, and the GC battle behind Pogačar through Wednesday is one of the most open in years with Florian Lipowitz, Santiago Buitrago and Sepp Kuss all within a minute. But the structural conversation Chassot has now publicly opened — and the question of whether the UCI rule will be tweaked or left untouched for 2027 — is one that will outlast Sunday's Leysin summit.

"I have run this race in different forms for twenty years," Chassot closed. "The first time I have ever had to look at a startlist and say to myself, this is not the best version of the bike race — that's this year. We are going to fix it."

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