Unibet Rose Rockets’ Tour de France dream dashed by ASO’s realpolitik

The omission of Unibet Rose Rockets from the Tour de France has caused a degree of consternation in some quarters of the internet, but a dose of perspective is always useful at a time like this.

In the thorny history of Tour wildcard invitations, ASO’s decision to exclude a fairly new team with just a dozen wins to its name in its first three years utterly pales by comparison to the burning selection controversy of the early 2000s, when then-director Jean-Marie Leblanc refused entry to the teams of Mario Cipollini and Marco Pantani for three years in succession between 2001 and 2003.

Pantani, as if anyone needed to be reminded, was a past Tour champion, while Cipollini became the world champion in that period. They were two of cycling’s biggest stars at the time, drawing millions of extra eyeballs to the Tour from one of Europe’s biggest media markets, but Leblanc was unmoved – the Italian pairing were personae non gratae.

Ethical concerns were among the reasons cited, though the Tour’s moral gatekeeping has always been haphazard. Richard Virenque won stages in two of those Tours, after all, while Lance Armstrong carried yellow to Paris each year. When Armstrong was later stripped of those Tour wins, the decision not to reassign them to anybody else was a clear indictment of that entire generation. 

No matter, Pantani and Cipollini were not welcome, and no amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth would change Leblanc’s mind. Then as now, the Tour de France made its decisions primarily for the benefit of the Tour de France. Nothing personal, just business.

All of that begs an obvious question – what is ASO’s likely rationale for selecting the unheralded Caja Rural-Seguros RGA ahead of the much-hyped Unibet Rose Rockets for the 2026 race?

Speaking to AFP on Friday, race director Christian Prudhomme attempted to couch the decision as one of pure sporting merit. Cofidis, Pinarello-Q36.5 and Tudor earned automatic invitations as the top-ranked ProTeams outside the WorldTour, and Prudhomme suggested that ASO had simply followed that logic for its two discretionary picks, thus selecting TotalEnergies and Caja Rural.

That is perhaps a little disingenuous. For one thing, Unibet’s Dylan Groenewegen is much more likely to compete seriously for a sprint win at the Tour than Caja Rural’s marquee signing Fernando Gaviria. More to the point, TotalEnergies would have been selected regardless of their position in the UCI rankings. 

ASO have always favoured French squads, as is their right, and with their sponsor withdrawing at season’s end, TotalEnergies’ presence in July was an existential matter. And let’s not forget, it very much helps that TotalEnergies is also an official sponsor of the Tour. French teams and sponsors have always understood the cost of doing business in July.

That left one more place at ASO’s discretion, and all winter, all indications had pointed towards Unibet Rose Rockets. The merger of Lotto and Intermarché, the WorldTour promotion of Uno-X Mobility and the demise of Arkéa-B&B Hotels meant that the slate of potential wildcards was considerably weaker than in years past, which opened the door for a team with such modest results to that point.

What’s more, Unibet Rose Rockets strengthened considerably for 2026, and Prudhomme himself lauded the signings of Groenewegen, Wout Poels and Victor Lafay. Bringing in Marcel Kittel as sprint coach was another canny hire and a signal of the increasing seriousness of a team that had grown out of a former under-23 rider larking about on his YouTube channel. 

When Bas Tietema showed up on the 2021 Tour in his initial guise as an influencer, ASO filed a copyright claim that forced him to take down the bulk of his content. In the years since, however, Tietema parlayed that YouTube channel into a team that has been steadily cultivating a fanbase through its social media output. This winter, that following came to believe a Tour debut in 2026 was almost a formality.

In that light, ASO’s decision to hand a wildcard to Caja Rural seemed to come from left field, given that few observers had even speculated that the Spanish squad was seriously in the mix. In recent weeks, there had been suggestions that Caja Rural might even miss out on a Vuelta a España spot, given the preponderance of Spanish ProTeams to wildcard places. But in the end, that consideration might have been a key factor in their invitation to the Tour.

ASO also owns the Vuelta, which means that ASO and their affiliate Unipublic had to solve the conundrum of how to distribute the race’s two wildcard places. By inviting Caja Rural to the Tour, ASO was now free to give the two Vuelta spots to Burgos Burgpellet BH and Kern Pharma, which it duly announced on Friday.

It helped, too, that the Tour Grand Départ in Barcelona gives Caja Rural ample publicity in their home market despite missing the Vuelta. ASO made its calculations accordingly. 

For Unibet Rose Rockets, all the YouTube subscribers in the world weren’t going to balance this particular equation in their favour. This was cycling realpolitik in action.

For all the wide-eyed enthusiasm of their social media output, Unibet Rose Rockets weren’t naïve when it came to the dark arts of pitching for a Tour invitation. In the winter of 2024, when restrictions on gambling advertising in the Netherlands meant they had to give up their Dutch licence to keep Unibet on board as title sponsor, Tietema’s team opted to register in France – ostensibly because it was the home country of Unibet’s new owner, FDJ United, but at least partly in the hope it would boost their prospects of a future Tour invitation.

That idea appears to have backfired for the time being. As well as owning the Tour, ASO considers itself to be the guardian of French cycling at large. With bona fide French teams complaining that the country’s employment and taxation laws put them at a financial disadvantage compared to the biggest teams of the peloton, the Tour organiser was perhaps unlikely to be all that well disposed to the perception that a foreign-based team was adopting the French flag out of convenience. 

“They don’t claim to be French at all, they have more Dutch riders,” Prudhomme said pointedly on Friday.

In hindsight, and despite the swell of support from social media, maybe the odds were always stacked against Unibet Rose Rockets getting the nod for the Tour, at least for this year. ASO is an inherently conservative company, and those instincts have seemingly led it to reward a longstanding sponsor like Caja Rural ahead of a relatively upstart operation.

Unibet Rose Rockets will probably have the considerable consolation of a Giro d’Italia wildcard in May and a season of results from Groenewegen, Lafay et al will significantly bolster their case for a spot on sporting merit at the 2027 Tour. 

But in the meantime, ASO have handed out the same lesson they gave to Pantani, Cipollini and plenty of others in years gone by – at the Tour, the house always wins.