Track cycling’s flagship event, the Track Champions League, has been axed after four years in a surprise move by the sport’s governing body, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI), and its broadcaster Warner Bros. Discovery.
The league was inaugurated in 2021 as an annual exhibition series of five fast-paced rounds taking place across Europe, with many of the world’s top riders taking part in either endurance and sprint categories. The series made tweaks to the Olympic format of some disciplines with the intention of making track cycling appealing to a wider audience, and it drew in large crowds throughout the 2025 edition, with the final round – held at London’s Lee Valley velodrome – sold out.
The 2024 women’s endurance category was won by Scotland’s multiple Olympic and world champion Katie Archibald, with Brits Emma Finucane, Matthew Richardson, and Will Perrett all taking individual victories over the course of the series. Last year’s edition had no victory ceremony as a crash brought the final round to an abrupt end, with Britain’s Katy Marchant flying over the velodrome’s protective barrier and suffering two arm fractures.
A statement released on Monday said that the broadcaster WBD Sports would “redefine its involvement in the promotion of track cycling,” with the decision spelling the end for the Track Champions League.
The decision comes towards the beginning of a new Olympic cycle, with riders starting down the long road to the Los Angeles Games in 2028.
At the same time, the UCI has announced a revamp of the Track Nations Cup, a season-long competition taking place over three rounds and itself a rebrand of the Track Cycling World Cup, which ran until 2021. This year there was only one round, in Konya, Turkey, earlier in March.
The competition will be renamed the Track World Cup from 2026, with three rounds each season and points accrued throughout the series determining qualification for the annual World Championships and the Olympics.
The decision appears to have been made to streamline the track calendar while maintaining TV coverage, with Warner Bros. Discovery to cover the renamed Track World Cup in place of the Track Champions League, as the UCI seeks to raise the profile of the series and track cycling as a sport.
The shelving of the Track Champions League comes during a turbulent time for live coverage of cycling. The news that ITV would not renew their contract to broadcast the Tour de France from 2026 means that this year’s edition will be the last to have free-to-view coverage. Cycling more broadly has gone behind a more expensive paywall since the dissolution of Eurosport in the UK and move of Eurosport’s content to TNT Sports – under the Warner Bros. umbrella – at the end of February, with viewers hit with a 344% price hike.
