Tour director Prudhomme explains thinking behind Unibet Rose Rockets snub

Tour de France director Christian Prudhomme has defended ASO’s decision not to award a wildcard invitation to Unibet Rose Rockets for this year’s race.

On Friday, ASO announced that it had given its two discretionary wildcard invitations to TotalEnergies and Caja Rural-Seguros RGA. 

ProTeams Cofidis, Pinarello-Q36.5 and Tudor Cycling Pro Cycling automatically received berths as the three top-ranked teams outside of the WorldTour, and Prudhomme suggested that TotalEnergies and Caja Rural had been invited as they were the next two teams in the UCI rankings.

“We followed the same principle as in previous years, which is to say that we took the second division rankings,” Prudhomme told AFP. “Caja Rural are 25th, but with the disappearance of Arkea-B&B Hotels and the merger between Lotto and Intermarché, they are now 23rd.”

Unibet Rose Rockets, which developed out of the YouTube channel of former rider Bas Tietema, had been widely tipped to receive an invitation to the 2026 Tour. The Dutch squad took up a French licence last year, partly due to restrictions on sports betting sponsorship in the Netherlands, but also as part of their campaign to secure a Tour invitation in the future. With that goal in mind, they also signed Dylan Groenewegen, Wout Poels and Victor Lafay to their roster for this season.

The Tour has tended to prioritise French teams with its wildcard invitations, but Prudhomme and ASO still regard Unibet Rose Rockets as a Dutch outfit.

“They don’t claim to be French at all, they have more Dutch riders,” Prudhomme said. “It’s true that they have recruited very well with Wout Poels, Dylan Groenewegen and Victor Lafay, three former stage winners on the Tour. It’s a team that dreams of the Tour de France in the long term. We’ll be watching all this over the coming years.”

Caja Rural’s surprise invitation clearly owes much to the fact that this year’s Tour starts in Barcelona. Their presence on the Tour means that ASO and Unipublic have handed the Vuelta a España’s two wildcards to fellow Spanish ProTeams Kern Pharma and Burgos Burgellet BH.

“[Caja Rural] finished fourth in the team classification of last year’s Vuelta where their leader Abel Balderstone finished 13th overall,” Prudhomme said. “He happens to be Spanish, of course, but he’s also Catalan.”