What do you see in the picture above? Three cyclists on a podium? The Flche Wallonne podium? Right now some team managers see 400, 320 and 260 UCI points as they and their teams aim for promotion to the World Tour or worse, stress about relegation.An update on the promotion and relegation standings as were now about halfway through the three year cycle. The relegation contest is raging and if its not front page news, well youre already reading a niche blog about the sport so youll probably be thinking of this contest when looking at results in the coming monthsRelegation reminderIts a three year process between 2023-2025 based on the sum of each teams rankings for each year. The top-18 teams qualify for a World Tour place, a World Tour team below 18th place faces relegation. Riders score UCI points with race results and a teams ranking is based on the total of its 20 best scorers.Here are the current standings for this week. Were almost exactly halfway now in the three year promotion/relegation cycle because the season is lop-sided with more points in the first half of the year than the second half thanks to a denser calendar and more World Tour events. The red line signifies the promotion-relegation barrier.Lets start with a quick look at the top of the table. UAE lead to the point of distorting the chart, if they werent so far ahead on the x-axis the gaps between others lower down would look wider. So here is the scoring for 2024 only, WorldTeams in blue, selected Proteams in red:We can see Visma-Lease A Bikes relative woes here, last spring all that was missing was the Ronde and Roubaix and they rightly made plans to fix this, now theyre well short of rivals UAE and instead scoring similar to Lidl-Trek and Alpecin-Deceuninck, top table but not table-topping. Bahrain start the year with a big cushion but have not been scoring much.Promotion candidatesLotto-Dstny and Israel-PremierTech scored well in 2023 and have kept on doing so, even if the Belgian squad didnt score big with Arnaud De Lie this spring because of injury and illness. Both are consistently scoring more than some World Tour teams.Uno-X are the best of the rest and have expressed ambition to move up but start from behind this season and need to score more, theyre roughly 3,000 points short of the red line today.Relegation battleGoing to the relegation battle Arka-B&B Hotels and Astana are below the line. Both started the season in 19th and 20th place but Astana have scored few points since, Alexey Lutsenko won the Giro dAbruzzo but its a 2.1 race and his GC and stage placing haul brought 150 points; team mates Christian Scaroni and Simone Velasco have scored more placing here and there. Collectively they dont yet have 20 riders with UCI points.Arka have picked up speed lately, this year theyre they 11th best team but hampered by last years bad start. New signings Arnaud Dmare and Florian Snchal havent been scoring much, instead Luca Mozzato is their big winner with over 1,000 points today with 640 from finishing second in the Ronde.DSM Firmenich-PostNL is only 500 points above the relegation line. Two of their three top scorers Oscar Onley and Warren Barguil are now out with injuries. After Astana theyre the other team not to have 20 riders scoring. Its not a big deal if a team has a 20th rider with 1 point, its more about the top scorers but shows how theyre all finding it hard going to score. They need a good Giro, with Fabio Jakobsen, Romain Bardet and Max Poole able to score. The Firmenich corporate merger and the arrival of PostNL has come with talk of budget increases so they could buy themselves out of trouble too.If Astana have the lowest score this season, of the current 18 World Tour teams next come Cofidis. They look only have a small cushion above DSM and ought to be worried. Top scorer Bryan Coquards had a more discreet start to the season but you can see in races hes having to do more work for himself, the team has lost engines (and scorers) like Max Walscheid. Guillaume Martin is picking up pace.Movistar cant be sitting comfortably either. On paper Enric Mas should score in the summer but his traditional Tour-Vuelta combo is risky, a window to score big but it means he often doesnt score much before and then it is subject to him avoiding illness and injury. Ivan Sosa should pick up some points too.OutlookTheres still a year and a half to go but Lotto-Dstny and Israel-PremierTech look like solid promotion candidates, they did well last year and have kept this up. If anything theyre improving, Lotto are uncovering more talent like Maxim Van Gils and Lennert Van Eetvelt.Promotion of two teams comes at the expense of two others and here Astana though have the proverbial uphill battle and to extend the metaphor, not enough climbing power to win it. They looked doomed although Lotto and IPT show relegation isnt the end of things: if we can see Astana sent down to the ProTeam ranks, the question is really about their long term stability, do there sponsors settle for this? If they can sit 19th or 20th and harvest invitations thanks to some marquee riders its a sweetspot.The other relegation spot is not easy to call from this far out. Arka are below the line so the obvious candidates but starting to score wide, DSM ought to have the quality to stay up but sport can be unjust while winless Cofidis look weak all round. So theres a contest to watch in the coming months.The post World Tour Promotion-Relegation Rankings first appeared on The Inner Ring.