No official communication from Astana with its new Chinese traction, but specialized data and statistics sites - ProCyclingStats and FirstCycling above all - inform us of a change in the Kazakh-Chinese team's roster. In the XDS Astana WorldTeam, the name of the 24-year-old Chinese Haoyu Su appears, and simultaneously the giant Gleb Syritsa is demoted to the "devo" formation. A change that is currently not registered on the UCI website where Syritsa still appears regularly in the WorldTour formation, while there are no news about Su yet, as the rosters of Continental teams have not been published.
A strong performer with good time trial placements in his home country, Su has worked his way up through the main Chinese Continental teams: he comes from China Glory and is the fourth rider from his country in World Tour history. Before him Cheng Ji, who with the current PicNic PostNL team completed the three grand tours and Milan-San Remo between 2012 and 2016, and the less famous Gang Xu, in the last Lampre, and Meiyin Wang in the then Bahrain Merida.

Regarding Syritsa, Su's peer and a sprint specialist especially at the Tour de Langkawi, if confirmed, he would be the third rider to move from Astana's professional roster to Development for the next season. The first two, Santiago Umba and Daniil Marukhin, had already been "moved" at the beginning of December, while the "last minute" timing related to the Russian sprinter almost suggests the need to sacrifice a rider to make room in the 30-rider roster for a representative of China, the country of the ambitious naming sponsor XDS. In a similar and opposite direction, moreover, seems to be the transfer to the same China Glory of Yevgeniy Gidich and Igor Chzhan, as well as the Kazakh sports director (not registered with Astana, but a former rider) Daniil Fominykh.

However, there will be no shortage of opportunities for Syritsa, as well as Umba and Marukhin naturally, to race aggregated with the WT squad: an increasing number of teams have indeed decided to use their Development formation as a "reservoir" to draw from extensively to face even high-level races during the season.