Huh, the links work for me. Not sure why they're not working for you.
All types of UCI categorised races (world champs, world cups, continental champs, national champs, HC stage races, C1 stage races, C1 one day, C2 stage race, C2 one day, C3 one day) count towards individual rankings, and the top 3 riders in a country contribute to that country's ranking. The bigger races have far, far more points associated with them than small races (e.g. a win at world champs will get you 300 points, whereas winning a C2 will get you 30 points). I listed the races in order of most points available to least.
It is kind of true that a country can improve their ranking by holding a bunch of category 1 & 2 races. Especially a country like Australia where our races are nearly entirely contested by Australians. In contrast, when a European country has a categorised race many international racers come, meaning the hosting country doesn't necessarily get many of the points.
But there is a limit to the number of races of each type that count towards an individual's ranking. On the uci website there is a document with all the rules about this:
http://www.uci.ch/Modules/BUILTIN/g...&ObjTypeCode=FILE&type=FILE&id=34424&LangId=1
The relevant part is:
For events in the categories below, only the best results of each rider are taken into account:
• Class 1 one-day events: the best 5 results
• Class 2 one-day events: the best 4 results
• Class 3 one-day events: the best 3 results
• Class 1 stage races: the best 3 results
• Class 2 stage races: the best 2 results
So only a maximum of 4 C2s count for any one rider. So if Australia really wanted to maximise our number of places at the Olympics then we would hold 5 C1s, 4 C2s etc. The reason we don't do this (I am assuming) is that these races are pretty fricking expensive to hold. See the following document for a list of fees & minimum prize money
http://www.uci.ch/Modules/BUILTIN/g...bjTypeCode=FILE&type=FILE&id=NDc2MTg&LangId=1
For example, the minimum prize money for a C1 race is around 6,500 Euros just for the XC categories, and about 3,000 for a C2. Stage races are 1.5 times a single day race plus 1,600 per stage. And there are a bunch of other expensive rules (like the number of commissaires required). So you can see that it gets expensive pretty quickly for a country like Australia where our elite races already lose money even when they are not UCI categorised.
Hope that answers your questions. Now that you're the XC rider rep it might be a good idea to get familiar with all those documents. If the links aren't working for you, you can access them all from the UCI website,
www.uci.ch/
