April Stats: The Spring Classics Update
April is often the best month in cycling especially if you’re a big classics fan as I am and it’s also the month where both the flat, cobble and hill stats are at their most dominant. So this April update is kicked off by stat changes in the big cobbled classics of
Flanders and
Roubaix which as always were highlighted by the luckier riders who mostly stayed out of trouble and the unluckier riders like
Cancellara and
GVA who seemed destined to fail, despite being on some of the best form of their lives. Also to try to recognize the differences between certain riders that do well at Flanders and not so well at Roubaix, there has been some tinkering with the hill stat to show these differences if they occur. The cobble star was surely
Sagan who finally answered a lot of his critics and there’s clearly no question about his STA now, in fact he’s had updates in both cobble and STA.
Boonen has proved he’s still a force to be reckoned with and
Stannard has proved he can do it over longer cobble classics as well, whereas an out of form
Kristoff and
Stybar have had small decreases in the cobble stat. Moving further down the upgrades
Rowe has shown that Sky have a great replacement in these races for
Thomas and and an emerging
Moscon has seen stat rises for those two, while riders like
Erviti and
Hayman have been upped to try and make them more prominent in these races (it’s almost impossible to get them to perform as they did in real life though) Finally as a team IAM were a surprise package with so many of their riders deserving mid 70s cobble stats, if they were to ever get a big cobble star in the future they really would have a great cobble team.
Whereas cobble stats can be hard as they only come once a year, the hill stats starting with the
Basque Country were a complete breeze to begin with, with nearly all the rider performing as their stats would suggest, It was really only riders like
Vervaeke, Craddock and
Latour that continued to improve in the stats and of course a rider like
Cummings just continued to impress with his strength, a real RES beast. These hill stats then should have been simple for the
Ardennes classics but in fact it was only at
Fleche where the riders performed as they should.
AG was a bit different from recent years and was highlighted by a big boost to
Valgren in a number of stats and also really consolidated the stats of
Gasparotto. Unfortunately it’s hard to get AG right, as the game AI treats it like a typical Ardennes race, which of course it isn’t.
LBL was dictated by the weather which saw what I call in-form 78-79 hill stat riders fighting it out between them, while their leaders were mostly in the chasing group. The hill stats probably saw more decreases at the top than increases as
Rodriguez looks a bit over the hill,
Gerrans, Gilbert and
Kwiatkowski were out of sorts and
Moreno working too much as a domestique for
Valverde now. Increases came for
Zakarin who is getting increases it seems a lot now and also upgrades for
Barguil and the veteran
Sanchez the BMC one. Other riders like
Howes, Cummings and
Konrad also surprised at LBL and got boosts. Unfortunately a possible update was expected for
Henao but with him being dropped by his team that didn’t happen.
Races like
Trentino basically just showed that they were being used as prep races for the bigger riders and this allowed lesser names to shine more. Also the
Tour of Croatia and the
Tour of Turkey highlighted some lesser known names from the PT and CT level riders who find their best form for these races and I know
Croatia was busy with riders in these races as well. Tour of Turkey even showed us that some Lotto flatmen could climb better than previously thought as well.
We also squeezed in the
Tour of Romandie a race which is always a big tour form indicator and yet again
Zakarin was on the rise with his mtn stat for this race and is looking like the next
Froome all the time and its mountain stages were a great test for the mtn stat at this time of the season and saw unlikely riders like
Howson and even
Gasparotto improving on their mtn stats and
Ion Izagirre in great form and getting a mtn and pro boost as well. Also updates stats for riders like
Reichenbach and again
Latour who impressed in this race.
On top of all this we have done a big revision of the RES stat which has been matched to a criteria that we in the stats team have drawn up and agreed on, so hopefully the use of the RES stat will seem more realistic now, as it’s always been the least understood stat in general. Along with this
Matt and myself did a recent STA check as well so we can have the most up to date STA for the classics and on a positive note we probably decreased more than we actually increased.
The rest of the team headed up by
Selwink and
Togo in the stages department, have put together the real life
2016 Giro route along with other guest stagemakers and so what an excellent time to try out the latest stats on the first GT of the year. If you’ve still got the classics bug,
Togo has added two amended versions of the
Milan San Remo and he’s finally got the best
Paris-Roubaix ever created for the db by
Leon working properly so we can enjoy it. Talking of Leon he’s in the process of doing a variant Tour of Flanders the monument that the game most desperately needs and also check out his
Fleche-Wallonne which was actually added on the previous upgrade. Also if that’s not enough
Biggassi is putting out what seems like a never ending supply of Tour de France routes as well.
In addition to this both
Croatia and
Kodman have been putting hard work into a new project that they’ve thought up and that is adding a whole load of researched additional young riders to the DB an area which both are very interested in and I know both will be working on another free agents topic as well in the near future.
Finally the rest of the
PCMdaily Team has worked hard to update graphics, team jerseys, NC's jerseys and new stages and variants etc (see main release section for details)
Stats brought to you by the
PCMdaily DB Stats Team of Tafiolmo, Croatia, Kodman and Matt who keeps an eye on everything.
For the new update to work you already need to have the V1.0 and V1.1.0 installed and the download for the V1.2.0 is here:
https://pcmdaily.c...p?did=1063 
