Good to see Galta make use of that TT and climb to 7th in the GC. 6th will be difficult as Hirt is great, but there should be no reason to drop spots, making 7th in the GC our new goal.

Congratulations on a surprise stage win, Roman, and also to SotD for keeping the jersey and basically deciding this Vuelta. Can't see any chance for Lecuisinier dropping time to Tenorio (or Kritskiy) on the remaining stages.

Prado with another great surprise, looks like he had an amazing day, although I don't really understand how it is possible that a guy with 74 TT attribute wins a time trial in a Grand Tour, have to be really happy with the result. Hirt at least somehow limited his loses. Good day for my team.

Stage wise 9th is another dissapointment, but I can’t complain about the times. I suppose there must have been a change in wind/weather conditions seeing the outcome here. But less points for Tenorio also means keeping the points jersey by a decent margin. I still need some Stage succes for Lecuisinier to win the points jersey, but for now it’s good.

Keeping the jersey and still with a margin where we Can afford Tenorio to pick up a time bonus is good. But I would prefer it if we would go on the offense to enhance the lead.

By now though I agree it is ours to lose, and Lecuisinier SHOULD be able to win.

Disappointed that we didnt join the break. Skujins was unlikely to win this stage from the peloton anyway so seeing this turn of events was a bit frustrating to watch.

Tvetcov is personified crazyness



I liked to see Egger in that winning break. Hasnt showed that enough last season but he is a pretty cool rider so glad to see him doing well

It's always a bit of a bummer to miss out on potential stagepoints, when Lecuisinier was the pre-stage favorite and Bongiorno even too was a 1 star pre-stage favorite, but allowing the breakaway riders to fight it out, we ensure that the bonus seconds doesn't come into play and from that perspective I can easily accept us doing nothing here.

What does bother me however is that Lecuisinier is isolated in the group. That's just poor help. Bongiorno should have easily been around him, much like Budyak, Barta or Mavrikakis could have been looking at the size of the group and the riders in it. Being caught out by a split isn't acceptable either when you should be man-marking the red jersey. If Barta was just somewhat awake he could climb a ton of positions and end up in the 3-5th region of the U25 competition and also be safely inside the top 50 GC. We really don't want to contest the Team GC either with these constant blimps.

Oh well, those are just RP me being over-eager. The only thing that matters is to let Lecuisinier get to the finish line in Madrid and take the red jersey over his head one last time. I would like to crown the race with the points jersey too, but with Grosu just 18 points behind and us having no interest in winning more stages (I suppose) that could prove tricky!

Good job by Novak trying, but I fear like those points over Smtih won't be enough. He's looking pretty empty tbh.

As expected no game changing stage. And also as expected the breakaway takes it and someone like Dion Smith may actually go into the Top-10 with those breaks. Not sure, why my riders stopped joining those breaks and we may again end up with a rather disappointing scoring output despite a surely nice 5th place in the GC..

If I'm not the last place scoring team from this race I'll be surprised. In terms of PCM AI, I've just been extremely unlucky. However PCM would make you think I have the worst team here. No breakaways, GC contender that should have been a safe Top 10, keeps losing his position to Dion Smith (no offense). Not many sprint stages, but the ones we had were mostly horribly mis-timed. Tons of depth climbers but none are "high enough or low enough quality" to join the break, Im really not sure which it is. The fact the team is just so passive is completely unrealistic and frustrating though. If teams haven't done much or their GC rider turns out to be trash, usually a team will throw riders into the break of the day each stage in the last week of a grand tour. Like I fully believe I should have scored a minimum of 500 points here, and instead I think I'm on track for about 130.

Appreciated! I'm glad there's at least one thing we can bond over.

5th is at least on par for the course by Mike there, a really good showing for our long lost child. The sprint was tight, so both a better result and a worse result was possible there, I can't complain getting the solid middle ground.


Arndt getting dropped in a stage he was a favorite for is funny, but luckily irrelevant GC-wise.
I do want him in the breaks for the last two stages though instead of our domestiques.

I was expecting 3 mountain stages at the end of this Vuelta, I guess not! Well protecting our podium is all what's left to do anyways.

Sorry for the lack of comments. Pretty happy with the race. Not great scoring wise, but we keep getting in the right breaks. Really liked Nesset in the vreak a couple of days ago, but just ran out of gas in the end. Unfortunate as that probably was his chance to get a top 12 place in the GC. Hope to see him in the break again in the final weekend.

Weird stage for my team.

Finally Valls joining the break...on a stage where only minimum time can be gained...he really should have joined all the mountain attacks where you really could have climbed in the GC.

Plus Velits getting a puncture from the break and then sitting only being caught by the peloton, dropped there and just like Carboni the other day not showing any interest to ride a good pace...So while Carboni dropped 50 places this way out of top100, Velits at least only dropped a few spots but still this AI is weird in some cases when dropped from the break. He just could have sit in one of the peloton groups I guess on such profile instead of giving up.

So in the end a bad stage unfortunately. Losing GC points and no stage points due to Valls finishing in the later spots of the stage. At least they try.

Given Grosu finished in the red jersey group in the last couple of stages I'm guessing the team thought he actually had a shot at the stage win and that is why we didn't have anyone in the breakaway.

Brambilla losing time and a place is disappointing and given how close the situation is in that region of the rankings, the top 10 might be in danger. But now that he is even further away in time in the GC he might fancy another go at a breakaway tomorrow

Must admit, I haven`t expected such huge gaps today. Luckily this time on the good side finally this GT. A bit of a pity Valls couldn`t go for the stage win but 3rd on the stage and a bit of a GC climb is nice. At least around the spots, where other riders are that are similar.

Would still say, he is a bit below expectations with Tvetcov, Brambilla, Goos, Smith, Warchol, Karlsson, Gogoy all ahead of him, where he surely could be a bit more in the mix but most had more than 1 lucky breakaway.

Dang! Krigbaum just missed out on a top 10. That would have been awesome. happy to see him active anyway!

This could turn out to be a valuable stage if Tvetcov can defend his GC position tomorrow against the odds but right now i'm just frustrated that Skujins didnt even try to get into the break. It was so obvious that this was going to the break and there was not a single reason why he shouldnt attempt to join it. And when he didnt try to join it, we also didnt try to control the gap so that we might end up bridging to it later. So frustrating.

Wow, sleepy Haig. Didn't expect to lose time in this one and the fact that he finished somewhere back in the peloton tells me, that he didn't pay attention.

At least we joined the early break, which was always going to win the stage. A pity that Lane hadn't the finishing kick to make the podium though..

Well that wasn't smart.

Some very weird gaps there. Bongiorno took a(nother) day off, while Bouglas was in the front group. I didn’t see that coming.

Sucks for some managers to lose minute(s) here.

Lecuisinier with 19 points to Grosu. That’s not enough so we need him to get a top 5 tomorrow which isn’t likely looking at the route.

I wouldn't bet on a sprint in the final stage though. And with the sprinters being quite tired, I see Lecuisinier potentially grabbing some good points there too. I think the onlt scenario at this point where you don't get the green jersey is if Grosu wins the final stage.