knockout wrote:
In a vacuum 7th for Gautier sounds good but in your situation it is simply not good enough

As almost per tradition we have teamed up with Spotify for the biggest U23 race of the season hoping to get a good GC for FÃ¥glum Karlsson.


Marcus started of well taking 6th place in the short stage 1 TT.

The next two stages were on cruice control and we avoided trouble as was the goal.


On the hilly stage 4 we saw Ludvigsson show the jersey beautifully with a mid-stage attack.
He makes the attack last all into the finale and gets within 1 point of the KOM jersey.
But then he got caught and it was up the favourites.

FÃ¥glum made full use of the situation and fought his way to 8th place.


Marcus put in another valiant effort on the first real mountain stage.


On stage 7 we saw FÃ¥glum continue riding well in the second tier of climbers and winning the sprint for 5th place.


The long TT was another solid day for Marcus taking 18th and consolidating his GC 4th.


Unfortunately the race was one stage too long for our Swedish climber and he eventually dropped to 6th in the GC.
Still very much approves compared to pre-race expectations but nevertheless a bit disappointing going into the final stage on 4th place.

	Best Rider	Place	Time
St. 1	Marcus Faglum Karlsson	6th	+ 7
St. 2	Marcus Faglum Karlsson	23rd	s.t.
St. 3	Gustav Höög	26th	s.t.
St. 4	Marcus Faglum Karlsson	8th	+ 45
St. 5	Marcus Faglum Karlsson	7th	+ 4'06
St. 6	Fredrik Ludvigsson	47th	s.t.
	Gustav Höög	63rd	s.t.
St. 7	Marcus Faglum Karlsson	5th	+ 6'14
St. 8	Marcus Faglum Karlsson	18th	+ 2'32
St. 9	Marcus Faglum Karlsson	13th	+ 16'59

1	Silvio Herklotz	Team Puma - SAP	32h36'13
6	Marcus Faglum Karlsson	Valio - DeLaval	+ 30'11
93	Fredrik Ludvigsson	Valio - DeLaval	+ 1h42'30
110	Hiski Kanerva	Valio - DeLaval	+ 1h51'01
116	Joni Kanerva	Valio - DeLaval	+ 1h56'03
131	Oskari Vainionpää	Valio - DeLaval	+ 2h10'58
148	Gustav Höög	Valio - DeLaval	+ 2h38'12

knockout wrote:
(Likely) Relegating to CT means the roster size will have to go down. Perhaps that opens the door for a certain rider staying with his current loan destination?

Pre-season we expected to let the sprint team end the season with a well-deserved partytime on Barbados.
Now it's more of a bolt gun to the head situation.


Right from the start we saw something that usually ends in disaster: Us working in front of the peloton.


Lo Cicero was supplied with a great looking train.

Manninen made a huge leadout but Ivano had already punched out.
At least Matti put in a good effort allowing him to take the young riders jersey.


We tried the same procedure on the following stage though this time with Vinther doing the final leadout.
Somehow Ivano managed to screw up things once again…


Same stratgy on stage 3 with some small adjustments to the final train.

This time with a much better result with Ivano just inches from the win.


Since Lo Cicero won't use his train anyway Manninen just dropped him off at the front with 6 km to go on the final stage.
Lo Cicero found a perfect spot right behind Cavendish, but as usual this season he was unable to follow through.

16th on the stage is a miserable result even for 2017-Lo Cicero.

The peloton broke in the crosswinds and Manninen lost some time. Thankfully he still managed to defend his youth jersey.

	Best Rider	Place	Time
St. 1	Matti Manninen	6th	s.t.
St. 2	Ivano Lo Cicero	9th	s.t.
St. 3	Ivano Lo Cicero	2nd	s.t.
St. 4	Ivano Lo Cicero	16th	s.t.

1	Mark Cavendish	Kraftwerk Man Machine	15h32'47
7	Ivano Lo Cicero	Valio - DeLaval	+ 43
25	Matti Manninen	Valio - DeLaval	+ 2'17
37	Troels Vinther	Valio - DeLaval	+ 2'25
52	Jukka Vastaranta	Valio - DeLaval	s.t.
76	Sami Tiainen	Valio - DeLaval	+ 3'57
79	Olli Kulppi	Valio - DeLaval	s.t.
102	Ahmad Arissol	Valio - DeLaval	+ 5'00
129	Gustav Höög	Valio - DeLaval	+ 6'33

Youth jersey: Matti Manninen

Aquarius97 wrote:
It's kinda depressing to see Lo Cicero doing so bad all season and making your team to relegate. But as you have already said, you are also looking forward to a season in CT with Manninen as a top sprinter down there and fighting for bigger things that just avoid relegation

It was a long flight to Rwanda from Helsinki knowing that a small miracle was needed for it to be more than theoretically possible to stay in PCT.

Really our only chance was an upset from the break and that didn't happen.


In stead our riders got dropped off the back without making a mark on the race.

Our final race of this PCT stint was a hilly classic in Japan.
At this situation we don't really care much about the amount of points we get (unless something really crazy happens) so the main goal was to go out with a bang.

We didn't get in the break so it was all up to Gautier in the end.

Highly motivated to show the jersey in our final PCT race he did a bit too much work pulling the favourite group.

That doesn't leave him enough energy to be in the front line of the final sprint.

Still he manages to salvage a 5th place which is still one of his best results all season.

1	Edvald Boasson Hagen	Grieg - Eftel	4h23'32
5	Cyril Gautier	Valio - DeLaval	+ 19
32	Philip Lindau	Valio - DeLaval	+ 3'19
48	Ingvar Omarsson	Valio - DeLaval	+ 3'44
67	Jukka Vastaranta	Valio - DeLaval	+ 5'34
85	Paavo Paajanen	Valio - DeLaval	+ 7'28
86	Branislav Samoilev	Valio - DeLaval	s.t.
108	Joni Kanerva	Valio - DeLaval	+ 9'08
156	Gustav Höög	Valio - DeLaval	+ 16'10

Last bit of PCT Moohsic for a while.
October wrap-up cowming uphttps://t.co/AziX7PCy4z

— Valio - DeLaval (@Atlantius_PCM) April 28, 2018

October was slightly less disappointing than much of the season but a miracle was needed and we didn't produce that.

Gautier did well with a 7th and 5th while Lo Cicero was as disappointing as all season.
Nice to see Manninen take another youth jersey though!

The cobbles didn't bring us anything. As usual.

Copenhagen-Malmo was good for us, but just as our GC 6th in l'Avenir that didn't bring us any closer to avoiding releegation.

Real heroes are made when the situation is at it's toughest. One rider did his job so well that he bagged a slightly unexpected result.

Championship season is always fun.

Finland have earned a spot in the B Worlds Race which is great for us.
We have a bunch of other riders eligble as well. Especially Gautier and Paillot for France could have a chance to be part of a successful team.

After that we start executing the promotion plan to get back to PCT as fast as possible!

knockout wrote:
Quite sad to see you go down. It might not be really encouraging for you at this point but i think your team is probably the team that is the easiest & most fun teams to rebuild in CT. With a lower squad size needed/allowed it will be interested to see how nationalistic the squad will look.

And obviously I'm looking forward to see whether Kulppi can live up to my expectations in CT. Cannot perform much worse than this season at least...

Marcovdw wrote:
Sad to see you go down, I hope this won't have an impact on the puns and jokes in the HQ posts. Anyway I hope your stay in CT will be only be one season and that we have you back here the season after.

We started the season full of optimism believing that Anacona getting replaced by Gautier meant that we had a stronger team than last season.

However we didn't ned to get far into the season before it became obvious that Lo Cicero just wasn't the rider he was last year.
The team worked hard for him but he always found a way to screw it up towards the end.

In the mountains we had hoped to see our former climbing domestiques go in a breakaway frenzy having been relieved of their previous leader.
They didn't. In fact the four climbers got in a total of one breakaway and that was in a PT-race.
They didn't even try getting decent minor positions either making the mountain races give even less points than hoped/expected.

Likewise in the cobbles where Olli's great efforts riding for Evonik made us trust in him to lead us on the cobbles.
Not that we expected him to win a lot but some consistent 10-15th places in the classics was our hope and we even signed two riders to support him.
That didn't work out apart from a breakaway-win.

Finally we had a proper hilly leader, who usually was there in the finale, but also had an unfortunate tendency to finish last in his group despite having a great kick.
Perhaps he uses a bit to much energy due to often being left to fend for himself a bit to early?

Put together that adds up to a season where we underperformed in varying levels in every discipline.
Still not the worst season in the teams history though...

Pos		Rider	Team	Pts
34		Ivano Lo Cicero	Valio - DeLaval	463
36		Cyril Gautier	Valio - DeLaval	450
99		Yoann Paillot	Valio - DeLaval	151
201		Emils Liepins	Evonik - ELKO (PT)	128
120		Matti Manninen	Valio - DeLaval	123
156		Kari Brynjolfsson	Valio - DeLaval	90
201		Branislav Samoilev	Valio - DeLaval	68
247		Paavo Paajanen	Valio - DeLaval	46
140		Jesse Kaislavuo	Team Reddit (CT)	40
270		Samuel Pökälä	Valio - DeLaval	38
274		Jukka Vastaranta	Valio - DeLaval	37
281		Olli Kulppi	Valio - DeLaval	36
315		Ahmad Arissol	Valio - DeLaval	26
457		Risto Aaltio	Iberia - Team Degenkolb (PT)	24
375		Ingvar Omarsson	Valio - DeLaval	16
395		Marcus Faglum Karlsson	Valio - DeLaval	14
417		Troels Vinther	Valio - DeLaval	12
433		Sakari Lehtinen	Valio - DeLaval	10
452		Philip Lindau	Valio - DeLaval	7
465		Gustav Höög	Valio - DeLaval	5
471		Roope Nurmi	Valio - DeLaval	5
497		Gökhan Hasta	Valio - DeLaval	2
519		Joni Kanerva	Valio - DeLaval	1
548		Essa Khalifa	Valio - DeLaval	0
555		Hiski Kanerva	Valio - DeLaval	0
563		Joonas Henttala	Valio - DeLaval	0
580		Oskari Vainionpää	Valio - DeLaval	0
584		Raimondas Rumsas	Valio - DeLaval	0
588		Sami Tiainen	Valio - DeLaval	0
590		Samuel Halme	Valio - DeLaval	0

As per tradition we will evaluate each riders season individually going alphabetically by last name,

Risto was loaned out to Iberia to get experience. We had expected him to be closely linked to Degenkolbs train but in stead he was used in a wide variety of terrain, which wasn't always as well suited for him

He did help Iberia towards three wins but I feel he would have been able to do more good for the team had he been put in Degenkolbs team more often.
Future:
There will always be need and room for a Finnish work-horse to control things for our sprinters. Especially seeing how things went without him this season.

Arissol was part of our somewhat dysfunctional cobbles-squad but did his best with several breakaway attemps even resuting in a splendid solo win in Langkawi.
The first win ever for the Seychelles!

Future:
Generally we will always have room for a winner, but the big puzzle is getting room for both him and the local talent the teams future should rest on.

Just as Arissol we signed Kari as support on cobbles and for TTT'ing.
While the cobbles-squad didn't impress in general Kari did give us one of the season highlights with a solo win in Viana do Castelo as well as several other breakaway attempts during the season.

Future:
We like Nordic riders with an attacking spirit and the ability to finish things!

Faglum Karlsson was on loan from our friends at Spotify largely riding with a free role in mountain rces but not really making the most of his chances.

He did put in a decent effort in l'Avenir taking a 6th place in GC though.
Future:
Will be going home.

Cyril was signed as our leader for the hills. With a strong acceleration we had high expectations for him and in the early season he lived up to it.

However the further into the season we came the less convincing he was and while he wasn't the biggest reason four our trouble he should definitely have scored more in the late classics.
Future:
Gautier is a quality rider and if we can make the budget work we would love to keep him for another season.