March is a jam-packed month for us with 10 races in total - too much for a single recap, so here's an overview of the first 5. As has been the case for the first two months, we've been mostly pretty successful!

Fabio Silvestre had raced just one day over the first two months of the season - at the Down Under Classic - and he'd won that race. You can imagine our shock and delight, when he simply continued where he started and went on to win Stage 1 of the Barbados Cycling Festival! Not only does that mean we have more wins at this point of the season that we had all of last year, but a day later, he would also wear the team's first yellow jersey in its history.

Unfortunately, the race did not continue as successfully as it started. But thanks to the bonus seconds of that first stage, Fabio still ended up 6th overall despite finishing just 13th, 10th and 8th on the final three stages. While those days felt like a slightly missed opportunity, we happily take a stage win and that GC placement.

After a dysmal performance last month in the Ukraine, Joey Rosskopf had the opportunity to redeem himself in Singapore and Malaysia at the Jelajah SKL. And boy did he! Starting with a great 7th place in the opening time trial, he followed that up with a 12th and a 13th place in the following two road stages to end up 7th overall. Brilliant result against tough competition and exactly what we signed him for.

But that's not the end of it. As highlighted in the picture above, Janvier Hadi also performed really well, specifically on day 3 with that Top 10 finish, and with solid TT results, too. He finished 16th overall, then Bob Schoonbroodt in 18th and Andrea Vendrame in 25th not only provided additional depth scoring, but also handed us our first team classification win in team history. And last but not least, Jacob Fiedler had his first good result in our jersey with a 4th place in the epilogue. A great four days all around.

It seems to be one good race, then one bad race for Rosskopf. Following the good results in South East Asia, hopes were high for the Vuelta al Pais Vasco, a race that should suit him well as a good time trialist and climber-puncheur. However, he did not manage more than 37th in the long TT and 36th and 94th in the concluding hill stages.

So it was left to others to pick up the slack. Jacob Fiedler had another good result, again finishing 4th place in the time trial, and Mektel Eyob ended up in 3rd place on the final day, a strong performance from the morning breakaway that also propelled him to 26th in the GC, our best rank there. Janvier Hadi and Bonaventure Uwizeyimana rode a solid if unspectacular race to both finish inside the Top 40.

Our third C2 race of the year, and our third Top 10 result. For the second time, it's Loic Vliegen who does well and finishes 7th in a sprint from a group of 28. Slightly disappointing performances by Schoonbroodt and especially Khederi, but really no big deal.

History for Bralirwa - Fabio Silvestre delivers our first ever GC victory!

This man is incredible! Fabio Silvestre continues to be nothing but an absolute boon for our team and worth every penny we spent for him this offseason. After opening the race with a 7th and a strong 2nd place, then taking a day off (25th) and recovering a bit with another 7th place on day four, Silvestre achieved the biggest success in team history by winning stage five and both the GC and the points classification alongside it.

After just 11 race days, the Portuguese is already confidently the most successful rider in our (admittedly short) history and one of the two big reasons we can feel pretty secure when thinking about the PCT standings at the moment. The second, of course, is Joeri Stallaert, who will get his chance to shine in the second part of the month when he competes in the E3 Prijs and Kuurne-Bruxelles-Kuurne.

cunego59 wrote:

You're being proven more and more correct with every passing race, it seems I won't complain at all!

redordead wrote:

No complaining allowed

Nemolito wrote:
https://www.youtu...OCHRECORDS

After a pretty successful first half of the month, where Fabio Silvestre in particular could shine, the second half featured our first two zero-point races of the year. But we also had a quite a few highlights:

Loic Vliegen had delivered a 2nd and a 7th place in his first two C2 classics, so we were hopeful to get something out of this race in San Marino as well. Alas, our Belgian puncheur had perhaps his worst day yet and did not manage to even crack the Top 30. Souheil Khederi and Janvier Hadi did a little better, but the Tunesian just barely missed out on the Top 25.

No points, but, as seen in the picture above, our stagiaire Yacob Debesay was able to test his legs a bit and got us some screen time riding in the breakaway.

Second race without anything to show for in a row, but this time it was much more expected. Our squad simply isn’t built to compete in HC hilly races and that’s okay. The fact that Moise Mugisha was our best finisher in 94th place is still not ideal, but at this point, it’s water under the bridge.

The Tour of Eritrea had already been very kind to us last year when Valens Ndayisenga won a stage and finished third overall. And once again, we had a very nice race. On the final stage, Valens managed to repeat his feat of winning a stage – the first time we won something in a race in two consecutive years.

And while he could not repeat his GC result, we still scored nicely on that front. In a tough field, Mektel Eyob acquitted himself very well to finish tenth, with Bonaventure Uwizeyimana and Valens Ndayisenga providing additional depth points. Last but not least, Joeri Stallaert did well to finish third in the second of two sprint stages.

Back on terrain that suits us even more, it was Joeri Stallaert’s turn to deliver some big time points again. He won his first race of the season and finished second in the next, so it is kind of fitting that he finished third in his third. While he made the final selection of five riders, in the end he wasn’t able to keep up with Matteo Trentin and Maxime Daniel to rely on his sprint. Still, a great result in a tough field!

Once again, Yves Lampaert proved to be a really good lieutenant, supporting Stallaert for as long as possible and then holding on to finish 18th for himself. Tesfom Okbamariam and Bob Schoonbroodt did not manage to add more points, but still fared decently well.

After 1st, 2nd and 3rd places for Joeri, it would have been kinda fitting to get a 4th place next. Luckily though, instead of continuing the series like that, he decided to return to the starting point: with another win!

Kuurne-Bruxelles-Kuurne, with its cobblestones but also a decent likelihood for a bunch sprint, is a very suitable race for Stallaert and he delivered perfectly. After countering a few attacks early, he arrived at the finish line in a group of 15 and with main rival Trentin further behind, he was able to win the sprint. Yves Lampaert was once again crucial in the build-up, although he wasn’t able to finish as highly as we’ve been used to.

Still, an exceptional ending to a great month for us!

Not quite the 10 races we had in March, but still lots of scoring opportunities for the team. Joeri Stallaert has two of his last three cobbles classics of the season, plus he’ll take on the tough sprinter classic in Lisbon.

Fabio Silvestre competes in the other flat classic in Veenendaal, as well as in the Baltic Chain Tour, which should suit him extremely well and hopefully, he can build on his successes from Barbados and Juarez.

The Tour de Pologne is a bit less promising, as are all hilly races for us. Rosskopf, who might benefit from the early prologue, Vendrame and Ndayisenga are all there to hopefully pick up a few points here and there.

With an emphasis on spring classics, it could have been expected, but it still caught me a little by surprise to recently discover that we have actually raced all of our goal races already. With another PCT Rankings update just now released, I figured it was a good opportunity to take stock of the season so far. Let's start with the goals:

We chose our goals with the intention to sign a big time cobblestone rider, and what can I say, Joeri Stallaert delivered the goods. He smashed all his three goals, including the win goal, which very much exceeded our expectation, but is all the more pleasing.

Fabio Silvestre also contributed well. While it’s slightly frustrating that he missed the targeted Top 5 by a single second in Barbados, we still came reasonably close. And complaining about that, given how exceptional our season has been so far, really doesn’t feel right. The Team Standings are obviously still in flux, so drawing an ultimate conclusion there is not possible yet. But with around a third of the season in the rear-view mirror and us at the freaking top of the standings (see below), that Top 15 certainly looks achievable ...

Pos	Last		Team	Total	RD	PpRD	Proj
1	5		Bralirwa - Stevens	1506	81	18,59	3253
2	1		Team Popo4Ever p/b Nemiroff	1442	78	18,49	3236
3	3		Red Bull Zalgiris	1376	83	16,58	2902
4	9		Binance Cycling	1252	83	15,08	2639
5	12		Aker - MOT	1223	53	23,08	4039
6	21		Lierse SK - Pizza Ullo PCTeam	1134	53	21,4	3745
7	7		cycleYorkshire	1067	61	17,49	3061
8	4		Team UBS	1019	63	16,17	2830
9	23		Cedevita	984	55	17,89	3131
10	15		Carlsberg - Danske Bank	970	61	15,9	2783

Umm ... so ... What?

After around a third of the season, we actually lead the PCT Rankings!
This is obviously beyond our highest hopes, given that we chose the Top 15 preseason goal because there was literally no way to aim lower.

Now, we're "only" third in PPrD, and Stallaert has almost all of his more valuable race days behind him already, but as crazy as it (still) sounds, if things continue to progress as they have, we might only spend one year in PCT - which I feared before this season, but in the other direction! Let's not get carried away though, I don't think it's reasonable to expect us to keep this up.

Let's have a look at the individual rankings, too:

Pos	Rider		Team	Total
1	Joeri Stallaert		Bralirwa - Stevens	583
3	Fabio Silvestre		Bralirwa - Stevens	510
90	Joey Rosskopf		Bralirwa - Stevens	73
99	Valens Ndayisenga		Bralirwa - Stevens	60
102	Mektel Eyob		Bralirwa - Stevens	57
119	Loic Vliegen		Bralirwa - Stevens	50
127	Yves Lampaert		Bralirwa - Stevens	47
160	Janvier Hadi		Bralirwa - Stevens	35
163	Bob Schoonbroodt		Bralirwa - Stevens	33
192	Bonaventure Uwizeyimana		Bralirwa - Stevens	26
259	Tesfom Okbamariam		Bralirwa - Stevens	13
298	Jacob Fiedler		Bralirwa - Stevens	9
328	Andrea Vendrame		Bralirwa - Stevens	6
415	Natnael Tesfatsion		Bralirwa - Stevens	1
416	Souheil Khederi		Bralirwa - Stevens	1
426	Madushanka Perera		Bralirwa - Stevens	1
427	Samuel Mugisha		Bralirwa - Stevens	1

Hey Siri, what is "top heavy"? It is no secret that our success is built on two pillars, and two pillars only: Joeri Stallaert and Fabio Silvestre. This is how we envisioned it, to be fair, but they performed better and more consistently than we could have ever hoped for.

As I've mentioned, Joeri only has 1 Jour de Dunkerque and the Benelux Tour left on cobbles, and he hasn't convinced as a sprinter yet (which he'll try again in Lisbon and at the Olympia's Tour). But on the other hand, Fabio still has 26 of his 42 race days ahead of him, almost all of which come with considerable scoring potential.

And then, we do have at least a little depth scoring, which is nice and hopefully continues. Jacob Fieler in particular has hardly had any meaningful race days and we hope he'll start to collect some points soon. But in general, it's great to see that 16 of our 18 non-rookie riders have scored points (or a point, at least) already, and the disappointments (looking at you, Vendrame and Perera) were not expected to score that much in the first place.

I may have said it before, but at this point, it very much feels like we’re playing with house money. We’ve already achieved so much, to the point where even a "collapse" would probably only see us fall to mid-table. Whatever the season holds in store for us from here on out, we'll take it in stride.

Note: I've updated Post #3 to include our team's major results as well as end-of-season rankings and goal reviews of these past one and a half years.

redordead wrote:
Congrats on all the success

If you don't know what to do with all that money next year send me a PM

The season keeps chugging along and as the rankings above reflect, we keep collecting good to great result after result (four of the six races recaped below are included in the PCT Rankings #3). In April, we scored a few Top 10s, avoiding a zero pointer three out of four months now, and even got our 8th (!) win of the season.

The Baltic Chain Tour was another stage race for sprinters, hence another job for Fabio Silvestre. After an okay cobbles-filled prologue, Fabio took over yellow with a second place on day two. With this good GC position, he rode more carefully over the next two days and entered the final stage in 8th place, 24 seconds off leader Jakobsen. What followed was the sprint pictured above. Jakobsen was outside of the Top 10, so a stage win would have meant 25 bonus seconds and the GC victory. Unfortunately, Fabio fell just inches short, took third on the day and fourth overall. Still, a very decent result.

Hills are not typically Joeri Stallaert’s strength, so despite his recent successes on cobbles, expectations were tempered for this climbing-filled race in Hungary. And yet, once again Joeri made the most of it, hanging on to the front for as long as he could to finish 6th after being distanced only in the final few hundred meters.

Non-sprinter stage races don’t tend to go too well for us, so any and all points here are taken happily. In Poland, those points came from Valens Ndayisenga’s solid 15th overall. After a very promising 6th place on the first road stage, he consistently placed well, though never reaching those “heights� again.

Joey Rosskopf was in the Top 25 for most of the race, too, but imploded on the last stage, unfortunately. Madushanka Perera actually had his first really strong performance for us, finishing third from the peloton on the second sprint stage … alas, behind five escapees.

With Poland in the rearview mirror, we were back on better terrain for us - cobbles. And even better: flat cobbles! Say no more this year for Joeri Stallaert, who once again utilized his speed to overpower everyone else in the finale to win the sprint from a group of 11 despite being in the wind very early. Tesfom Okbamariam added a handful more points with a very nice 21st place.

Veenendaal - Veenendaal is a flat classic, but late attackers have prevailed here in both previous editions and this one was no different. Still, only two riders managed to stay ahead and Fabio Silvestre finished as the third sprinter behind them in a messy finale, despite being poorly positioned earlier. Some very decent points, we’ll gladly take those any day.

Taking Joeri Stallaert to Portugal appeared to be a planning mistake at first, as it had been more of a puncheur’s race in recent years. However, to everyone’s surprise, most major sprinters were able to hang on going into the finale and indeed, so was Joeri.

While quick for a classics rider, he’s not the most impressive pure sprinter, and coupled with poor positioning in the final kilometers, he scored “only� a 9th place. Given our pre-race expectations though, that is more than enough to book this one as a succes, too. As a nice little bonus, Souheil Khederi made one of his rare appearances in the spotlight, being part of the three men breakaway group of the day.

May is a rather quiet month for us, but almost all of our leaders get an opportunity to shine. Fabio Silvestre has another flat classic, Joeri Stallaert another cobbles one, though again with a good amount of climbing.

Then we have two stage races, one for the climbers in Österreich - low expectations as always, though Bonaventure Uwizeyimana might make use of the final time trial if he limits his losses until then - and one for the time trialists in the Netherlands, where we hope that Jacob Fiedler will finally make an impact. Madushanka Perera (for two stages in the former) and Stallaert (for three in the latter) will be our sprinters in those two races, any single point from those two would be a success.

We've only had four races in May and three in June, so I feel comfortable to do both in one recap. Once again, we had reasons to celebrate, scoring our wins number 9 and 10 of the season. Many riders contributed, and while there were some disappointments along the way, we continued our generally positive trajectory from the first part of the season.

A C1 sprinters classic means, of course, another chance for Fabio Silvestre to shine. In finale, Leigh Howard and Peter Kennaugh were clearly a cut above, then there was a group of five very, very close together. Unfortunately, Fabio drew the short end of the stick and was barely beaten by all four of the other guys to end up seventh. Not a terrible result by any means, but coming so close to even the podium, it was a slight disappointment.

Mountain stage races are always a role of the dice for us. Neither Valens Ndayisenga nor Bonaventure Uwizeyimana or Mektel Eyob can be expected to compete with the best climbers of the division, but all of them pose credible threats when in a breakaway. That said, nothing could excuse what happened on the very first stage, where Valens was our best finisher on a mountain top finish - in 128th place!! But at least we now had no reasons not to go into breakaways.

And wouldn't you know it, just a day later Valens did just that, and he did it in the best way possible - by winning stage 2, another mountain top finish. In a strong breakaway, he was ultimately the strongest, outsprinting Vegard Stake Laengen at the line. Bonaventure went into the breakaway on days 3 and 4, our youngster Natnael Tesfatsion took over on day 5, and though nothing came of it, it was a commendable effort.

Madushanka Perera was also here for the two sprint stages. He finished 5th and 11th, picking up at least a handful of points, as did Valens for his 5th place in the final KoM classification. Not a single rider in the Top 50 is still a bit wild, but overall, the stage win alone made this a great race for us.

What can you even say about this man anymore? Joeri Stallaert seemingly can't be stopped this year. Despite 1 Jour de Dunkerque's hilly route, he left stronger puncheurs among the top cobblers behind on the final ascent to the finish to celebrate his 4th win of the year.

And for the first time in a while, the rest of the team was able to chip in as well. Tesfom Okbamariam spent the whole day in the breakaway, which was caught fairly late and he hung on to finish 17th. Bob Schoonbroodt supported Joeri for as long as he could and then went on to claim 24th despite all his efforts. Just an all around awesome race for us.

The Olympia's Tour is stereotypically Dutch: all flat every day. With two individual and a team time trial, this was one for Jacob Fiedler. And he opened with a great 4th place on the first stage. The team then tried to support him as well as they could in the team time trial, but that was always going to be tough. 13th on the day was about what could be expected, but it still pushed Jacob down to 27th overall.

Unfortunately, he then had a rather poor day on the concluding time trial, finishing just 32nd, which only moved him up to 25th. Joey Rosskopf did well to finish 8th on the day, but an atrocious opening time trial and another time loss halfway through left him far outside the Top 50 in the GC.

Joeri Stallaert had one of his few appearances as an actual sprinter. He finished 10th, 7th and 13th, collecting a single ranking point along the way. Samuel Mugisha featured in a breakaway twice, which was nice to see. We didn't expect a whole lot from this race and got probably even slightly less, but the good stage 1 makes us hopeful for stronger performances by Jacob in the future.

The Hanko Classic in Finland was our first race in June, another flat classic and Fabio Silvestre wanted to improve on his Nakhon Ratchasima performance. And he managed to do just that! Once again, it was really close and only a few centimeters seperated him from even the win here, but 4th place, just ahead of former Bralirwa star Rüdiger Selig, is nothing to sneeze at (plus, sneezing is never normal). Shoutout to Samuel Mugisha for another breakaway appearance, the young man is relentless in getting us more airtime.

Another flat classic, another breakaway appearance for Samuel Mugisha! This time even doing it at PTHC level, what a guy! Oh, yes, and Fabio Silvestre was here, too. Unfortunatly, he had one of his poorer outings. The Binance duo Kennett and Kennaugh suddenly jumped away from the peloton in the final 2 kilometers and Fabio took it upon himself to lead the chase, which left him in the wind far too early and he only managed to finish 9th (still one place ahead of Kennaugh, as it happens). A bit of bad luck to be sure, but it speaks to his season that even a Top 10 can be a disappointment.

Our final race of this stretch was the Scandinavia Open Road Race. Three hilly stages, one of which is a time trial - theoretically, exactly the race that Joey Rosskopf was built for. He has struggled against top level competition this season though, so expectations were subdued. Which made his 3rd place finish in the opening time trial all the more surprising and exciting! Less surprisingly, he struggled to hang on with the top puncheurs the following day, dropping to a still very good 16th place overall. He lost a few more places to drop to 25 on the final day, but that's absolutely respectable. And Valens Ndayisenga did really well on those two hilly stages, even jumping his teammate to 24th, giving us another rider in the Top 25.

Meanwhile, we were also very active in breakaways. Moise Mugisha apparently was inspired by his namesake to go on the attack, which he did on stage 2 alongside Andrea Vendrame, collecting a good amount of KoM points along the way. Loic Vliegen did the same on stage 3, resulting in the two of them finishing 5th and 4th, respectively, in the final KoM classification. Despite no single outstanding result, all of those small accomplishments combined to a nice points haul in a race that could have easily seen us leaving almost empty-handed.

July will be a pretty diverse month for us with most of our leaders getting a chance to shine. Fabio Silvestre will have another two opportunities in classics, Jacob Fiedler goes to Great Britain, Valens Ndayisenga and Joey Rosskopf go for the GC (or stage wins) in two very different stage races, and Madushanka Perera will try his best in the sprints in both of those. Only Joeri Stallaert will get a well-deserved rest.

Now, obviously those races have happened already, so the review will come relatively soon. However, first we'll take a look at the fourth PCT rankings of the season, which were released at the end of June, in a few days.

Pos	Last		Team	Total	RD	PpRD	Proj
1	2		Team Popo4Ever p/b Nemiroff	2455	120	20,46	3581
2	5		Aker - MOT	2167	101	21,46	3756
3	1		Bralirwa - Stevens	1895	109	17,39	3043
4	10		Carlsberg - Danske Bank	1857	97	19,14	3350
5	4		Binance Cycling	1831	118	15,52	2716
6	9		Cedevita	1823	92	19,82	3469
7	3		Red Bull Zalgiris	1809	124	14,59	2553
8	14		Assa Abloy	1762	116	15,19	2658
9	7		cycleYorkshire	1694	110	15,4	2695
10	20		Polar	1651	96	17,2	3010

This is still such an amazing sight! While we were not quite able to hold on to first place (what a wild thing to say), we continue to be in the Top 3 overall and, even if just barely, 5th in projected points. I said this last time already and it is still true that with Joeri Stallaert having hardly any valuable race days left, our PpRD will likely continue to decline. But there are still a good amount of race days for our other leaders left, and our competition also has to pick up all those projected points to catch up first, too.

We're six months in, four left to go. I would be lying if by now I wouldn't be hoping for promotion, even if it was beyond our wildest dreams when the season started. That said, I can only repeat myself when I say that there is no way that I will be disappointed by the end. It's just been too fun of a year for us.


A quick look at the individual rankings as well:

3	Joeri Stallaert	Bralirwa - Stevens	684
4	Fabio Silvestre	Bralirwa - Stevens	680
100	Valens Ndayisenga	Bralirwa - Stevens	112
107	Joey Rosskopf	Bralirwa - Stevens	105
155	Loic Vliegen	Bralirwa - Stevens	60
158	Mektel Eyob	Bralirwa - Stevens	57
187	Yves Lampaert	Bralirwa - Stevens	47
224	Janvier Hadi	Bralirwa - Stevens	35
225	Bob Schoonbroodt	Bralirwa - Stevens	34
267	Bonaventure Uwizeyimana	Bralirwa - Stevens	26
302	Tesfom Okbamariam	Bralirwa - Stevens	19
324	Jacob Fiedler	Bralirwa - Stevens	16
394	Andrea Vendrame	Bralirwa - Stevens	6
401	Moise Mugisha	Bralirwa - Stevens	6
412	Madushanka Perera	Bralirwa - Stevens	5
472	Natnael Tesfatsion	Bralirwa - Stevens	1
473	Souheil Khederi	Bralirwa - Stevens	1
474	Samuel Mugisha	Bralirwa - Stevens	1

Concurrent with our slight decline in the team standings, every single one of our riders except for Moise Mugisha and Madushanka Perera slid down in the individual rankings. But Joeri Stallaert and Fabio Silvestre still tower at the top with incredible performances. And especially Valens Ndayisenga and Joey Rosskopf provide pretty solid supporting scoring.

There are still a few disappointments, including Andrea Vendrame and Jacob Fiedler, but both will have opportunities to still redeem himself. And overall, even the fact that we only have one non-stagiare rider who hasn't contributed at all, and that even our Rwandan youngsters are on the scoreboard, makes me very happy.

redordead wrote:
Still well on course for promotion

baseballlover312 wrote:
Stallaert and Silvestre have just been incredible. With your performances since the last update, you should be well on your way to double promotion.

hillis91 wrote:
Top heavy with with Stallaert and Silvestre - double promotion incoming!