Bit suprised by how suprised people are by the result. This race has always been won by a sprinter and both the last two seasons the podium on S3 was all sprinters.
Gaps on hilly stages are all about positioning, which isn't unrealistic. And the game has to give someone preference, when there is a 20 competitive teams like in the mangame, the differences between being good and bad are going to result from marginal gaps in stats.
If we want the race to move back to more punchy riders we can reverse the direction of S3, right now most of the climbing is done early when the peloton isn't going that hard so don't think that it is that hard for the stronger sprinters to survive (and it is mostly the stronger sprinters).
Not happy about the result, but Lopez tried, Kurianov also managed to hang to the front group, so we cant really complain too much about the way we acted here. It was always a risk to go here with Lopez and it just didnt pay off.
Ulrich Ulriksen wrote:
Bit suprised by how suprised people are by the result. This race has always been won by a sprinter and both the last two seasons the podium on S3 was all sprinters.
If we want the race to move back to more punchy riders we can reverse the direction of S3, right now most of the climbing is done early when the peloton isn't going that hard so don't think that it is that hard for the stronger sprinters to survive (and it is mostly the stronger sprinters).
I think this route is very cool and hits a real sweet spot where its mostly for the punchier sprinters but can(!) also be good for other sprinters or puncheurs, it would be one of the last routes in the entire schedule that I'd want to change. Rather the issue is that there are (almost) no proper hilly stage races (that are not dominated by TTs giving stage racers the edge) so lots of top puncheurs were "forced" to ride here and if you have a top puncheur, you're hoping to get bigger points out of every race out of him even if not 100% likely. If you want to change the calendar, rather remove the tting from one of those hills plus tt races of which there are plenty (Tasmania, Ukraine, Lithuania, Slovenia, ...).
knockout wrote:
Not happy about the result, but Lopez tried, Kurianov also managed to hang to the front group, so we cant really complain too much about the way we acted here. It was always a risk to go here with Lopez and it just didnt pay off.
Ulrich Ulriksen wrote:
Bit suprised by how suprised people are by the result. This race has always been won by a sprinter and both the last two seasons the podium on S3 was all sprinters.
If we want the race to move back to more punchy riders we can reverse the direction of S3, right now most of the climbing is done early when the peloton isn't going that hard so don't think that it is that hard for the stronger sprinters to survive (and it is mostly the stronger sprinters).
I think this route is very cool and hits a real sweet spot where its mostly for the punchier sprinters but can(!) also be good for other sprinters or puncheurs, it would be one of the last routes in the entire schedule that I'd want to change. Rather the issue is that there are (almost) no proper hilly stage races (that are not dominated by TTs giving stage racers the edge) so lots of top puncheurs were "forced" to ride here and if you have a top puncheur, you're hoping to get bigger points out of every race out of him even if not 100% likely. If you want to change the calendar, rather remove the tting from one of those hills plus tt races of which there are plenty (Tasmania, Ukraine, Lithuania, Slovenia, ...).
Agree with both points here. To clarify I was suggesting how you could change this race, it would not be my vote to do it. I think we need to embrace races for punchy sprinters/sprinty puncherus like this and TDU and add more. Also agree that we need to reduce the number of TT/Hill races, particularly in PCT, since they heavily favor the TTers. Calendar team has already bounced around some ideas on that so think that is the direction we will go in.
Happy to land a GC top 10 with Wisniowski there! Looked like we were set for nice depth points as well, after the «Aker train» brought it back at the front. Unfortunately it fell apart towards the end, but that’s okay, as we clearly rode for Wisniowski’s GC
Thank you for the reports! This is always a very interesting race.
First victory for Samolenkov this season (and second for our team), hopefully we can keep this momentum going. Skujins wasn't able to do much this race, but at least he finished in the first group during the last (hilly) stage. Which will give us some extra points.
Thanks Ulrich Ulriksen for the great race reports!
