January traditionally is one of PT's shortest racing months - only August and October have less PT racing on average. Three races, thereof two stage races and a PTHC classic.
As mentioned at the end of the 2023 season, I'll try to keep the updates a tad shorter. It looks like people mostly appreciated the race summaries, so I'll keep those. On the other hand, I won't comment as much on the monthly rankings and the overall update, as you can just read these numbers on your own. And as always, if you need some clarification on any numbers, hit me up - there's no better test for the calculation tool and the rankings file than precise questions!
But now, let's dive into the first update:
Period Ranking: January
Tasmania came first, once again. Phinney made it four in a row last year - but after another decline, he'd probably only be the top favourite again if he managed to win stage 2 one more time.
However, it wasn't to be. He didn't win. Nor did any other of the top favourites. Instead, Ryan Mullen managed to avoid a random split on stage 1, and then held onto the main group on day 2 (pretty much at the end of the group, but still inside the group). Most surprisingly, though, he was able to beat almost everyone in the final stage, and 2nd place was enough to get the GC win for Polar! It's 319 points for the Finns - 278 by their leader, 11 by Garcia Cortina, and minimum points elsewhere.
And actually, this wasn't even enough to win the race scoring-wise. Despite a horrible stage 1 performance by their newly trained sprinter Cullaigh, cycleYorkshire managed to score the most points in Tasmania, 350 to be precise! With Oliveira in 4th and Hayter in 7th, they had two Top 10 GC finishers, plus Hansen in 19th, and Kanerva also making the Top 50. Bonnamour contributed some KoM points, and the team finished 3rd in the team standings - depth beats top results in this case!
The next name is more surprising - the most surprising thing is that EA Vesuvio didn't win the race, in terms of stage 3, GC, and points. On the contrary, MG's new TT king Wirtgen had to settle for 3rd in the TT and 2nd in the GC, missing out on the win by two seconds. And they didn't get their usual depth result, either, with only loanee Firdaus making the Top 50. 290 points for the Luxembourgers - still not the end of the world.
Qatar was next. 5 days for the sprinters collecting bonus seconds to keep the prologue - or epilogue - specialists at bay. And as always, some sprinters just didn't sprint (or were unsuccessful) - including big names like Groenewegen or Dainese.
However, the two fastest sprinters on paper did sprint, and they crushed the opposition! Admittedly slightly benefitting from a blunder of his main rival's team, Gaviria just was the most consistent sprinter with the ranks 4-5-3-1-2 on the five sprint stages. He easily defended his lead in the epilogue, winning the race and 422 ranking points. After a surprising 2nd place on day 2, Nommela also scored pretty well, 30 points in total. Kurkle (37th GC) was the third Moser rider getting more than minimum points - 492 for the team in total.
With the places 5-1-2-2, Grosu did even better than Gaviria on the first four days - before his train somehow hit the barriers and derailed on the fifth day, with the Romanian not finishing in the bonus second positions. Still, 2nd overall and in points is a big result for the 2019 race winner. 363 points for Grosu; sadly, his teammates couldn't quite help Rabobank's scoring, with only Kooij scoring 2 points above minimum. So that's 400 points flat for the Dutchmen.
Things were far less clear for 3rd place. In the end, it took a decent sprinter and strong TT depth to claim this spot, which is exactly what Oxxo did. Three Top 6 results were enough for him to hold onto 5th place in GC (one spot ahead of Oxxo/LPH legend Manninen), resulting in 166 points for the Norwegian. But it's thanks to Sütterlin, Vlatos and Erdenebat adding 18th, 21st and 34th GC positions that the Mexicans significantly boosted their score, to 286 points in total. Including a 3rd place in team standings.
The final race of the month - at least for (only) 10 PT teams - was the PTHC Great Ocean Road Classic. A race for the sprinters usually, for late attackers occasionally, and for breakaways almost never. Except in 2024.
The bad thing for the PT teams was that most of the breakaway riders were PTHC ones - only two among the Top 10 finishers belong to a PT team. Menten was the sole PT rider in the break, and by taking 2nd place he scored big points for King Power. 125 to be precise, which without much surprise made them PT's highest scoring team in this race. By a mile.
After having mostly disappointed in Qatar, Kemboi for once won the sprint of the pack - sadly for him, it was only worth an 8th place and 50 points. Lidl also had Dekker in the Top 50, totalling 52 points in this race.
Grosu was the next PT finisher in 11th place, netting him 32 points. Van den Berg also got 2 points, making Rabobank the 3rd best team with 34 points. Yes, thirty-four. Last year, the minimum required for 3rd place in a PTHC classic was 72 points, so we can conclude that this was just an awful race for PT teams.
Obviously, the January rankings correspond to the current overall standings, but I'll still post two tables due to the latter one having all the PpRD stuff you might be interested in.
Both Rabobank and Moser had a great start with Qatar bringing them a big load of points. King Power did well but not exceptional in all three races, which is enough for 3rd - ahead of the first promoted team which is Xero. All of them scored 500+ points, hats off for a great start.
cycleYorksire are a bit above the rest (and could have been the clear leaders with Cullaigh performing just a little bit in Qatar), and then it gets crowded with 6 teams within 42 points from Oxxo in 6th to ZARA in 11th. The next group of teams is 40 points down, but at this stage one race can obviously change things a lot.
Evonik once again had a bad start, with MOL and Cedevita also scoring less than 200 points. Defending champion Aker also started slowly. Of the promoted team, none is currently in the bottom 5 positions - but looking at the teams that are currently in the last positions and which won't be there in the end, a lot of work remains to be done. But the season has started, which is the most important thing. And February has between 21 and 32 RDs per team, so expect the standings to look very different in a month.
It's not very surprising to see the sprinters dominate the standings after Qatar, with Fernando Gaviria and Eduard Grosu being quite a lot ahead of the rest, totalling 422 and 395 points respectively (the latter having scored in GORC as well).
Tasmania winner Ryan Mullen is next with 278 points, with runner-up Tom Wirtgen in 4th place. Then we have Asbjorn Kragh Andersen, Fabio Jakobsen, Salem Kemboi, Matti Manninen and Kristoffer Halvorsen in the Top 10 as well - with just Mads Würtz squeezing in between Jakobsen and Kemboi for 7th place.
With Tirreno and Paris-Nice following in February, we can expect some different names to arrive in the Top 10 - on the other hand, the sprinters have the year's first monument to strike back.
Solid start for us this season! Not the greatest of races in Tasmania but Conci scored pretty well and then a big haul from Jakobsen in Qatar. Find ourselves in the upper-middle pack which is where we want to be and remain in the next few months. Will have to see if that's possible!
Thanks Fab for the first of many great updates this season
For us, we're actually going to relegate this season... Sitting in the relegation zone after Qatar (and Tasmania) speaks for future disasters regarding Groenewegen, which will make it veeery difficult to survive, I'm afraid.
Fingers crossed Groenewegen can turn his season around. Think Paris-Nice and Sanremo are his only two other races in this first part of the season, and we'll need good news from him, especially in Paris-Nice to start believing in our survival chances
For the other end of the ranking, King Power is off to a great start, scoring everywhere, and with those breakaway points in GORC, it only makes it more difficult to catch them for EA and Evonik, assuming those three are the main contenders.
Can't believe we are actually leading the rankings after an update
And it could have been even better with a better 5th stage in Qatar or no breakaway in Great Ocean Classic. But we had our fair share of good luck so far so I guess it balances out.
A bit higher than I thought we would be after Tasmania, so really a shame what happened there. Luckily Halvorsen and the time trialists in Qatar helped us turn the page with some good/great performances. February is a month with some big scoring opportunities, and if we fail to score there I fear we could be very low in the rankings post March/April and the bigger cobbled races.
Thank you for a very fine ranking update as always, Fabianski
Wel,, 13th place is about right, given we were the lowest scoring team in Tasmania. Lost the sprint lottery, lost our depth GC guys to the split, and didn't bring any TT, so that makes sense.
Qatar helps salvage it with AKA's amazing performance. Happy to see him bag over 200 points already on the year, and hopefully we can keep growing that. Our lack of TT depth burned us a little there, but that's the choice we made in the offseason, and we'll live with it. We've managed to avoid TT's pretty well throughout the year, though there will be spots were we need to just accept zero pointers there.
Thanks for the update!
RIP Exxon Duke, David Veilleux, Double Feature, and Monster Energy
Pretty happy with 14th place so far. Some teams obviously had their share of bad luck for this year already, but as we don't have any top level leaders who could get 2,000 points, the potential loss we have in a race will never be as huge as e.g. Assa's or Aker's in Qatar...
Awesome start for Rabobank and Moser, congrats to them! I thought that at least Rabobank would be within reach for us this year - I guess not
Over performance in Tasmania followed by 2 truly god awful performances in Qatar and down under... Its a better start than last season but should have been much better and sadly seems to be ominous that Cullaigh can't get it together for a single decent result so far <- if that continues then relegation will soon follow
John St Ledger in Team Bunzl-Centrica and Team U25
4th is a good look to start the season but doesn't change my disappointment overall with Ganna and Manninen in two very suited races to them, definitely think this was an underachievement that we can't afford any more of from those two. Thanks for the amazing updates as always Fab!
24/02/21 - kandesbunzler said “I don't drink famous people."
15/08/22 - SotD said "Your [jandal's] humour is overrated"
11/06/24 - knockout said "Winning is fine I guess. Truth be told this felt completely unimportant." [ICL] Santos-Euskadi | [PT] Xero Racing
Not a great start from us, but we somehow managed to collect 368 pts so that's good (135 more than last year). Thanks Fabianski for the first ranking update of the season, always great write up.
Very slow start for me as well. Partly expected, partly unfortunate.
Tasmania obviously ended far worse than expected and with a leadership of Phinney/Vansevenant you just expect more points. Then again later just used his 3 spare rds and first was obviously hit by the weather impacted randomness GC wise.
Other than that having 2 sprinter events in January never was going well for me. Both without Bauhaus sprinting at all, well fair enough obviously.
Salas at least showed a promising start in both January TTs, which is nice to see for races he leads later on. Just has to work a bit on his positioning to still be in the mix, worked decent in Qatar at least.
Thanks for the huge write up. Always appreciate your effort to bring those rankings into detail. Definitely one of the huge MG highlights since you took over.
Without checking the maths too closely, I think the goal for Tasmania with Wirtgen is definitely making it a 400 pointer. GC + Stage win + Points jersey + better team depth. 290 still a solid score but not the best initial platform if the team are to match the expectations that some seem to have!
