August was a slow month for us with just 3 races, but there were a couple of massive highlights to take a look back on:

Fabio Silvestre delivers a massively surprising stage win

We didn't have particularly high expectations for the Deutschland Tour. Some depth points from Nils Politt, maybe Carlos Verona if we're lucky, and perhaps one or two Top 10 finishes in the sprints from Fabio Silvestre. Little did we know.

The pivotal stage came on day two, where Fabio not only won the stage - a miracle on its own -, but there was a split between sprinters and peloton, which vaulted him into second overall. After a solid time trial, he ended up in 6th overall, a tremendous result. Nils added a 30th overall for good measure.

While we didn't have any expectations for Deutschland, we had high hopes for the Tour du Maroc, given Louis Meintjes led a solid team to attack the overall classificatino. To make it short: 3rd, 7th and 5th places on the three uphill finishes were enough for 5th overall. Not stellar, but reasonable given the opposition.

Joeri Stallaert was our sprinter and he actually did pretty well, being 3rd and 1st from the peloton on the final two sprint stages ... unfortunately behind the breakaway both times, robbing us of additional stage points, solidifying the picture of a good, not great race.

The GP Kigali is maybe the biggest race on our calendar - not in terms of points, of course, but it's our one home race of the year, and it's sort of our white whale: Despite having nominal contenders in all three previous years, we've yet been unable to win it. Joeri Stallaert came closest last year with a 3rd place ...

... and he bested that performance! Unfortunately only by one place, falling short of the win we'd have treasured so much. That being said, in a tough field that is still a really strong result and some valuable points.

The end of the season is creeping ever closer, and the top of the PCT rankings becomes closer and closer, too. Well, not the very top: Los Pollos Hermanos reigns supreme with a huge lead, and Jura GIANTS can arguably plan for a PT season as well. But behind them ... just take a look:

Pos	Last		Team	Total	RD	PpRD	Proj
1	1		Los Pollos Hermanos	3872	147	26.34	4293
2	2		Jura GIANTS	3246	134	24.22	3948
3	4		Indosat Ooredoo	2965	146	20.31	3311
4	7		Assa Abloy	2945	145	20.31	3311
5	3		Bralirwa - Stevens Bikes	2818	136	20.72	3377
6	5		Fastned	2657	132	20.13	3281
7	9		Sony - Force India	2546	139	18.32	2986
8	6		Lierse SK - Pizza Ullo PCTeam	2500	145	17.24	2810
9	8		Xero Racing	2429	132	18.4	2999
10	10		Lampre - Pinarello	2404	133	18.08	2947

We've fallen to our lowest ranking position since January, which in and of itself is a ridiculous thing to say given that we're still in 5th place. This is in part because we didn't ride as much. Our PpRD actually increased by .12 over the last month. The bigger factor, though, is the strong performances from our rivals. Assa Abloy and Indosat in particular boosted their PpRD by 1.66 and .95, respectively, to pass us.

Now mind you, we're still in 3rd by PpRD with 27 race days left. The big question, of course, is how many of those race days are actually valuable. The answer, unfortunately, is: likely not that many.

Decent scoring expected:

Race	Cat.	Leader
Rheden GP	PTHC	Joeri Stallaert
Tour of Japan	HC	Louis Meintjes

The final two races of the season for our main leaders. Joeri will have tough PTHC opposition in the Netherlands, but at best something like a podium finish is certainly possible. The same applies to Louis Meintjes in the Tour of Japan. These are the two races where a decent amount of points are the most likely.

Decent scoring possible, but far from guaranteed:

Race	Cat.	Leader
Riga - Jurmala	PTHC	Fabio Silvestre
Tour of Britain	C1	Uwizeyimana, Izagirre

Fabio's final race, perhaps in his entire career, will happen in Latvia. We can't expect him to score much against PT competition, but it's not impossible to imagine him getting a decent amount of points here.

Bonaventure and Ion are then asked to work their magic in Britain. It's honestly not that far-fetched that they can do something nice there: If the final stages favor climbers, there are only two riders who have both a higher climbing and a higher TT stat than Bonaventure. And Ion has done pretty good things on these types of courses, too, this year.

Decent scoring unlikely:

Race	Cat.	Leader
Balkans International	PTHC	Ndayisenga, Eyob
Chrono d'Arenberg	PTHC	Darren Young
Grand Prix Cycliste	PTHC	Eyob, Izagirre
Giro dell'Emilia	HC	Ndayisenga, Izagirre

Hills just aren't our forté, so nothing more than hopefully a few depth points are expected in the two classics. In the Balkans, our main hopes rely on breakaways and hopefully a challenge for the mountain classification. Natnael Tesfatsion has an outside shot at a Top 3-5 of the U25 classification, too. Finally, Darren Young is a Top 15-20 contender in Arenberg, but that won't deliver a whole lot of points.

So that leaves us with 8 hopefully valuable race days, 7 shaky race days and 12 where any decent amount of scoring would be a pleasant surprise. Will that be enough to ultimately end up in the promotion ranks? Who knows. But a month like this, where a significant and unexpected overperformance is the main reason why we've not dropped far more places underscores how lucky we are to even be in this position in the first place.

So the mantra remains: This is an incredibly fun season, the fact that we never even once had to worry about relegation is still the main achievement, and the excitement we currently experience is just a massive bonus, no matter the outcome. That said ... if the outcome was promotion, we certainly wouldn't mind.

In briefing to the press, Bralirwa - Stevens team principal Theodore Boss announced today that following the end of the 2023 MGUCI season, Stevens will conclude its four year run as name sponsor of the team. "For a while now, we've been in open communications with Stevens about their role in the team moving forward", Boss states. "Despite efforts from both sides, we were unfortunately unable to agree on a future strategic orientation of the team that would have been satisfying for all involved."

An official statement from Stevens reads: "We're very proud of our part in getting this team off the ground and of what the team has accomplished over these past four years. But a sponsorship like this is a big financial commitment that needs to be evaluated constantly. Ultimately, while it is of course the team's prerogative to select and sign the riders they feel give them the best chance for success, we have to acknowledge the consistently low number of German riders on the roster in recent seasons, and therefore the lack of coverage in our core markets. This led us to the tough decision to scale back our sponsorship investment."


Stevens will remain part of the Bralirwa family as the bike supplier for the foreseeable future. "We're very grateful for Stevens' contributions and support throughout our team's young history, and we're happy to keep them and their excellent bikes on board, even if in a smaller capacity", Theodore Boss says.

He continues: "Bralirwa is not in a position to fully fund a team on the PCT, let alone the PT level, on its own. We're therefore definitely going to add another title sponsor to replace Stevens in that role, and are already in contact with a few potential candidates." Boss declined to comment on the nationality of those candidates and any implications this might have for future teambuilding strategies.

"For now", he says, "our focus is on bringing this season and our time as Bralirwa - Stevens to a successful conclusion. This endeavor deserves our full attention. Everything else will follow in due time."

September consisted of just five races for us, four of which were in the PTHC category. We had high hopes for some, very little hopes for others, and overall we didn't get all that much from them - with one exception being another strong performance by Joeri Stallaert, who rounds out his season in style.

Races like the Tour of Britain, with a time trial and some hills, have been very good to us this season, and the bedrock of our unexpected promotion push. We were hoping to replicate that in Britain, with both Ion Izagirre and Bonaventure Uwizeyimana among the second tier of contenders for the GC.

The race kicked off with a flat stage, and for the first time, neo pro Jago Willems was our dedicated sprinter. He couldn't really compete for points, but that wasn't expected, either. A 13th place is honestly a pretty nice performance. Then came the time trial, which went decently well: Ion and Uwi were both just outside the Top 20, with many of the riders ahead being pure time trialists.

Unfortunately, things didn't go according to plan from there. The remaining three stages proved way too tough for Ion, who ended up outside of the Top 30 in the GC. Uwi did okay-ish, but couldn't replicate some of his early season successes and finished 12th overall. What sort of saved this race for us were Mektel Eyob and Valens Ndayisenga, both of whom benefitted from the hard profiles and joined Uwi in the Top 20. Overall, it wasn't a terrible result, but it was a step backwards in the promotion race nonetheless.

Riga - Jurmala was Fabio Silvestre's final race of the season, and likely of his Bralirwa career. Against tough competition, we were hoping for him to end on a high note, but it wasn't to be. Never really finding his way in the finale, he was far from the action and finished all the way down in 36th place.

Hilly stage races on PTHC level without Louis Meintjes are always a tough proposition for us. We knew that breakaways were our only chance at scoring a decent amount of points, and to the team's credit, we had a presence ahead of the peloton in five of the six stages.

Moise Mugisha was up first, joining the group of the day on stage 1, and he made the most of it, coming away with the provisional lead in the mountain classification. Youngster Welay Hagos Berhe had perhaps his most prominent day of the year on stage 2, where he was in the winning group, capturing a 6th place on the day. On stage 3, Lennert Van Eetvelt made it three different riders on three different days.

Unfortunately, this splitting of responsibilities meant that Moise wasn't able to keep his lead in the KoM competition. But we would take one more shot: Supported by Jago Willems, Natnael Tesfatsion was in the breakaway on day 4 to lay the groundwork for another challenge on the final stage. And while he fell just short of the polkadots jersey, he managed to climb to 2nd place in the classification to score some solid points.

Five riders involved in breakaways, the other three were supposed to compete for the GC, even if of course not for the highest places. Valens Ndayisenga did the best, coming in at a respectable 27th place overall. Mektel Eyob and Ion Izagirre both missed some scoring thresholds by just a handful of seconds, respectively, with Eyob in 51st and Izagirre in 104th. Overall, we can commend the team for their efforts with the limited resources available.

The Chrono d'Arenberg was the one race where we placed our hopes on the shoulders of Darren Young. A decent-ish rider on both cobbles and the TT bike, we were hoping for him to compete for a lower Top 20 spot. Unfortunately, it turned out that the cobbles didn't have that much of an impact after all, which left him stranded just outside of the Top 30.

In his final race at the peak of his powers, Joeri Stallaert concluded what, despite comparably fewer wins, has points-wise been his strongest season for us. And he added another considerable chunk to his points total. In a very tough race, he proved to be the only rider who could match world champion Wisniowski, showing resilience and catching up with him time and time again.

As the two headed towards the finish line together, we were hoping that Joer might turn his superior sprinting skills into a great victory, but his legs were empty and Wisniowski ultimately got the better of him. Still, against the strongest competition, Joeri once again showed his prowess and delivered. Tesfom Okbamariam also had perhaps his best day of the year, finishing 22nd, and Matthew Teggart added another Top 30 result to his very good season.

Pos	Last		Team	Total	RD	PpRD	Proj
1	1		Los Pollos Hermanos	4250	155	27.42	4469
2	2		Jura GIANTS	3642	151	24.12	3932
3	3		Indosat Ooredoo	3141	155	20.26	3302
4	4		Assa Abloy	3088	156	19.79	3226
5	5		Bralirwa - Stevens Bikes	3045	153	19.9	3244
6	9		Xero Racing	2926	146	20.04	3267
7	6		Fastned	2910	151	19.27	3141
8	8		Lierse SK - Pizza Ullo PCTeam	2858	153	18.68	3045
9	7		Sony - Force India	2759	151	18.27	2978
10	10		Lampre - Pinarello	2583	147	17.57	2864

What can we say about this penultimate ranking update? Compared to preseason expectations, it looks amazing. But despite our current rank, an actual Top 5 finish seems more and more unlikely, which is a little bit heartbreaking giving that we've been among the promotion spots each month since February. Xero will easily move past both us and Assa Abloy, so the Swedes are who we need to overtake - while keeping Fastned behind us -, and given that we know the mediocre outcome of Louis Meintjes' Japan campaign, with very little other scoring potential, it's not looking all that great.

But who knows what'll happen over these final few days? All we can do is wait, see and enjoy the last races before we head into the offseason.

Louis Meintjes finishes 5th on stage 5, securing 5th overall.

Our last chance to make a meaningful impact in the fight for the Top 5 was Louis Meintjes' final race of the season. The route wasn't perfect for him, but with a couple of punchy finishes, there was at least a chance for a high end finish.

Unfortunately, basically every stage was "only" decent for Louis. A solid prologue, an okay first hilly stage, 6th in the mountain time trial and 5th on the second hilly stage, and then getting lucky with a freak time split on the final day, combined to 5th overall. Perfectly in line with Louis' skills against this startlist, but not enough to push us over the line, even with another good result from Valens Ndayisenga in 20th overall.

The final two races of the season were hilly classics, our worst terrain. But our riders have done their best all year to squeeze at least a handful of points out of these races, and the GP Cycliste was no different. While the bulk of our team had no impact and finished outside of the Top 100, Samuel Mugisha joined the morning breakaway and really made the most of it: Hanging on as long as he could, he ended up in 22nd place, a really good result for him in a PTHC race.

Ion Izagirre had a tremendous year, but he was able to shine mostly in stage races, not in classics. While it might be a bit much to call his Emilia performance "shining", his 21st place prevented us from ending the season with a zero pointer, and that was really all we could've hoped for in this race.

And that's it for 2023! Full season review is coming in the next few days, with more in depth thoughts on missing out on the Top 5. As mentioned before, 7th in the final rankings is still a really good result, but of course slightly mixed feelings about it given the course of the season. But still, we're in good shape moving forward and it was a thoroughly enjoyable year!

In last year's recap post, tongue-in-cheek, I called out all those optimistic predictions that had us as surefire promotion candidates as we tumbled to an 11th place finish. Now, we look back at a season where we are one of the two biggest overperformers compared to not only my own expectations, but also consensus preseason predictions. How did that happen? Well, let’s take a look:

In the season where I was perhaps most apprehensive about our chances, we scored our highest ever points total and our highest ever rankings finish (yes, ever: in our inaugural season, we promoted from CT as the 9th ranked team). And the most satisfying thing is that we achieved this by successfully executing a main offseason strategy, something that’s been missing last season in particular: finally scoring good depth points. Well, that, and Joeri Stallaert’s best season in our jersey yet.

With all that positivity also comes a drop of bitterness. If you find yourself in the Top 5 in eight of the ten ranking updates of the season, but one of the two you’re missing out on is the only one that matters, a faint smell of missed opportunity lingers in the air (I don’t expect 7th place to become a promotion spot through disbandments, and I hope it won’t). But given our expectations, and the fact that we’re in a long-term process to build up a team that can not only promote but establish itself at the highest level, the many fun highlights of 2023 simply have to be seen as a bonus on that path.

Interestingly enough, but also supporting the case that our success this year really was a team success, our best year rankings-wise is also our year with the fewest wins.

Joeri Stallaert, despite eclipsing both of his previous two season by over 200 points, won just a single race compared to four in 2021 and three in 2022. Ion Izagirre, however, added only the second stage race GC win in our team’s history, Fabio Silvestre concluded his Bralirwa run with stage wins four and five for us, and new team leader Louis Meintjes added a stage win, too. But like I said, this year wasn’t about wins - it was about consistency. And our two main leaders were the paragons of that.

Our leaders were just incredibly reliable. Joeri Stallaert finished outside of the Top 5 in just a single cobbles race - when he finished alllll the way down in 8th place in Franceville - and even added a 6th place in a sprint race in Lisbon. Louis Meintjes similarly finished in the Top 5 of every single stage race he entered and only had that one horrendous outing in Hallstatt.

And like I said, in contrast to previous years, the whole team pitched in. These are just the Top 10 results, which is already an impressive list and it’s awesome to see guys like Janvier Hadi and Matthew Teggart on there. But the more amazing fact to me is this: Throughout the 46 non-wild card races we entered this year, we scored zero points in … exactly one of them. Only the GP Wallonie back in April! That’s incredible to me.

We relied entirely on Joeri Stallaert for our goals and he (mostly) came through. It is slightly unfortunate that his worst performance of the year, Franceville, coincided with a goal race and that he couldn’t do the threepeat in OHN, but he did it in KBK and also did very well in Rheden. Combined with the big overperformance in the team goal, we can be very happy with this.

The theme of better depth scoring is only reenforced by looking at the point totals of each rider. Last year, we had just six riders with more than 50 points - that’s up to eleven! New signings such as Ion Izagirre, Matthew Teggart and Nils Politt were major contributors. Of the ten riders who wore our jersey last year, seven of them increased their points (and the decrease for Fabio Silvestre is obviously tied to his age-related decline, while Tesfom Okbamariam suffered from Teggart's arrival). Just one single rider, rookie Jago Willems, didn't score at all.

The thing is, all of this didn’t even come at a significant cost to our top end scoring. This is of course in large part due to Joeri’s great season, who almost singlehandedly offset Fabio’s decline. But it’s also noteworthy that Louis Meintjes fell just 84 points short of Angel Madrazo’s points total from last year, meaning our Top 3 only scored a bit more than 100 points less compared to 2022. And to add to that, Fabio actually broke our team record for Points per 1k wage, which had previously stood at 3.90 from Valens Ndayisenga in our debut season.

Now, some of these comparatively high scores are due to outlier performances, such as Ion’s overall victory in the Tour of South Africa, Janvier Hadi’s 6th overall in the Vuelta al Pais Vasco and Fabio’s 6th overall in Deutschland. That said, I do think we can give ourselves a bit of credit here for our team building and our planning. We specifically improved our time trialing department and invested quite a lot into Ion to give ourselves as many shots as possible in exactly these hilly, time trial heavy stage races with him, Uwi and Janvier - enough for some of them to pay off. Joeri’s schedule was near-perfect and Louis had many good opportunities, too.

Looking back, our goals for the previous offseason were simple: Creating a more balanced squad and adding high potential talent without getting into danger of relegation. I was optimistic that we had succeeded, but of course only time was going to be able to fully tell. Now, the conclusion can firmly be drawn: Mission Accomplished.