May with a total of 6 races for PT teams and a total scored of 12390 points over the month brings us many changes and 2 new teams in the top 3. A bit turnaround in the top, with even 1 team falling not only out of top 3, but out of top 10. Without further ado, lets focus on the teams this month!
The best team this month is Xero Racing with great results from Joseph Areruya in Fleche Wallone, Liege-Bastogne-Liege and Balkans. While a strong Tour of Northern Europe and Tour of the Battenkill from Florian Vermeersch helps their total for the month up to 1236. Not only their strongest month of the year, but THE strongest month of the year by any team (1 point more than King Power got last month)
Talking about King Power, they are the second strongest team this month, and continue their race up the standings. Last month they where 8th (a position now Xero has taken) but this month they enter the top 3 in 2nd place. Thats whay 2 strong months in a row can do for you! Yevgeniy Gidich the big star with 416 points to his name, but also Dylan Van Baarle in Tour of Nortern Europe and Rasmus Tiller in Battenkill helps a lot!
EA Vesuvio is another team with a strong month, and the 3rd strongest score this month takes them to 3rd in the overall standings. The points mainly coming from Tom Wirtgen in Tour of Northern Europe and Matej Mohoric with good results in the hilly classics.
The favorite before the season Evonik - ELKO has started to gain some pace and with the 4th strongest score this month they climb to 5th in the overall standings Miguel Angel Lopez with a total of 346 pts the highest scorer (though I guess they hoped for more?) while Rune Herregodts and Roger Adria helps the scoreline to a good month!
Climbing into the top 10 we have Aker - MOT. While Attila Valter is the biggest scorer from the hilly classics there has been steady depth scoring and Hampus Anderberg with a good Rheden results help a lot!
ELCO - ABEA is another team climbing and as a newly promoted team they should be very happy getting into 6th at the end of the month. While Tomohiro Kinoshita and Stylianos Farantakis both has had good months it is more about several riders scoring all over that helps the team here. I would dare to say that staying up seems safe for the greece team.
Team Puma - SAP shouild be very happy with the scores they got this month. We know Silvio Herklotz will do well, but getting 280 pts in a month from Johannes Schinnagel was not expected. They are still all the way down in 18th, but they seem posed for a big jump
The only team staying in top 3, is also climbing from 2nd to 1st. Rabobank did not seem the strongest team before the season started, but they just keep scoring points. Another team that picks up points everywhere and with many different riders, with Davide Formolo having the best month for the team.
Jura GIANTS started the month in last, but with Mauro Schmid putting the team on his back in Northern Europe and scoring a total of 313 points for the month they climb up to 20th. Still in a relegation spot, but could there be hope?
A team on another path is Grieg-Maersk, the main cobble season is pretty much finished, but Mads Pedersen keeps scoring points as soon as he finds some cobbles. They are falling from 16th to 17th and are just staying out of the relegation spots, even though I am afraid that they will soon be there on these updates
Starting in 7th and ending the month in 7th is Polar. Andrea Bagioli with a strong result in Liege-Bastogne-Liege pretty much saves the month here for the team!
If you have a really good race that helps scoring a lot, and if it hadn't been for Tour of Northern Europe Cedevita would've had less than 100 pts this month. That dosen't matter when we had the race and they scored 395 pts from it with Jasper Philipsen being the top scorer, but also Bachirou Nikiema and Ivan Siric getting good points. Still a fall from 5th to 9th, but this could've looked bad without that race
Another team staying in the same position is Sony - Force India, thought I would guess staying in 21st is not a goal for the team. Mick Van Dijke continues to be the hero with a strong Tour of Norther Europe, but I am starting to be afraid that his friends on the team is not helping him enough.
Fastned most likely hoped for more from Mauri Vansevenant in the hilly classics, but with a nice Tour of Norther Europe he still scores 208 pts this month, which helps Fastned stay in 13th
Another team pretty much staying put is Gazelle, they fall 1 spot from 15th to 16th and is dangerously close to relegation. A team that for years has been focused on depth scoring is not getting the same results as we are used to. Mike Teunissen with a strong Rheden GP the top scorer of the month with his 125 pts, while Giovanni Aleotti managed some points in the hilly classics
Another team fighting for survival is Lierse SK - Pizza Ullo Pro Cycling, staying in 19th the team most hope for some good results soon to get them up the standings. Patrick Gamper with a strong Rheden the main man this month!
Starting the month on top of the standings was Tinkoff Team - La Datcha, but a low scoring month sends them down to 4th. The main scorer this month is Toms Skujins with his strong Fleche Wallone, but other than that there has not been a lot to brad about this month for the Russian team
cycleYorkshire falls from 11th to 14th on the back of a month where really only Franck Bonnamour scores for the team with his 154 points for the month. Still not in any mayor danger as I see it its never fun to fall in the standings
The same can be said for Indosat Ooredoo who was 1 place behind in 12th, and is still 1 place behind in 15th. No mayor scorers in May with Erick Herrera being the best with his 72 points. That tells you pretty much why the lost 3 places in the standings
Then we come to the team that has taken over at the bottom of the table, not a good month for Los Pollos Hermanos. They fall down to 22nd, even with their star man Sergio Higuita scoring 168 pts this month, with most of it coming from Fleche Wallone. Should the team survive either he needs to overperform, or someone else needs to start scoring, after him the best score this month was 20 pts...
A team who would like to forget this month fell from 3rd to 11th, maybe too many taste tests from the sponsor? Who knows, but Carlsberg - Danske Bank had a bad month. The managed guessed it before the season, but Alex Aranburu seems to not be able to score as they hope, but are still the top scorer this month with 93 points. That is not good enough to stay in top 3, and proves to not even be good enough to stay in top 10.
The worst scoring team this month however is Team UBS with a total of 205 pts with the team top scorer only getting 47, that was Javier Serrano. What about their hilly leader Emanuel Buchmann? After all we had Fleche Wallone and Liege-Bastogne-Liege! He managed a total of 43 this month, showing why it has been bad for UBS taking them down to 12th.
Top scorer in May is Joseph Areruya who climbs into the top 10 overall standings. In general we see the hilly captains scoring well with Yevgeniy Gidich and Miguel Angel Lopez making out the top 3 for the month.
It is however Mads Pedersen who becomes the overall leader, climbing past Merhawi Kudus who dosen't do anything, while Remco Evenepoel keeps his 3rd place. Other than Areruya climbing all the way from 135th to 10th there are no need names in the top 10, with only Tadej Pogacar falling out of the top 10.
Weird month for me. Ardennes week didnt work out for us, Balkans was probably still okayish for us despite very annoyingly losing the gc to a break and not getting anything out of classifications and ToNE was the pleasant upside hit that i was hoping for. I was hoping to win the month but seeing how well Xero performed that was always going to be super tough but losing further ground to king power and ea is just very annoying
I definitely can`t agree on the "nice TONE comment", seeing my expectations were a lot higher there without getting a stage win or coming closer to the podium. But at least the scoring wasn`t worse than this.
Though as you said, my expectation on scoring from Vansevenant was higher indeed. He is missing far too many chances by doing weird moves or this year unfortunately due to splits, that shouldn`t happen for him.
On the good side, so far it looks like a decent top15 ahead of the relegation area. Let`s hope this remains till the end as the number of underperformances seem to gain over the overperformances so far.
Rheden the only reason we're not last after a really really bad month. But the gap with the safe spots is there and will be hard to close. Thanks for the update!
Guess our month wasn't that bad since we are back in first place. But that's mostly because the other teams in the top 5 in the previous update had an even worst month. And even then it's only a few points that allowed us to get back first place.
I mean, we expected this time some extent. We had a lot of race days on others before this, so not racing Balkans, Battenkill, or Rheden brought us back down to reality in a pretty slow month for the team. In terms of our actual racing, I'm obviously not satisfied with our Liege performance, but the big loss was the unmitigated disaster that was Northern Europe, with Per simply not caring and my team dropping off the back on its own volition to wait with AKA. We got a lot of points there last year and very few this year.
Looking ahead, I can't say I'm super optimistic. We have a lot of Skjelmose leadership race coming up, including the Tour, and I can't say I'm optimistic about the AI having him compete there, especially because we've also sent sprinters to those races, not knowing how harmful that can be for minor GC fighting. Our floor relies on Skjelmose getting white jerseys and minor GC spots, especially where Plapp and Evenpoel are absent, and that's definitely in jeopardy. Glad we banked points early on this year.
Thanks for the update!
RIP Exxon Duke, David Veilleux, Double Feature, and Monster Energy
