cunego59 wrote:


I was happy to hear your positive assessment of Jago in the podcast and hope you're right!

I'm curious what you think of the choices of races where Bini rides in support of Jago. In hindsight, I think going for the all-out sprinter races may have been a mistake as Jago will likely not get a sprint train anywhere with all the top sprinters present, so Bini might be wasted, unless he sprints for himself, which I don't think that's likely. Maybe going for Britain or Langkawi might've been the better choice to give Willems a strong leadout when he might need it? But then there are quite a few race days (hilly/mountains) where Bini has almost no role. Not sure, but something to think about for next year I guess.

We start the season with the first race for maxed Jago Willems. It should give us a decent indication straight away how he'll perform against the cream of the PCT sprinting crop. He's got pretty much the best support we can give him with Bini Girmay, Habimana, De Buyst and Samu Mugisha. As mentioned before, I'm unsure if sending Bini to these flat classics alongside Jago was such a great idea, but again, we'll find out early. The hope is for a Top 10 result for Jago, anything outside of the Top 15 would be a disappointment.

Another debut, this time for new signing Valentin Madouas, who gets his first shot at team leadership. He should be suited quite well for the race, Top 10 in the GC is the minimum expectation, and he has decent support around him. Jago Willems is here, too, for the three flat stages.

Takeaki Amezawa also starts his season already. The Tour of the Middle East should suit him quite well and we're hopeful he can use his strong puncheur qualities to beat out nominally better climbers. In a crowded field, that's a bit tough to predict, but a Top 5 should at least be within the realm of possibilities. Less than the Top 10 would be a disappointment, and I'm hoping Tim Wellens could be able to score some depth points, too.

Madushanka Perera won a stage here last year, but the race was still C2 and he was in his prime, so that won't happen again. But he's got a chance to compete for points in the two sprint stages, so that would be neat.

Laurens147 wrote:

Three races right off the bat where I expect quite a bit from your team. Willems, Madouas, and Amezawa should all be able to rack up some points.

Best of luck!

January hasn't come to an end yet, but since we start racing on the 1st of February, I want to give the preview a few days of space. Especially since February might be the single most important month of our season. Why? Mainly because 50% of Biniam Girmay's cobbles race days take place here, and those include all four of our goal races. And that's basically our entire month! Six cobbles races, five for Bini and one for Jean Eric Habimana, and rest for every other leader.

Biniam Girmay's cobbles campaign starts immediately with one of our two win goals. This will be more or less his standard support squad for all cobbles races, with Jean Eric Habimana, Jasper De Buyst and Gerben Kuypers as the primary helpers.

Any win goal on cobbles this season will be tough, given the presence of David Per most of all but also many other strong cobbles riders in the division. Bini finished 5th here last year, which was of course before his training, so we're cautiously optimistic.

Due to the clash with Viana do Castelo and our desire to give Jean Eric Habimana a good shot there, the squad for Roma Maxima is quite a bit weaker, with only Jasper De Buyst as a significant domestique for Biniam Girmay. Was it ideal planning to set this as a goal race nonetheless? Probably not. But even in this setup, we're hopeful that Bini can achieve that Top 5 goal, or at least come close.

As mentioned, Jean Eric Habimana gets his one shot at sole leadership in Portugal. He's got decent support from Gerben Kuypers and, hopefully playing a good role on this terrain, Andreas Miltiadis. Habimana finished 14th here last year while still in development, so a Top 10 is the minimum expectation.

We're back to full team strength for our second win goal of the year. Biniam Girmay was already the runner-up here last year, so hopefully he can take one more step up.

Cobbles stage races are notoriously volatile, but we still chose the Cheshire Cycling Tour as our final goal race, again with a Top 5 goal. All four stages should suit Biniam Girmay very well and we don't have any sprinter here to confuse the AI. Instead, Bini could even be in contention for the sprint himself. He's got full team support again of course, so we're looking forward to a fun and hopefully successful race.

To round out the month, it's the third HC cobbles classic, Le Samyn. No goal race this time, just hoping for another strong result, ideally a podium finish, for Biniam Girmay.

Fabianski wrote:

Will be a good feeling to check off all sponsor goals after just two months of racing
Of course, things can always go wrong, but Bini is just so amazing that the worst thing I can see happen are some close misses. Or punctures obviously, but I guess it's more likely to see you get a rather commanding lead in the PCT standings after February

Will also be interesting to see how Habimana does in Viana. Should be a good race for him

Five races (I may have forgotten about two of them in the preview) with 19 races days meant a busy first month of the season for us. Jago Willems was main attraction, leading us in three of the races. Valentin Madouas made his debut for the team. And Takeaki Amezawa had his first race of the season in our first PTHC outing.

How did it go? Overall, I'd say it was pretty good. No wins, but the goal this season is to get to the top by collecting Top 5s and Top 10s at a very consistent rate. And January was a prime example of that.

Points: 53

PpRD: 26.5

We opened the season with the HC sprint race Down Under Classic. In his first race as a maxed rider, Jago met expectations with a good 6th place. No further contributions from the team and an early glimpse that Bini's non-cobbles planning might be rather bad this season, but still a very decent start.

Historically, around 20 PpRD would be a near-guarantee for promotion, so that's going to be the goal for most races and we achieved that here.

Points: 113

PpRD: 18,83

In his debut, Valentin Madouas immediately showed why we spent so much money on him in FA and training. On the two most selective hilly stages, he finished 3rd both times, which brought him up to 2nd overall. He also finished T-3rd in the mountain classification.

Jago Willems added a few points with 8th, 5th and 6th place finishes on the three sprint stages, and Hamza Mansouri added his first 2 points in a Bralirwa shirt, finishing 25th in the GC.

In total, this was quite a successful race. The fact that we still missed our PpRD target, even if just barely, shows just how good you need to be to ultimately promote - and that the real points are scored in HC and especially PTHC.

Points: 139

PpRD: 34.75

Speaking of big points in PTHC races: Takeaki Amezawa began his season in the Middle East. Last year, he struggled a lot in the first half of the season, missing the Top 10 in all of his first five races. Not this year. On the two mountain stages, he finished 4th and 6th, respectively, and consequently earned himself a 5th overall rank.

With a few more points added for 4th place in the KoM rankings and some depth scoring from Wellens, Barguil and Miltiadis, this was handily our best race of the month.

Bit of a tough one to evaluate, this. On the one hand, Jago Willems performed less than ideal on four of the five sprint stages with 7th, 8th, 10th and 12th place finishes. His one great result, a 2nd place on stage three, was enough to lift him to 10th in the GC. Before the race, we said a Top 10 and winning the U25 classification was the minimum goal, so we at least checked both of those. But one more good result could've meant as much as a Top 5, so this feels like a missed opportunity.

That feeling of ambiguity and missed opportunity is amplified by youngster Nicolas Gojkovic's performance. One day in a breakaway was enough to vault him into second place in both the mountain and U25 classification as well as the Top 15 in the GC before the final stage. Then, he ended up on the wrong side of a big split in the peloton and lost his GC and U25 position rather unnecessarily. At the same time, scoring 17 points is great for the rookie, and 101 points for the entire team is still quite good. So, not a full disappointment, but not a great feeling either.

The full disappointment came on the last day of the month. Hoping for one more Top 10 result for Jago, we got the first zero pointer of the season. In a very hectic race, the peloton fell apart near the end and we were simply caught out of position. Unfortunate, but that happens.

By points, this has been easily our most successful January in team history. We are where we want to be in 4th place in the team rankings, in good position to take over the lead with a strong February on cobbles (well, looking at OHN, we'll see how strong it'll be, but the potential is still there).

Our three leaders that were active this month are all in the Top 15 and Jago Willems has surpassed Alvaro Hodeg's points from the entire previous season by a decent margin after just one month already.

To track our progress throughout the season, I've looked back at the last five years of this division, how we as a team have fared on average, and what 1st place and 5th place looked like on average, points-wise. So far, we're on track for a Top 5 finish, which is what we're after.

It's obviously still early, and at this point in the season, the points over the last few years still vary greatly, so the average isn't as meaningful yet. But it underscores that we can really call this January a good start to the season.

February was our most important month of the year. Not only did it provide by far the most Biniam Girmay race days of any month, it also included all four of our goal races. We even started right away with the first one:

Points: 61

PpRD: 30.5

Bini's first cobbles race of the season was our first win goal and we were hopeful that he could do it or at least come close. Depending on how you want to look at it, he was sort of close: Within the final 5 kilometers, he was out in front of the peloton alongside Alexandr Ovsyannikov.

Unfortunately, neither had the strength or the will to work together to fend off the chasers and so a group sprint would decide the race. Ordinarily, this would be a great scenario for Bini. Not here, though. Apparently, the attacks had cost him too much energy and he finished 6th behind some significantly worse sprinters.

6th in a win goal is terrible for budget considerations, of course, and while the PpRD technically look good, in part thanks to an 18th place by Jean-Eric Habimana, this was definitely not the start to the cobbles campaign we hoped for.

Points: 102

PpRD: 51

Bini had a chance to redeem himself just one day later. Our second goal race was PTHC Roma Maxima, and he did indeed much better here. Despite multiple unnecessary attacks from far out, he kept enough in the tank to finish 3rd. This was enough to tick off the Top 5 Goal that we had set for this race, so we’re happy. Jasper De Buyst, who was part of one of those weird attacks, ended up in the points, too.

Points: 28

PpRD: 14

De Buyst was Bini’s only notable domestique in Italy because the other half of the cobbles squad went to Portugal for Jean Eric Habimana’s one main leadership opportunity of the year. On the hilly cobbles course, he did what he came for and scored a solid 7th place, which is pretty much on par with what we expected. A bit more from lieutenant Gerben Kuypers would’ve been nice, but that’s not that important to be honest.

After the failure of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, we were quite nervous for our second win goal race, Kuurne – Bruxelles – Kuurne. But luckily, that nervousness was not warranted. Having finished 2nd here last year, Bini went one step further, beating Alexandr Ovsyannikov in a super close sprint to take the win. His first of the season, the second in our jersey, and one of hopefully many more to come.

Jean Eric Habimana and Gerben Kuypers added a few points as the cherry on top, and following the success of Roma Maxima, we now stood at two of three attempted goals successfully achieved. One more was to come ...

... which was the Cheshire Cycling Tour. Bini was at it again, looking for a Top 5 GC result. And the race started out well enough, with Bini finishing 2nd in the sprint of the opening stage. He followed that up with a 7th place on day two, losing a few seconds to the riders ahead of him, but remaining in 3rd place overall and even taking the lead in the points classification.

Things took a turn for the worse in stage three, where he got blocked in the leadup to the bunch sprint, finishing outside of the bonus seconds in 15th place and dropping to 4th in the GC. Still on pace for the goal, though, so it all came down to the final day. And luckily, it was a good day for Bini. Another stage that ended up hardly selective at all meant Bini could simply join the sprint, finish 5th and defend his 4th place in the GC, which we're very happy with.

As an additional bonus, Jean Eric Habimana did well enough to win the young riders classification, Bini fished 3rd in the points, Gerben Kuypers randomly finished 3rd on the final stage and we got a couple more depth points from the GC, most notably with Jasper De Buyst in the Top 50. All in all, another very good race!

One more cobbles race to round out the month and we were back in Belgium for Le Samyn. It’s a race that suits Bini well and he delivered accordingly. He proved to be one of the two strongest riders alongside David Per, and in a super close sprint, the Grieg captain just had a tiny bit more in the tank. Always a bit tough to lose out on a win by such a slim margin, but still another stellar result, capping of a month that was just a model of consistency from the entire team.

And thanks to that consistency, for only the second time ever and the first time since March 2021, we top the PCT Rankings at the end of the month.

And we do it by already cracking the 1.000 mark and scoring the most points any PCT team has scored through February in the last five years. This is right where we hoped to be.

Looking at the points progression, this month obviously puts us in a great place, although graph is exaggerating a bit, as I believe many of the cobbles races we did already had been in March over the past few years.

That said, we have only ever scored more points through March (!) than we have already accumulated now, which is kind of wild. Whichever way you look at it, this has been a stellar start to the season.

Add three of four goals achieved to that (even if OHN still stings) and this was another very good month. Obviously, we won't be able to keep this pace up in March (or any future month), but there will still be good opportunities to score, which we'll explore in the next monthly preview soon.