Some teams were already enjoying some well-deserved rest today - but most PCT teams did actually race. One of them, Red Bull, even twice!
However, their participation in Zurich wasn't exactly successful - nor was it for Popo4Ever or Strava. Three teams, zero points!
So let's leave that one aside and focus on Giro dell'Emilia! After having some great results this year already, Benoot finally claimed his second classic win of the year (after Dunkerque), leaving all other top puncheurs behind! Raileanu (14th) and Velasco (16th) were not only great domestiques, but scored Top 20 results on their own - and so Philips end up with 162 points on the final day of the year!
We also had the duel Cedevita vs. Carlsberg - with the boys in orange getting a 2nd place with Beltran, plus depth points by Gaudu and Ardila. The men in green, however, had two Top 10 finishes with Aranburu in 4th and Jensen in 7th place! In the end, the latter was worth slightly more points, with Carlsberg winning today's duel 115 vs. 112!
Trans weren't far behind, though, with Waeytens (3rd place), Bystrom (18th) and Jang (23rd) picking up 95 points combined.
It's then a pretty sizeable gap to Project: Africa who end up with 66 points, with Lierse following with 53. Overall, only 12 teams actually scored today!
And here's the overview:
Emilia
Metzgete
Total
1
Philips - Force India
162
0
162
2
Carlsberg - Danske Bank
115
0
115
3
Cedevita
112
0
112
4
Trans Looney Tunes
95
0
95
5
Project: Africa
66
0
66
6
Lierse SK - Pizza Ullo PCTeam
53
0
53
7
Xero Racing
43
0
43
8
Crabbe-CC Chevigny
32
0
32
9
Red Bull Zalgiris
18
0
18
10
Amaysim Cervelo
15
0
15
11
Kraftwerk Man Machine
11
0
11
12
Sauber Petronas Racing
5
0
5
13
Zara - Irizar
0
0
0
14
Minions - Subwoolfer
0
0
0
15
Binance
0
0
0
16
HelloFresh - Lampre
0
0
0
17
Bralirwa - Stevens
0
0
0
18
Assa Abloy
0
0
0
19
Team Popo4Ever
0
0
0
20
Indosat Ooredoo
0
0
0
21
Voyagin - Bird
0
0
0
22
Gjensidige Pro Cycling Team
0
0
0
23
Strava
0
0
0
24
Volcanica - Fox
0
0
0
Final Teams Ranking
So, what are the implications of Emilia on the final rankings? There aren't actually huge ones - but still some.
Amaysim Cervélo run away with the division win - which we already knew. Congratulations on the title, and for bouncing back in style after a short trip to PCT! 3,955 points aren't quite the 4,000 that might have been their inofficial target, but it's definitely a great score!
And it's 565 points more than runner-up Zara - Irizar end up with. The Spaniards achieve the rare feat of back-to-back promotions - and it wasn't even close! Honestly, I didn't see them up there at all pre-season, but somehow they always found some magic stuff to be incredibly consistent, even winning races with second-tier riders - congratulations!
But - who ends up 3rd? Minions? Cedevita? Carlsberg? Well, it was close. And just some slightly different results could have made for a different outcome - for example, if Beltran had won, or if Aranburu had finished 2nd instead of 4th. But Minions actually hold onto 3rd place, by the pretty narrow margin of 17 points! Not only do they promote (surprisingly for me as well), they even end up on the PCT podium! Congratulations once again!
We knew that the fight for 4th place was close as well - with 7 points separating the two teams pre-race. As seen before, Carlsberg however could "only" gain 3 points - so Cedevita hold onto their 4th place, with the Danes finishing 5th! Both achieve a massive result though, as they promote to PT - which I did expect Carlsberg to do, but not at all Cedevita! (Yeah, you see how little I understand about this game ^^) Congrats to both of you as well!
So, who's missing out? Well, first of all, Binance. They didn't even get a chance of fighting for promotion today, not being in this race. And while they looked great for most of the season, the Portuguese end up over 200 points behind 5th place. 6th place could still a precious one to be in, though, as you never know if all PT teams actually continue...
Kraftwerk would have needed something big today - instead, they just failed big time for once. Still, their traditional end-of-season high carried them all the way to 7th - which may or may not end up in disband promotion as well.
And in 8th place, we have the team that pretty much took Kraftwerk's usual role this year, scoring huge amounts of points and gaining lots of spots late in the season - Philips! Indeed, the Dutch make a big jump from 13th all the way to 8th, getting even a Top 10 after looking like relegation candidates for quite some time! Great job!
This obviously makes HelloFresh slip down one spot - it's just by 5 points, though, and I guess they were counting on Meurisse today for getting at least that amount. It's not much harm done for them in the end, though.
Neither is it for Lierse, who despite doing a good job today (being the 6th highest scoring team) lose a spot as well.
It's worse news for Bralirwa, though, who - being pretty much undisputed promotion favorites - fall out of the Top 10 on the final day of the year! They sure will be questioning some of their transfer decisions now, as they did by far not bring the success they were hoping for. Promotion is over 600 points away, though, so it's surely not just one rider not doing his job right...
But they're not alone in that situation, at least. In fact, just two points behind, we have not one, but even two more teams! Whereas being up to 12th must be considered a success for Assa Abloy who at some point looked like locks for relegation, it's a big disappointment for Xero. A top performance by Areruya today would have seen them entering the Top 10 as well, now they're falling short. They sure did get some great results this year, but overall they clearly weren't good enough to head back up to PT.
We have yet another disappointing - and probably disappointed - team in 14th place. Popo4Ever were always close to the promotion spots in previous years, and now put some big hopes in Padun - but the team just failed too often, and when they did well, they got beaten by some seconds. Is there a major rebuild imminent, given that Pluchkin's career is approaching its definitive end?
The fight for the final Top 15 place was again really close with Sauber and Red Bull being just 4 points apart pre-race. The decisive factor in the end was that two Red Bull riders scored today with Errazkin and Schönberger, while just breakaway rider Chhetri scored for Sauber. So Red Bull take that 15th place, 9 points ahead of Sauber!
But in fact, both of them were almost caught by Trans, who end up 31 points short of Red Bull. But they still gained a spot, leaving Indosat behind by just 2 points! So that's 4 teams within 33 points of each other - another region of the table where things were really close!
Let's then talk about the least joyful subject - relegation. Well, it is joyful for Voyagin, as they stay up for another year. For Gjensidige, however, it was a race to forget - instead of getting a miraculous run to safety, they ended up with zero points, and so they remain in the first relegation spot.
Strava and Volcanica (the latter didn't race at all) didn't score, either, taking 21st and 22nd - the latter despite having the division's top scorer on board! Crabbe and Project: Africa did score, the latter even pretty well - but they still have to go down.
Here are the final numbers - great news for some, an awful sight for others:
Just like in CT, the best PCT rider scored more than half of his team's points. However, instead of promoting like Colombini, Volcanica relegate despite Jonas Ahlstrand's stellar season! Despite those 1,066 points, he might regret all those close races where he finished "only" second - and there were quite some of them!
Joseph Areruya probably won't enjoy his 2nd place that much, either. As expected, he overtook Eddie Dunbar on the final day - but only just, with a pretty disappointing 8th place. The latter, on the other hand, once again was the main factor for his team not relegating, and had just an amazing year!
Mattia Cattaneo, Sam Oomen, Kristoffer Halvorsen and Angel Madrazo are next (they couldn't be overtaken anyway), but then we have Tiesj Benoot in 8th place thanks to his win in Emilia! He was the only rider who could potentially enter the Top 10 today - and he did so in style!
Which means that Jack Haig and Fabio Jakobsen slipped down one spot each - and so did Joeri Stallaert, for whom this means that he misses out on the Top 10.
Beltran made quite a big last-day jump in the rankings, from 28th to 16th - and it's actually pretty amazing that the highest placed rider of a promoting team isn't even in the Top 15! It's even more blatant in Carlsberg's case, whose top scoring rider is Guldhammer in 21st place... On the other hand, Xero have 3 riders in the Top 20, but don't promote (by far) - strange world!
tsmoha and 4 rookies set for the PT is a very nice sight to see.
Binance and maybe even Kraftwerk with a good shot of making it too. Philips with a fantastic end of the season, but I don't think we'll see 3 teams disbanding for them to go up. But there's always next year!
Great to see bbl finally making it to the PT, but I'm afraid that team will need a full rebuild. But it would have probably needed anyway, so it's definitely good to have the extra PT money.
Seriously though, what a couple of months for us! The pre ToA rankings (and the one before that) had us in 19th and to end up 8th is amazing. This is by far our best season in the MG with the previous best result being 18th in the PCT! Benoot has been a revelation and it is so satisfying to see that training pay off big time. Choi was a little hamstrung with ToA, but did well for a 500+ return as well. Penasa once again outdid himself with 400 points. We had decent depth scoring with six riders crossing into double figures. TvA finished off his last season before decline with a great ToA. Glad we could give that send off
Congrats firstly to tsmoha on the title. Amazing season indeed for them. Congrats also to all the other promoting teams, with all them going into the PT for the first time. Great stuff.
Relegation is always a sad aspect of the season and it sucks for the five teams going down. Hopefully we see them back soon enough in the PCT.
Thanks for another great rankings update Fab. Thanks to everyone who made the season possible and see you all soon in the 2023 season.
Slightly disappointed to miss out on to 4k mark, but who cares anyway? This season has been amazing (particularly the first half, but also a few nice results towards the end of the year) and apart from our four big guns (Haig, Bewley, Durbridge, McCarthy - who all had their great moments) the performances by Hamilton and Wohler definitely made a dominating season like this possible. Ofc we were confident to achieve promotion, but I didn't really expect Bewley to be that strong in most of his races. Legendary - which shouldn't surprise met at all!
Also just realized how often we came 2nd (in stages, KoM or points classifications). Eventually we had (I believe) 6 race wins and also 6 stage wins, but I guess those runner-up results sum up like another 3-4 wins (points wise). Anyway, ofc we had some lucky results, too (especially going for 2+3 in the Pologne with Hamilton and Storer - guess this kind of stuff happens, when you're about to win it anyway). Reminds me of our first promotion campaign in 2014, where we just had the "flow" for some parts of the year).
I must admit though, that my race planning almost went to perfection this year I will somehow miss that part as a PT team now
Congrats to all promoting teams, btw! And a huge thank you to all the reporters and those, who made the game running smoothly! It's been a while, since I "carried" the game, but I still know which effort is needed. That's a great commitment to this beautiful game - thank you!
It's still a bit hard to believe we finished 4th and are promoting to PT
Completely unplanned season the way it turned out. In fact I planned to have just a solid midtable season (see Conglomerate prediction). I had to give Beltran a solid wage raise after his season last year, sold Saber, Alarcon and replaced them with deals for domestiques like Borisavljevic, Roman, Pavlic and McCormick. Then I added some domestiques from free agency Bouchard, Eriksson and Crncevic.
I continued my talent acquisition with some lesser names like Zariff, Govekar and Wright. Pretty much a leaderless approach outside of Beltran. No way this team was supposed to promote?
Somehow we did...
A level 4 Pogacar was up and down, but very good when he was up and didn't restrict some of the good domestiques. Katrasnik, after having no luck last year, was involved in most flat classics. The maxing of Groselj and Christodoulos along with some of our stage race domestiques propped up our TTT unit. That allowed us to score a lot more points in all our TTT outings. Gaudu was especially a rider that benefited from some unlikely 'leadership' opportunities.
In the end the depth of scoring was overwhelming with 12 riders providing 3 digit scoring (I need to check if that's some sort of record ). Pretty much everyone contributed with only one stagiare not scoring a point. I'll probably go into more depth on the season in the HQ.
PT, huh?
It's going to take a lot of work to have this non training eligible and unmaxed team be competitive there. I don't feel quite ready, would've preferred one more year of development to be honest, but we'll see what happens.
Congrats to Amaysim for winning the division in dominant style. Congrats to all the other promoting teams and commiserations to the relegating teams.
And of course thank you to Fabianski for providing another awesome ranking update, they really make things more lively
Also thanks to everyone doing the hard work behind the scenes to keep the game running
No one predicted this, not even myself. Top ten seemed like a good result but at one point in the season Cattaneo and Dennis almost won everything between them and got us to this point. Sure it got tense in the final race but the lead was big enough.
Our first PCT season without our lifelong leader Uran and we immediately promote. Cattaneo has perhaps done better than the Colombian in all those years, finishing fourth individual is testament to the great (second part of the) season he had. Dennis was a huge risk at half a million wage but I guess it has paid off. The sprinters also did very well, Vesely making the top thirty again with somewhat consistent results this time around. And of course everyone who contributed points to us needs to be thanked, as without them we wouldn't have been third or may have even missed out on promotion. From loanee Tikhonin, old guy Coppel, or even the one point from Stöckli.
Dropping hill focus completely did not hurt the team and may have improved my sanity (as far as I had any, I mean, the team are sponsored by fictional characters and a masked pop duo ). Losing the cobblestone leadership was also a great call in hindsight, with the skeleton crew still bringing in some points in C2. Cattaneo, Dennis and to a lesser extent Brown did not get in each other's way, so I guess the planning was close to optimal.
So, ProTour. With declining leaders and no talents to fill the space, it will be an active transfer season once again. After six years in PCT it will be a different challenge, but of course the immediate target is to stay up next season.
Congrats to tsmoha on the ranking title, though that was clear a long time ago. Congrats to the other promotees as well: Luis Leon Sanchez, redordead and baseballlover312, who all deserved it. Especially nice to see Carlsberg go up with us again, we did the same in CT six years ago and look where we are now.
Commiserations to the relegating managers and hope it doesn't dampen your enjoyment of the game. Thanks to all other managers in the game for making it very fun. Special thanks to Fabianski for the awesome and detailed ranking update over the season, all reporters and previewers for taking the time for our enjoyment, and everyone who does something behind the scenes which can't be applauded enough.
I was obviously hoping we'd be in the promotion fight but never, even in my imagination, did I think my team would manage to finish 2nd come the end of it all!
The gap in the end to the other promoters and then to 6th downwards wasn't too significant but we got over the line and that's what matters
After winning the CT individual rankings last season, Jakobsen continued his outstanding performances at this level to be our best rider individually this season for 10th in the PCT individual rankings.
Taaramae was brought in for big performances and wasn't cheap but he did what we needed to finish 18th in the individual rankings. He did what we needed as a Mountain stage race leader and what a way for him to "finish" his career by guiding us to the PT.
Massive over-performance from Conci being in the Top 25 individual riders. Some amazing rides from him, even taking leadership over Taaramae in some cases. He scored a fair few U25 points, even with Pog for competition, which he won't get next season, but we'll have to see how we use him next season.
Cosnefroy 6th last season in the CT managed to make it into the Top 50 and put in some strong rides at the back end of the season, as did Thomas who chipped in with some good results too.
Mas also with some great rides as he notched over 300 points which was vital for us in the end. He scored more than would have expected in the Beltran type races and it worked out well for us.
Finally, all of our riders scored at least a single point. Great contributions from many but even the small amounts make a difference from them all.
Onto everyone else.
Congrats to Amaysim on a dominant victory taking the overall rankings. In all honesty, a team that really shouldn't be in the PCT in the first place, but a fun season for them and it could really have been even better.
Huge congratulations to the other promoting teams! Great that all of their managers are active too and many have riders who have been with us that we've been following to.
Commiserations to those relegating teams. I've been relegated twice to the CT but it always helps to re-evaluate and re-prepare for another assault on the PCT when you come back up!
Finally, thank you to all the reports who drove the game forward this season You're all the backbone of this and, without your time, efforts and contributions there wouldn't be a game for us all to enjoy.
Also a special thank you to Fab for the rankings updates. Always great to see how everyone is going and really keeps everyone engaged too.
Thank you to all others for their contributions too. Whether that be our amazing stage makers, DB makers, start list creators, preview writers and many others, including those managers who comment, engage and make it worthwhile.
Arh. The gamble that didn't pay off.
Back to CT.
Thank you for the ride PCT, and congrats to Amaysim Cervelo with the win. Thank you to all the reporters and background people who make this game run. You all are the real MVP's
Going to be a strange strange year to look back on. Our three leaders posted three pretty great scoring seasons without any of them being at their best for a lot of the races, especially Areruya (weird as it sounds to say about 2nd in the division but it should have easily been 1st) and Houle, who barely sprinted all year. But that's racing and I'm sure every other team feels the same about their leaders - I think our guys never completely failed except Houle in South Africa, so the scoring evened out I guess.
The three of them can't be faulted at all for us not getting higher (except Areruya in Emilia, I mean what the fuck ), they combined to give us our most winningest season ever at 11, and they were the only ones who won anything all year! All three taking a GC win is very cool, doubling our historic GC wins in a single season.
So, as the great post by Fabianski mentions, 2nd best rider in the division and two Top 20 guys. Sounds like promotion, instead it's bang on mid table. So what's the rest of the story?
Really ugly. Habtemichael and Stannard disappointed frequently when they had leadership and almost always when they were expected to provide depth or co-leadership (Habtemichael in Portugal the only outlier) to the top three or each other. Nobody overperformed except maybe Tesfaye Heyi. Not even a stage podium from a breakaway. This is part planning, part squad building and part really shitty luck. We were never going to be a team with huge depth scoring but it just hurts when it's so plain to see we've completely wasted such a huge year from the front three.
The squad looks very different already next year with Pidcock arriving at level 4, Stannard, Nikiema, Fouche and Kipkemboi maxing and three more riders developing - plus Houle sadly beginning his decline. That close to solves our depth issue already you would think plus giving us a bona fide leader in Stannard makes it an easy promotion roster... but our team as it stands also will not fit into the PCT cap in renewals, not by quite a few hundred thousand I would guess (still have Areruya training to account for too). A lot to think about in the off-season for sure, because that issue will keep happening each year we stay in PCT as Pidcock and then Vermeersch max too.
Spoiler
"hey jandal if you need help I'll take Areruya or Pidcock or Vermeersch off your hands hahahahaha"
Looking down the table, awesome to see some long-term teams getting their first shot. Minions, Carlsberg, Zara all had fantastic seasons in very different ways, and I'd struggle to think of more deserving or likeable teams to be promoting. Hope to see you all again in PT not back down here! Cedevita too have done their due and of course I love to see them do well, red put together a very strong team down the line and it shows in the fantastic stats you can make which I'm sure he'll be parroting for a while And of course our relegation buddies amaysing amaysim back where they belong with a great bounceback year taking the title in style. Binance could easily have done it and maybe (though of course hope there's never disbands...) still will, sad to see them miss it. Kraftwerk with a great year too, they are firmly in that category that Minions and Carlsberg just ascended from of I really want them to have their promotion year!
If redordead is going to take credit for Beltran leading out Benoot to the win in Emilia, I am going to make the case that Xero lead out Philips to 8th - from 17th and 18th before September to rocket up the table just one point ahead of them for the final race, perfectly dropping them off to leave us in their dust and complete another awesome jump Congrats on a very good season Abhi, always love to see you doing well and excited for how you build on it. No secret my dream is us promoting together (not sure what his is, maybe he'd rather hog the attention and be okay with us in 9th or something...).
Some teams really outperforming what I thought they'd be, some the opposite, many I feel good about what I had to say pre-season - that's life with predictions - the "expert" in our preview has always been in inverted commas after all. Love to see Voyagin staying up but commiserations to those relegating, I hope to see you all continuing and coming back up sometime
And of course last but the opposite of least, a big thanks to all the reporters, previewers, organisers, task-doers, goal-collectors, list-makers, calendar-shakers, stat-takers, etc for all your hard work, you are all amazing and do so much to keep this game that we all love going, it's a great community. And in particular a big thank you to Fabianski for doing these rankings updates and especially going above and beyond with the quality of write-ups to accompany them which are very much enjoyed!
Wow, Philips (probably) clinching promotion on the final day is insane, what a result. Congrats to all the PCT managers that made it a stellar season. Amaysim was insane of course, but I'm especially impressed by how Zara and Cedevita turned their squads into promotion sides. What a shame to see so many cool teams relegate though
Promoting to PT. Wow. I've played this game for 9 years, and I've never been good. For the first 6 years, I was gnuinely bad. I had one truly good season in CT, but that was mostly a product of being a relegated team with an established core. Then last offseason I signed Skjelmose, and at the time I thought that took me out of the promotion hunt entirely. My thought was always promotion OR Skjelmose. The idea that I could change that to AND was foreign. I even attempted to sell off Guldhammer and Trentin for younger, slightly worse leaders in preparation of a long stay in PCT.
But now I'm going to PT. Carlsberg have finally made it. As Alex said, my team will need a full rebuild, and I don't think I'll be viable to not relegate next year, but this is still a pretty huge year for me as the extra budget space will help in future planning. Also allows me to carry declining riders wage wise and sell them for scraps rather than release. Plus I get to experience MG planning in an entirely new way, with GT's and everything. I'm very excited.
Now, onto the team review. I can't say enough about Guldhammer to start. Going into the season after decline, he was almost an afterthought. So many top climbers and stage racers entered PCT in the offseason that I specifically planned his calendar to not include as many traditional stage races, leading to abominations like 6 race days in Benelux. Yet he still was rock solid all the way through and finished 21st overall, ahead of a lot of superior riders. What a final leadership season for him. I wanted him on my team for so long, and his two years as our GC guy did not disappoint in the slightest.
But the real MVP this season was Kamna. I got so many inquiries about Kamna last offseason, I couldn't even count. He was seen as a great secondary GC guy or a young member of a time trialing team. But I saw him differently, and I planned my season around sending him as my leader to every TT race with some hills. He scored over 500 points, so I'd say it worked. Not in the way that I imagined, to be fair. He often underperformed in TT's and overperformed in the hills. But he still showed why I trusted him so much, and he was probably the reason we promoted in the end. Core talent for us.
Trentin was consistent as hell too. Rough start to the year and none of the standout victories of last season, but he was just always in the 3rd-6th range in cobbled classics, which was exactly what we expected and needed from him. When he'd have a stinker, he'd make up for it with a race like Battenkill. I'm not sure the other classics leaders I considered would have gotten us here.
The puncheur duo of Jensen and Aranburu had mixed results. Maybe there weren't quite enough race days to go around in the end. Both ended up finishing in the top 100, so I can't complain about that, but neither had a real breakout. Jensen in particular was a bit disappointing in the big races and rarely made his presence in stage races known like some of the other puncheurs. But Aranburu, the training recipient of much ire, really came through with a strong second half of the year. Some great results in the hybrid races he should excel in (though not as a co-leader in the more mountain dominant ones, understandably). Over 300 points is pretty good, and I'm starting to think he'll be even better with the new engine, though that remains to be seen.
More depth than ever before with Lander finally scoring significantly thanks to Benelux and guys like Gregaard hanging around for a few points in most uphill races. That was big for us as depth scoring has traditionally been awful for us.
And then there's AKA. He really came back down to earth this year, and for a while it really looked like he might be the downfall of our season. He flubbed most of his stage races GC's and did not have nearly as many of the overperformances he had last year. Of course, I could not expect 600+ again, but I hoped he'd get closer to 500. Ultimately, no harm no foul. He salvaged his season a bit in his last few races, and his renewals demands may actually be a bit lower for once. He's a lifer, and nothing will change that at this point, so you live with the ups and downs. Yeah, promoting makes that easier.
Thank you all for the congratulations. I'm so exicted for what's in store now. Thank you to Fabianski for the amazing write ups all year, and thank you to all the reporters and admins who made this season possible!
RIP Exxon Duke, David Veilleux, Double Feature, and Monster Energy
Goal coming in to the season was to add enough quality to comfortably stay up and despite a terrible second half of the season we managed that just fine in 16th.
It might have come at a bit of a cost but that's something we can absorb if it means we keep what we are building on the right, albeit slower paced track.
Big Congrats to tsmoha on the win, never in doubt.
And congratulations to the other promoters as well, it’s a really deserving group going up this year. Zara had a great team build and it’s good to see their consistency pay off. Minions spending a few years in mid-table have now got their shot in the big league, Carlsberg have also built a great team and this was really their last year to promote and they nailed it, and surprisingly Cedevita with some ridiculous depth that I don’t even understand and despite Beltran bludging half the season. 5 really great managers that totally deserve it - LLS, BBL, Red and Marco in PT all for the first time is awesome! Hopefully you can make it stick. And also, no more Dennis, Kämna, Cattaneo and Conci and Durbridge to take points from Irish Eddie
Commiserations to those heading the other way, although for some I’m sure it will only be a short departure. Hope to see you all fighting for promotion next season, especially Laurens, hillis and DW. I don’t think Shonak and Aidan have been around for a little bit, but hopefully they stick around.
And for us, it’s another year of defying the odds. The obvious highlight being Dunbar - what a man! The PCT stage race depth scared me pre-season and so I took a lot of risks with his race planning, and every single dubious race choice worked out which is just crazy. We’ve always had shit luck in TTs, so it was a nice change this season. I’ll have to go back through his results, but I don’t think Indosat has ever had a rider score so many good results. And 3rd in the rankings!
Borges was solid all season, we didn’t plan for a puncheur after selling Jensen so he really didn’t have many races that would suit him. Despite that, he rose the most dominant race a rider in our jersey ever has basically winning everything there was to win in South Africa.in contrast, Howard’s last viable season was not so good. He rarely turned up for races and was a bit of a headache. His work for us last season can’t be understated though, and he will be remembered for that. The biggest loss for us next season will be Bambang Suryadi’s decline. Probably the top Indonesian rider, she will get the better of him. He joins Parno and Supraman in our retirement village.
And speaking of next season, it would truly be great to not be teetering around relegation all season. 4 straight years of relegation threat in PT and PCT doesn’t do wonders for the heart. We will continue to build our depth with some big boys coming back from loan in Verschave, AH, Abdurrahman and Nur Hasan. Our wage bill should be decent, so hopefully we can fill the team out during transfers and have a nice boring mid-table season next year. Dunbar is hungry for power bars too, but we will see if we will continue to indulge him or put him on a diet.
Thank you for the reports, previews, DBs, and all the behind the scenes work this year. Ulrich, Red, cunego, Abhi and Fab kept the game going all year, as did a few others. Thank you all so much for your contributions to keeping this game going.
Congratulations to Amaysim on the title! Lovely to see so many fresh and cool names going up. Conmiserations to the ones who relegated. Not the best season ever for latin american teams with Volcanica going down as well, but I'm sure they'll be able to bounce back soon.
What a season! First of all, third time’s the charm for staying in the PCT. This time I was ok with spending big on Free Agent leaders in Kennaugh and Daniel, investments that proved to pay off big time. I am kind of sad that we didn’t string a few 100 points more together because there were definitely the opportunities to do so but we had some unfortunate luck of the draw in some stage races with Kennaugh and I had quite a few planning errors that came back to bite me, which is something I can use in next season’s planning. Learning from mistakes is one of the best things about this game and I finally get to rebuild a team in the division I started the previous year in.
Kennaugh had a decent sprinting year, and I am very happy with the fact that I got to have him on the team but he’s on his second decline now so decisions will have to be considered in terms of the future of the team.
Daniel did what was expected from him as the cobble leader in front of GVK he performed to an acceptable level, with declines around the block next season he should be in a better position to score a lot better then.
Also I think my favourite rider to follow this year was 50k Quin Hermans, really fun rider and him almost getting top 100 individually as a 75 main stat rider is honestly fantastic and I am somewhat fearing his renewals.
Also we outplaced long time friends in Xero which is not surprising considering we bought two of their most consistent scorers in Rowe and Meurisse. Especially the latter has had a season to remember he’s been a cycling highlight reel, while he obviously hasn’t had the consistency of some of the bigger puncheurs I am super happy with what he has accomplished and can’t wait for next season to see if he can keep it up. Rowe probably didn’t perform to the expectations that I had for him but he has been part of some super interesting lineups but ideally I’d liked him to have scored more than 2 points over Dzamastagic who has also been a fantastic rider this year!
Onto the overall standings: What a season from Amaysim! Don’t think anyone expected them to not finish first in the division but they’ve had some amazing performances over the course of the season that I don’t even think tsmoha expected to happen. Also super happy to see LLS go up his team last year was obviously not as good as mine in CT but was built way more sustainably and he finally gets to harvest the fruits of his labour and will avoid having to sell off his biggest talents for once, I think he might be in the PT to stay, he has the mentality for sure. Also where did Minions come from? Great season for Marco and mainly off the back of Cattaneo having a career season, massive congrats to him. Seeing redordead and bbl promote is also fantastic, especially happy for the latter who has been bouncing around for a while now and has had some interesting seasons in PCT but now finally gets his shot at PT, going to be super fun to watch! Also ROD promoting in the final season of Beltran is great and I am looking forward to watching them next year!
Really sad to see Gjensidige go down they were so close to staying up but I have no doubts that they will find their ground in CT and easily repromote. Same thing goes for Crabbe who made some enemies this off season but staying in the PCT is a rough market and you got to what it takes to do so. But the previous understanding of the CT should come in handy for them. Same can be said for DW, his project has been amicalbe even if he strayed a bit from the course with Ahlstrand as his main leader, which was a great signing but just not enough firepower around the block but he should be able to rebuild in CT and go up. Sad to Strava and PA go down but with Shonak and Aiden’s activity levels dropping I think that them relegating is probably for the better, but I do hope that they will stick around and give the CT another shot!
Thanks for everyone working on the game behind the scenes, whether it is route creating, reporting, ranking updates, the work is immense and this has been one of the smoothest seasons that I have been a part of in my 5-6 years in the game!
or Carlsberg 
