Thanks dominox for the final monthly preview of the season!
BP has Sagan for Bucamaranga and Sagan and Howard for Paris-Tours. Just Tao for Il Lombardia, he'd need a great day to make the top 10. And then the TTT WC, our goal is to get into scoring range for the first time, that is, make the top 15 and leave 5 teams behind.
Wow, that's indeed 7 races for our main team in the final month!
Bucaramanga is yet another WT race - not necessarily one we put a lot of hope in, but it's in Colombia, home nation of several of our riders - so we obviously have to be there. We're hoping for the duo of Huamán and Romero MartÃnez to pull off a surprise result, or at least to join the breakaway. We can't really expect any more from the team.
Lombardia - our first ever monument - is pretty much the same in terms of lineup and expectations. We're just here to see how it feels like to ride a monument, but given that neither of our puncheurs are semi-decent climbers, expectations probably are even lower than for Bucaramanga.
So, the main focus obviously is on the Continental Races. Tre Valli, Milano - Torino and Emilia are on our agenda - all three of the Italian fall classics (plus Lombardia, obviously). Huamán will be our leader in all of these as well, supported by Romero MartÃnez. Torino is the exception to that rule, though, as Chamorro joins the team for this race, replacing Romero.
But the Colombian is mainly there to get his climbing legs ready for his home tour, the Vuelta a Colombia - our final focus race of the year! Mendes, Brus and Biró will be his climbing domestiques, with Gonçalves and mainly Sepulveda and Gaviria adding some firepower for the stage 1 TTT! We'll be hoping to get our GC captain a head start over the competition, and with our focus fully being on the GC this year, we also renounced sending a sprinter.
What remains is the big meetup of the TTers in France, the Chrono des Nations. We'll see how competitive Gaviria and Sepulveda are against this compeitition, with Brus getting a chance to surprise as well.
It's a much less busy month for the development team, who only have two races left. They'll first ride in Paris - Tours Espoirs, where Cruz and Espinosa will be hoping to claim another big result.
And finally, the big stage race on the home continent, Vuelta a Colombia, provides them some great opportunities for attacks - something the main team likely won't be allowed to do.
Thanks for the preview, and good luck to all for the final races of the year!
