The goal was to finish inside the top-5, and Manninen heard us. Fifth place in the sprint for the flying Finn, as Peruvian rouleur Quispe also finished in the points with a 22nd place. No lead-out by him or another rider for Matti, but I consider that a good thing.

Only a C1 race, but we do have quite a strong field for Hong Kong. Whether it is enough for a strong result, is still to be seen. If the time trial isn't decisive this year, Higuita would be a decent bet for the GC. It does look more like he'll be a stage-guy instead of going for the GC though. If the hills are only partly selective, our best GC bet might be
Aular. Both Zmorka and Sütterlin have a realistic shot at winning the time trial. Even though they probably shouldn't be GC contenders, you never know how far Zmorka can go if he has a really strong ITT in his legs. So in the end we could very well have no riders in the top-15 of the GC, but of course we hope one of the above mentioned names is able to do that, and perhaps even sneak into the top-10. Winning a stage is a must with this team.

Last year Aular managed to win a stage and finish fifth for Binance in Portugal. We would be thrilled if he could repeat this, but will already be very happy with a top-10 in the GC. Only five other team members for him in Portugal though, but with the likes of Osorio and Lopez Nolasco he should have some decent uphill domestiques, both able to finish inside the top-25 themselves with some luck. Two Europeans here to hopefully score some time trial points, whereas the legendary
Quispe needs this race to reach the max level. He will either have a free role or possibly be on chasing duties.

An other race with six riders in and around Ghent, as the Omloop is our first cobbled race of the season. Cobbles leader Zepuntke finds a parcours that has proven to be too hilly for him in the past, but that doesn't mean we can't hope for a top-10 result. Only one real cobbled domestique for him, as the unmaxed Nareklishvili has been given the task to keep Ruben safe and sound for as long as possible.

Only a few days after the start of the Volta a Portugal, once again six Pollos will be heading towards another race there. The Viana do Castelo is scheduled on the same day as the Omloop, which means our cobbles team has been split in two. Our best cobbler in the race is Ulloa, and with Ruiz we have another homegrown latin American talent that's quite versatile and might hope for a surprise result. The biggest surprise to many however is the attendance of Higuita. If the Colombian survives until the penultimate lap and has enough energy left to accelerate on the castle hill, he could do something magical.

Let's start with the negative: we were unable to finish inside the top 10. Over the the positive: most of the other stuff.

Good depth saw three men in the top 20. Higuita 13th, Aular 16th and Osorio 17th in his first race as a maxed rider. The latter was also in the podium in the U25 classification, with Beltran also scoring points with his sixth place there. Without having someone in the top-10 of the race, we still managed to win our second team classification in LPH history.

Purely looking at stage results, we also did a nice job. Higuita won stage 1, after which Zmorka won the time trial. Higuita's fourth on the final stage lead to a win in the points classification, where Zmorka also scored some points.

That time of the year, more cobbles! The last three editions of this race were far from selective, so I guess once again a top-10 should make us happy looking at Zepuntke's rouleur and sprint capacities. He has his two most important cobbles domestiques with him for the first time though, those are Ulloa Nareklishvili.

First cobbles of the year, and as mentioned in the preview it was going to be an interesting race for us with the likes of Ruiz, Ulloa and
Higuita as our leaders. Ruiz made a great move by joining the early break and finishing 24th, but the other two leaders didn't cooperate really well. Instead of one trying to help the other, they both kind of went their own way. For Ulloa this meant a 15th place, whereas Higuita landed just outside the top-10 in eleventh. Not the worst outcome for this little experiment, but a top-10 would have been nice.

On the same day, the Belgian cobbled season opened as well. Five domestiques over there for our main cobbler Zepuntke, who never really loved the hilly profile of the Omloop. Nevertheless, the German did well to hold on as long as possible, which resulted in him being able to get our top-10 finish of the day with a ninth place.

Our best cobbled race so far, however, was Le Samyn! Although
Zepuntke definitely did not have the best track record in this race, he managed to finish fourth this season. The race seemed to be just a bit harder as previously thought, as he was able to put in one big final shift at the end of the race, leaving many stronger rouleurs and sprinters behind him. This was also the first race our cobbled team was complete, which resulted in Ulloa scoring depth points in 27th.

A long PTHC stage race means Aular is our main guy. His support wasn't ideal though, with only two climbers, two pure time trialists and one pure rouleur.

The time trialists did well. Sütterlin finished fourth in the prologue and just missed out on the stage win on the longer, slightly undulating, time trial in the penultimate stage. Really can't ask more from him.
Sterbini finished seventh in the prologue, which is already better than anything he did in PT last season. We also must mention the legendary Quispe, who joined the breakaway several times and can now add multiple Portuguese polka-dot jerseys to his collection. In the final KoM he also finished eighth. All hail Alain!

The main man for the GC was of course our Venezuelan climber Aular, as mentioned above. He rode anonymously all race, but was able to finish sixth in the final rankings after a strong performance on the final stage, which was the only mountain stage of the week. The results of his main domestiques Osorio and Lopez Nolasco were far from amazing, but this race was definitely good enough to keep the Los Pollos fans happy.

Home race! Stage sprint racing was really bad for us in 2021 PCT, so let's hope Manninen does better this time. Two years ago he was eleventh in GC, top-5 is our goal now. Most important (lead-out) domestiques should be the Peruvian duo of Ruiz and Quispe, but ideally Matti can stick to wheel-surfing.

Superb moment for the Los Pollos fans earlier this week, as our Finnish superstar Matti Manninen succeeded in winning our home race! He managed to finish on the podium in four out of five stages, and as he won the final stage he also won the GC and points classification. Great performance by Matti, as he never really relied on any lead-out.

Nevertheless, one man must be mentioned yet again. Team legend
Alain Quispe went on another one of his classic KoM-runs, and got very close to succeeding in the end. Finishing second in the KoM-classification and wearing the polka dots for two days can be called a success anyway, as we are looking forward to what else the superperuvian can show us in the coming months.

The team also went to Belgium to experience some more cobble riding. Local hero Stallaert won the race, as our German cobbler Zepuntke secured some points with a tenth place. No depth scoring for us this time, as Ulloa was our second best rider in 31st.

Not only the riders can be superstars, but the managers as well. MG legend Fabianski gave us another detailed points update, and it's definitely one we can be happy about. For the first time in team history, Los Pollos are leading the rankings! Nice depth on every terrain so far in addition to Matti's (and Alain's) great point haul in Mexico see us ahead of Jura and the others. Top-5 is the goal, and we definitely started the year pretty well.

With a lot of confidence after our Juarez result, two Mexicans and six other Pollos went to Great Britain for the Isle of Man TTT. Although we have had Zmorka for a while now, we never really excelled in the team time trials. The predictions had us finish on the podium though, so we were very interested to see where we were going to end up. In the end, all eight of our riders managed to be beaten by only one team, top favourites Jura - GIANTS, finishing 23 seconds behind them. Fantastic result for us, thanks to eight heroes. The point-scoring riders are Aguilar Mendez, Zmorka, Sterbini, Sütterlin and Nareklishvili, and they couldn't have done it without the help of Galvan Ramirez, Osorio and Abolaji.