It's always extremely interesting to see what other people are cooking up with their trainings.
The cobbles seem to have taken a massive jump with riders like Siric, Vermeersch, Girmay, Gamper and Ovsyannikov bridging from somewhat sub-top (Siric maybe above that already) to elite level! Below that riders like Louvel, Tediashvili, Lampawog and my own Stavrakakis also takes steps - but pretty much just status quo from an overall perspective due to the massive top heavy investments.
Dainese joins the very top level, which he was already somewhat a part of. I do agree that if this was the idea from the beginning the team might have made a mistake in the building of a train. Atleast if the one Farantakis is doing (again) is somewhat of a measure. A very large pool of 75SPR riders, just one 77SPR rider and then a couple of flat beasts. Might be enough, but could also end up serving him injustice I feel. Nur Hasan will be very interesting with that sneaky 80SPR. Banaszek was already doing very well with 79SPR. It's going to be interesting if making him 80SPR will actually make a difference. I don't necessarily see him performing better than the previous seasons.
I love to see both Kmielkauskas, Bjerg, Bissegger and Ocampo joining the elite TT'ers. I do find it a bit surprising to see more top TT'ers coming out of training than top sprinters though, as that TT stat seems somewhat underwhelming when you don't get a PRL bonus along with it. Atleast that is the main reason for me not investing in TT training despite having a couple of very talented greek TT riders.
Vansevenant becoming an even stronger rider, somewhat followed by Bagioli seems like real powermoves at the top, but obviously getting Remco to 79HI is another huge training! Not sure it will catapult his points tally up that much tbh, but it will make him easy to train to 81 HI - and by then he will probably be a top 5 puncheur along with all other great stuff he does. Madouas just bumped a bit to make the most of his HI/SPR combination seems clever, while Schmid finally gets to move up in those key stats. You love to see that! van Dijke will be extremely interesting, as he already did great things last season. Now you have to suspect he will take over the role of Yates more permanently. Stocek also feels like a cool training!
In the MO/GC battle the trainings are just intense! Bernal, McNulty, Skjelmose, Giannoutsos, Lasinis, Leknessund, Firdaus, Cras and Powless all move up the ranks ready to tease the current top of the game, which is slowly starting to come back down again. Also some fun trainings for Jorgenson, Primozic and Osorio I think!
There's a few strange solutions too, but that's the charm of the game I think. The extremely expensive +1HI for Almeida to me seems a bit wasted when you could have invested in Arensman or Müller instead or even just limited some of the obvious weaknesses of Stöckli. The 650K spent on Bayer also strike me as a bit strange, but I do love the RP training. The only one where I was really biting my lip however was Pira. IMO he's one and only obvious weakness is his FL and STA, so to begin making him more "expensive" in OVL regards by upping his TT seems like a mistake to me.
All in all a pretty balanced training where I'm mostly surprised to see the lack of SPR training given the age of riders like Gaviria, Ewan, Coquard, Grosu, Groenewegen, van Poppel, Zabel, Samolenkov etc. - You could have made some huge jumps in this category. Even the next riders are pretty old. Riders like Cullaigh, Farantakis, Abdul Halil, Halvorsen, Kemboi, Hsu, Jakobsen etc. are now locked to their top level. We might see training bonkers here next season I think!
New DB uploaded in first post. Minor updates so probably not necessary to redownload for most purposes. Updates are as follows:
1. Preferred Dev team riders where teams retain negotiation rights for next season are now reported in the appropriate columns. Please check if applicable to you.
2. Dev teams now indicated with DEV in the Division column
3. Zalgiris name corrected in the loaning team column.
Most planners are in with only minor clean up left. Previews can be posted starting Friday (21/08)
