ianrussell wrote:
Awww never quite made the top 10 (TJ and switching Rowe for an Astana cheap rider instead probably put paid to that in the end)
Congrats to Di Lego and note the top team in the overall competition didn't have Sagan in it
TimoCycling wrote:
One again congrats Di Lego. Good run for me too this time, 6th in our league. Pretty happy with it considering I lost Sepulveda and Rui Costa.
Thanks! Congratz as well to Bajbar and mustneeger for 2nd and 3rd place in our league, the remaining podium spots, as well as to the many others that think they did a good race.
Phew! I have to admit that the last few stages were pretty tense for me and I'm surprised that I still managed to take back the lead. Everything was going so well with just a couple stages left, almost perfect in fact. I was 14th overall out of 38.000+ teams, and my top10 ambitions were very realistic. Then, as we hit the Alps, everything was turned upside down. I've experience this before actually, at this years TDU, where everything was going beautifully, just for it to completely fall apart. After that, it almost got worse and worse for every additional stage. I'll say now what I said then, I'm just happy that it ended now and didn't continue.
Basically, riders that had been doing badly were now strong, and those who'd looked strong for so many stages were looking very weak, including some of my riders.
Meintjes was completely invisible at what should have been his terrain. On one Alp-stage I know he was the last rider to cross the line, solo and around 10min behind the sprinters' gruppeto. Rodriguez went from dropping riders like Bardet and Fuglsang fairly easy, to being dropped by them fairly easy just a couple of days later. He couldn't even hang on to a larger group of breakway riders up to the top of a mountain to score KOM-points. Still many of these riders had been riding hard since the Pyrinees, while Rodriguez had taken it easy every day. Let's not even talk about Gallopin on this topic. Yes, he's not known as a Mountain- or GC-riders but the fact is that for 2 weeks he was among the best in GC. For mountain stage after mountain stage he was one of the 10-15 strongest, then suddenly, he just sank like a stone. He was barely climbing better than the sprinters (probably worse than Sagan). He tried the breakway once and he was dropped even by that group half-ways through the stage. Even the sprint in Paris went much worse than an other sprint stage so far.
I can't help but be disappointed with the last few stages, but on the whole, I think a win in our league and 51st overall is pretty repectable at a TdF with 38k+ teams competing.
Oh well, on to the next one. There's a Velogames competition for Volta a Portugal today - a smaller race with lower level teams than we're used to - and the page for the Autumn/Fall Classics will be up soon too.
Unfortunately for me, both these events would need some research and planning, and I'm abroad on vacation without that possibility. Still, I'll do a Adam Hansen and try to compete anyway, everywhere and at any time.
It was a close call, but just finished ahead of Sutty
Zubeldia was a risk, I hoped he had one more good year in him. Henderson only 12 points, I was hoping he would get some more as team mate for Greipel. And I expected more from Trentin as well.
Ollfardh wrote:
It was a close call, but just finished ahead of Sutty
Zubeldia was a risk, I hoped he had one more good year in him. Henderson only 12 points, I was hoping he would get some more as team mate for Greipel. And I expected more from Trentin as well.
Don't worry i will be back next year for an arse kicking again
8th place? I know I'm a bit late on this, but wow! Extremely fortunate if I'm honest, some really solid performances from Rolland and Mollema to go with 1st and 2nd on GC and Sagan winning the points meant my five higher price guys all paid off really well. Barta was great, Reinardt did his job well and even Kangert and Roy got something in the end.
Early on I was watching out for 3 or 4 teams and my predictions from after the 1st week couldn't have been much further off how it finished. Lord Di Lego came out strongest after (I thought) starting a bit below other contenders, I went from lower mid-table to top 10 (by far my best outside of 2014 ToB) and Sutty finished much lower than he deserved to, bad luck yet again.
Overall a great Tour and congrats to all for another year's competition!
OZrocker wrote:
8th place? I know I'm a bit late on this, but wow!
...
Overall a great Tour and congrats to all for another year's competition!
Nice result! Congratz. No need to wait a full year for more though, there's still a couple of competitions coming up this season.
OZrocker wrote:
Early on I was watching out for 3 or 4 teams and my predictions from after the 1st week couldn't have been much further off how it finished. Lord Di Lego came out strongest after (I thought) starting a bit below other contenders, I went from lower mid-table to top 10 (by far my best outside of 2014 ToB) and Sutty finished much lower than he deserved to, bad luck yet again.
Hehe, the important thing is being at the top by the end of it. Or rather, to maximize the team's potential for the three weeks, rather than having a clear peak in the first week and then fading completely. I still faded a bit in the last few stages through the Alps, but it was enough to take the win.
It's actually interesting, I think, because I do put some serious thought into these things before the races, when I have the time.
With only two TTs in this year's Tour, a short prologue where results can be a bit more uncertain and a TTT, one could predict that they would have minimal effect on the race and the final GC standings. Add the two together and TT specialists may not bring in as many points as they normally would at the Tour. Granted, riders like Cancellara and Tony Martin are more than just TT specialists and looking back they were on their way to making a great Tour and score a bunch of points before they crashed. However, there's still some doubt. Are they going to be on form? Are they going to succeed in the breakaways? Are they going to work for teammates in GC contention? Are they going to crash early on? The truth is, being very well known riders, they were fairly expensive for riders that the course didn't suit all that well.
I considered them, of course, but quickly decided to go another route. Meaning my team was everything but optimized for the few TT-stages, including the starting prologue. I think I scored 2p on that stage, similar to many other teams who have done nice results in other Velogames competitions. As you said, I was well behind. I was never worried though, it was all planned. Following the prologue, throughout the first week, I took a good and even pile of points on every stage. The stages with a tougher sprint finish or even a sharp Ardennes-style finish suited my team very well even, and by the first rest day I had slowly but surely approached the very top of the league and gotten myself into position to strike. The meat of the second and third week, as well as the GC-battle of course, were the mountains and that's where I'd put my focus. That's where my team had to shine to be somewhere at the top of the standings by the end of the Tour, and sure enough, that's what had happened. Had I not faded in the Alps, I had very realistic possibilities of getting an overall Top10 even.
I guess what I'm trying to say is just, it's all about perspective as well. It has to be put into context. The prologue, and the start of the Tour with it, were sacrificed in order to, as far as I believed at the time, optimize my team for a good final placing. Sometimes it goes wrong, it's all dependent on your predictions. In fact, I think the shorter stage races offer up more freedom in that regard, since you can completely change the structure and focus of the team when you don't have roles to choose. In GTs so far, you just try to choose the right riders from each category without going over budget.
