tastasol wrote:
Trust me bbl, you're safe from relegation. Plenty of good results here, even though Garby easily could have been a couple of spots higher up in the GC.
Not even too sure on Garby.
Sure he looked strong but on paper Barguil, Schelling, Berhane, Pinot and Kiserlovski are all stronger.
Chamorro had the advantage of the huge team depth and is on paper similar as Garby.
Fraile might be the weaker climber but is the most complete with 79 TT.
Think Garby at 8 is about fine even. Warbasse e.g. could have been in front of him as well on paper.
Sure the skills on the mountain showed that Garby might have gained a few seconds here and there but then again Berhane should even more.
With the stage results, imo Carlsberg took quite some profit from that race. Need to calculate the 2nd half later today but think you did pretty well in general.
The Tour of America as usual can offer big scoring when having a strong team but can also be a huge gamble with teams using many race days without a lot of PpRD.
Here the scoring for the 2018 Tour of America.
Ticos Air with race winner Barguil the obvious top scoring team here. Barguil alone with 273 pts was almost as good as runner-up UBS with long time leader Schelling.
Ticos might have passed the 1000 points mark in the rankings but still not above the relegation zone it seems. But it`s closer again.
UBS with 13 PpRD could be happy, though it reduces their season PpRD even! The scoring should still help their promotion chances though.
Telia Brussels scored nicely due to De Marchi being an incredible rider here as also Santambrogio`s stage win while Aeropostal took most points by Granjel Cabrera, who despite missing out here and there was the 3rd best individual scorer with mainly the rest of the top10 following.
Newton in especially clearly struggled here with their PpRD and hence might have risked their promotion here while MOL are in the upper half and might have put the pressure on some teams.
At the bottom Statoil, SanCor and Löbau remain as some of the weakest CT teams and can`t improve really.
I mean, you guys are definitely right. Garby is no stud, and it's always easy to say "well if this hadn't happened," but that goes for every other rider that lost time too, so it's not fair at all. Getting dropped in the TTT is what really hurts. Losing time in the final TT, that's part of the racing. Berhane lost more time in the mountains than he should have, and that's hard to take for SN I'm sure.
But having your leader dropped in a TTT is something that logically should never happen, in real life or in game, because your team would pace to the leader, not away from them. The team probably would have had a slower time overall, but not as slow as he was after being dropped. That's the spot where I feel I got screwed over by AI simply being dumb and illogical. And when you see how close the gaps were above Garby at the end of the race, it's hard not to think, what if?
But just looking at the point totals, we were basically only above CT teams for the most part, so I can't be super happy with that. Sure, it's not like all was lost, but it certainly isn't a performance I wanted when I was planning my season out. Maybe it's representative of the team I sent, but when almost everyone in your division gains on you through the race, how can you really be happy?
I'm sorry, I hate to always be the glum pessimist, but I really don't want to relegate.
Thanks again to roturn for the reporting and all this info!
RIP Exxon Duke, David Veilleux, Double Feature, and Monster Energy
First off, thank you very much for the fantastic reports throughout Roturn and congrats on the win Ste, really glad to see you get a big win here! I mostly abstained from commenting as I worried I would be too negative about MOL's success, but I did follow closely.
I just did a very rough calculation quickly to look at how the relegation battle stands right now (numbers might not be perfect). There's one safe spot to share between these four teams:
Team
Points
RD
MOL
1433
127
Netia
1427
123*
Ticos
1367
119
Valio
1345
128
*Excluding Tour of Japan
Races Remaining:
MOL: Rheden GP, Barbados Cycling Festival, Japan Cup + 4-5 unknown C1 RDs (Probably Milano - Torino and East Java given they are C1)
Netia: Tour of Japan, Milano - Torino, Rheden GP, Giro dell'Emilia, Barbados Cycling Festival
Valio: Milano - Torino, Giro dell'Emilia, Barbados Cycling Festival, GP Kigali, Japan Cup
This could end up being very close, Valio should have Gautier in Milano, Emilia and Japan, plus Lo Cicero in Barbados, so definitely the most scoring potential of the three. We have Kwiat in Japan and Emilia plus Vantomme in Barbados but no riders to score in our other two races.
MOL is probably the hardest to predict given they overperform a lot, I'm guessing Di Maggio in Milano Torino and Japan Cup, Vanovershelde in Barbados and Pomoshinkov/Stancu/Ratiy in East Java, which potentially could be a very dangerous race based on the final stages of America.
EDIT: Ticos is also back in the hunt after scoring many points there and they have quite a few RDs left, don't have time to work out their schedule, but I assume despite having the most races they'll only score a lot in East Java (but there they'll score a lot!)
Edited by trekbmc on 28-03-2018 14:15
Adding my congratulations to ste and thanks to roturn for the great reports, plus the course selection for giving us a close and mainly crash free race.
Loved being part of our first GT, pleased Kraftwerk achieved our goal of a podium finish and discovered a little gem in Tartarinov who worked his socks off for Kiserlovski.
Points wise we were a one man band, the team not having the depth to send an all round team, Hirschlein was dissapointing never really getting in the action.
Enjoyed ToA throughout as usual, always very interesting to see 2nd tier leaders on different terrains get the chance to shine. Congrats to Ticos on the overall victory, and great team showing. Even with such a dominant performance, less than 400 points demonstrates the difficulty in taking on ToA and it not negatively impacting points accumulation even when successful. Nevertheless, UBS also had a great race with Schelling, and don't think their promotion push will have taken too much of a dent. Pretty big and unexpected fail from Eritel this go-round, as expected bettr both in GC and sprints from their line-up.
BBL's angst re: Garby and relegation continues to quietly amuse, as like Roturn above, I think he performed right within expectiations on GC and even over-performed in the mnts and hills to balance under-performance in TT's. I also believe Carlsberg well safe from relegation hence apprehension mis-placed, but I guess an imminent update will either confirm or confound this feeling.
Really enjoyed the reports, so chapeau to Roturn for maintaining a high standard throughout .
Thanks for the update Roturn.
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