Nice stage. We were aggressive and Eenkhoorn seemed to be on a very strong day. The favorites unfortunately were too strong again but Eenkhoorn claimed the 3rd spot in the kom and secured the top 20 gc finish so i got at least got something countable out of this stage and i guess i can live with that.
And so ends the race. Not a good one for us. I'm not gonna hyperbolize because ultimately we didn't have the largest expectations here in the first place, but still.
Every rider we brought to score here underperformed. Quintana had a horrendous second half of the race, and just barely scraped back into the top 20 in the end. AKA had his stage win, but underperformed in the vast majority of sprints and ends up 9th in Points. And Aranburu had some decent placements in the first week, but botched his big stage win opportunity and then disappeared entirely later on. He and Eg were always too poorly placed to figure into the minor placings too. The opposite of the Giro and Gregaard/Eg.
Not the worst thing in the world, but when you're in the relegation fight, any underperformance is a big deal. We'll have to make up these points elsewhere, and I'm not sure when or where that can happen with the classics over.
Congratulations to Cio, and thank you so much to Ulrich for 3 weeks of consistently phenomenal reports!
RIP Exxon Duke, David Veilleux, Double Feature, and Monster Energy
Thanks for a series of great reports! Outstanding quality (once again) from start to finish!
I am satisfied with the race. A stage win and a 16th place in GC is fully okay with the lineup ive sent. Especially Eenkhoorn ended up in some good breaks and showed good legs multiple times in the final few stages so im happy with that. Could have gotten more good stage finishes if the peleton wouldnt have been so support happy for Herklotz.
What im not happy is the way the rest of the team raced, especially in the first two weeks. Blums had pretty bad timing with his few attacks and did not make any use of being outside the top 50 gc (which is also pretty bad for him), and nobody stepped up in the first week to attack which had to big part of why certain riders were riding here.
Congrats to those who did exceptionally well. Most notably of course to cio for a red jersey that wasnt in real danger at any point but also to ember for what was an insane first half of the race and a massive scource of unexpected points.
We salvaged the race on the final day. 2nd and 4th on the stage is just what we needed to scrounge up some last minute points. Lammertink is really a reliable guy this season and he does it again here.
Geoghegan Hart finishing 10th in GC is the best he could've done. In that respect I feel like I picked the correct Grand Tour for him. Still the goal was to spend a lot more days in the GC top 3 post TTT and we are missing those points.
All in all it was an okay race for us. In the end we just managed to hit our minimum points expectation and secured a sponsor goal by winning the TTT. That's nothing to sneeze at.
Thank you for all the great reports Ulrich!
Given the nature of my team, a lot of the stages were largely non-events for me, but for the ones that we were involved in (mostly the TTs), I was glued to the screen
Thank you for the wonderful reports, UU! I enjoyed the McCormick references as well as the Gesink mentions.
Speaking of Gesink, his career is now officially over. Not ideal to finish your last race in such a bad GC spot, but at least he got his chance to ride at the highest level one more time, which not many of the other MG legends were able to do.
For our actual race, Formolo finishing outside the top 10 is not great in terms of budget for next year as we will be once again completing two season goals at most. A shame he still didn't get that stage win. He has 5 second places in the last two years iirc.
Van Poppel started off well, but then it looked more like the Giro adventure for him, finishing on the podium on just one occasion after that victory.
On the upside we got the something new: our first KoM competition in a Grand Tour, which also completes our trio of jerseys in La Vuelta: red and green for Gesink, blue polka dots for Formolo. A nice way to round up what might be our last Vuelta in a while as it's very likely we'll get relegated at the end of the season.
I want to start by saying thank you to UU for an amazing standard of reporting as you always do! The reports caught the action perfectly and the consistency of posting was fabulous too.
On the race itself from a GC side, I am disappointed with Wellens finishing 5th as he should be 4th. It seemed like he was very inactive in general and, when he tried his luck, he failed more often than not. Definitely feel like he missed an opportunity here to not only take 4th but even assault the podium with the support he had.
Onto that support, a lovely shout out in the final stage for our man Conci! I think I saw his name in reports more than any other of our riders, including Wellens, which says a lot about the selfless riding he did on the front day after day. I can't fault him and he topped it off with 7th on the final stage and 22nd overall which is very respectable!
Rodriguez was also strong support but his decision to join the break in the final Mountain stage was a shocker and left the team isolated to the Tinkoff assault.
We can't forget about Thijssen either! Picked up his first GT stage win in the Giro and unfortunately couldn't repeat his efforts here but he was 3rd of the sprinters in the Points classification due to his consistency getting onto the podium as well as Top 5. He'll definitely be back here again in the future to hopefully get that win.
In all, I haven't checked our Points tally but I assume we should have scored fairly well with the GC and the stage finishes throughout! Given it's our first GT in our home country as a PT team, it's been a success to see us active and in the front.
Big congrats to Puma in particular for GC win with Herklotz. Definitely contributed our fair share of help to ensuring no Giro-like antics from anyone. He was never going to finish 2nd here really. Kudus and Morton were also strong as expected despite being isolated on every climb.
Thank you again to UU and my fellow competitors for a good 3 weeks in Spain
Can only second what has already been written on the reports. Thank you, UU!
Also big congratulations to cio on another GT win with Herklotz. Not surprising at all, but what a way to do it. 6 stage wins, was it?
For us, that first half of the Vuelta was unforgetable! Really sensational, especially by Prasad, even giving him the points jersey all the way to the final podium too. Kragh's prologue win was not a surprise, but still very satisfying to see. Preidler's stage win was definitely something we hoped for, and luckily he got active early in the race, as in the second half of these three weeks, he had no chance against great breakaway opposition. Four stage wins, a short spell in the leader's jersey, and holding the points jersey for 3/4 of the race and winning it in the end, is a great outcome for us, and far more points than we expected/hoped for pre race.
It seems like we're on a roll this season, so let's just go and do it all again in the Tour, where we're led by the same riders Seriously, though, whatever we do there, the GTs this season can already now be called a success, due to the great performances here and to some extent in the Giro too.
Thanks UU for all the reports the past three weeks, nice reads! Congrats to cio on the red jersey!
With the weakest squad of the three GCs I did not expect much. Hodeg with a few nice sprints and Vosekalns with a KoM attempt which never really went anywhere. We got some points, but not a lot, and definitely not enough to get us away from last.
Cattaneo in the Tour where we will focus on the GC, but given the competition I don't have high hopes.
First and foremost, you delivered truly top tier reporting throughout these three weeks UU, it's highly deserved praise coming your way from everyone!
Silvio did it!
That's a sixth GT win, with only Spilak thwarting the run from being consecutive, and as far as I can tell Cunego's GT stage win record is coming within reach too.
An incredible career already, and there will be at least three more opportunities.
It technically may never have been in doubt, but these 21 stages still were unusually stressful to follow with Kudus being the strongest opponent we've faced in a GT since 2020 and the Giro shenanigans on everyone's mind.
Luckily, we didn't get an AI repeat of last month, although I do obviously feel for the teams that got shafted both then being at the top of the GC and now being in the opportunistic lower Top 10-15.
It should go without saying that even though we've benefitted massively from most breakaways getting caught, I myself would prefer a healthy mix between both AI extremes on display. Herklotz definitely won more stages than he should've been allowed to contest.
On that topic, as far as I can tell these 6 stage wins in a single GT are a feat not seen since our very own Arnaud Demare in the 2018 Giro!
Before focusing on our roster and racing, I therefore have to again extend my utmost gratitude to every team helping us out in the chasing efforts at some point in the race.
A major shoutout does have to go out to ZARA and particularly our old loanee Nicola Conci, who we clearly still have a good working relationship with, and Tinkoff who utilized their depth to the entire favorites' advantage. Thank you for that!
Furthermore, I think teams like Polar also got a lot out of their contributions to the peloton.
Clearly, ever since we had to cut riders like Stüssi and Vasyliv due to the extreme wage demands of the Herklotz-Demare duo and borderline too many talents starting to require significiant funds, we've balanced on a thin line of mountain support vs TTT focus with the latter becoming the most relevant factor when choosing which GT to attend due to Silvio's TT limitations (even though this final TT saw him barely lose time).
I obviously hope to build up a healthy backbone again with pieces like Stork and Cemazar and whoever we might target in the coming transfer seasons, but for now we had to do with what we've shown here.
And speaking of, our riders certainly gave their all!
The aforementioned Stork and Cemazar managed to stay with Herklotz longer than I anticipated on some stages while contributing to the chase, while the rest of the team made sure we got to that mid-stage point with GC-safe time gaps.
I'm eagerly looking forward to riders like Cemazar and O'Brien improve another step next season, they can both be vital core riders for the future. And not to forget, a shoutout to Matthias Brändle who, in all honestly, basically got signed for this one race alone and did his job very well considering that!
Our TTT strength, while remaining largely similar to earlier years, is not quite enough to fight the recently arising TTT powerhouses, but we made sure to not concede time either and that's always a good thing.
Points- and budget-wise, this win fulfills our sponsor goal and practically guarantees our low-risk season goal of a Top 10 at the end, so that only leaves us with two rather high-variance goals left this year.
Both will be Herklotz-races again, and we could fail both spectacularly, so I'm rather excited to see how they'll play out later on!
Last but certainly not least, thank you for all your kind words, on our success throughout the race as well as now after its conclusion.
Thank you bbl, it indeed wasn't fun to see your team drop the ball a few times too many here. I hope having a GT stage win and pretty good Per results to back you up will make this more bearable in the long term.
Thank you knockout, you also have a stage win to put in your record books and indeed overall not as much success as could've been possible, but your season still looks pretty fine overall to me!
Thank you Laurens, good luck for your own GC adventures with Chiarello!
Thank you alex, it was very sentimental to watch Gesink ride his last of many GTs. He was THE allrounder trying to take it to the mountain goats when I got started, and his three red main stats combo in his prime was among the most significant inspirations to double-red stat both Herklotz and Demare over time. Hats off to his career!
Thank you LLS, indeed as I mentioned your team was instrumental in keeping everything on track. I too would say your home GT went pretty well overall!
Thank you ember, clearly you've been the big winner of this Vuelta coming in with little expectations. You do deserve all the good things happening this season!
Thank you Marco, Vosekalns definitely has more potential in KoM hunting than what he managed to show here, but it's always a lottery. Good luck in the TdF!
Thank you DD, I really really wish you had similar racing in the Giro, it does feel a bit unfair. Let's hope it stays a one-off.
Edited by cio93 on 09-02-2024 04:05
Delighted to see some more impressive performances from Peak, and of course great to see Prasad doing so well. The less said about Cort’s GC performance the better, given the aim would have been the top 20 at the start of the race – I wonder if Cataford was treated as the leader at points seeing some of the stage results. Thanks for the reports!
Seriously, though, whatever we do there, the GTs this season can already now be called a success, due to the great performances here and to some extent in the Giro too.
Let's hope it stays a one-off.
