Meanwhile a couple of teams in the relegation battle scored badly. While i dont rate the setup Rakuten send nearly as much as valverde, the team should have done at least better than it did. Aker one of the losers as well as they werent seen all race long but imo EA was the biggest disappointment. They sent a very interesting lineup with two big sprinters and interesting riders for the uphill stages but they just never brought their horse powers on the grid.
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I can agree with your views on my team. I think from my complaining, I probably seem to think highly of my team, but I was expecting Quintana to be around 13th in the GC based on the startlist. I think I have strong climbers, but they are perhaps a bit weak on Hill/RES/ACC but nonetheless should have been either more active in breakaways, or better secondary help to Quintana. I think I realistically should have expected to easily score about 150-200 pts more in all GTs (apart from maybe the Giro), so to be bottom 2 in both the Vuelta and Tour is pretty frustrating. Taking tha into account, where my team would stand, is atleast with a shot of survival, rather than definite relegation in the standings.
Thanks for all the wonderful reports, awesome as always.
Congrats cio, good to see Herklotz do what he was manufactured in a lab to do. Scary to think how many more times he can pull it off in the future too!
Big congrats cio for the Tour win! Herklotz is certainly becoming a massive factor for the game. Also a big congrats to the others with a good race.
I guess that includes us. Coming away with 2 stagewins and 6 days in the KOM lead is a big achievement albeit we did bring a team capable of exactly that. The only thing we really needed was for Boily to step up a bit, but the 3rd week was too difficult for him, and the race tactics didn't favor him unfortunately - and as he didn't go all in for the KOM jersey he came away pretty much barehanded.
Losing Nizzolo was a bit of a blow as he would have been a safe bet for a couple of points (atleast) on the final stage. After the first week, we set a benchmark for the overall pointshaul at 500. We didn't quite reach that despite of a stagewin from Aidan, but we came close enough with 70 points too little. Before the race started we would have settled for 250 points.
Cool to get a podium place in the last stage, but that doesn't change the fact that we didn't score much points this Tour. Overall it was a great race to follow thanks to the great reports, thanks again cunego59!
