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Our plan was quite simple this transfer season; Replace our old sprinters (Juan Van Heerden, Cameron Meyer and Aleksandr Serebriakov) with a Puncheur, Sprinter and Time Trialist. We managed to sign Mario Vogt (puncheur) and Moreno Moser (sprinter), but signing a time trialist was almost impossible this year without overpaying. Therefore we moved our resources to another cobbler: Arman Kamyshev! Also, we signed three stagiaires to support Pavel Sivakov during the Tour de l'Avenir (Evgenii Tikhonin, Julian Cardona and Joel Ponce).

So what do you guys think? Good enough to stay another year in the PT?

The season has started with Badaling International, Tour of Qatar and Tour of East Java but let's first have a look at the Previews/Predictions for this season. I believe we have a difficult season ahead of us, hopefully we can stay in the ProTour but if not a much needed rebuild could benefit Team Tinkoff in the long run. The
Community Prediction rated us as 13th, SportingNonsense mathematically puts us on position 12th and SotD believes we will be 16th at the end of the season:

-SotD-

The Russian multimillionaire Oleg Tinkov created the Tinkoff Credit Systems – Rosneft in 2011, and it didn’t take long for the team to become PT regular. In 2014 they saw their debut ending in 7th on two consecutive tries. In the past seasons the team have become way too familiar with the relegation line, and have become a master of surviving it being regularly in the region of 15-17th.

Timofey Kritskiy had a massive season last season, and while decreasing he is still a top level GC rider. The added competition might pose a threat and I doubt we will see him in the individual top 10 or even in a GT podium. So expecting 1700 points from him alone is not realistic. He will however surely be a top 25 rider and have some decent backup in Novikov and Mamykin. In the next line there is a bunch of strong climbers without a high enough mountainstat to be anything but aggressive riders.

Mario Vogt and Sergey Chernetskiy lead the team in the hills, and that surely isn’t PT worthy. The latter proved to be a decent rider last season, but I can’t see the two combined landing above 5-600 points, which is not good looking at the amount of hilly pointpotentials.

But where the team is lacking puncheurs it’s stacked with cobblers. Senechal, Kamyshev, Sulimov and Zubov should provide a fair amount of points, however both Senechal and Kamyshev need to step up in comparison to last season in order to help the team move away from the relegation line. The team is very potent in team timetrials, also have a line of riders that can get decent points themselves, such as Yatsevich, Dal Col, Malori and Vorobev.

In the sprints the combination of Samolenkov and Moser isn’t too shabby either, although neither will win many stages. Overall the team is much too comfortable to being in the lower half that I will tamper with that. I see the team as one that should survive, but not with ease. And much is down to the cobbled setup and whether or not Kritskiy will perform as he should.

This year Tinkoff is celebrating it's 10th season in the ManGame! During this decade we "only" had 83 riders on contract, so it's fair to say that once you have ridden for Tinkoff you belong to a very exclusive club.

Let's take a closer look at some stats; 66 riders are Russian and 17 are non-Russian, Timofey Kritskiy is the only rider who has been under contract every single year (although he was loaned-out in 2012 to Wiggle - San Pellegrino/rjc_43), of the non-Russian riders Adrian Malori has the most years under his belt (last 5 years).

Other fun facts 42 surnames of our riders end with a "v" and if you are looking for Aleksandr you better be more specific! Below an overview of all of our legendary riders from the past 10 years:

The first two months of the season weren't great for us, we failed our first sponsor goal by not winning but being 2nd at Copenhagen - Malmo TTT, but we did manage to win stage 2 of Tirreno-Adriatico (Moreno Moser) and Samolenkov finishing 10th at Milano San Remo was also a decent result.

Right now we (Team Tinkoff - La Datcha) are in 20th position with 767 points in the ProTour Rankings. This month will be very important for us because there are 4 cobble races on the program; Strada Appia Antica, Ronde van Vlaanderen, E3 Prijs and Paris - Roubaix. Our cobble squad combined is about 1/3 of our salary budget, so we need to score as much points as possible to avoid relegation at the end of the season.

Now that all Grand Tours are done for this season it is time to officially hand out the Adam Hansen Award to Nikita Novikov! After finishing the Tour de France (56th) he now is the only rider to complete 17 consecutive ManGame Grand Tours:

The goal for next season of course is to extend his own record to 20, below an overview of all Grand Tour finishers of Tinkoff:

In an interview Kamyshev's agent has told cyclingnews that a €2.5 million release clause has to be met for him to leave, if not he will stay at Tinkoff.

We are very pleased to announce our first signing of the transfer window; Savva Novikov! Novikov is the youngest and biggest talent this year from Russia, so we had to sign him (yes not much from Russia lately; we are still waiting for the new Ignatiev/Trofimov/Gusev/etc.).

Just like Evgenii Tikhonin (who we already signed last year as a stagiare and now has a full professional contract with Team Tinkoff - La Datcha), Novikov will ride for HelloFresh this season to gain eXPerience. Thanks whitejersey for taking the time to pamper our youngsters!

We are very pleased to announce our second signing of the transfer window; Moreno Moser! Moser already rode with us last year, but he was giving us a hard time during contract renewals. Luckily the Italian came to his senses and signed a new one year contract with us and we are very happy to have him on our team again this year! Together with Samolenkov he will lead our squad during the flat stages.

We are very pleased to announce our third signing of the transfer window; Kelland O'Brien! Just before the transfer season started it was announced that only 3 teams will relegate this season...

Therefore management of Team Tinkoff - La Datcha decided to take a risk and go all-in for talent this year and Kelland O'Brien was the perfect match for our Time Trial focused squad (Puncheur development is also an option). Anton Vorobev and Sergey Chernetskiy (both 31 years old) will be his mentors throughout the season and we believe O'Brien will be a very good rider in the near future.

We are very pleased to announce our fourth signing of the transfer window; Joni Kanerva! Kanerva used to ride for Valio - Viking Genetics, but they decided to withdraw their sponsorship, so a short drive of 350km from St Petersburg, Russia to Tuusula, Finland was enough to sign him.

At our first training camp of the season he even showed us more potential than anticipated by being the fastest of our team during uphill sprints (during this training camp we somehow lost 1,000,000 Russian Rubles).

We are very pleased to announce our fifth signing of the transfer window; Alan Banaszek! Banaszek is a young talent (sprinter) from Poland, he is the second rider from Poland to ride for Tinkoff (Jarosław Marycz rode with us in our very first season 2011). Moreno Moser (31 years old) will be his mentor during the flat stages.

We are very pleased to announce our sixth signing of the transfer window; Roy Goldstein! Goldstein is a time trial specialist from the State of Israel, his main objectives for this season are Praha - Karlovy Vary - Praha and (together with Kiril Yatsevich, Aydar Zakarin, Anton Vorobev, Andrea Dal Col and Alexander Vlasov) the Copenhagen-Malmo TTT.

We are very pleased to announce our seventh signing of the transfer window; Einer Augusto Rubio! Rubio (23 years old) had a pretty weird transfer season; he used to ride for the Andorra Cycling Project but that team disbanded at the end of the season. During the transfer window he first was signed by Volcanica - Fox, then he was sacked by the same team 2 days later... We still had some salary cap left, so we decided to help out the poor guy.

Einer Augusto Rubio and Kelland O'Brien will mostly be riding the PTHC races to gain eXPerience and both will be on the startlist (together with Evgenii Tikhonin and Savva Novikov) at the Tour de l'Avenir 2021.