Good to see Brambilla so active, but he obviously is too old now to deliver the goods as well. On the oher hand, a very poor peformance from Dombrowski in this race. I knew we were in trouble when I saw who he was up against, but I figured we will miss out on the podium, not the top 5.
The best part of this race were the reports, great job cunego.
Kraftwerk managed 2 riders in the massive break and long term Kraftwerk rider Tatarinov took full advantage to build on his KOM points.
Tatarinov's performance was out of this world! Top 10 and KOM in a PTHC race is unbelievable. He showed incredible grit to hang on during the last climb to grab the few points needed to secure the jersey. He even managed to jump a GC place to 9th thanks to bonus seconds in the intermediate sprint! Best result of his career by far.
Arndt had a solid tour, only missing a top 20 by 15 seconds.
Helme just managed to stay in the U25 points with 9th.
Congrats to Roman for GC and sammyt93 for the stage win.
I'm really sorry for Georg that the pre-Christmas stress has only allowed me to catch up with his amazing stage 3 performance today! What a ride!
I always love to see our riders make big breakaways and become one of the few to take something away from the stage.
It definitely made sense to stay out of the early KoM fights then! I bet his 77 sta/res made a big difference at the end.
With Conci and Kämna doing very well already, it's so lovely to see our third climbing loanee adding a great effort of his own.
This will both make it harder to ever sign him long-term, but also even more tempting to at least give it a serious shot.
Dunno how Vasyliv lost over 20 minutes in the very same stage, but I really couldn't care less in that situation.
Then on stage 5, Zimmermann went on the offense again right away!
Aided by Egger, they formed a very strong duo to add some KoM points and aim for another stage result if the favorites allowed them to, which they actually did again.
Egger couldn't quite make it to the end, which still constituted a great effort assuming he did the relaying work in the break to keep Zimmermann fresh, and fresh he was indeed!
Not fresh enough to win, but definitely fresh enough to hold onto his white jersey AND add the polka-dots as well, what an insane race.
Even if the two-jersey combo was predictably only meant to be for one day, I can't help but applaud that performance from our youngster. This was exactly the type of racing I was hoping for from our squad of breakaway hunters.
Stage 6 finally produced a sight I expected from PCM20 this season: the peloton-sized breakaway.
Vasyliv did well there to animate the race and try his luck, but ultimately he couldn't separate from the group and obviously couldn't fight for a podium spot in the sprint.
Aular rightfully and forcefully attempted to catch Zimmermann, but the disorganized peloton chase with very few helpers left had the big advantage of them just going slow enough for a very motivated 75mo rider to hang on to it and get dragged along the descent to stay in white!
Overall, I absolutely loved this race from a neutral perspective with the thrilling Kudus-Lecuisinier fight (congrats Moser! you're back on track ) AND definitely from a Puma perspective, starting with the smart sprint from Niu on stage 1 that already would've made for a good week, but was easily toppled by Zimmermann's mountain efforts.
4th in both Points AND KoM alongside his white jersey victory makes for incredible 80+ points for him alone when added to his 2nd and 4th stage finishes.
With Praha being just as surprisingly successful, I'm really enjoying this season so far.
I do see and feel for everyone who understandably doesn't though!
And finally, thank you cunego for always delivering top class reports.
Well the Colombia + Tasmania gamble failed miserably unfortunately. 2nd here is not good enough, 2nd in pts is not good enough and 4th KOM isn’t good enough.
We came with an ambition of 350-400 points here. We are no way close to that.
I came to this race expecting nothing and ended up leaving here with something more than I expected. Although without achieving any brilliant results this turns out not to be a bad race for us.
