ember wrote:
I'm sure SotD won't be thrilled to see himself being gapped by Vesuvio in terms of points on the cobbles!
You are absolutely right. Having 3 better cobblers in my team it sucks to see my main rival getting A LOT more points with the only cobbled-like rider they have in the team. The points they have made here is probably what I can aim to make throughout the entire cobbled season. I really hoped that those points would be something I gained, not lost.
Anyway, I think this race is too random, and as such is a bad race for the game - But I do aknowledge that we have to try something different from time to time, but even great cobblers lost this race on day one for no apparent reason.
I am happy with the pace of the reports though, as this race was just something to get through as quickly as possible. Not having a single rider in top 50 shocked my quite a bit. Off to the Next races!
Having caught up on a few races, I'm rather glad I wasn't hanging on to the reports on a daily basis - they'd have ruined me. I can only reiterate others' opinions. I'm just glad Rowe got a top 10, but not exactly what I was thinking now that Blythe is a top 5 cobbler.
So far having read a few other reports it doesn't look like Good Energy will be repeating a Good season this year.
The race went down here about as well as I predicted when racing it It's a real pity as the route could have let to a really interesting race. For some reason the presence of the TTT made the AI set time triallists as team leaders rather than the top cobbled rider, and this hurt the chances of many. It's possible that a cobbled ITT at the start of the race would help, to most likely put cobbled riders in the high GC positions, but then Stage 2 didnt show particularly great gameplay - so it's probably the case that it's better off keeping cobbled races as classics.
Ridiculous luck by Schlechter. I was pleased to see him make the break, but for him to follow attacks at the end when Bewley and Cancellara did nothing was quite stupid to see.
You just have to make Omloop Het Volk a 2 stage race (with Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne and Omloop Het Nieuwsblad) and than ride the ttt separately after that, because adding the ttt-times shouldn't be that hard.
