Ulrich Ulriksen wrote:

Congrats on a great first half. Your somewhat unconventional team build is working well.

Laurens147 wrote:

Already a successful rebuild, congrats

SotD wrote:

Great to see an achieved goal. I’m awful at picking the right races, despite actually having some nice results :-)

Let’s see if you can’t push for promotion. Would feel weird to not having you yo-yo’ing right back up as you use to do. I Think you have a pretty solid chance. This time around your love for great secondary stats could be the difference between succes and failure (if not promoting Can be called a failure with your approach to talents).

Now we just need to find a Way of letting those Greek/Cypriot guys come “Home�

Originally we planned to develop Page as a pure sprinter, but observation of sprints this season made us think acceleration was less important than it had historically been. With that in mind we've chosen to focus on improving his energy stats at the cost of his acceleration, hopefully also making him a more useful leadout for Peak (and later Mihkels).

A late addition in transfers, Mulubrhan's development makes him potentially worth keeping as part of our hill squad next season. Alternatively, we may seek to cash in to add to our budget, be that for training or signings, but either way we're glad to see him develop.

Pithie's development plan was the second most complicated for us to figure out this season, due to his varied skillset. For a while we considered turning him into a puncheur/cobbler hybrid, but eventually going all in on cobbles won out. However, we deviated from our original plan to make him a stronger allrounder at the expense of his sprint speed.

We originally planned to turn Theorpanous into an all rounder and flat domestique, but the puncheur route became more appealing when we looked at it in more detail. Few riders will have his combination of skills, which should make him useful on most terrains and competitive in some of the more unique races on the calendar. Plus as you'll see shortly, we identified another candidate to fill his niche...

Kunkumpai's development could have gone in a variety of directions - we even considered making him a medium mountain specialist. However, eventually we settled on perhaps the most boring option, but one we think will make him a useful rider in longer stage races in the years to come.

The biggest talent we've possibly ever signed, and our future home nation star, we've taken a slightly different path to developing Mihkels to the one we originally expected. At the expense of a little acceleration we think we've managed to significantly improve his energy stats - and we also hope in the long run to make him more of a threat in races like Qatar.

The change of plans for Theorpanous was enabled in part by a change of plans for Svrcek, who instead of becoming a puncheur becomes an all rounder and cobbles domestique. That being said, we found this the toughest decision when planning development paths - at various stages our Slovak talent was expecting to be a puncheur, a stage racer, a fighter and then finally the path we settled on.

quadsas wrote:

Appreciate ruining Mihkels, will make him less tempting

whitejersey wrote:

Think this path for Mikhles makes a ton of sense considering that he becomes a lot more trainable and with 2-3 years of investment will be one of the best pure sprinters of his generation.

Bikex wrote:

Cool to see Kunkumpai getting stronger. It might be boring but I can see why you went for stage race. He should end up being a very useful GT domestique.

Nemolito wrote:

An interesting choice for Page! It might be worth it in the end points per wage-wise, but I'm not sure. Looking forward to see a maxed Pithie and Mihkels tackling the peloton 'soon'

kandesbunzler26 wrote:

Some nice talents you got there! And although I'm not sure I like the leadout choice for Page (for totally not selfish reasons) it's probably a good one given you have your future sprinter in Mikhels. See you again in PT next season!

SotD wrote:

Agree with the others here, it's a very cool bunch of riders. Not the route I would have picked for Stavros, but he's not my rider

AbhishekLFC wrote:

As always, a great talent class coming through for you, with Mihkels and Pithie top of the bunch. Some surprising choices of training paths but you have all the profiles covered with this approach.

We started the season well with a few solid results in stage races, before Peak took a surprise 2nd in Lithuania in July to give us our best result of the season. Burke and Zariff then added a pair of 6th places in the autumn to help wrap up promotion, aided by a double top 10 in South Africa.

Most of our better results in classics came in the first half of the season, but van der Poel and Peak added a few more top 5s to aid our promotion push. The efforts of Errazkin, Burke, Dekker and Mansouri to add a few surprisingly strong results were also incredibly valuable.

6 stage wins for the team this season, with 4 of those coming in the second half of the year. Zariff finally broke his duck in the Dauphine, while Peak starred on wildcard duty in Praha - Karlovy Vary - Praha. Errazkin's stage win was the highlight of a poor race for us in Denmark, and Burke's success in Morocco was the moment we convinced ourselves promotion was assured.

We had two big aims when rebuilding this season: having a competitive sprint department in every race, and to refresh our talent base. Our strong showings in Points and U25 classifications shows a degree of success here, with our biggest number of top 10s in each since our title winning season in 2020. Can we crack the secret to KoM success next?

A pair of fantastic individual seasons from Peak and van der Poel underpinned our success, but credit has to go to our whole roster. 10 riders in the top 150 of the rankings and above 100 points is well beyond even our most optimistic expectations, particularly given the only riders to score less were either talents or late signings to make up the numbers. Now we have to find another 2000 points in transfers for PT safety next season...

After a few seasons of failing the vast majority of our goals, this season was a pleasant surprise. 3/5 goals completed plus a near miss in a 4th goal will hopefully put us on a solid financial footing as we return to PT - a sentence we wouldn't have expected to be writing at the start of the season for sure!