7 races for the month makeing it a high scoring month for many teams. Lets dive into it!
Fastned the best team this month with big scores in Suisse and Scandinavia. Taylor Phinney and Daniel Vesely getting the points in Suisse while Mauri Vansevenant did his job in Scandinavia. Fastned scored a total of 1041 points this month and climbed from 13th total to 8th
Second best team this month was Indosat Ooredoo with 926 points. Best scoring race was Suisse with Colin Stüssi and Pierre Latour, while Fernando Gaviria secured good points from Moscow and Hanko. All in all a good month for Indosat who climbs from 15th to 9th
Behind the top 2 comes a tight field but Polar just pips the 3rd best score of the month with 850. Egan Bernal contiunes to be the team top scorer with good points in Chrone (also well from Ryan Mullen) and Suisse, while a team efford from Andrea Bagioli and Enric Mas secured the points in Scandinavia
Just 4 points behind comes the preseason favorite Evonik - ELKO with a big haul from Miguel Angel Lopez in Scandinavia (449 points from him alone there) and a good haul in East Java being the main points of the month. This makes Evonik climb into the top 3 for the first time this season!
While they are newly promoted they are not inexperienced in PT and ELCO - ABEA shows that experience matters with another good month and rising into top 5. 841 points with good scoring across the month from the greece team. Stylianos Farantakis started the month well in the sprinter classics of Moscow and Hanko while Panagiotis Karatsivis secured a good Dauphine and a team effort pipped the total score from Suisse over 100.
The new leader of PT comes from Luxembourg and we are of course talking about EA Vesuvio. Their manager might be missing but the riders don't care climbing from 3rd to 1st. Considering the team there might be no surprise that Tom Wirtgen and Mads Würtz secured a great haul in Chrono des Herbiers while a team effort lead by Matej Mohoric ended the month in Scandinavia.
Los Pollos Hermanos is fighting with everything the can against relegation and climbs into 19th this month after Orluis Aular and Jonel Carcueva scored well in East Java. Team star Sergio Higuita secured 117 points in Scandinavia and Kristoffer Halvorsen keeps scoring in the sprints. They are still in a relegation spot but they are no doubt fighting against it with everything they have
cycleYorkshire is another team that climbs this month going from 14th to 11th and just not being able to get that top 10. Lachlan Morton scoring 141 points in Dauphine while Salem Kemboi also netting over 100 in East Java the most important results while also Franck Bonnamour did well in East Java and Gabriel Cullaigh scoring in the sprinting classics helps the team. Could next month see them in top 10?
Are the early season form starting to go the wrong way for Rabobank? Still not a bad month but they loose the 1st spot after scoring 656 points. A good haul in Scandinavia after sending pretty much everyone there, with Clement Champoussin being the top scorer, but still Davide Formolo, Remco Evenepoel, Juan Sossa, Andreas Kron and Floris Gerts help with depth. Stanislaw Aniolkowski also shows that he can score points in the flat classics in Moscow
The team that falls out of top 3 this month is King Power who moves from 2nd to 4th. They started the month weak, but by the end of the month Yevgeniy Gidich woke up in Scandinavia and decided it was time to score. A team effort from Brandon McNulty and Chun Wing Leung in Dauphine also helped. We are pretty sure that King Power will try to get back into top 3 again next month!
Another team fighting against relegation is Sony - Force India who climbs one spot from 21st to 20th. Not safe yet and will need some big scores in the coming months. Best score in June was Marlen Zmorka in Chrone des Herbiers while Leo Hayter and Gijs Leemreize made a team effort in Dauphine.
A team waiting for their star to really start is Team Puma - SAP. Silvio Herklotz does score, its not that we just expect him to be at the top of the rankings, something he might be when he really uses his race days. Still he scored 166 points in Scandinavia this month as the teams best scorer. Max Kanter with his score from Hanko and Lennard Kämna in Dauphine is the other main storylines this month with the team climbing somewhat from 18th to 16th
A team falling that might be falling into the relegation battle if this continues is Team UBS going from 12th to 15th with a score of 516. The team rely on Merhawi Kudus and while he delivers by scoring 286 points in his only race (Dauphine) this month considering that his GT is done that might be scary for the Swiss team. Apart from Kudus this month everything else is depth points and that might be a scary pattern at this point of the season.
Dauphine was the best scoring race for Danish Carlsberg - Danske Bank aswell with Mattias Skjelmose Jensen getting 40% of the total points for the team from that race while they fall from 11th to 13th. Still not really a score position for them and they also got ok points in Moscow and East Java but not a top month.
Another team falling is Tinkoff Team - La Datcha falling down to 7th. Artem Samolenkov the star this month with his 113 poitns from Moscow while Pavel Sivakov got 95 in East Java.
Xero Racing has by many been tipped as a top team this season but they barely keep their top 10 spot after only scoring 469 pts in June. with pretty much all of them coming from the 1 race their 2 big stars raced, Scandinavia. Joseph Areruya with 207 points there and Thomas Pidcock with 102 pretty much saves a month that would've been catastrophic without it.
Lierse SK - Pizza Ullo Pro Cycling really finds them ass-deep in relegation zone falling from 19th to 21st. A month that could've looked even worse if not Sam Oomen had scored 147 in Dauphine while him together with Laurens De Plus secured some points in Scandinavia.
Going out of the top 10 into 12th place we find Aker - MOT. Dylan Groenewegen in Suisse (helped by Alexander Salby) and Attila Valter in Scandinavia the best scoring in a bad month for the Norwegians.
Talking about bad months and falling out of top 10 we have Cedevita going all the way from 9th to 14th with only 354 points. Jasper Philipsen in Moscow and Tadej Pogacar in East Java the best scores, but the team might've wanted more, specially from Pogacar.
One of the teams expected to be at the bottom this season was Jura GIANTS and they have no placed themself smack at the bottom. They scored well with 201 points from Suisse but no good scores anywhere else moves them from 20th to 22nd. Suisse was a team effort with Valentin Darbellay being the top scorer while Jose Fernandes and Muhammad Abdurrahman helped the total tally.
Gazelle ends up being the second worst team this month scoring 327 points with the strongest pure scoring from a rider being 59 from Giovanni Carboni in East Java. Gazelle has always been known for being a deep team scoring points everywhere but there seems to be less magic than usual this season. Still they are 1 spot above relegation, can they save stay above the line?
The worst team this month is without doubt, scoring only a paltry 192 points is Grieg-Maersk. That is a really bad month and they fall into a relegation spot in 18th. With the most important cobble races being done this looks scary for them. Still Mads Pedersen was this months top scorer for the team with 43 points...
Merhawi Kudus climbs into 1st place with his 286 points from Dauphine while Tom Wirtgen goes into 2nd on the back of Chrone des Herbiers. The top 3 is rounded out by Egan Bernal who got 328 points this month.
A big new face in the top 5 is Miguel Angel Lopez who climbs from 14th being the best scorer this month among all riders with 635 (that means he scored more this month than 25th placed Valentin Darbellay has scored all year). The last rider in top 5 is the former number 1, Mads Pedersen
Other than Lopez there are 2 other new faces in top 10 with Mauri Vansevenant in 8th and Fernando Gaviria in 10th. While Joseph Areruya (11th), Thomas Pidcock (12th) and Ivan Siric (14th) falls out of the top 10.
Notable big climbers this month is Mattias Skjelmose Jensen going from 103rd to 49th, Lennard Kämna from 238th to 105th, Jonel Carcueva from 219th to 99th, Panagiotis Karatsivis from 200th to 102, Riccardo Minali from 222nd to 124th and Daniel Vesely from 178th to 85th. (Trying to ignore those rising from nearly 0 points)
Cool to see we are still on the podium. I guess Scandinavia really saved our month.
I think we are set for our highest placing yet. The top spot is a hat too big for us, but I think we are well covered in the remaining races to score decent and put up a fight for the podium.
Very good month for us. Lopez carrying us to be on the podium already and i expect to top the table in the next update but we need to have a big enough gap to defend it.
The bleeding is real! We desperately need to turn it around, sooner rather than later, but definitely think we'll be right down in the fight to avoid relegation after this Tour and July. Our first good chance to turn it around will be Anderberg, who has three races in a row with Kigali, East Midlands and Arenberg. That's where we need top, top results, I guess. The time until then will be painful, to not mention those three races in itself. Nervous times ahead!
Never good to fall again, although with the classics over and Carthy not racing, some of that was inevitable. Aside from the few fall cobbled classics, it's really a holding pattern now to just stave out falling into the relegation spots.
Skjelmose's amazing Dauphine is going to skyrocket his renewals demands, but that will all be worth it if it saves our season. It definitely made up for some of his early season lapses. He'll need to follow it up with White at the Tour to keep me happy though.
Biggest flop predictably is Aranburu, who just doesn't have it at this level in this version for this cost. Thus, no surprise that Scandinavia ended up such a poor race for us and sees us sink.
Thanks for the recap Heine!
RIP Exxon Duke, David Veilleux, Double Feature, and Monster Energy
