Unlike for PT, January is already a pretty full month of racing for many PCT teams; in particular of those going to Tachira, obviously. 9 races are potentially on their calendar - which obviously no team did. It's a huge variety between 4 (Tafjord) and 24 (Llapi) race days used...
Let's see how it turned out:
Period Ranking: January
The season started with clashing classics - one for the sprinters, one for the puncheurs.
Only two teams made the trip to New Zealand for the C2 Gisborne GP, though - and neither Popo4Ever nor Tryg came back with any points in their bags. The former had Bratashcuk in 35th, missing out on points by 10 spots. Seibeb for the latter was 6 positions further down, so zero points as well.
Things were obviously pretty different for the HC Down Under Classic, the "true" season opener for PCT. And one man just continued his unbelievable string of overperformances: Xhuliano Kamberaj. Llapi-Vita's sprinter took the first win on the first day of the season, rewarded with 140 points. Even better than that, Kiskonen added a 15th place and 11 points - 151 in total for the newly promoted Albanian outfit!
The situation was a bit different for 2nd place, where an often disappointing sprinter got his team the first top result of the year - Bonifazio, scoring 98 points for Lierse. With Suter in 20th and Biermans in 28th place, 11 depth points were added as well, bringing their tally to 109.
For Specialized, it was a strong start as well, with declined Coutinho sprinting to 3rd. 82 points by him, 5 points each by Dzama and Medvedev - 92 points for a solid start to the year.
The final race in the first half of the month was another C2 classic - a flat one this time, with two PCT teams participating in the Nakhon Ratchasima Trophy.
Lierse did rather well, ending up with 20 points. Late attacker Suter finished 9th for 12 points, and Mareczko did pretty well in the bunch sprint behind the breakaway to take 11th place and 8 points.
It was a less spectacular race for Zalgiris, who managed to bring Dakteris inside the scoring range, with a 21st place for one point.
After Thailand, it was China, where the C1 Badaling International was held - a medium-mountain classic with a short final kicker, so potentially one for the robust puncheurs.
And so, it's not a big surprise to see Buchmann getting the win here for UBS. He launched roughly 500m from the line and just pulled through, a very strong sprint! That's 80 points for the German, with none of his teammates finishing in the scoring area.
After a Swiss team, we had a Swiss rider, with freshly maxed Hirschi sprinting to 2nd place. And despite Sauber being known for their great depth, he was the only scorer of his team for once.
This also holds for 3rd placed Bagioli, getting 46 points for Indosat - as many as the team got from the entire TDU.
Then, we had the longest C2 race of the year, the Vuelta al Tachira with its 10 stages. As PCT teams only need to subscribe to 8 days of C2 racing, Tachira didn't attract many teams - 2, to be precise.
The race wasn't a huge success for either of them. Llapi-Vita still came back with 43 points in their bags, most of which were unsurprisingly scored by Culey. The Aussie surprisingly resisted against the sprinters right on day one to take the stage win and obviously the GC and points lead. Holding onto GC and points lead for two more stages was worth more points, with him getting 37 in total. Demiri, Nuha and Goos contributed 3, 2 and 1 points respectively, bringing the team's total to 43.
Sauber, a traditionally well-performing Tachira team, on the other hand, had to live with a big disappointment. Campero narrowly missed out on the GC Top 10, losing too much time in the closing ITT. Stage-wise, there wasn't anything to write home about, with some riders getting small points here and there - 23 in total for the Sammarinese.
That's a lot of races... And who had the best start of the year? Well, points wise, it's a newly promoted team - Llapi-Vita! The Albanians made pretty good use of their massive 24 RD spend, scoring 331 points in the first month for a 13.79 PpRD. In terms of PpRD, this is just outside the Top 10 - but still a great start!
It's then 5 teams within just 10 points, with Zalgiris, ISA, Manada, Lotto and Ekoi. The latter currently have the best PpRD of the whole division, after their surprise GORC win.
At the bottom, we have five teams below 100 points, with in particular Everesting being pretty unlucky to be there after a great yet not rewarded Stannard attack in Badaling.
Here are the January rankings and the overall standings, the latter including all the PpRD stuff:
Just like in PT, the Top 2 of the month's sprinter-heavy stage race are on top of the standings, with Caleb Ewan and Bryan Coquard taking the first two spots.
Lewis Askey is right behind, though, thanks to his 170 GORC points. Then - like in PT again - the rest of the Top 10 is almost full of sprinters: Niccolo Bonifazio, Xhuliano Kamberaj, Daniel Vesely, Lionel Coutinho, Stylianos Farantakis.
9th and 10th however go to two talents: Fabio Christen - after his exploit in TDU - and Lennert van Eetvelt, with his GORC podium.
Unlike in PT, the cobblers will already join the game next month, with up to 6 races on the PCT calendar. And the sprinters will get another - even more important - chance to shine, this time in Mexico. Stay tuned!
Well that was ugly, calendar really wasn't in our favor but TDU was a race we hoped to score in. GORC we expected to be a zero pointer but it hurts that other teams who would have expected that scored really well. We really should have been in the break there.
Still no Yates or Sosa race days used and only 2 for Haller. We have been in first in January before and it has been the high point of the year, lets hope we reverse that.
Average as can be for us. Expected to be around 10-15th, but tdu sucks and the quicker we can forget it exists the better. Bagioli did very well in our only ‘proper’ leadership race in Badaling. We’re probably gonna be pretty close to last in the next update though - we have a few Rd’s in Feb but most are just filler (cobbles), we only have Ukraine as a scoring opportunity. I have a feeling that’s gonna put us pretty close to last.
Good to see Ekoi and Liapi have a good start to PCT life. Thanks for the update Fab!
Would have liked a better Down Under Classic, but Guedaloupe was solid. In the projected ranking we are in top 5, which is nice to see after the first month. We only used 6 RD’s so there’s still some way up to those teams ahead of us.
A big thank you to Fabi for some more great recaps!
You rightly state the GORC result could prove decisive in the relegation battle as we got about 10% of the points needed to stay in the division (I expect about 2000 points as the target line) by a fluke result (to be frank, despite the great effort of our riders) in a race that otherwise would have been close to a 0-pointer. So we end with about double the PpRD targeted to stay in PCT (and the best in the entire division) instead of one of the lowest and a dead-last place in the January ranking. That's even more important as our fellow promoted teams (who are, by large, seen as our biggest competitors in the relegation battle by most predictions) mostly also did pretty well this month.
So let's hope we could get some more good results (and points) in February, especially Daniel should be able to get us some non-fluke ones on the cobbles.
The standings are obviously going to be coloured by the lucky shots that started the season, going to be interesting to see if those will be equalled out over the season! Thanks for the update!
Dismal start for us with blunders in the Tour Down Under and Badaling and weak squads elsewhere driving us to the very bottom of the table. Consolation came from the lucky break in GORC with Kusi single-handedly dropping the PCT lanterne rouge. Worrying start. I can only hope luck treats us more favourably as the season progresses.
I didn't thought I would smile by being so close to the lanterne rouge-spot, bu I'm pretty happy with this ranking, given that we've just had 4 race days.
I hope that we can hold PPRD high also in the next months, but I know that our sprinter team is way better than our climbing force, so we will likely struggle a lot when the montainious races starts unfolding.
Thanks alot Fabianski for the lovely recap. Always looking forward to it
Had to take a break for RL reasons for a while but I'm finally catching up on everything and I'll leave my collected thoughts here. As always, first of all thank you to all the reporters so far and to Fab for the update.
I have to say I was really worried when Kevin Feiereisen didn't even take part in the main sprint in the Down Under Classic and already saw every sprint race day of the year going to waste entirely. Luckily, he proved me wrong with two Top 10s in the Tour Down Under and even a third place in Guadeloupe, with Top 20 GC finishes in both. 35 points at this point in time makes me optimistic that our sprinting output might not be quite as dismal as I had feared coming out of transfers.
Tesfatsion was really poor in the TDU, which again was quite worrying, although that, too, was at least a little softened by that 10th place in Badaling. It also looks like him and Teuns can work together, which is nice to see. There probably will still be a decent amount of hilly races where we don't score well, but we should hopefully get enough chances that a few good results come of it, too.
The biggest positives are the breakaway results though. Rookie Ben Ameur with that second place stage finish in Down Under and above all Van Eetvelt's third place in the GORC. That's obviously nothing we can rely on consistently, but we need those outlier results for a successful season.
