badboyberty said:
Not that it matters because both are weighted against sprinters, and Chavendish was definitely the most successful rider of the year.
I don't actually think that the ranking is weighted against sprinters. Firstly, I will just say that any points-based system is heavily flawed as assigning numbers to rankings is very arbitrary in the first place.
With regard to Cav, he didn't really race much after the Tour and therefore missed out on points coming from stages in Pologne and Eneco Tours, and he missed the Vattenfall race.. all good races for him to rack up an extra hundred points to move up the rankings.
With regard to the top 5 ranked riders being typical GC riders, all these five raced a pretty solid season with many stage race appearances and wins (Valv and Cont) and one-day placings (Schleck, Sanchez and Evans) to get their points.
Is the tour de france worth 200 points, when Milano-SanRemo is worth 100? - Who knows? It's pretty arbitrary. But one race takes 7 hours and the other takes 90+ hours, so I think Conti being on top of the rankings reflects this.
In regard to Cav being the "most successful rider of the year".. well, probably in terms of quantity of wins, but most sprinters have more wins to their name than a typical GC rider, so in that sense, I don't think the ranking system is weighted againts Cav. If Cav had of raced, and won, Vattenfall, that gives him an extra 80 points, and he would have jumped up to 3rd. So one more semi-classic, and he moves from 7th to 3rd in the rankings...
The list of world rankings is
right here