And so the time comes to get the ball rolling for the 11th edition of the CQ game that focuses on younger riders. Yet there are only 7 winners so far: "How can this be?" I metaphorically hear you ask. Because this game takes three years to unravel (and because I haven't yet done the inevitable and officially declare SafeBet as winner of the edition that is drawing to a close now)
In the current top 60 of the CQ annual rankings there are 14 men who, three years ago, were no more than promising youngsters, some of them greatly hyped, others still flying below the radar, and each of them with less than 200 CQ points in their short lives. And now they are household names (if your household has more than one person in it that follows cycling as closely as anyone who has read this far does), with highly noteworthy results gained in the intervening three seasons.
So the task here is to uncover their young equivalents: who are the up and coming riders that have not yet upped and reached the 200 point limit, but who will be among the top levels of the sport when we look back at the end of the 2026 season?
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to identify 18 male riders, each with a maximum of 199 CQ points throughout their careers to the end of 2023 (including points that would have been given but for a later cancellation of results due to doping, although I will probably have to rely on your honesty for that, because I can't think of any likely picks in that category). Send them to me by PM before the start of the Tour Down Under on 16th Jan* (11:10 South Australia, small hours of the morning in Europe, sometime in the evening in North America). Then all you have to do is wait with baited breath to see whether you have outscored everyone else three years later, with approximately monthly updates to maintain the tension (or make it very clear at an early date that you have failed miserably).
To give you a clue of the calibre of rider you are looking for, those who have made themselves ineligible, but not by too much, during 2023 include Alexandre Balmer, Nicholas Dalla Valle, Matthew Ricitello, Sean Flynn and Marco Brenner. Your riders will have to have a less impressive palmares to date than them.
After the teams in the Main annual CQ game have been revealed, I will post a list (EDIT:now post #6 below) of those that are chosen there and eligible here, which many like to use as an aid to their selections (and which carries no guarantee of success: a team based on the most popular picks in the 2021 main game that were eligible would have come in the bottom third of the edition now drawing to a close, and the best possible 18 in the game that is one year in has 7 riders that nobody picked in the 2023 main game). {now done: post #6 below this}
As ever, please just sent the 18 names, one on each line, no extraneous details, and in CQ format if possible.
And as ever, thanks for entering (if you do so), good luck to your riders, and enjoy the game.
* There will have been some southern hemisphere racing prior to that, and we might have a Gaviria-esque epiphany in one of them, but teams that have already been sent in before that can edit their squad if somebody suddenly seems unmissable based on their performance there. And it gives a bit of fun to some players who like to pick a team heavy in Gravel and Tar top ten finishers to take an early lead.
In the current top 60 of the CQ annual rankings there are 14 men who, three years ago, were no more than promising youngsters, some of them greatly hyped, others still flying below the radar, and each of them with less than 200 CQ points in their short lives. And now they are household names (if your household has more than one person in it that follows cycling as closely as anyone who has read this far does), with highly noteworthy results gained in the intervening three seasons.
So the task here is to uncover their young equivalents: who are the up and coming riders that have not yet upped and reached the 200 point limit, but who will be among the top levels of the sport when we look back at the end of the 2026 season?
Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to identify 18 male riders, each with a maximum of 199 CQ points throughout their careers to the end of 2023 (including points that would have been given but for a later cancellation of results due to doping, although I will probably have to rely on your honesty for that, because I can't think of any likely picks in that category). Send them to me by PM before the start of the Tour Down Under on 16th Jan* (11:10 South Australia, small hours of the morning in Europe, sometime in the evening in North America). Then all you have to do is wait with baited breath to see whether you have outscored everyone else three years later, with approximately monthly updates to maintain the tension (or make it very clear at an early date that you have failed miserably).
To give you a clue of the calibre of rider you are looking for, those who have made themselves ineligible, but not by too much, during 2023 include Alexandre Balmer, Nicholas Dalla Valle, Matthew Ricitello, Sean Flynn and Marco Brenner. Your riders will have to have a less impressive palmares to date than them.
After the teams in the Main annual CQ game have been revealed, I will post a list (EDIT:now post #6 below) of those that are chosen there and eligible here, which many like to use as an aid to their selections (and which carries no guarantee of success: a team based on the most popular picks in the 2021 main game that were eligible would have come in the bottom third of the edition now drawing to a close, and the best possible 18 in the game that is one year in has 7 riders that nobody picked in the 2023 main game). {now done: post #6 below this}
As ever, please just sent the 18 names, one on each line, no extraneous details, and in CQ format if possible.
And as ever, thanks for entering (if you do so), good luck to your riders, and enjoy the game.
* There will have been some southern hemisphere racing prior to that, and we might have a Gaviria-esque epiphany in one of them, but teams that have already been sent in before that can edit their squad if somebody suddenly seems unmissable based on their performance there. And it gives a bit of fun to some players who like to pick a team heavy in Gravel and Tar top ten finishers to take an early lead.
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