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Announcing the Women's WT CQ Game

The obvious gap in the stable of CQ games on these sites has been anything based on women's races. Years ago I bemoaned the fact that the downloadable updates, produced weekly on the men's racing side of the CQ site, only appears about 3 or 4 times a year for the women. And I left it at that.

Until, that is, I was doing one of the updates in the Spring Classics game, when it suddenly occurred to me that I had there the spreadsheet template that could provide a game based on any calendar with a limited number of races. Like the World Tour. Add in the World Championships as well, and the game can deal with the vast bulk of the points earned by the top riders. So I made a few adjustments to the Spring Classics spreadsheet, and compiled the scores for the races that happened this year and will be WWT (or WC) to see what that throws up.

This method is not ideal: 482 women got points in this selection of races (as opposed to 1336 if we were to include all the 2022 races to date), and for some riders, even fairly high in the rankings, very few of their points (this year at least) came from WWT races. So, for example, Agnieszka Skalniak-Sojka, Ricarda Bauernfeind and Silvia Zanardi are all in the CQ top 50 but have 5% of their points or less on this tally; Olga Shekel is 90th in the CQ ranking but none of her 206 points come from races I would include. The way around this would be to have the game updated by 13 or so pages worth of CQ table being copied and pasted into a spreadsheet every time an update is required, but that's not what I am offering and I fear it would be such a pain to do that it would not be maintained. (If anyone wants to do that, I will happily withdraw this proposal in favour of their game and offer any spreadsheet help I can give)

This year's scores are lower than can be expected next year: Omloop van Nieuwsblad and Swiss Tour will have a higher points scale than this year (when they have not been WWT), and TDU, Cadel Evans RR, UAE Tour and the two Chinese races are all to be added/revived. But to give an idea of what scores could have been achieved this year (3rd column would be proposed game scores: 4th column would have been their cost if the game were played this year):

RankName CQ pts from WWT +WC2021 ptsAll 2022 CQ pts
1​
VAN VLEUTEN Annemiek
1729​
1813​
1750​
2​
LONGO BORGHINI Elisa
1061​
1254​
1192​
3​
VOLLERING Demi
1010​
1293​
1175​
4​
WIEBES Lorena
987​
773​
1615​
5​
BALSAMO Elisa
936​
704​
1129​
6​
KOPECKY Lotte
936​
993​
1042​
7​
LUDWIG Cecilie Uttrup
784​
760​
947​
8​
LABOUS Juliette
733​
553​
797​
9​
LIPPERT Liane
731​
383​
832​
10​
CAVALLI Marta
714​
638​
859​

20​
CORDON-RAGOT Audrey
382​
231​
576​

30​
SIERRA CAÑADILLA Arlenis
286​
519​
580​

40​
GEORGI Pfeiffer
206​
414​
405​

50​
JACKSON Alison
162​
333​
295​

100​
VERHULST Gladys
75​
282​
232​

150​
PIERGIOVANNI Federica
39​
78​
50​

200​
SWINKELS Sylvie
22​
9​
43​

300​
CHRISTOFOROU Antri
8​
23​
143​

400​
HARRIS-BLAIN Pearl
4​
0​
4​
 
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The most important element of getting a CQ game right is setting the team size and budget. So I invite your thoughts on that, either by PM or, if you want to try to persuade others of your wisdom, in the thread. I will set the team size and budget as the median of all sensible suggestions (I might round it off a bit), and will put my suggestion up in a few days. I can use responses to that to confirm whether there is enough interest to make the game worthwhile.
 
Prices, once we know how much we will have to play with, will be the end of 2022 CQ rankings (which will be very similar to what they are now), and entries will be up until the start of the Tour Down Under Sheilas, or whatever name they give it.

Opinions on whether it should be included in the 4 seasons challenge (which would need renaming) welcome.

And congratulations if you picked up on the couple of hints I had dropped in other CQ threads and had worked out what I had in mind.
 
Last edited:
I am not intelligent enough to offer credible input as to team size or budget, but I am starting to get more familiar with the women’s peloton. I would certainly put a team together, and would be all for adding it to the four seasons challenge. Thanks Armchair cyclist for doing the hard work to get this up and running!