Early in the season but it stil feels a bit surreal to look at this after the 2015-2018 struggle:
8 wins by the middle of February.
For context they reached 8 wins in the four preceding seasons in late June, never, early July and mid August.
In 2018 they didn't even have 8 wins in the whole season.
Just had a check through the EF roster and they've been put together a seriously good squad. For hilly races Uran, Martinez, Higuita, Carthy, Woods, TJVG plus several good climbing domestiques. And for classics Bettiol, Vanmarke, Clarke, Langeveld, Cort, Keukeleire... I'd say on paper they're one of the strongest teams in the WT, and looks like they're backing it up with wins.
This is an interesting opinion, because the core of the team is pretty much the same as it was in 2018, when the team was widely regarded as one of the weakest in WT. Surely both 2018->2019 and 2019->2020 transfer periods brought in some solid reinforcements but nothing groundbreaking on paper, no one of the joining riders had demonstrated WT-leadership deserving results the year before they joinded. The biggest gain is how freakishly good Higuita turned out to be (which had not been widely expected) and of course Bettiol looks like a great deal too after winning Flanders but I bet nobody expected that after his poor 2018 season.
The competition for GT spots will be very interesting this year. I think at least Bettiol, Caicedo, Carthy, Clarke, Cort, Craddock, Guerreiro, Halvorsen, Higuita, Kangert, Keukeleire, Langeveld, Martinez, Powless, Scully, Uran, Van Garderen, Vanmarcke and Woods are kind of riders you would expect to ride a GT but that's 19 riders and there are only 16 spots available for Giro and Tour combined. I guess some good riders will either have to settle for just Vuelta or even have a year without riding a GT alltogether. Interestingly, Vanmarcke only rode 1 GT in the last 3 years so maybe we can expect this trend of top classics riders skipping GTs to continue.
And there are still young and developing riders who could use a GT to learn as well. I'm not talking about Higuita or Martinez there as they're already top riders of the team but more about riders like Whelan, Van den Berg, Villalobos etc.