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The 2024 CQ Ranking Manager Thread

Page 89 - Get up to date with the latest news, scores & standings from the Cycling News Community.
Plapp, Poole, Pickrell, Pollefliet, Lamperti and Colleoni for Tour of Guangxi. Maybe a last shake-up is possible.
Yeah, it's still very close in the Top10.
I have Staune-Mittet, Herzog, Plapp, Foss, Lamperti and Schachmann in the race, so also not that bad!
Final week now. Startlists for the Veneto races and Japan Cup are still to be confirmed. Hopefully some of my riders will also participate there..
 
Plapp, Narvaez, Van Eetvelt and Lamperti for me. Hope I can cling on to a spot in the top 20.

Also - Emilien Jeanniere… almost on par with Del Toro for the season. Quelle surprise.
I remember looking at Total Energies roster when putting my team together and thinking Jeannière had the perfect profile for the random French sprinter that scores a million more points than he should due to a stupidly easy schedule. I should have acted upon that instinct but whatever it's not like I'm deadlocked in a virtual tie for second place and could have used a few extra hundred points.
 
Update #39: Top 10 tightens up and excitement atop the Green Jersey standings with one week left

Lombardia is in the books, and most riders' seasons are over. But this week there was still time for the best rider to cap off quite possibly the best season of all time, and some handy results for other riders to buffer (Remco, Mas) or salvage something from (Ciccone) their seasons. Let's see how it shook out.

This Week's Top Scorers

RankTeamPoints this week
1Amethyst612
2Armchair cyclist479
3firefly3323476
4Googolplex398
5hfgon1396

It should be no surprise by now that the team that took the bold swing on Pogacar and Evenepoel takes a handy win this week - Amethyst takes their team's 4th weekly win of the season thanks to 280 more points from Pogi (2 teams, 3602 points cost) and 170 from Remco (2 teams, 2933 cost). That alone would have been enough to almost win the week. But Amethyst also got a nice 100 points overseas from Lukas Nerukar who, at 83 points cost, is somehow incredibly Amethyst's 3rd most expensive rider behind those big 2! Just some truly fabulous team selection there.

Second place goes to Armchair Cyclist, grabbing 479 from the likes of Nerukar (the team's 27th most expensive rider, btw), Xandro Meurisse (114, 2) and Enric Mas (112, 14), while firefly3233 gets the final podium spot thanks to Mas and unique pick Nielson Powless (268 points).

This Week's High Movers

RankTeamUp/down
1Amethyst(+13)
2Googolplex(+5)
2Armchair cyclist(+5)
4firefly3323(+3)
4nbfc1962(+3)
4hfgon1(+3)

Amethyst doubles up here with a very impressive (at least for the end of the season) 13-spot leap up the standings on week 39. Armchair Cyclist also repeats on the podium, but shares 2nd with Googolplex, who moves up 5 spots overall as the other Pogacar owner.

Green Jersey Competition

RankTeamTotal
1Googolplex355
2Amethyst332
3Jakob747324
4JumboVismaFan243
5shalgo229

Some real action at the top here at the end of the season! Amethyst parlays 45 points on the week into 232 overall, which would have been enough to go into 1st by 3 points if Googolplex hadn't scored any. But of course, if only 2 teams have Pogacar, the other one can't be far behind on a week where Pogi-based scoring wins the week. Googolplex picks up 26 points for 4th on the week to hold onto the lead. Intriguingly, Jakob747 scored 18 points for 7th on the week, and is not far back in 3rd place.

So with one week to go, Amethyst needs 24 points (4th place on the week or better) and Jakob747 needs 32 points (2nd place on the week or better) to take the lead. There's a slim path, but it's still mathematically possible. Without looking at the lineups of each of those teams yet, I'm not sure how feasible it is, but the end of season China and Italy races are definitely opportunities for rare CQ picks to get surprising results for end-of-season points. So we shall see!

Top 10 Overall

RankUp/downTeamPoints
1(-)shalgo16257
2(+1)Squire14580
3(-1)EvansIsTheBest14536
4(-)Earns198514416
5(+1)MADRAZO14397
6(-1)Salvarani14376
7(-)JumboVismaFan14343
8(-)Gotland14338
9(+1)HoudiniCycling14243
10(-1)adamski10114021

Topline news here of course is that Squire gains 15 points on shalgo, meaning that there are only 1677 to make up in the final week. I'm sure that might be mathematically possible if one got the top 10 spots in China, Japan, and both Italy races, but in the world of reality it's a done deal that we'll fete next week.

For real though, Squire does outscore EvansIsTheBest to move into 2nd by 44 points with one week left. EITB does have a 120 point lead on Earns1985, but like I said in the Green Jersey section, there are often weird results with rare riders in the final week. Even more intriguing is that less than 80 points separate 4th from 8th, so there could be some mixup in the final week.

Nobody moves in and out of the top 10, and 11th place Hugo Koblet is 168 out of 10th so will need a good week to break in.

The last week of the season is upon us! All that is left is the Tour of Guangxi, Japan Cup, Giro de Veneto and Veneto Classic, and that's it for the year! Thanks everyone, enjoy the last week.

spreadsheet link
 
I wanted to check something from the first pages of this thread and saw this (about Baudin, who has been an excellent pick, but ended up unpicked!):

Riders can be DQ'ed for many different reasons. There are immediate ones like Sagan (TdF '17), Valverde (Liège '12), Moscon (WCRR '17) and Nibali (VaE '15), but I guess those are not the ones in mind. Still, getting retroactively DQ'ed without any suspension for violating the medical rules (Baudin and Quintana) does not seem that different to the immediate ones to me. If Quintana had been thrown out of the Tour two days after he "tested positive", and then immediately raced somewhere else, would that not be more or less equivalent to Nibali's DQ?

The line is much clearer when riders have to have been suspended, like Groenewegen was. But this too is not fully spelled out. Filip Maciejuk was picked twice this year, but I don't know if his price would have been different if his 2022 score had been higher than his 2023 score, as he was suspended for one month after Ronde '23.

With the introduction of yellow cards and short suspensions as a result next year, will such suspensions be treated as doping bans in the 2026 game?

@skidmark
Yeah in my original comment I kicked the can down the road saying I'd 'have to think about it', but I forgot about that conversation so I haven't thought about it, so I guess now's the time.

I do think of Quintana's DQ as quite different from, say, Nibali or Moscon. For one, even though it wasn't technically a doping violation, it was related to taking a substance outside UCI rules. So the overlap with doping - the thing that has affected riders' eligibility for the CQ game since 2012 - is more than incidental. Whereas holding onto a car is more in the 'against UCI rules for doing something in a race' vein, like riding on a bike path or throwing a water bottle outside of designated zone or whatever. Second, and I think more relevant to the CQ game, the nature of detecting substances makes the effect on points different. Sure, Quintana could have raced soon after his DQ and gotten some points and it 'would have been like Nibali' in that way, but in another way he raced 21 days and accumulated a bunch of points that were erased from his total cost in the game. So he wasn't getting those 21 days back to accumulate equivalent points (not to mention that no race has as many points as the TDF), whereas Nibali was DQ'd on stage 2 and lost no points and Moscon was DQ'd in a 1-day race. So both of those guys could get back to scoring points without losing any time or energy, whereas Quintana lost 21 days retrospectively.

The only exception I (believe) I have made for non-doping-adjacent behaviour was Groenewegen after 2020, just because the severity of Jakobsen's injuries made it feel distasteful to offer game participants the pressure to be incentivized to choose him at a discount. Plus the length of his suspension was longer than most non-ADRV related suspensions, so his was a rather singular case in terms of how it affected the game. If I'd run the game when Theo Bos got suspended for what he did to Darryl Impey (right? going by memory here), I probably would have done the same.

I don't think I see suspending someone for a yellow card type violation affecting the CQ game score. The spirit and intent of that rule as Hugo Koblet created it was to eliminate the similar tension that some fans found distasteful, of being incentivized to pick a doper. My sense is that the temperature has gone down on that moral disgust in general post-Armstrong suspension, so that is maybe not as much of a consideration as it was in the early 2010s when this game was formed. Either way, someone being suspended for doping for significant parts of a season can impact this game to a decent degree.

Anyway, maybe I have to tweak it to be a suspension of over, like, three months. That might cover edge cases. But I'm open to - and interested in -feedback.

(also, what the hell to do about Robert Stannard? UCI rules in 2024 he loses all his results from 2018-2022, but all his CQ points are still there? Yeesh. Might just make him cost his most expensive year)
 
Yeah in my original comment I kicked the can down the road saying I'd 'have to think about it', but I forgot about that conversation so I haven't thought about it, so I guess now's the time.

I do think of Quintana's DQ as quite different from, say, Nibali or Moscon. For one, even though it wasn't technically a doping violation, it was related to taking a substance outside UCI rules. So the overlap with doping - the thing that has affected riders' eligibility for the CQ game since 2012 - is more than incidental. Whereas holding onto a car is more in the 'against UCI rules for doing something in a race' vein, like riding on a bike path or throwing a water bottle outside of designated zone or whatever. Second, and I think more relevant to the CQ game, the nature of detecting substances makes the effect on points different. Sure, Quintana could have raced soon after his DQ and gotten some points and it 'would have been like Nibali' in that way, but in another way he raced 21 days and accumulated a bunch of points that were erased from his total cost in the game. So he wasn't getting those 21 days back to accumulate equivalent points (not to mention that no race has as many points as the TDF), whereas Nibali was DQ'd on stage 2 and lost no points and Moscon was DQ'd in a 1-day race. So both of those guys could get back to scoring points without losing any time or energy, whereas Quintana lost 21 days retrospectively.

The only exception I (believe) I have made for non-doping-adjacent behaviour was Groenewegen after 2020, just because the severity of Jakobsen's injuries made it feel distasteful to offer game participants the pressure to be incentivized to choose him at a discount. Plus the length of his suspension was longer than most non-ADRV related suspensions, so his was a rather singular case in terms of how it affected the game. If I'd run the game when Theo Bos got suspended for what he did to Darryl Impey (right? going by memory here), I probably would have done the same.

I don't think I see suspending someone for a yellow card type violation affecting the CQ game score. The spirit and intent of that rule as Hugo Koblet created it was to eliminate the similar tension that some fans found distasteful, of being incentivized to pick a doper. My sense is that the temperature has gone down on that moral disgust in general post-Armstrong suspension, so that is maybe not as much of a consideration as it was in the early 2010s when this game was formed. Either way, someone being suspended for doping for significant parts of a season can impact this game to a decent degree.

Anyway, maybe I have to tweak it to be a suspension of over, like, three months. That might cover edge cases. But I'm open to - and interested in -feedback.

(also, what the hell to do about Robert Stannard? UCI rules in 2024 he loses all his results from 2018-2022, but all his CQ points are still there? Yeesh. Might just make him cost his most expensive year)
I see no similarities at all between Nibali and Quintana. Getting thrown out of a race happens all the time. Tarling in Roubaix for example, or Sagan in the 2017 Tour. Quintana first got points, then had them taken away post-race due to a doping violation. I can't think of any other types of violations where you are stripped of results a significant amount of time after the race. Any other relegations/DQs happen pretty much instantly. And I agree with you that the spirit of the rule is to affect doping cases (and other 'morally problematic' things as you mention). In any case, Quintana was a non-factor in the game anyway following that DQ. And I agree with not making any weird rule exceptions to have him not be available for 50 points for this season.

I also agree that what you did with Groenewegen was the right call, and that Bos probably would have been as well. However, those are very rare cases and I don't think the rules need to be re-written to accomodate such cases. Although 'being suspended by the UCI' covers basically everything anyway, doesn't it? Or has there been cases where a rider suspended by the UCI for something non-doping related was available for his suspension-affected reduced cost?

The TL;DR is basically that I agree with all your decisions.

As for Stannard, isn't that quite a clear-cut case? The CQ website is 'the law' as far as this game is concerned, and going by our rule, he should cost 367 points due to having been suspended (like, actually suspended) for parts of 2023 and 2024. I doubt CQ will strip his results from previous years. They haven't even done so with Armstrong, for example. But if they do with Stannard, I guess we need another discussion then.
 
As Stannard was provisionally suspended in both 2023 and 2024 (from August to June), I think the usual treatment would be that his cost is his 2022 score (which is also his highest scoring year at 367 points) even if he had scored higher in 2020.

I think you only need to consider the years 2018-2022 if CQ changes his score those years. If he loses all results in the period retroactively, his highest score would be 119 points from 2018. I don't know if the cost of a doper has ever been the original highest score before results have been changed.

Roson did get his results (and CQ score) changed, and he ended up costing his 2016 score (178), despite originally earning more points in 2017 (523):
Therefore, you can pick any rider you like, but if you want to take Jaime Roson, for example (his suspension ends in 2022), he got 0 points in 2017-2021 due to his suspension and backdated annulment of results. His suspension dates back to 2017, meaning his last 'full' season was 2016, in which he scored 178 points. The length of suspensions (and relatively low profile of positive athletes) means that hopefully the complicated rules around doping won’t be an issue this season.
That's very much in line with the default cost being the official CQ score (for the right year):
Therefore, you can pick any rider you like, but if you want to take Matteo Rabottini, for example, he won't cost the 0 points he earned in 2015 (he was suspended all year). His suspension began in 2014 so his last 'full' season was 2013, in which he scored 189 points. However, since he scored more in his 'partial' 2014 season, his cost is instead the 507 points he scored in that season. (note: in this case, CQ seems to not have nullified his results after August 7th, as he picked up points later on. Regardless, CQ's database is the ultimate arbeiter of points.)
This was also the case for Contador, who originally scored 2373 points in 2011, but who was stripped of results and points when he was banned, so his cost for the 2013 game was his 2009 score (2272 points).
 
I see no similarities at all between Nibali and Quintana. Getting thrown out of a race happens all the time. Tarling in Roubaix for example, or Sagan in the 2017 Tour. Quintana first got points, then had them taken away post-race due to a doping violation. I can't think of any other types of violations where you are stripped of results a significant amount of time after the race. Any other relegations/DQs happen pretty much instantly. And I agree with you that the spirit of the rule is to affect doping cases (and other 'morally problematic' things as you mention). In any case, Quintana was a non-factor in the game anyway following that DQ. And I agree with not making any weird rule exceptions to have him not be available for 50 points for this season.

I also agree that what you did with Groenewegen was the right call, and that Bos probably would have been as well. However, those are very rare cases and I don't think the rules need to be re-written to accomodate such cases. Although 'being suspended by the UCI' covers basically everything anyway, doesn't it? Or has there been cases where a rider suspended by the UCI for something non-doping related was available for his suspension-affected reduced cost?

The TL;DR is basically that I agree with all your decisions.

As for Stannard, isn't that quite a clear-cut case? The CQ website is 'the law' as far as this game is concerned, and going by our rule, he should cost 367 points due to having been suspended (like, actually suspended) for parts of 2023 and 2024. I doubt CQ will strip his results from previous years. They haven't even done so with Armstrong, for example. But if they do with Stannard, I guess we need another discussion then.
I'm not sure if I understand you right. You think Quintana's DQ was a doping violation, but you agree with the decision not to handle it as a doping case? (The same was the case for Baudin, also treated as a non-doping case).

In the future, riders can get suspended for up to 30 days from yellow cards, and that could see riders available for a suspension-affected reduced cost. Which was why I brought it up.
 
I'm not sure if I understand you right. You think Quintana's DQ was a doping violation, but you agree with the decision not to handle it as a doping case? (The same was the case for Baudin, also treated as a non-doping case).

In the future, riders can get suspended for up to 30 days from yellow cards, and that could see riders available for a suspension-affected reduced cost. Which was why I brought it up.
Oh, I was under the impression that he was made to cost 758 due to the 'medical violation' and subsequent DQ. Which I would have agreed would be sort of in keeping with the 'spirit' of the rule. But turns out he wasn't. However, I also don't really have a huge problem with him costing 665, considering he wasn't suspended for any period. I do see it as quite different from a normal race DQ though.

I misunderstood the discussion there.

The yellow card situation could indeed be a bit tricky. But at least in most cases it would be very short suspensions and it won't be for particularly 'morally egregious' things. It could start getting a bit silly in terms of this game if some rider racks up multiple yellow card suspensions in one season however, and ends up being much cheaper because of it. But then I guess anyone that picks him would do so with the risk of him continuing that trend.
 
In other news, today might be the most important day for mine and @EvansIsTheBest's battle for second place. If Laurance doesn't get a huge result, it's pretty much over for EITB I think. But with two suitable 1.Pro races for him to score big in if he has the form, there's definitely a Laurance shaped road to 2nd place for EITB. It's of course also dependent on Poole/Onley/Plapp not doing much for me in Guangxi, but as Laurance is the key, today is kinda D-day.

Edit: Nevermind, my brain is not functioning today. :tearsofjoy: Despite me thinking it was the case for ages, EITB appears to not have Laurance in his team. It's MADRAZO who has him (and also Shalgo). And MADRAZO is a bit too far back. So now I feel very secure in my 2nd place.

I'm also liking how the final week of the game is quite a big one, and that we won't have one of those drawn out 'waiting-for-one-1.1-race-to-be-ridden-two-weeks-after-all-other-races' kinda finish.
 
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In other news, today might be the most important day for mine and @EvansIsTheBest's battle for second place. If Laurance doesn't get a huge result, it's pretty much over for EITB I think. But with two suitable 1.Pro races for him to score big in if he has the form, there's definitely a Laurance shaped road to 2nd place for EITB. It's of course also dependent on Poole/Onley/Plapp not doing much for me in Guangxi, but as Laurance is the key, today is kinda D-day.

Edit: Nevermind, my brain is not functioning today. :tearsofjoy: Despite me thinking it was the case for ages, EITB appears to not have Laurance in his team. It's MADRAZO who has him (and also Shalgo). And MADRAZO is a bit too far back. So now I feel very secure in my 2nd place.

I'm also liking how the final week of the game is quite a big one, and that we won't have one of those drawn out 'waiting-for-one-1.1-race-to-be-ridden-two-weeks-after-all-other-races' kinda finish.
Can confirm I only pick Laurance in seasons where he sucks. A bit rude to celebrate finishing in second place when Bruttomesso slashed 7 whole points off your lead today. He'll reel you in before the end of the week.
 
Can confirm I only pick Laurance in seasons where he sucks. A bit rude to celebrate finishing in second place when Bruttomesso slashed 7 whole points off your lead today. He'll reel you in before the end of the week.
I did notice Bruttomesso! :D

At least you're leading the Guangxi battle between our teams at the moment. If Bruttomesso ends up being the rider propelling your team into 2nd place after having scored only 30 points until this race, I'll take my hat off for your exceptional foresight, and I won't even be mad.
 
I'll update the website again before TDU in 2025 then for sure! Will need to remember to send my own team in though. At least I'll definitely do better than this year ... I won't select a retired rider for instance !

(If someone can tag me early next year... I'll be grateful. I regularly check the clinic so I'll see the notification)
@Shakes Just to offer my reflections on the website - I think it's great, thanks for putting it up. I didn't go on it too much myself, but in the earlier days of this game I certainly would have (when I had more time to obsess). But as game host, I like it for a variety of reasons. For one, it allows people to engage with the game as frequently as they like. For two, I think that engagement is probably likely to drive even more conversation on this thread. For three, it takes the pressure off me to provide updates quite as urgently, as there are some weeks where it's quite hard for me to get it done the day the CQ download is posted. And for four, to me it feels to be enhancing and complementary to the updates - like, I feel like what I write up weekly has value as a narrative summary of the week, and without having the restrictive bottleneck of being the only source of stats for the week, that has made me think of the updates in a bit of a different light actually.

Anyway, glad to hear it'll come back next year!
 
@Shakes Just to offer my reflections on the website - I think it's great, thanks for putting it up. I didn't go on it too much myself, but in the earlier days of this game I certainly would have (when I had more time to obsess). But as game host, I like it for a variety of reasons. For one, it allows people to engage with the game as frequently as they like. For two, I think that engagement is probably likely to drive even more conversation on this thread. For three, it takes the pressure off me to provide updates quite as urgently, as there are some weeks where it's quite hard for me to get it done the day the CQ download is posted. And for four, to me it feels to be enhancing and complementary to the updates - like, I feel like what I write up weekly has value as a narrative summary of the week, and without having the restrictive bottleneck of being the only source of stats for the week, that has made me think of the updates in a bit of a different light actually.

Anyway, glad to hear it'll come back next year!
For next year: but if you want I can probably get an export function with data you need. Of any given date you want. Not sure if helpful for your updates but if so, let me know.
 
I also agree that what you did with Groenewegen was the right call, and that Bos probably would have been as well. However, those are very rare cases and I don't think the rules need to be re-written to accomodate such cases. Although 'being suspended by the UCI' covers basically everything anyway, doesn't it? Or has there been cases where a rider suspended by the UCI for something non-doping related was available for his suspension-affected reduced cost?

The TL;DR is basically that I agree with all your decisions.

As for Stannard, isn't that quite a clear-cut case? The CQ website is 'the law' as far as this game is concerned, and going by our rule, he should cost 367 points due to having been suspended (like, actually suspended) for parts of 2023 and 2024. I doubt CQ will strip his results from previous years. They haven't even done so with Armstrong, for example. But if they do with Stannard, I guess we need another discussion then.
Yeah I think what I was getting at was that Groenewegen and Bos are two rare exceptions I can think of that I'd consider for the doping price rule as applied to clearly non-doping suspensions. Both of those cases were serious enough to be viscerally upsetting, and felt weird to have to revisit/calculate those feelings in the context of this numbers-based game. But also, they were the only non-doping suspensions I can think of that were longer than like a race or two. So what I was getting at was that maybe I could just make a rule that if someone is suspended for more than a couple of months in a year, they'd be ineligible at that year's cost. That would cover virtually all doping violations, and it's likely the non-doping suspensions would be only the most serious racing incidents that would probably cause me to make an exception anyway.

Of course someone could miss time due to an investigation and later be cleared (Sergio Henao is the only example I can think of atm that was relevant to this game), but whatever, that'll just happen sometimes.
As Stannard was provisionally suspended in both 2023 and 2024 (from August to June), I think the usual treatment would be that his cost is his 2022 score (which is also his highest scoring year at 367 points) even if he had scored higher in 2020.

I think you only need to consider the years 2018-2022 if CQ changes his score those years. If he loses all results in the period retroactively, his highest score would be 119 points from 2018. I don't know if the cost of a doper has ever been the original highest score before results have been changed.

Roson did get his results (and CQ score) changed, and he ended up costing his 2016 score (178), despite originally earning more points in 2017 (523):

That's very much in line with the default cost being the official CQ score (for the right year):

This was also the case for Contador, who originally scored 2373 points in 2011, but who was stripped of results and points when he was banned, so his cost for the 2013 game was his 2009 score (2272 points).
Thanks for digging up all those examples from former games, that's helpful. And yeah for Stannard I just blanked because I was reading his CQ page which said in 2024 he was retroactively suspended from 2018-22, so I thought by a strict reading he'd be available at 2023 price (or 2024 price). But I forgot he was provisionally suspended - they just moved the official suspension to dates outside of the provisional suspension. That may be confusing for some as that's not usually the case, and kind of falls through the cracks of the game rules as usually it's provisionally suspended riders at the start of the current CQ game year that aren't available for selection at all, and riders formally suspended last year aren't available for last year's price. But in 2025 he'll be neither, so I'll have to flag that explicitly.
 
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For next year: but if you want I can probably get an export function with data you need. Of any given date you want. Not sure if helpful for your updates but if so, let me know.
That's interesting... would definitely be potentially helpful in those weird weeks where CQ doesn't have an update or gets one out on Monday with the Monday races included. At the same time, it has always been the "CQ Game" so it might be weird to shift official updates off-platform. Will have to think on that one.