The 2026 CQ Ranking Manager Thread

[Salvarani]

I have a whopping 20 teams represented in my selection.

And if you want to clash first + dev team together. It is 19.

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

Well, you might find me on this field.

There may be others as unwise as me that prevent them being unique...

 

[Squire]

I have a whopping 20 teams represented in my selection.

And if you want to clash first + dev team together. It is 19.

I have 19 teams represented, no devo teams. Not that it actually makes much difference. I guess there's the theoretical possibility that the riders can cover more simultaneous races than a real team, but that's very theoretical.

As for nationalities (I have 13 different ones), there's the theoretical 'advantage' that more riders can win their NC and not step on each others' toes, but I think I once had it pointed out to me when I speculated that my many nationalities could net me a good score in nationals week that RHD won that week the year before. But there are a couple of NC related considerations I have made this year which might have slightly influenced some picks. Guess I'll say more about that after the reveal.

 

[DJ Sprtsch]

Anyone want to bet on how many unique picks they'll have?

I usually have two or three. This year I almost picked a guy from Uganda, just for the laughs: Jordan Schleck Ssekanwagi.
But in the end I went boring and played it safe(r).

 

[Panda Claws]

I usually have two or three. This year I almost picked a guy from Uganda, just for the laughs: Jordan Schleck Ssekanwagi.
But in the end I went boring and played it safe(r).

I always want to pick guys like that and then I look at their team and see they've never had anyone score above a 100 points.

Last year there was one incredible pick in Alexander Salby who had a transfer to the Chinese circuit and went on to dominate. I spent some time looking for similar situations but stopped when I couldn't find a single other example.

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

I always want to pick guys like that and then I look at their team and see they've never had anyone score above a 100 points.

Last year there was one incredible pick in Alexander Salby who had a transfer to the Chinese circuit and went on to dominate. I spent some time looking for similar situations but stopped when I couldn't find a single other example.

If you had noticed George Jackson you might have thought it worth looking a bit more?

 

[Squire]

Last year there was one incredible pick in Alexander Salby who had a transfer to the Chinese circuit and went on to dominate. I spent some time looking for similar situations but stopped when I couldn't find a single other example.

There is actually one very similar case this year, who could be a legitimately really good pick. He was one of the more unconventional possible picks I alluded to in an earlier post. He is probably going to be on a handful of teams. But like DJ Sprtsch I ended up playing it safe(r).

 

[Panda Claws]

If you had noticed George Jackson you might have thought it worth looking a bit more?

I only looked into Chinese teams specifically. I know Jackson though. Picked him last year to no avail.

Haven't found anyone similar this year I think so will be happy to be surprised.

 

[Squire]

If you had noticed George Jackson you might have thought it worth looking a bit more?

His new team seems to be racing in North America, where there's very few points available. No Asian results for any of their riders over the last few years.

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

His new team seems to be racing in North America, where there's very few points available. No Asian results for any of their riders over the last few years.

I didn't mean Jackson himself for this year: I thought Panda was saying that Salby's Asian point farming was unique, therefore not worth looking for a successor in that role.

 

[Devil's Elbow]

There is actually one very similar case this year, who could be a legitimately really good pick. He was one of the more unconventional possible picks I alluded to in an earlier post. He is probably going to be on a handful of teams. But like DJ Sprtsch I ended up playing it safe(r).

If you're talking about the rider I think you are, I almost took him and I was kind of expecting you to have him given that you've had your share of riders on Asian teams in the past.

 

[Squire]

If you're talking about the rider I think you are, I almost took him and I was kind of expecting you to have him given that you've had your share of riders on Asian teams in the past.

Yes, I was very tempted. Carstensen, who is a lot less of an accomplished rider than this guy, was pretty good for my CQ team a few years back and Brenton Jones got a lot of exotic sprint points for me one year too, so I definitely have history as you say.

But in the end I felt it was a bit too risky banking on a big score in a few races like Tour of Taihu and then a lot of accumulated points from smaller races. It's mostly Taihu where the big points are for sprinters, cuz the 2.1 Thai tour that Salby won last year doesn't always seem to be for a sprinter. And while there has been a bump in category of some Asian races, I'm not sure about the routes for most of them. And most of the buffed ones are in China, and the team in question might not actually do that many Chinese races.

Salby's new teammate at Li Ning Star is another one I was tempted by, but I don't know how all-in he'll be as a cyclist anymore.

On a different note, I unfortunately won't be around for much discussion tonight, so I'll enjoy people's musings with my morning Monster tomorrow.

 

[Samu Cuenca]

I have picked a couple of riders from Asian teams following my good experience with Taaramäe last year (I would have won the game easily if all my other riders had also quadrupled their points score).

 

[skidmark]

Okay ten minutes until reveal folks! I've made some headway into the popularity rankings and hope to be able to post at least those by an hour after midnight CET, after which I'll be busy until tomorrow. Thanks to everyone who's sent a team in!

 

[Devil's Elbow]

Let's get this show on the road, shall we?

My main takeaway from last year was that, although I finished fourth, parts of my approach were still suboptimal. I’d like to think I know what I’m doing when going from a shortlist to my actual team by now, but before this year I’ve always had my shortlist partially in my head rather than on paper. Sure, I kept a running list of more obscure picks throughout the year, but for the more expensive riders I assumed I knew who made sense and who didn’t if I just went off their PCS page. The result of that was that I didn’t take a proper look at Almeida last year, and therefore didn’t realise just how good his schedule was until after the reveals. Now I doubt I would have picked him regardless, but the fact that I didn’t have him on my shortlist tells me I didn’t do my homework properly.

So this year, I told myself that if I can spend insane amounts of time researching and writing about GT routes, I can also spend slightly less insane amounts of time compiling my longlist. The net result of that is that the full-scale research I used to put into 50 or 60 riders now went into over double that number. I didn’t find another Almeida, but I did wind up with a slightly longer shortlist than usual at 61 riders. And that list didn’t even include the likes of Pithie, Pericas, Valter and Williams who I all expect to be quite popular but didn’t really fancy for different reasons.

Among those 61 riders were the two obvious quad-digit picks in Evenepoel and Philipsen. Obviously I could have replicated last year’s overarching approach and gone for both, but I had already arrived at the conclusion that that was a bad idea when a) the 200-to-400 range is as stacked as it was depleted last year and b) there is a lack of good cheap options courtesy of, above all else, most of the best 2006 riders being either very expensive or still not turning pro. I did really want Evenepoel at first – I think he can score somewhere between 3500 and 4000 points with an uninterrupted preparation and season, which is normally worth it at his price – but after seeing who I would have to leave out to take him, I became certain that there were going to be teams who were going to manage more than a 100% profit on the three to six mid-range riders you can spend almost 2000 points on instead. In other words, I think that while you can do very well with a team containing Evenepoel, it’s going to be really hard to win with him. And so, I settled on going for a more egalitarian approach for the first time since 2022 – and even then, the choices were still really painful.

And because of those painful choices, I do want to talk about who I really wanted but couldn’t take, and therefore will borrow Squire’s style of listing my actual team in bold and the riders I almost picked in italics. I figure that anyone who’s read 500 words of me waffling about my process won’t mind the additional post length, so here goes:

Paul Seixas (661) – On the one hand it feels insane to take a teenager as my most expensive pick, but on the other hand, if there’s one thing that this era has taught me, it’s that backing the supertalents to the hilt until they become crazily expensive is usually a good idea. Continuing to go for Pogacar continued to be worth it in 2020 and even 2021, Vingegaard was still a good pick in 2022, and the more analogous Evenepoel would have been a musthave in 2020 had he not had that horrible crash in Lombardia before actually being that musthave the first year he wasn’t suffering from that crash anymore. My thinking is that if Seixas is more or less at the level he was at in the last few months of last season and couples that with a more extensive schedule (as he seems to be doing), he will already be quite a good pick, and then if he takes another step up (which would not be a surprise) he could easily turn into a decisive one. The only drawback is that the Tour seems more likely than the Vuelta.

Ben O’Connor (563) – Obviously I’m not expecting him to come close to his 2024 score, but outpacing his 2021-2023 baseline by a little bit would already make him worth it and he had his slice of bad luck in the latter two of those years. His schedule also just looks really tasty – he’s doing the full Australian summer, leading Jayco everywhere, and then a likely return to the Giro is something I was quite happy to see. Finally, based on an interview with another Jayco rider I’ll be getting to, it seems that the team want to start focusing on points this year already so that they don’t get sucked into a relegation battle come 2028. Overall, it’s a cocktail that should put him back into the quad digits if he doesn’t have the illness niggles he had this season.

Enric Mas (560) – Probably the most scared I’ve ever been to leave someone off my team. Going Giro-Vuelta in a year where he’s this cheap means that he really should be doubling his tally under normal circumstances. The problem is that these aren’t normal circumstances, and the injury he’s returning from is nasty enough that it could really impact the first part of his season in particular. That makes him a little bit less safe than the alternatives. I still would have taken him had I found a good way to free up the budget to take out Küng in his favour, but, well, I didn’t.

Albert Withen Philipsen (459) – Pretty similar considerations to Seixas for obvious reasons. Any rider who can podium both Varesine and Tours at a cost of less than 500 points is worth having a look at, let alone when he’s 19. I think he won’t have quite as much freedom as his French counterpart, but on the other hand he’s 200 points cheaper and definitely won’t be doing the Tour, so arguably he’s the safer of the two.

Stefan Küng (433) – Got pretty unlucky last spring with the last-minute catch at Omloop and a bad crash in Roubaix. According to himself, said crash impacted him for the rest of the season (and then another crash kept him out of the Nationals and the Tour), but he’s recovered now. In addition to that, the Worlds TT actually suiting the time trialists again this year basically amounts to a ‘free’ gain of 50-100 points. Tudor have also supposedly invested in their TT setup this winter. While there’s a chance that he’s past his best (I don’t think he is – aside from the two classics where he got unlucky, he made the top-10 every single time), the most likely outcome is him cracking 900 points again like he did every year between 2021 and 2024.

Thibau Nys (423) – He was a bit of a frustrating pick last year, having an offday at Frankfurt when he was the out-and-out favourite, getting sick in a Tour of Belgium he probably would have won, and then never really recovering after that (he really should have been taken off the Tour startlist in my book). I still see no reason why he can’t be a quad-digit rider at minimum even with a relatively limited schedule, and his CX results suggest he’s only continued to improve. Definitely one of the first ten riders on my list.

Maxim Van Gils (362) – Speaking of Belgian Ardennes specialists who were among the first ten riders on the team sheet, here’s someone who should be near the top of the popularity rankings courtesy of an endless stream of bad luck last year. I don’t think I need to elaborate on this one.

Joshua Tarling (328) – I had him in my team for most of the process, but wound up taking him out for Gaudu on the final evening because I needed the 13 points to help me get rid of Jakobsen. With him having missed four months last year and the Worlds TT going from mountainous to flat, his floor is pretty high. However, to turn from a solid pick to one that I really don’t want to miss out on, he’s going to have to score serious points in the classics, and while he showed signs of ability in 2024 he was rather anonymous off the TT bike in 2025 even when healthy, so I’m not convinced that he will. I’m also sceptical as to him riding both the Euros and Chrono des Nations again if he’s going to Canada right beforehand, which would partially negate the effect of the latter.

David Gaudu (315) – While he hasn’t said this openly, from the way he’s analysed his season it basically sounds like he/the team kept trying to rush himself back into races after injury without having done enough training to actually have his legs back. The one race he did before getting injured (Oman) and those two days at the Vuelta suggest that he still has the ability. In a lot of ways, he’s like Küng – I’m not certain that he’s going to bounce back which is why he’s more of a borderline pick, but it’s more probable than not that he does, and like with Küng a return to his baseline is more than enough to make him worth it.

Lennert Van Eetvelt (302) – Even when he scored 999 points in 2024, he had quite a lot of bad luck. While I’m not that confident in him having a clean run and blowing past that score, as he is surely capable of doing, at this price he is an obligatory pick.

Matej Mohoric (290) – From his interviews it seems that his training approach last winter was simply wrong, and then getting sick at the wrong moment not once, but twice meant that he was never really at the races in the spring. A return to normalcy should be plenty from a CQ perspective.

Christophe Laporte (273) – It really feels like every candidate for most common pick of the year is either Belgian or French, doesn’t it? The last few weeks of his season were very much vintage Laporte, to the point where going back to being a top-5-in-the-world cobbles rider is a real possibility. And even if that proves to be a bridge too far, he should be a very good pick.

Benoit Cosnefroy (268) – It seems like UAE intend to go full Hirschi with him, which makes him my number one candidate for best pick of 2026.

Carlos Rodriguez (262) – Yes, he was arguably stagnating a bit even before that, but pretty much all of his 2025 can be explained by injuries. Geraint Thomas says that he’s recovered, so really there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be a good pick at bare minimum.

Léo Bisiaux (246) – GC talents who’ve had the kind of neopro season he’s just managed have generally been good picks in their second season of late – Onley, Poole and Riccitello come to mind. However, it does remain the case that there was really only the one day in Burgos where he wowed (admittedly he did get sick twice), and with his CX season (which is going rather poorly) limiting the length of a road campaign which seems set to be very WT-heavy once more I feel like he has a lot less room for error than those three did. I was still very close to taking him, but wound up giving him the boot the evening before the deadline.

Jarno Widar (245) – I wasn’t quite as wowed by his 2025 as I thought possible twelve months ago, but it was still enough to reaffirm that he’s a big talent indeed. He’s been announced for quite a few big races, but given that Lotto have been patient with developing him and the start of a new promotion/relegation cycle there should be enough easier races for him to score in even if his progress winds up being slower than expected.

Luke Lamperti (245) – Between him, Van den Berg, Mihkels and Hobbs, EF rather unusually have four sprinters who are all at least somewhat interesting, but that does make me think there’s going to be some double-bunking. That put me off the other three, but Lamperti was just too tempting – young, proven that he’s good enough to turn the profit he needs to, and with plenty of untapped potential courtesy of Quickstep using him as a leadout far too often in 2025 in particular. Him being the team’s sole sprinter Down Under suggests he starts high enough up in the hierarchy.

Kevin Vermaerke (219) – Proved that he can score a lot of points, then got screwed by an array of bad luck which means his price is way down. Matxin is on record as saying they want to have him winning races and riders of his profile tend to score pretty heavily at UAE, so I was pretty confident in picking him.

Max Poole (215) – Even when he scored 600 points in 2024, he didn’t exactly have the cleanest of runs, so in a world where he’s the clear team leader and has another two years of development under his belt, a mostly problem-free season is probably a quad-digit season. Between his track record and the lack of updates about his recovery from mono, it isn’t exactly a guarantee that 2026 will be smooth sailing for once, but his potential is far too high to even consider leaving him out.

Aleksandr Vlasov (209) – In 2024, I got burned really badly by leaving out obvious picks who didn’t have an obvious reason for their bad season (Girmay and Martínez come to mind). Vlasov is a great example of such a pick, but with him, it’s quite possible that he didn’t simply suck, but was hampered by one or multiple issues that haven’t become public because Red Bull are quite secretive and Russian rides aren’t exactly prime interview material these days. He’s not a pick that excites me in any way, but I’m not interested in trying to be clever rather than defensive with this kind of rider anymore.

Anders Foldager (203) – He is the Jayco rider I mentioned when talking about O’Connor, and in fact it sounds like the team’s plan is for him to spend most of 2026 farming points – lines like ‘I will get a lot of opportunities’ and ‘I won’t ride a lot of WT races this year’ are just exactly what you want to hear from this kind of rider. Initially I couldn’t find a way to fit him in, but putting him in instead of Bisiaux on the final evening turned out to be key to completing the puzzle. The more I think about it, the more I’m happy I went for him, and it also doesn’t hurt that he will probably be one of very few rarer picks on what is a mostly boring team.

Gerben Thijssen (192) – Christoph Roodhooft has said that they’ve signed him mainly to lead the team at the smaller races where Van der Poel and Philipsen aren’t starting. If that doesn’t sound like he’s going to score a lot of points, I don’t know what does.

Marco Brenner (191) – It was definitely good to see signs of life from him at the end of the season after his horrible Giro crash – given that he could neither walk nor use crutches for six straight weeks, I was quite impressed that he was already at that level again. I don’t think that he’s particularly close to having fulfilled his potential yet. I’m hopeful that Tudor’s new TT bike can give him a leg up in GCs in the right kinds of races as well as possibly just points from the TTs themselves, but obviously he can score as a stage-hunter and in one-day races too.

Edward Dunbar (167) – He’s way better than his cost, but it’s not an accident that he’s basically had one good race in the past two seasons. Obviously he has the potential to be a great pick and I was tinkering with combinations that did feature him for that reason, but you know in advance you’re signing up for crashes with him and that made him a little too risky in the end.

Axel Zingle (155) – Arguably the unluckiest rider of 2025. Still kicking myself for choosing against him in 2022, obviously he will be too popular to make up for that regret but hey, at least he’s finally made it onto my team.

Nils Politt (137) – All of his bad luck seemed to happen in the races where he wasn’t a pure domestique. Part of me feels that the share of said races is slowly decreasing, but his scoring potential in the classics is just too high to pass on him.

Mikkel Bjerg (137) – He has definitely slipped down the hierarchy at UAE, but if the result of that is apparently him not doing a GT and focusing more on his time-trialling and getting results in one-day races this year, then that might just be a good thing. He’s definitely a boring pick, but he should also be a good one.

Arvid de Kleijn (134) – At the start of 2025, I was wondering whether he could really start challenging the big names on a structural basis this year, and then that crash in the UAE Tour ruined everything. It will be hard to get back to his previous trajectory, but his results post-comeback are those of a man who should have no problem in being a good pick.

Pablo Torres (130) – There are two ways to go about him. On the one hand, obviously 2025 was a major disappointment and I don’t believe as much as I did twelve months ago. On the other hand, he had a lot of trouble with his knee injury and a pretty bad concussion that together compromised him for large parts of the season, and therefore it’s far too early to give up on him. Ultimately, I was really on the fence about taking him, but the final few puzzle pieces were such that it made sense to give him a second chance and now that I have, I think it was probably the better option to not cycle between shiny new toys too quickly.

Dani Martínez (121) – Probably the biggest enigma in the peloton from a CQ perspective, something that isn’t helped by him riding for Red Bull and the Colombian cycling media being the most useless on the planet. Aside from the viral infection that delayed his season start, I have zero idea why he once again had a limited schedule and disappointing results. But ultimately, he’s always been a good pick when he’s had a bad season, and this time he’s cheap enough that he doesn’t even need to outscore his previous bad seasons by that much to at least be a decent pick, so he was never in doubt this time round.

Mauri Vansevenant (113) – had some illness issues, but by his own admission those can’t explain his underwhelming season on their own. However, with Evenepoel leaving, he should be able to ride for himself in the Ardennes-type races, and he already proved in 2024 that he can score heavily in the Ardennes themselves. In other words, my trio of Flemish Ardennes types became a quartet pretty early on, and I never considered changing that.

Per Strand Hagenes (106) – The case for picking him: he has never raced more than 44 days in his career, so plenty of room to improve, and with Benoot and Van Baarle gone, he moves up in Visma’s cobbles pecking order. The case against picking him: he has never raced more than 44 days in his career, so every chance he is once again beset by fitness issues, the only time he got to ride for himself last year was after Zingle crashed out in the leader’s jersey, and he’s starting the season on domestique duty for Brennan in Australia. The latter was the last straw for me and thus I took him out of my team.

Simone Gualdi (100) – I definitely believe in his talent and he absolutely has the potential to be a very good pick this year already, but in a season with a good amount of safe options I felt it was a bit too risky to go for someone who might need a year to adapt to the WT.

Emiel Verstrynge (83) – His CX season suggests a big step up compared to twelve months ago, and rumour has it that he’s ending his winter after the Belgian championships on Saturday. However, the problem is that he did about the most CQ-hostile calendar last season, and nothing I’ve read suggests that things will be particularly different this year. Even so, there’s a good chance I would have taken him had the budget been four points higher.

Tom Crabbe (79) – But the budget is a round number, and so I went with him instead as my 33rd rider. He started the season still struggling with the effects of a crash in late 2024, but once he got going, he was getting top-10s against good opposition on the regular, and would have scored more if his best results hadn’t come in stages rather than one-day races. There are definitely good reasons against picking him – he will likely be doing some races on the track, it’s been a few years since anyone on Flanders has scored the kind of points he needs – but at the same time I feel like he’s the biggest talent his team has had in quite some time, and I fully expect to see a WT side pick him up at the end of the year.

Markel Beloki (76) – I was very close to taking him instead of Crabbe. A big chunk of his season was ruined by mono, then once he found his legs, he managed to do a pretty good Vuelta for a second-year U23 who wasn’t initially supposed to ride it. I could see him taking a big step up this year, but really only if that Valdezcaray ride is a good guide, and considering some of the names who finished in his group I was worried I was putting a bit too much stock into that result. Ultimately it might just be more likely that he has a similar third pro year to the one AJ August had this year, and at that point he wouldn’t be a terrible pick but also definitely not worth it.

Senna Remijn (52) – He had a grand total of two days where he got to ride for himself against the pros this season. On the first one, he managed third in a Luxembourg stage against proper opposition, and on the second he finished in the top-15 at Bernocchi. Those are seriously impressive showings for a first-year U23, and then I haven’t even talked about his U23 results. With Alpecin’s lineup as thin as it is, he should be getting plenty of opportunities. The only concern I have is that he’s having a pretty underwhelming CX season off the back of a muscle injury, which makes me think he might have a slow start to his road season.

Andreas Kron (50) – A very annoying pick to have this season, but in retrospect it was mostly for circumstances beyond his control. He spent half the year struggling with back issues contracted at the 2024 Vuelta, then once they figured out these were being caused by a hip problem and he finally started to look decent again, he broke his sacrum and that was the end of his year. Obviously I don’t trust his fitness too much after the last two years, but I’m confident his ability is still there and if he can stay healthy for more than a couple of weeks this time, he should do well for a rider in this price range.

Lionel Taminiaux (42) – A bit of a lame choice, but ultimately I do think that he is a sensible cheap pick in a year with a lack of sensible cheap picks. The collapsed lung and broken rib sustained in De Panne really hampered him last year, and when he finally got going again his schedule was limited to kermesses (where he did well) and non-sprinter-friendly UCI races. Him being Lotto’s only sprint option in their Down Under lineup suggests he will have plenty of opportunities, and a healthy Taminiaux riding for himself should be able to get anywhere between 200 and 500 points. In fact, with some stage points and a good Surf Coast Classic, he could already be into profit by the time he leaves Australia.

Pierre Barbier (41) – I really considered taking him instead of Taminiaux, or keeping Tarling and taking him instead of Crabbe. I see the possibility of him being this year’s Salby, with him stating he will be racing from January to October and all that, but he’s also said that the heat doesn’t particularly suit him, which increases the possibility of this Terengganu adventure ending in failure. I legitimately hope somebody has him.

Matthew Dinham (25) – Obviously it’s a risk taking someone who has been away from the bike for as long as he has, but his comeback in Langkawi was actually surprisingly good for someone who’s had so much to recover from. He’s supposedly been training all winter, which makes me hopeful that he can have a strong Aussie summer, and then with Onley and Bardet gone and Van den Broek switching focus to the classics Picnic have so few climbers left that any sort of form should put him decently far up in the hierarchy.

Fabio Jakobsen (11) – yes, he’s said that he feels like the blood circulation in his legs is back to normal, but I’ve been following cycling long enough to know that the chances of iliac artery issues returning are pretty high. It isn’t that unlikely that he really starts to perform again, but my gut feeling is that he’s done, and so I was happy to be able to take him out of my lineup late in the process.

Pelayo Sánchez (5) – I had him as an ultra-rare pick one year too early in 2022, so part of me had been hoping an opportunity to give him another go would open up at some point. Can’t say that getting him for practically nothing off the back of a season destroyed by illness is the way I expected or wanted that to happen, but when he says he’s fully recovered, who am I to pass on him?

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

I think we are at the appropriate hour.

A couple of mini polls:
Who will be the most popular pick?

How many teams (out of ninety-something) will have Evenepoel?

 

[MADRAZO]

My team with a few thoughts:



SEIXAS Paul 661

Im ashamed I skipped him last year astoo young. Could not miss out again and should get a lot more races to score this year, would also expect him to be quite popular

UIJTDEBROEKS Cian 614

Missed most of the season last year and looks to be free from his problems and will be leader in all races, should be a solid pick

WITHEN PHILIPSEN Albert 459

Another young guy thats a bit expensive already, and not sure what to expectexactly but still a monstertalent with huge potential in many races thats likely to improve a lot so had to get a chance

LANDA MEANA Mikel 433

They cant be young all of them and he missed a lot of last season and has not really started a age-decline yet and still has lots of ambition and will get a lot of leadership next year so a solid safe pick

NYS Thibau 423

The last expensive rider to make my team and clearly some doubts about if he will ride enough races to become a good pick, but should be betterthan last year for sure and if he rides enough races in the last halfof the season after the Giro he could become a very good pick

VAN GILS Maxim 362

Certtain after his bad luck last year

TARLING Joshua 328

Was a bit in danger of losing his spotin the nd, but again a rider that missed a lot of last season andthat should be a solid pick

VAN EETVELT Lennert 302

Certain after his bad luck last year


MOHORIC Matej 290

Had skipped him as over the top most of the proces, but still sounded ambitious and not that old and had some excuses for his poor 2025, so a danger to leave out and towards the end I chickened out and added him


BLACKMORE Joseph 277

Dissapointing 2025, but still a big talent and with potential to be a very goodpick

LAPORTE Christophe 273

Most certain of all missing most of the year and regaining topform in the end of the season

COSNEFROY Benoit 268

Very certain, with his new (Hischi-like) role as captain in small races for UAE

RODRIGUEZ CANO Carlos 262

Certain after his unlucky year, still a huge talent

BISIAUX Léo 246

Big talent that ought to improve, solid pick even if I doubt it will be super

WIDAR Jarno 245

Certain, monstertalent that now finally gets to ride the big races


PITHIE Laurence 228

Dissapointingand unclucky 2025 but still a big talent that should be a solid pick, but was one of the latest to make the team

POOLE Max 215

Certain as a big talent that had a unlucky year. I hope he is over his illness, which was abit hard to find any confirmation about but did not dare leave him out

VLASOV Aleksandr 209

One of the absolute last 2 picks to better fit the points as he seems a bit over the hill and a bit locked into a helperrole in the stacked Bora-team, but did find some explanations for his poor 2025 in his foot injury and a bad winter last year which should be better this year, just as him riding the Giro and not the Tour might be good for his own chances so in the end he got a chance being so cheap compared to his usual scores

FOLDAGER Anders 203

Did not make my initial list of candidates to my team as a bit of a mediocre talent, but then I saw a interview with im sounding very optimistic about getting a lot of results from the start of the season and the whole season and getting to ride his own chances a lot so after that he got a pretty sure spot


THIJSSEN Gerben 192

Should get a lot of results in smaller races as Alpecins 3. sprinter. Solid pick


ZINGLE Axel 155

Certain after his unlucky 2025

VALTER Attila 137

Boring but solid pick changing teams to get his own chances

DE KLEIJN Arvid 134

Boring but solid pick after missing a lot of last season

TORRES ARIAS Pablo 130

Was seen as the perhaps biggest talent in the world going in to last season, so even if this year was dissapointing and UAE-leadership is hard he had to get another chance

VANSEVENANT Mauri 113

One of the last to make the team and a bit of a boring pick, but had a unlucky 2025 and should get his own chances more this year with Remco gone, and still in his best age. If he can find his Ardennes form of 2024 he should become a very good pick

HAGENES Per Strand 106

Big talent with a unlucky 2025, made him a solid safe pick

HOBBS Noah 90

One of the best U23 sprinters last year and sounds like EF believes a lot in him so he had to get a chance at the price even if its a bit unclear where he will be in the EF hierachi with 4 quite similar sprinters

REMIJN Senna 52

Huge talent and should get his own chances a lot on Alpecin

KRON Andreas Lorentz 50

Very unlucky again in 2025 but he should be over his injury problems I think and if so he will be a great pick

BEHRENS Niklas 16

Last rider to make the team, fitting the last points with Vlasov.Dissapointing but also unlucky 2025 but still young with bigpotential, especially given his late start in cycling, and then Kooij leaving might give him more chances also, so should be a solid picke ven if Im not too exited about including him

JAKOBSEN Fabio 11

Probably a waste of a spot, but I guess with the operations there are still some hope the old Jakobsen could come back. At the price I could not resist giving him one more chance.

WILLIAMS Stephen 10

Not sure how his knee-injury is going and couldnt find out, but at theprice I did not dare leave him out in case he comes back to good form

SANCHEZ MAYO Pelayo 5

Very unlucky2025 and again not sure he is over his problems, but again at the price the risk of not picking him was higher than the risk of wasting a spot




The riders that I would have liked most to include but could not fit:



Filippo Zana 237, very solid pick that could improve with Quick Step after an unlucky 2025.

Jenno Berckmoes 408, Big talent missing a lot of 2025, a very solid pick I would have liked to find room for

Jelte Krijnsen 45 – A talent scoring 10 times less last year than 2024 should be a obvious pick, but cut him in the end (together with Dunbar) mostly due to fitting the points but also due to his poor 2025 and a look at the rest of his career that really was only impressive in a few months on 2024, and then he is probably also just the type of rider that will end as helper a lot in the World Tour


Besides those these riders were the riders closest to making my team, all being included at some points:


B O'Connor or A Tiberi
E Dunbar
A August
P Ackermann (the mandatory over the hill sprinter that always tempts)
M Agostinacchio (the best 0 pointer)
M Milan
M Burgeaudeau
A Ryan

And then if I would have picked someone more expensive it would have been J Ayuso, but with so many good middlepriced riders this year and less of the good riders below 100 points I preferred not to go that way

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

My guess for most popular: Pelayo Sanchez;
my Evenesweepstake is 17

 

[Armchair Cyclist]

Let's get this show on the road, shall we?

So one of the three that I thought had a vague chance of being unique is not...

 

[escartin]

I forgot about Taaramäe last year but based upon his performances and also that of someone called Alessandro Fancellu, I have my first rider on an Asian Continental team (Japan) this year. looking at Salby's team lineup this year, I could have maybe looked at some Chinese teams in more detail as well...

 

[MADRAZO]

My guess for most popular: Pelayo Sanchez;
my Evenesweepstake is 17

I think its Laporte for sure

 

[Devil's Elbow]

Not sure how his knee-injury is going and couldnt find out, but at theprice I did not dare leave him out in case he comes back to good form

In December, his limit was short rides at a slow pace on the hometrainer and he said his injury was twice as bad as the one that previously kept him out for two seasons. I don’t think he’s going to be at the pointy end of races any time soon.

 

[EvansIsTheBest]

Let's get this show on the road, shall we?

My main takeaway from last year was that, although I finished fourth, parts of my approach were still suboptimal. I’d like to think I know what I’m doing when going from a shortlist to my actual team by now, but before this year I’ve always had my shortlist partially in my head rather than on paper. Sure, I kept a running list of more obscure picks throughout the year, but for the more expensive riders I assumed I knew who made sense and who didn’t if I just went off their PCS page. The result of that was that I didn’t take a proper look at Almeida last year, and therefore didn’t realise just how good his schedule was until after the reveals. Now I doubt I would have picked him regardless, but the fact that I didn’t have him on my shortlist tells me I didn’t do my homework properly.

So this year, I told myself that if I can spend insane amounts of time researching and writing about GT routes, I can also spend slightly less insane amounts of time compiling my longlist. The net result of that is that the full-scale research I used to put into 50 or 60 riders now went into over double that number. I didn’t find another Almeida, but I did wind up with a slightly longer shortlist than usual at 61 riders. And that list didn’t even include the likes of Pithie, Pericas, Valter and Williams who I all expect to be quite popular but didn’t really fancy for different reasons.

Among those 61 riders were the two obvious quad-digit picks in Evenepoel and Philipsen. Obviously I could have replicated last year’s overarching approach and gone for both, but I had already arrived at the conclusion that that was a bad idea when a) the 200-to-400 range is as stacked as it was depleted last year and b) there is a lack of good cheap options courtesy of, above all else, most of the best 2006 riders being either very expensive or still not turning pro. I did really want Evenepoel at first – I think he can score somewhere between 3500 and 4000 points with an uninterrupted preparation and season, which is normally worth it at his price – but after seeing who I would have to leave out to take him, I became certain that there were going to be teams who were going to manage more than a 100% profit on the three to six mid-range riders you can spend almost 2000 points on instead. In other words, I think that while you can do very well with a team containing Evenepoel, it’s going to be really hard to win with him. And so, I settled on going for a more egalitarian approach for the first time since 2022 – and even then, the choices were still really painful.

And because of those painful choices, I do want to talk about who I really wanted but couldn’t take, and therefore will borrow Squire’s style of listing my actual team in bold and the riders I almost picked in italics. I figure that anyone who’s read 500 words of me waffling about my process won’t mind the additional post length, so here goes:

Paul Seixas (661) – On the one hand it feels insane to take a teenager as my most expensive pick, but on the other hand, if there’s one thing that this era has taught me, it’s that backing the supertalents to the hilt until they become crazily expensive is usually a good idea. Continuing to go for Pogacar continued to be worth it in 2020 and even 2021, Vingegaard was still a good pick in 2022, and the more analogous Evenepoel would have been a musthave in 2020 had he not had that horrible crash in Lombardia before actually being that musthave the first year he wasn’t suffering from that crash anymore. My thinking is that if Seixas is more or less at the level he was at in the last few months of last season and couples that with a more extensive schedule (as he seems to be doing), he will already be quite a good pick, and then if he takes another step up (which would not be a surprise) he could easily turn into a decisive one. The only drawback is that the Tour seems more likely than the Vuelta.

Ben O’Connor (563) – Obviously I’m not expecting him to come close to his 2024 score, but outpacing his 2021-2023 baseline by a little bit would already make him worth it and he had his slice of bad luck in the latter two of those years. His schedule also just looks really tasty – he’s doing the full Australian summer, leading Jayco everywhere, and then a likely return to the Giro is something I was quite happy to see. Finally, based on an interview with another Jayco rider I’ll be getting to, it seems that the team want to start focusing on points this year already so that they don’t get sucked into a relegation battle come 2028. Overall, it’s a cocktail that should put him back into the quad digits if he doesn’t have the illness niggles he had this season.

Enric Mas (560) – Probably the most scared I’ve ever been to leave someone off my team. Going Giro-Vuelta in a year where he’s this cheap means that he really should be doubling his tally under normal circumstances. The problem is that these aren’t normal circumstances, and the injury he’s returning from is nasty enough that it could really impact the first part of his season in particular. That makes him a little bit less safe than the alternatives. I still would have taken him had I found a good way to free up the budget to take out Küng in his favour, but, well, I didn’t.

Albert Withen Philipsen (459) – Pretty similar considerations to Seixas for obvious reasons. Any rider who can podium both Varesine and Tours at a cost of less than 500 points is worth having a look at, let alone when he’s 19. I think he won’t have quite as much freedom as his French counterpart, but on the other hand he’s 200 points cheaper and definitely won’t be doing the Tour, so arguably he’s the safer of the two.

Stefan Küng (433) – Got pretty unlucky last spring with the last-minute catch at Omloop and a bad crash in Roubaix. According to himself, said crash impacted him for the rest of the season (and then another crash kept him out of the Nationals and the Tour), but he’s recovered now. In addition to that, the Worlds TT actually suiting the time trialists again this year basically amounts to a ‘free’ gain of 50-100 points. Tudor have also supposedly invested in their TT setup this winter. While there’s a chance that he’s past his best (I don’t think he is – aside from the two classics where he got unlucky, he made the top-10 every single time), the most likely outcome is him cracking 900 points again like he did every year between 2021 and 2024.

Thibau Nys (423) – He was a bit of a frustrating pick last year, having an offday at Frankfurt when he was the out-and-out favourite, getting sick in a Tour of Belgium he probably would have won, and then never really recovering after that (he really should have been taken off the Tour startlist in my book). I still see no reason why he can’t be a quad-digit rider at minimum even with a relatively limited schedule, and his CX results suggest he’s only continued to improve. Definitely one of the first ten riders on my list.

Maxim Van Gils (362) – Speaking of Belgian Ardennes specialists who were among the first ten riders on the team sheet, here’s someone who should be near the top of the popularity rankings courtesy of an endless stream of bad luck last year. I don’t think I need to elaborate on this one.

Joshua Tarling (328) – I had him in my team for most of the process, but wound up taking him out for Gaudu on the final evening because I needed the 13 points to help me get rid of Jakobsen. With him having missed four months last year and the Worlds TT going from mountainous to flat, his floor is pretty high. However, to turn from a solid pick to one that I really don’t want to miss out on, he’s going to have to score serious points in the classics, and while he showed signs of ability in 2024 he was rather anonymous off the TT bike in 2025 even when healthy, so I’m not convinced that he will. I’m also sceptical as to him riding both the Euros and Chrono des Nations again if he’s going to Canada right beforehand, which would partially negate the effect of the latter.

David Gaudu (315) – While he hasn’t said this openly, from the way he’s analysed his season it basically sounds like he/the team kept trying to rush himself back into races after injury without having done enough training to actually have his legs back. The one race he did before getting injured (Oman) and those two days at the Vuelta suggest that he still has the ability. In a lot of ways, he’s like Küng – I’m not certain that he’s going to bounce back which is why he’s more of a borderline pick, but it’s more probable than not that he does, and like with Küng a return to his baseline is more than enough to make him worth it.

Lennert Van Eetvelt (302) – Even when he scored 999 points in 2024, he had quite a lot of bad luck. While I’m not that confident in him having a clean run and blowing past that score, as he is surely capable of doing, at this price he is an obligatory pick.

Matej Mohoric (290) – From his interviews it seems that his training approach last winter was simply wrong, and then getting sick at the wrong moment not once, but twice meant that he was never really at the races in the spring. A return to normalcy should be plenty from a CQ perspective.

Christophe Laporte (273) – It really feels like every candidate for most common pick of the year is either Belgian or French, doesn’t it? The last few weeks of his season were very much vintage Laporte, to the point where going back to being a top-5-in-the-world cobbles rider is a real possibility. And even if that proves to be a bridge too far, he should be a very good pick.

Benoit Cosnefroy (268) – It seems like UAE intend to go full Hirschi with him, which makes him my number one candidate for best pick of 2026.

Carlos Rodriguez (262) – Yes, he was arguably stagnating a bit even before that, but pretty much all of his 2025 can be explained by injuries. Geraint Thomas says that he’s recovered, so really there’s no reason why he shouldn’t be a good pick at bare minimum.

Léo Bisiaux (246) – GC talents who’ve had the kind of neopro season he’s just managed have generally been good picks in their second season of late – Onley, Poole and Riccitello come to mind. However, it does remain the case that there was really only the one day in Burgos where he wowed (admittedly he did get sick twice), and with his CX season (which is going rather poorly) limiting the length of a road campaign which seems set to be very WT-heavy once more I feel like he has a lot less room for error than those three did. I was still very close to taking him, but wound up giving him the boot the evening before the deadline.

Jarno Widar (245) – I wasn’t quite as wowed by his 2025 as I thought possible twelve months ago, but it was still enough to reaffirm that he’s a big talent indeed. He’s been announced for quite a few big races, but given that Lotto have been patient with developing him and the start of a new promotion/relegation cycle there should be enough easier races for him to score in even if his progress winds up being slower than expected.

Luke Lamperti (245) – Between him, Van den Berg, Mihkels and Hobbs, EF rather unusually have four sprinters who are all at least somewhat interesting, but that does make me think there’s going to be some double-bunking. That put me off the other three, but Lamperti was just too tempting – young, proven that he’s good enough to turn the profit he needs to, and with plenty of untapped potential courtesy of Quickstep using him as a leadout far too often in 2025 in particular. Him being the team’s sole sprinter Down Under suggests he starts high enough up in the hierarchy.

Kevin Vermaerke (219) – Proved that he can score a lot of points, then got screwed by an array of bad luck which means his price is way down. Matxin is on record as saying they want to have him winning races and riders of his profile tend to score pretty heavily at UAE, so I was pretty confident in picking him.

Max Poole (215) – Even when he scored 600 points in 2024, he didn’t exactly have the cleanest of runs, so in a world where he’s the clear team leader and has another two years of development under his belt, a mostly problem-free season is probably a quad-digit season. Between his track record and the lack of updates about his recovery from mono, it isn’t exactly a guarantee that 2026 will be smooth sailing for once, but his potential is far too high to even consider leaving him out.

Aleksandr Vlasov (209) – In 2024, I got burned really badly by leaving out obvious picks who didn’t have an obvious reason for their bad season (Girmay and Martínez come to mind). Vlasov is a great example of such a pick, but with him, it’s quite possible that he didn’t simply suck, but was hampered by one or multiple issues that haven’t become public because Red Bull are quite secretive and Russian rides aren’t exactly prime interview material these days. He’s not a pick that excites me in any way, but I’m not interested in trying to be clever rather than defensive with this kind of rider anymore.

Anders Foldager (203) – He is the Jayco rider I mentioned when talking about O’Connor, and in fact it sounds like the team’s plan is for him to spend most of 2026 farming points – lines like ‘I will get a lot of opportunities’ and ‘I won’t ride a lot of WT races this year’ are just exactly what you want to hear from this kind of rider. Initially I couldn’t find a way to fit him in, but putting him in instead of Bisiaux on the final evening turned out to be key to completing the puzzle. The more I think about it, the more I’m happy I went for him, and it also doesn’t hurt that he will probably be one of very few rarer picks on what is a mostly boring team.

Gerben Thijssen (192) – Christoph Roodhooft has said that they’ve signed him mainly to lead the team at the smaller races where Van der Poel and Philipsen aren’t starting. If that doesn’t sound like he’s going to score a lot of points, I don’t know what does.

Marco Brenner (191) – It was definitely good to see signs of life from him at the end of the season after his horrible Giro crash – given that he could neither walk nor use crutches for six straight weeks, I was quite impressed that he was already at that level again. I don’t think that he’s particularly close to having fulfilled his potential yet. I’m hopeful that Tudor’s new TT bike can give him a leg up in GCs in the right kinds of races as well as possibly just points from the TTs themselves, but obviously he can score as a stage-hunter and in one-day races too.

Edward Dunbar (167) – He’s way better than his cost, but it’s not an accident that he’s basically had one good race in the past two seasons. Obviously he has the potential to be a great pick and I was tinkering with combinations that did feature him for that reason, but you know in advance you’re signing up for crashes with him and that made him a little too risky in the end.

Axel Zingle (155) – Arguably the unluckiest rider of 2025. Still kicking myself for choosing against him in 2022, obviously he will be too popular to make up for that regret but hey, at least he’s finally made it onto my team.

Nils Politt (137) – All of his bad luck seemed to happen in the races where he wasn’t a pure domestique. Part of me feels that the share of said races is slowly decreasing, but his scoring potential in the classics is just too high to pass on him.

Mikkel Bjerg (137) – He has definitely slipped down the hierarchy at UAE, but if the result of that is apparently him not doing a GT and focusing more on his time-trialling and getting results in one-day races this year, then that might just be a good thing. He’s definitely a boring pick, but he should also be a good one.

Arvid de Kleijn (134) – At the start of 2025, I was wondering whether he could really start challenging the big names on a structural basis this year, and then that crash in the UAE Tour ruined everything. It will be hard to get back to his previous trajectory, but his results post-comeback are those of a man who should have no problem in being a good pick.

Pablo Torres (130) – There are two ways to go about him. On the one hand, obviously 2025 was a major disappointment and I don’t believe as much as I did twelve months ago. On the other hand, he had a lot of trouble with his knee injury and a pretty bad concussion that together compromised him for large parts of the season, and therefore it’s far too early to give up on him. Ultimately, I was really on the fence about taking him, but the final few puzzle pieces were such that it made sense to give him a second chance and now that I have, I think it was probably the better option to not cycle between shiny new toys too quickly.

Dani Martínez (121) – Probably the biggest enigma in the peloton from a CQ perspective, something that isn’t helped by him riding for Red Bull and the Colombian cycling media being the most useless on the planet. Aside from the viral infection that delayed his season start, I have zero idea why he once again had a limited schedule and disappointing results. But ultimately, he’s always been a good pick when he’s had a bad season, and this time he’s cheap enough that he doesn’t even need to outscore his previous bad seasons by that much to at least be a decent pick, so he was never in doubt this time round.

Mauri Vansevenant (113) – had some illness issues, but by his own admission those can’t explain his underwhelming season on their own. However, with Evenepoel leaving, he should be able to ride for himself in the Ardennes-type races, and he already proved in 2024 that he can score heavily in the Ardennes themselves. In other words, my trio of Flemish Ardennes types became a quartet pretty early on, and I never considered changing that.

Per Strand Hagenes (106) – The case for picking him: he has never raced more than 44 days in his career, so plenty of room to improve, and with Benoot and Van Baarle gone, he moves up in Visma’s cobbles pecking order. The case against picking him: he has never raced more than 44 days in his career, so every chance he is once again beset by fitness issues, the only time he got to ride for himself last year was after Zingle crashed out in the leader’s jersey, and he’s starting the season on domestique duty for Brennan in Australia. The latter was the last straw for me and thus I took him out of my team.

Simone Gualdi (100) – I definitely believe in his talent and he absolutely has the potential to be a very good pick this year already, but in a season with a good amount of safe options I felt it was a bit too risky to go for someone who might need a year to adapt to the WT.

Emiel Verstrynge (83) – His CX season suggests a big step up compared to twelve months ago, and rumour has it that he’s ending his winter after the Belgian championships on Saturday. However, the problem is that he did about the most CQ-hostile calendar last season, and nothing I’ve read suggests that things will be particularly different this year. Even so, there’s a good chance I would have taken him had the budget been four points higher.

Tom Crabbe (79) – But the budget is a round number, and so I went with him instead as my 33rd rider. He started the season still struggling with the effects of a crash in late 2024, but once he got going, he was getting top-10s against good opposition on the regular, and would have scored more if his best results hadn’t come in stages rather than one-day races. There are definitely good reasons against picking him – he will likely be doing some races on the track, it’s been a few years since anyone on Flanders has scored the kind of points he needs – but at the same time I feel like he’s the biggest talent his team has had in quite some time, and I fully expect to see a WT side pick him up at the end of the year.

Markel Beloki (76) – I was very close to taking him instead of Crabbe. A big chunk of his season was ruined by mono, then once he found his legs, he managed to do a pretty good Vuelta for a second-year U23 who wasn’t initially supposed to ride it. I could see him taking a big step up this year, but really only if that Valdezcaray ride is a good guide, and considering some of the names who finished in his group I was worried I was putting a bit too much stock into that result. Ultimately it might just be more likely that he has a similar third pro year to the one AJ August had this year, and at that point he wouldn’t be a terrible pick but also definitely not worth it.

Senna Remijn (52) – He had a grand total of two days where he got to ride for himself against the pros this season. On the first one, he managed third in a Luxembourg stage against proper opposition, and on the second he finished in the top-15 at Bernocchi. Those are seriously impressive showings for a first-year U23, and then I haven’t even talked about his U23 results. With Alpecin’s lineup as thin as it is, he should be getting plenty of opportunities. The only concern I have is that he’s having a pretty underwhelming CX season off the back of a muscle injury, which makes me think he might have a slow start to his road season.

Andreas Kron (50) – A very annoying pick to have this season, but in retrospect it was mostly for circumstances beyond his control. He spent half the year struggling with back issues contracted at the 2024 Vuelta, then once they figured out these were being caused by a hip problem and he finally started to look decent again, he broke his sacrum and that was the end of his year. Obviously I don’t trust his fitness too much after the last two years, but I’m confident his ability is still there and if he can stay healthy for more than a couple of weeks this time, he should do well for a rider in this price range.

Lionel Taminiaux (42) – A bit of a lame choice, but ultimately I do think that he is a sensible cheap pick in a year with a lack of sensible cheap picks. The collapsed lung and broken rib sustained in De Panne really hampered him last year, and when he finally got going again his schedule was limited to kermesses (where he did well) and non-sprinter-friendly UCI races. Him being Lotto’s only sprint option in their Down Under lineup suggests he will have plenty of opportunities, and a healthy Taminiaux riding for himself should be able to get anywhere between 200 and 500 points. In fact, with some stage points and a good Surf Coast Classic, he could already be into profit by the time he leaves Australia.

Pierre Barbier (41) – I really considered taking him instead of Taminiaux, or keeping Tarling and taking him instead of Crabbe. I see the possibility of him being this year’s Salby, with him stating he will be racing from January to October and all that, but he’s also said that the heat doesn’t particularly suit him, which increases the possibility of this Terengganu adventure ending in failure. I legitimately hope somebody has him.

Matthew Dinham (25) – Obviously it’s a risk taking someone who has been away from the bike for as long as he has, but his comeback in Langkawi was actually surprisingly good for someone who’s had so much to recover from. He’s supposedly been training all winter, which makes me hopeful that he can have a strong Aussie summer, and then with Onley and Bardet gone and Van den Broek switching focus to the classics Picnic have so few climbers left that any sort of form should put him decently far up in the hierarchy.

Fabio Jakobsen (11) – yes, he’s said that he feels like the blood circulation in his legs is back to normal, but I’ve been following cycling long enough to know that the chances of iliac artery issues returning are pretty high. It isn’t that unlikely that he really starts to perform again, but my gut feeling is that he’s done, and so I was happy to be able to take him out of my lineup late in the process.

Pelayo Sánchez (5) – I had him as an ultra-rare pick one year too early in 2022, so part of me had been hoping an opportunity to give him another go would open up at some point. Can’t say that getting him for practically nothing off the back of a season destroyed by illness is the way I expected or wanted that to happen, but when he says he’s fully recovered, who am I to pass on him?

Can confirm at least one person picked Barbier. Swapped out Crabbe for Verstrynge at the very end so interested to see how that goes throughout the year.

 

[MADRAZO]

Let's get this show on the road, shall we

Very strong team and quite similar to my own. O'Connor instead of Uijtdebroeks was not that far away for me either, Dunbar only got out the last night to get closer to 7500 and also considdered Gaudu, Lamperti , Politt, Bjerg, D Martinez, Crabbe, Verstrynge and Vermaerke closely, so we have thought a lot of the same thoughts, and read the same Foldager interview

 

[EvansIsTheBest]

EVENEPOEL Remco
SEIXAS Paul
WITHEN PHILIPSEN Albert
NYS Thibau
VAN GILS Maxim
TARLING Joshua
VAN EETVELT Lennert
NORDHAGEN Jørgen
LAPORTE Christophe
COSNEFROY Benoit
RODRIGUEZ CANO Carlos
WIDAR Jarno
POOLE Max
FINN Lorenzo
BRENNER Marco
ZINGLE Axel
DECOMBLE Maxime
SPARFEL Aubin
HAGENES Per Strand
NOVAK Pavel
HOBBS Noah
VERSTRYNGE Emiel
REMIJN Senna
SENTJENS Sente
BARBIER Pierre
GRISEL Matys
DINHAM Matthew
HIRT Jan
JAKOBSEN Fabio
WILLIAMS Stephen
SANCHEZ MAYO Pelayo
PEREZ LOPEZ Cesar
AGOSTINACCHIO Mattia

Riders in bold are back from my 2022 team. More in depth analysis in the coming days.