Alright as mentioned yesterday, here's the more boring half of my team breakdown, sorry/not sorry:
Alan Hatherly (145, 1): Oh! I’m the 1! Cool. I have to confess, I love an unconventional route to road racing. Not only because I find it a rootable story (especially in a sport that starts its hierarchies at a young age), but also because it’s such a blank slate to forecast in this game. I picked him as a cheap rider last year, not knowing what to expect about how he’d do as an XCO world champion at a more advanced age. And he showed promise doing well in the Saudi Tour, but then kind of had middling results and ended up with 145 points. Not a great pick, but not a spectacular flop to give up on. After all, JC Peraud came in at 33 and had a learning year before almost tripling his points year 2. Hatherly is double defending XCO champ and a few years younger than Peraud. I also read an interview where he said that by the time you realize what you could be doing better, it’s too late to implement it that season. So I’m hopeful he’ll take the lessons of last year into his prep for this year and be more of a Peraud than a Cink.
That said, he was literally the last addition to my team – I was uninspired by my reluctant cheap additions of Darren Rafferty and Jan Tratnik so I swapped them for him and a zero pointer. At this point in the cost chart, it’s more about managing upside risk (who do I not want to miss out on if they have a breakout year) rather than downside risk (what if they tank), and there’s not really a Brennan to worry about upside – at least that I identified, eep – so here we go. I think 500-800 is optimistic but not unrealistic.
Arvid De Kleijn (134, 22): He found his groove the last couple of years after taking awhile to find his feet as a pro, and showed me enough at the end of the season to suggest he’d recovered from his 6 months off due to a complex collarbone fracture without showing age-related decline. At 31 years old and the demonstrated capability to score 500 in a season he’s just great for this cost.
Pablo Torres (130, 34): It’s hard when thinking about upside risk to put aside such an incandescent performance as his stage in Avenir 2024. I found one article where UAE suggested they’d figured out a plan to give him a more suitable training regime to improve his consistency and base level, and as I’ve stated earlier I feel like I should trust their investment in someone signed long-term as a tiebreaker at this level of cost.
Dani Martinez (121, 40): This is like groundhog day – every other year, Dani Martinez is relatively cheap in this game, and every year, I can’t find a single piece of information on why anyone thinks he did poorly the year before. So I just gotta take him on the blind trust that his yo-yoing in the 2020s of low scores in the odd years and high scores in the even years continues. I need someone with upside so that’s good enough for me!
Mattia Gaffuri (117, 3): The Zwift Academy guys are a big unknown – the best of them (Jay Vine) took a few years to find some comfortability in the peloton. But Gaffuri had that really fun ride in the Italian Nationals where he killed it for his amateur teammate Conca, which got them both in the WT, and he had a couple of other results at least suggesting he knows how to ride in a peloton. I tried a few times to switch him out but couldn’t really find a combo of riders I liked better than the ones I had, so I’m happy to have a rootable story at least.
Per Strand Hagenes (106, 36): The only rider under 150 points that was on the first 15-20 ‘definitely taking’ list, and not just thrown on when I realized I needed a bunch of cheapies. I almost took him last year at 375, so I definitely think he’s capable of scoring well, and hopefully he’s over his illness that basically ended his season in June. Again, at this cost level, I’m comfortable picking a rider who can earn their cost back in a good day, and he’s already shown he can win a random 1.PS race to do just that.
Lorenzo Rota (99, 8): He had a broken hand last year that nagged him and lowered his abilities, and he’s a serviceable pick at this price to get up to 500.
Pavel Novak (97, 15): Looking around at this price, he’s done nothing spectacular but has had a high GC placement at a pretty high-level U23 race each of the last couple of years. So if that turns into a couple of 7th places in Spanish 2.1 or 2.PS races, he’s holding the line.
Senna Remijn (52, 36): I didn’t know much about him, and when I looked at results and read between the lines, it kinda feels like nobody expects much of him this year on the road. But he got great solid results all throughout juniors, and his potential for a leap makes him more exciting than someone else in this range who is serviceable but low ceiling like a Tratnik.
Andreas Kron (50, 38): I thought he was a good deal last year at the same price, and then he had another bad year with only 28 racing days, so let’s reset! I couldn’t find too much info about his return but being on the TdU startlist is good enough for me. At least if he has another anonymous year and doesn’t feature in races, I won’t have to listen to Carlton Kirby refer to him as “Andy” any time he’s on screen.
Matthew Dinham (25, 33): I can’t imagine how frustrating it would be to be a pro athlete and have a setback that takes you out for almost two years, and I was glad to see him in the peloton at the end of last year. He seems freshly motivated, and although proof of concept remains just one good Worlds ride the last time he was really racing, you don’t need much more than that proof of concept at 25 points.
Niklas Behrens (16, 33): He was so invisible on my team last year that I forgot to check for him on startlists halfway through the season. Speaking of ‘proof of concepts remains one good Worlds ride a couple years back’, except U23 Worlds. I mentioned above that I added him in pretty much last because I wanted to fit Poole in but didn’t have enough points, so I traded a bit up for Poole and down for… someone in this price range, and the ball dropped in Behrens’ slot.
Fabio Jakobsen (11, 44): Double sigh. I personally like Jakobsen and am definitely sympathetic to him after he almost died in the worst crash I’ve ever seen watching a race on live stream. But this game is about points, and I’m fatigued at thinking about picking him, doubting that he can get me the points, and picking him anyway. This is the third year in a row now I think? He says he thinks he’s figured out his issues and just needs a good base of training to get back to normal, but every professional athlete wants to/has to believe they’re still the best, especially when your only skill is sprinting. Even at the best of times he was one of those guys who might not have the stamina to be there at the end of a hard stage, even without hills. And these have not been the best of times. But hope springs eternal, and he’s the least unhopeful of a number of riders I might have taken here. A return to ‘normal’ could net him 300-500, but really he’s just here because I might as well take 33 riders.
Stevie Williams (10, 51): What a hard time this guy has had. I definitely thought he’d be a big candidate to be picked until I read an article with him in early December saying he couldn’t even ride the bike for more than 30 minutes yet but hoped to be able to ride it on the road starting ‘around Christmas’. Yikes. Still, the season is long, and I think the chances are higher of him being good enough by the end of the season to get like Laporte 2025 points than they are of any specific healthy rando I choose costing the same getting over 200 for the season.
Pelayo Sanchez (5, 46): He only had 23 days last year and seems to be back (I saw a video in Spanish that I didn’t understand other than that he was upbeat and ready to go), so let’s do it.
Leo Hayter (5, 11): Even his team in official releases refers to him as a ‘longer-term project’ and terms like that, so this is kinda the same calculus I had for Williams. I have to say I did find an interview after Chrono De Nations where he talked about how he forgot about or underestimated the level in races, and just his whole vibe sounded determined and ready to be a pro cyclist again. So that’s nice. And I really have no idea what the schedule is going to look like for his team, but I’d imagine they’ll do some small races where they’ll want to send riders with a chance of getting attention. Heck, is Tour of Gila still a 2.2? Stuff like that gets 25 points, and that’s fine with me.
Mattia Agostinacchio (0, 29): Very similar to Senna Remijn, I felt like he was a year away, but zero pointers that have at least some upside always have a chance of sneaking onto your team at the end, and indeed he did. Kid seems like a huge talent, and I’d be happy for him to prove me wrong and be ready for some results this year.
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