If I had picked him, I'd be very unhappy with this week of course. But I'm still worried that he'll be a thermonuclear pick. It's not like he's suddenly going to be a bad climber for the rest of the season. His 3000 point seasons also had some spells of non-thermonuclear level. He's at 500 points now and the season has barely started.
And in the last two seasons where he didn't run into major injury, he did 68 race days both times. Obviously it doesn't work like this, but if he does 68 race days again and keeps up his current moyenne, he would end up at 2330 points, so his scoring so far is not that scary to me.
He still looks better than the Mas O'Connor combination.
I remember @Squire having Pidcock and Moscon as his most and third-most expensive picks in 2022, scoring 660 points between them at a cost of 1277 points, the other four of his six most expensive picks only managing a combined 32% profit margin, and still finishing sixth overall - and that was a high-scoring year. And Mas and O'Connor should still comfortably outscore Pidcock and Moscon's combined tally for that season so long as the former's injury problems don't drag on endlessly.
All hail Arnaud De Lie!
This basically sums up the way I'm feeling. All my expensive picks bar the ubiquitous Seixas either haven't raced or are giving me ample cause for concern, I have three riders who have sustained major injuries (Van Gils, Bjerg and Taminiaux), I don't have an early season-oriented pick like Morgado to prop up my score, yet somehow I'm 300 points up on and just three places lower down than where I was after the equivalent update last year when I was getting propped up by Morgado at that point, and went on to finish fourth. Being hellbent on not repeating 2024 with Vlasov and DFM and the magnificence of Brenner is keeping me alive so far.All hail Arnaud De Lie!
Feels like I need something similar this time. O'Connor is extremely worrying, and I had also banked on a bunch of early season Buitrago points that never materialized. I'm keeping up somewhat with the front runners so far, so hopefully I might stay in position to benefit from an Aaron Dockx miracle season.
from now on buitrago has only few points to defend . more than the giro , i think he has room for many points in the italian classics if he is not too tired thenAll hail Arnaud De Lie!
Feels like I need something similar this time. O'Connor is extremely worrying, and I had also banked on a bunch of early season Buitrago points that never materialized. I'm keeping up somewhat with the front runners so far, so hopefully I might stay in position to benefit from an Aaron Dockx miracle season.
Yeah, he definitely still has many good opportunities. But him becoming a monster pick is more unlikely without any meaningful TDU points. And it's also worrying that this is the first season where he's not nuclear from the start. He only looked really good in the Cadel race, without any points to show for it, then was underwhelming again at the nationals. The copium way of looking at it is of course be that he might now have more left in the tank for the rest of the year.
Pericas also there. Important race for him and Torres in particular, if they aren't among the best riders in this kind of field it's hard to see where the leadership opportunities, let alone the points, are going to come from. Soudal really should win the race, just a question of who will be the one - Vansevenant, Zana and Raccagni are all game-relevant to some extent too, so there's actually quite a bit of interest for such a weak 2.1.
You jest, but I could actually see Epis getting a result out of the two grippier sprints on the first two stages.
I hadn't even seen that he's there too, a little bit insane how interesting this one is going to be for the game.
Ya, Poole is a mystery. He did a decent ITT but was nowhere on the climbs. He was in one of the front groups of favourites when the peloton split on the last stage of Algarve but later in the stage he was nowhere to be seen, similar to Figuera where he was also in a earlyish break but then suddenly disappered from the break early and was way down. It's like he has decent legs but then runs out of stamina halfway through the stages.
Sadly for him, it could be the effects from the Epstein-Barr-virus still troubling him.
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