King Boonen said:
del1962 said:
Why are people comparing the TOB to La Vuelta
In this case, ABS raced it last year but not this year and Delaney complained about the arbitrary nature of wildcard picks (ignoring the fact it worked out for him last year of course...). Samhocking used the Tour of Britain as an example of a ranked wildcard system so we are interested to know how this system could actually be applied across several different national racing calendars and levels of racing to ensure every pro continental team has a chance of qualifying for the races they want to, not just, as Cav would put it, "some rubbish small race" (paraphrased so I don't get reported

). A couple of posters pointed out that the teams who qualified for the ToB were likely the teams that would get picked anyway and if a similar system existed for other Tours, focusing on domestic races/calendar, the same is likely to happen. There is the aded confounding factor of using other WT races to rank people for WT race spots, grading the races and so on. So far we've been told that the Tour of Britain is an example but nothing more.
You simply take the top 3 teams from Europe Tour the end of the previous season and offset UCI points upto the selection date deadline. So in La Vuelta's 3 wildcards, that would be something like:
UCI Ranked - Points - Team
1st - 4164 pts - WANTY - GROUPE GOBERT (WGG)
2nd - 3649 pts - COFIDIS, SOLUTIONS CREDITS (COF)
3rd - 2486 pts - ANDRONI GIOCATTOLI - SIDERMEC (ANS)
4th - 2442 pts - DIRECT ENERGIE (TDE)
Instead we have
UCI Ranked - Points - Team
2nd - 3649 pts - COFIDIS, SOLUTIONS CREDITS (COF)
11th - 1629 pts - EUSKADI BASQUE COUNTRY - MURIAS (EUS)
23rd - 971 pts - CAJA RURAL - SEGUROS RGA (CJR)
69th - 360 pts - BURGOS - BH (BBH)
Now, obviously many teams simply won't want to race Vuelta regardless if they are ranked highly. That is fine, then it works like Aqua Blue & Wiggins, the qualification criteria simply cascades down to a team that does want to race and meets qualification criteria.
My point is, you could have four of the best Pro Conti teams racing Grand Tours. At the moment really only Cofidis deserves to be at Vuelta from the wildcards.