You saw what happened to Ciccone and Gall today?
I was very impressed by Pidders today, I thought he'd get dropped before he got to take a single turn on the front. Excellent ride!
I did see what happened to Ciccone and Gall today. That's also why Pidcock would potentially have benefitted from collaborating with Almeida if the GC was his aim, to put more time into them while he has the legs. If the GC wasn't his aim, then he ain't gonna win the stage without them catching Vingegaard and it was clear Vingegaard wasn't being caught by Almeida alone.
When pog is not at the race, UAE tends to race stage races like Movistar.
Wait! Is there a Movistar connection here? Why, I believe there is!
Of course there's Marc Soler, but you did have me checking if they'd somehow managed to land Igor Arrieta (who had been in Movistar's feeder) by hiring his dad - they kind of got him because of Movistar firing his father for being the absolute worst DS that Movistar had (and think of the ground
that covers), so it would have made sense.
Movistar ....ah yes I remember them...whatever happened to them ?
Well, reality caught up with their budget, in the main. They were always overachieving their budget through the 2010s, thanks to Valverde being, well, Valverde, and when that generation of talents came out of Colombia in the late 2000s they backed the right horse by choosing Nairo Quintana out of them. They had a very stable and reliable core of road captains and helpers like García Acosta, Lastras, Gutiérrez, Erviti, Amador and latter-day Rojas. However, they hit a couple of swings and misses on some young Spanish GC prospects that didn't pan out (Soler being one, but even more notably Rubén Fernández and being sold a bill of goods with Jaime Rosón) and also had some gambles that didn't pay off (Antón, Betancur) and got shafted by Acquadro a few times, most notably over Richard Carapaz.
They broke the bank to bring Mikel Landa on board, but the trident leadership was a disaster, not least because it cost them almost the entirety of their most reliable domestique corps, leaving them immensely top-heavy. When forced to choose between their three leaders, Unzué let his heart rule his head and kept Valverde, which was fine in the short term, but was only ever going to be a short term solution, and the long-term plan they had was Enric Mas, and the problem with that is that Mas lives and dies by GC position, he doesn't have the explosivity and is not going to win you races if his GC bid fails the way that Valverde or Quintana could and had done for them on multiple occasions. Supermán was a successful integration that blew up in their face spectacularly and they ended up effectively trading him for loose parts with Astana - one bonanza leader for three strong role-players, and it worked out OK for Movistar, but none of the riders brought on were as prominent as the one they lost (it was a bullet dodged after his doping scandal of course). They had a pre-contract signed with Carlos Rodríguez but Ineos had a shambles of an off-season that led Brailsford to come in and annul that, leaving them way too reliant on Mas and without that much to follow up from that bar an increasingly forlorn hope that Nairoman turns back in to what he was a decade ago.
Now, they're essentially in an awkward limbo. They've made too many managerial missteps in recent years over development to be the first port of call for young Spanish riders, and we've seen most of those stars go elsewhere lately (Ayuso, Carlos Rodríguez, Arrieta, Torres, and now Noval), as well as the team being way too quick to give up on development projects as well, most notably Abner González who finished top 20 on Ventoux in his first pro race and top 10 in the Volta a Portugal as a neo-pro. Their attempts to find a second leader alongside Mas have been a complete disaster so far, and they have gone from being a team of leaders with no support squad to having an excellent support squad (or what would traditionally be an excellent support squad - the likes of UAE and Visma have rather changed expectations, but in most eras a GC leader being backed by the likes of Ruben Guerreiro, Javier Romo, Pablo Castrillo, Einer Rubio, Jefferson Cepeda, Davide Formolo and Pelayo Sánchez Mayo would be in a decent spot - they just don't have viable leaders beyond Mas at this stage unless Iván Romeo turns into more than we expect.
There is
some light at the end of the tunnel, though. The women's team is run far better, and has brought in some veteran leadership (van Vleuten, Reusser) as well as being able to attract quality both in terms of talent which is still young enough to be offering peak years to the team (Lippert, Mackaij) and being able to secure the signatures of young potential stars coming through development (Ferguson, Ostiz, the Ruíz twins). Sure, there could be a bit of humour to be had out of it in terms of, much like has been joked at times about the Ferrari F1 team, "the less Italian they get, the more successful they are", and the same could be said about the comparatively less Spanish feel of the Movistar women, with a lot of the Spanish journeywomen of the early days jettisoned and retaining only those like Sheyla Gutiérrez and Sara Martín, and the hiring in of overseas leadership instead of relying on home talents - but at the same time, a lot of this has been helped by the fact that instead of the rather set-in-his-ways Eusebio Unzué, the women's team is largely operated by his son Sebastián, in conjunction with a small but tight-knit group of helpers including Jorge Sanz - who moved across from the men's team in 2019 - and former men's team rider Pablo Lastras, who is the best DS the team has and splits time across both mens' and womens' teams. Sebas Unzué is only 33 and the average age of the staff for the women's team is around 40, whereas Alexis Gandia is the only staffer for the men's team below that age.
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