Next year I’ll be much more on the ball with posting stuff like this, I promise, but for now this can serve as a reminder of how last season finished, and whether any teams were able to hit their end-of-season goals or see their season fizzle out into nothingness. I published my mid-season review before La Vuelta last year, which was fairly late I’ll admit, but it did show which teams needed to step up to save potential disastrous seasons. The three world tour teams who were languishing somewhat around that time were Dimension Data, CCC, and Katusha. Whether or not they turned their seasons around will be touched upon later, along with highlighting some end of season performances and anything else you might have missed.
Notable Performances
So instead of the surprising and deserving result segments I wrote about for the mid-season review, here I’ll mention who caught my eye in the last couple of months of the 2019 season.
Ángel Madrazo – La Vuelta a España
First up is Madrazo’s efforts in La Vuelta. Despite attacking virtually every stage, the poor lad didn’t have the legs to come home with the king of the mountains jersey. He held the jersey for 14 stages after taking it on day two, until eventual winner Geoffrey Bouchard took it off his back. He did manage a superb stage win even after being almost run off the road by his own team car and looking completely shattered for most of the last few kilometers. So overall, a hugely impressive and entertaining race from the 31 year old.
Bauke Mollema – Il Lombardia
Bauke Mollema has shown he’s a real contender for this years hilly Olympic and world championship road races by snagging his first monument win at the race of the falling leaves. Mollema countered several moves on the penultimate climb of the race to go solo and he reigned in the finish with a 16 second advantage over Valverde, Bernal, and Fuglsang. A truly deserving result for a very talented and consistent rider who’s career has arguably been lacking in wins. Can he build from this into a strong 2020?
Tadej Pogačar – La Vuelta a España
3rd place isn’t bad for your first grand tour, in your first season at world tour level. Tadej Pogačar had a stunning 2019 with a race win in the Algarve; a first world tour stage race win in California; and he capped it off with three stage wins and the final spot on the overall podium behind Roglič and Valverde. He’s due to race Le Tour this year. Can he step it up again? At only 21, he’s another really exciting prospect for the future of professional road racing.
Teams Round Up
For the 2020 season I intend to come up with more interesting and colourful ways, but for 2019 I have a few raw data tables to show how the teams got on. As I mentioned above, there were several teams who were struggling for wins and had two and a half months to try and turn their seasons around. Hopefully the below will show how successful they were.
This list and all the results were derived from the Pro Cycling Stats website and I’ve attempted to eliminate all inaccuracies, which would only usually arise from riders joining the team part way through the season, or other results not won for the team, but still showing up in their season results. Of the three teams I mention at the top who were struggling the most, only CCC managed to pick up a win towards the end of the season. That was thanks to Greg van Avermaet in Montréal. Katusha and Dimension Data really did have rough seasons with only one World Tour win a piece.
At the other end of the table Deceuninck – Quick Step dominated the one-day scene and picked up 10 of the 21 available victories in the World Tour one-day races. Astana, Jumbo-Visma, and INEOS has the most successful seasons in stage races overall victories. In other results, Bora – hansgrohe picked up 7 of the available 16 World Tour points jerseys; and Lotto Soudal bagged the most World Tour king of the mountains jerseys.
In the second table we can see who the most proficient riders were for each team and there are one or two surprises. Two teams seem to share a lot more than others, EF and FDJ, whilst other teams depended more on a single rider to bring them success, INEOS and UAE for example. The break out year for Tadej Pogačar is in plain view here, and the same can be said for Benoît Cosnefroy of AG2R. I’ll leave you to digest the rest at your leisure.
Finally here are a few more nerdy stats that show how likely teams were to convert good positions into wins and who might have consistently missed out. It also shows where teams picked up the majority of their wins. Bora – hansgrohe for example definitely put more onus on the World Tour achieving more than 65% of their wins in the most important races. Again I’ll leave you to dissect the rest of the stats or this piece will end up turning into a novel.
As I said, I hope to make all this a bit more presentable this year, and also to post more regularly. I’ll be keeping a running tally on the number of wins for all World Tour and Pro teams, as well as PCS points. I will also post a 2020 season preview with updates about my own schedule, and a Velogames preview for the Tour Down Under when the competition goes live. If you’d like to be a part of it, then please click subscribe, or follow my Twitter feed for when I throw up a new post.
The Pelotonian 