CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR FSA DIRECTEUR SPORTIF WINNERS!!

Effectively it wasn’t what we imagined, however the 2024 season will go down as historic and memorable on the Males’s aspect, and fewer historic however ultra-competitive on the Ladies’s aspect. And whereas the main points may be coated in our different conventional year-end posts, for the FSA Directeur Sportif it appears to be like an terrible lot just like the yr we simply watched. You’ll by no means guess which Males’s rider was on all the high 10 groups…

[And you’ll never guess who banked hard on vdP/Remco overcoming… and who finished 519th. It seemed like a good idea at the time.]

[Narrator voice: Actually it didn’t.]

Anyway, let’s not quibble over who made what silly selections final winter, and concentrate on the individuals who pushed all the best buttons!

Meet Our Winners!

Congrats to our Males’s podium! DiCenta’s Azzurra took a slim 250-point win from Team Andmujika with Simpslb’s Grupetto main house the chase group only a bit off the tempo.

And chapeau to our Ladies’s Comp leaders! The Peluchen Impact, DS dreamer_mg, scored a 1,000-point victory over seriouscharly’s Lotte Finistère, in a 14-point picture end with Luctor Emergo’s Satisfaction and Prejudice.

Lastly, our mixed rating competitors was gained by Moncassin31, whose twin Pédale! groups eeked out a really tight victory.

As all the time, we invite our winners to come back by and inform their story. Each wnning crew has a narrative! However I’ll begin off with a little bit of background.

DiCenta is a primary time participant! Clearly no novice to the idea although. In contrast, Andomujika has been taking part in because the competitors went digital in 2010. SimpSLB has been concerned since 2016.

All of our girls’s winners have been round for some time. Luctor Emergo was thirteenth final yr, in addition to sixth two years in the past. Moncassin31 is one other long-time participant and was 4th within the mixed final yr.

Photograph by Kristy Sparow/Getty Photos

And Now a Win From Our Sponsor…

FSA and Imaginative and prescient have a protracted record of World Tour athletes and outcomes to brag about, and whereas Visma got here again to Earth this yr, there have been nonetheless wins everywhere in the panorama from EF Schooling, Israel-PremierTech, Astana, UNO-X, Lotto DSTNY, and Arkea. And it didn’t get any larger than Kristen Faulkner’s Olympic Street Race gold medal. [They were actually all over Paris this summer.] We don’t speak about their many disciplines however it’s all the above, together with this week’s IRONMAN insanity in Hawaii. Search for a resumption of highway racing excellence subsequent yr.

Photograph by Joan Cros – Corbis/Getty Photos

Rider Developments and Tidbits

On the lads’s aspect, clearly Tadej Pogačar dominated with an historic 6,580-point explosion, lapping the sphere and the report books. I consider Peter Sagan’s 2016 season held the earlier non-Pogačar report, 4,334 factors, a quantity the newly minted World Champ had topped thrice, together with a 4,803 mark in 2021. So yeah.

However latching onto that taking pictures star was solely a part of the profitable system, one which 216 groups sniffed out. [And a special congrats to herby westside, whose team No reason to kill my vibe finished 16th overall, making them king of the dipshits who were too stubborn, foolish, or otherwise impaired to pick Pogs.] To actually win this season, you wanted to take it to the Maxim! As in Van Gils, the younger Lotto star who 180 groups foresaw making the leap from final yr’s 720-point mark to extra rarified air, cracking the two,000-point barrier, eighth general. His 6-point pricetag was the bottom of the massive level producers, however 8-point studs Ben O’Connor and Biniam Girmay stepped as much as fulfill their previous promise.

Photograph by Luc Claessen/Getty Photos

On the. Ladies’s aspect, Demi Vollering and Lotte Kopecky. traded locations atop the leaderboard, a consequential improvement contemplating the 8-point value distinction, whereas Lorena Wiebes’ manufacturing dipped. The important thing to victory didn’t contain Vollering or Wiebes in any respect, and Kopecky wasn’t on lots of the high items both. As a substitute it was a resurgent Elisa Longo Borghini who crushed expectations with a 4,613 tally, proper alongside Vollering, at half the associated fee.

One other dependable veteran (and biking Godess) Marianne Vos, put collectively her personal rebound with 2,726 factors at age 37, her largest rating since 2021. That made her one of many large bargains at 20 factors, although 2-pointers Puck Pieterse and Thalita de Jongh being up round 1500 positively moved the needle for 100 and 5 groups, respectively. Congrats to CK Dallas and Crooked Rain for being the one two patrons of each discount bin specials.

Everybody ought to be happy to chime in along with your hits and misses, your personal league grudges… all the above. Oh, and alongside these traces, a particular congrats to my large bro, Mr Van P, for his Editors’ League championship! His victory raises the collective household victory historical past to… one. Not for lack of making an attempt, I’ll have you understand.

OK, because of everybody for enjoying, because of Superted, aka tedvdw, the creator and maintainer of the great web site model with out which this competitors couldn’t exist. Because of UMWolverine, Jens, Ursula, Henry (Chabinho), and the many individuals who chimed in with feedback on pricing, outcomes corrections, and all the main points that preserve this working. I’m sorry that my well being didn’t permit me to be very energetic, however I used to be gratified to see the group firing on all cylinders regardless. See you for the FSA DS ‘25!