Properly 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 will be coated in our different conventional year-end posts, for the FSA Directeur Sportif it seems to be an terrible lot just like the 12 months we simply watched. You’ll by no means guess which Males’s rider was on the entire prime 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 precise 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 residence 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 photograph end with Luctor Emergo’s Satisfaction and Prejudice.

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

As at all times, we invite our winners to come back by and inform their story. Each wnning staff 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. Against this, Andomujika has been taking part in because the competitors went digital in 2010. SimpSLB has been concerned since 2016.

All of our ladies’s winners have been round for some time. Luctor Emergo was thirteenth final 12 months, in addition to sixth two years in the past. Moncassin31 is one other long-time participant and was 4th within the mixed final 12 months.

Photograph by Kristy Sparow/Getty Pictures

And Now a Win From Our Sponsor…

FSA and Imaginative and prescient have a protracted checklist of World Tour athletes and outcomes to brag about, and whereas Visma got here again to Earth this 12 months, 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 greater than Kristen Faulkner’s Olympic Highway Race gold medal. [They were actually all over Paris this summer.] We don’t speak about their many disciplines but it surely’s the entire above, together with this week’s IRONMAN insanity in Hawaii. Search for a resumption of highway racing excellence subsequent 12 months.

Photograph by Joan Cros – Corbis/Getty Pictures

Rider Traits and Tidbits

On the lads’s aspect, clearly Tadej Pogačar dominated with an historic 6,580-point explosion, lapping the sector and the file books. I imagine Peter Sagan’s 2016 season held the earlier non-Pogačar file, 4,334 factors, a quantity the newly minted World Champ had topped 3 times, together with a 4,803 mark in 2021. So yeah.

However latching onto that taking pictures star was solely a part of the successful formulation, 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 12 months’s 720-point mark to extra rarified air, cracking the two,000-point barrier, eighth total. His 6-point pricetag was the bottom of the large 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 Pictures

On the. Ladies’s aspect, Demi Vollering and Lotte Kopecky. traded locations atop the leaderboard, a consequential growth 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 most of the prime 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 fee.

One other dependable veteran (and biking Godess) Marianne Vos, put collectively her personal rebound with 2,726 factors at age 37, her greatest rating since 2021. That made her one of many huge bargains at 20 factors, although 2-pointers Puck Pieterse and Thalita de Jongh being up round 1500 undoubtedly 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 at liberty to chime in together with your hits and misses, your non-public league grudges… the entire above. Oh, and alongside these traces, a particular congrats to my huge 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, due to everybody for taking part in, due to Superted, aka tedvdw, the creator and maintainer of the fantastic web site model with out which this competitors couldn’t exist. Due to UMWolverine, Jens, Ursula, Henry (Chabinho), and the many individuals who chimed in with feedback on pricing, outcomes corrections, and all the main points that hold this working. I’m sorry that my well being didn’t enable me to be very energetic, however I used to be gratified to see the neighborhood firing on all cylinders regardless. See you for the FSA DS ‘25!