Matt Winston from Picnic to
Decathlon
Linking back up with Bardet, except that this time Bardet will be the boss.
It really is all over then. Looking at their roster for next year they'll have Warren Barguil leading all 3 GTs and driving the team car.
I'm honestly surprised that any Picnic management are wanted anywhere, from the tales of being overly-controlling of riders as DSM to a recruitment policy that rivals the Israel team signing Froome for two decades to the complete absence of any notable points on that table this season... Surely the management - from top to DSes has some responsibility here?
Current UCI ranking
There are no fewer than
twelve PRT teams above them, as well as the 17 other WT teams. In fact there are only four PRT teams tat are ranked below them - Euskaltel - Euskadi (only sign Basque riders), Flanders - Baloise (folding at the end of the year), Modern Adventure Pro Cycling (brand new team, mainly sign Americans) and Novo - Nordisk (only sign diabetics). They just over 300 pts ahead of the highest ranked CT level team, and could genuinely get caught by the Red Bull development CT team (700 something points below).
They seem to be growing into the Vuelta though .... After not scoring a single UCI point in the first 7 stages, de Jong suddenly hit the big-time with a 15th place on stage 8.... That's a massive two points. Unfortunately they haven't managed to build on that in the last three stages since then.
I'm not just posting this to be hard on them, I think a proper inquisition is needed, and I think someone(s) needs to be held responsible
