CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR FSA DIRECTEUR SPORTIF WINNERS!!

Well it wasn’t what we imagined, but the 2024 season will go down as historic and memorable on the Men’s side, and less historic but ultra-competitive on the Women’s side. And while the details can be covered in our other traditional year-end posts, for the FSA Directeur Sportif it looks an awful lot like the year we just watched. You’ll never guess which Men’s rider was on all of the top 10 teams…

[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 stupid choices last winter, and focus on the people who pushed all the right buttons!

Meet Our Winners!

Congrats to our Men’s podium! DiCenta’s Azzurra took a narrow 250-point win from Team Andmujika with Simpslb’s Grupetto leading home the chase group just a bit off the pace.

And chapeau to our Women’s Comp leaders! The Peluchen Effect, DS dreamer_mg, scored a 1,000-point victory over seriouscharly’s Lotte Finistère, in a 14-point photo finish with Luctor Emergo’s Pride and Prejudice.

Finally, our combined ranking competition was won by Moncassin31, whose dual Pédale! teams eeked out a very tight victory.

As always, we invite our winners to come by and tell their story. Every wnning team has a story! But I will start off with a bit of background.

DiCenta is a first time player! Obviously no novice to the concept though. By contrast, Andomujika has been playing since the competition went digital in 2010. SimpSLB has been involved since 2016.

All of our women’s winners have been around for a while. Luctor Emergo was 13th last year, as well as 6th two years ago. Moncassin31 is another long-time player and was 4th in the combined last year.

Photo by Kristy Sparow/Getty Images

And Now a Win From Our Sponsor…

FSA and Vision have a long list of World Tour athletes and results to brag about, and while Visma came back to Earth this year, there were still wins all over the landscape from EF Education, Israel-PremierTech, Astana, UNO-X, Lotto DSTNY, and Arkea. And it didn’t get any bigger than Kristen Faulkner’s Olympic Road Race gold medal. [They were actually all over Paris this summer.] We don’t talk about their many disciplines but it’s all of the above, including this week’s IRONMAN madness in Hawaii. Look for a resumption of road racing excellence next year.

Photo by Joan Cros – Corbis/Getty Images

Rider Trends and Tidbits

On the men’s side, obviously Tadej Pogačar dominated with an historic 6,580-point explosion, lapping the field and the record books. I believe Peter Sagan’s 2016 season held the previous non-Pogačar record, 4,334 points, a number the newly minted World Champ had topped three times, including a 4,803 mark in 2021. So yeah.

But latching onto that shooting star was only part of the winning formula, one that 216 teams 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 really win this season, you needed to take it to the Maxim! As in Van Gils, the young Lotto star who 180 teams foresaw making the leap from last year’s 720-point mark to more rarified air, cracking the 2,000-point barrier, 8th overall. His 6-point pricetag was the lowest of the big point producers, but 8-point studs Ben O’Connor and Biniam Girmay stepped up to fulfill their past promise.

Photo by Luc Claessen/Getty Images

On the. Women’s side, Demi Vollering and Lotte Kopecky. traded places atop the leaderboard, a consequential development considering the 8-point cost difference, while Lorena Wiebes’ production dipped. The key to victory didn’t involve Vollering or Wiebes at all, and Kopecky wasn’t on many of the top units either. Instead it was a resurgent Elisa Longo Borghini who crushed expectations with a 4,613 tally, right alongside Vollering, at half the cost.

Another reliable veteran (and cycling Godess) Marianne Vos, put together her own rebound with 2,726 points at age 37, her biggest score since 2021. That made her one of the big bargains at 20 points, though 2-pointers Puck Pieterse and Thalita de Jongh being up around 1500 definitely moved the needle for 100 and 5 teams, respectively. Congrats to CK Dallas and Crooked Rain for being the only two buyers of both bargain bin specials.

Everyone should feel free to chime in with your hits and misses, your private league grudges… all of the above. Oh, and along those lines, a special congrats to my big bro, Mr Van P, for his Editors’ League championship! His victory raises the collective family victory history to… one. Not for lack of trying, I will have you know.

OK, thanks to everyone for playing, thanks to Superted, aka tedvdw, the creator and maintainer of the wonderful website version without which this competition couldn’t exist. Thanks to UMWolverine, Jens, Ursula, Henry (Chabinho), and the many people who chimed in with comments on pricing, results corrections, and all the details that keep this working. I am sorry that my health didn’t allow me to be very active, but I was gratified to see the community firing on all cylinders regardless. See you for the FSA DS ‘25!