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 by: Bill Oetinger  11/1/2022

Top Ten of 2022

Yikes…it’s November already! How did that happen? Or, more to the point in the context of this column: how did we get here? As in, who did what this season to earn a place on my Top Ten list of 2022?

Last year I said my list was pretty much a no-brainer. The big guns won the big races and most things followed predictable paths throughout the season. Tadej Pogačar (UAE) won his second straight Tour de France (convincingly). Primoz Roglič (Jumbo-Visma) won his third straight Vuelta a España (comfortably). Nine out of ten on my list were also nine out of the top ten in the UCI World Ranking, with only Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo-Visma) crashing that elite party, thanks to his 2nd at the Tour de France.

This year? Not so much. Whoo…what a muddle! In spite of this being just for fun, I do take my list seriously—assuming anyone cares—and I spend quite a bit of time and some of my few precious brain cells trying to sort it out. But my goodness, what a thorny thicket this season has been.

When I weigh up all the results from a past season, I consider several things: the UCI World Ranking, the One-Day Race Ranking, the Stage Race Ranking, all melded together with  a grain of salt, a little voodoo, some historical context, and a dash of sentimentality. My rankings favor all-round cyclists so I automatically toss out most of the pure sprinters, regardless of how many UCI points they accumulated. 

A case in point this year was 20-year old Belgian Arnaud de Lie (Lotto-Soudal). Ever heard of him? He finished 6th in the World Ranking and 3rd in the One-Day Race Ranking. He had a very busy season to get to those exalted placings. He won 10 races and was top five in at least seven more. But check out that link to his season’s results: there is not one single race on the list that most of us have ever heard of. They’re all minor-league, small-points races. Nickel and dime stuff. Perhaps in the years to come he will start winning at the top tier, but for now I picture a mouse picking up crumbs under the table where the big folks are feasting. That’s not someone who will end up on a Top Ten list.

This year I’m also taking a pass on the winners of many of the one-day classics and monuments. Not all of them but some. These winners—Matej Mohorič at Milano-San Remo, Binian Germay at Gent-Wevelgem, Michal Kwiatkowski at Amstel Gold, Dylan Van Baarle at Paris-Roubaix, and Dylan Teuns at Fleche Wallone—well, okay, they won those big events but then they didn’t do enough elsewhere to get within sniffing distance of anyone’s Top Ten.

So after dumping all those wannabes, who’s left? Let’s find out…

10. Dani Martinez (INEOS-Grenadiers), 26, Colombia

DM

Down here at the bottom of the Top Ten, a case could be made for any of half a dozen riders getting their foot in the door. But I’m going with Dani. He finished 14th in the World Ranking but with five of those ahead of him being pure sprinters or one-day wonders, he’s solidly in the Top Ten of all-rounders. In chronological order, he won the Colombian ITT on February 10, finished 3rd at the Volta ao Algarve (Feb 16-20), 3rd at Paris-Nice (March 6-13), 1st at the Tour of the Basque Country (April 4-9), winning one stage, 5th at Fleche Wallone (April 20), 4th at Liege-Bastogne-Liege (April 24), and finally 1st at the Coppa Sabatini (Sept 15). He also finished 8th at the Tour de Suisse and 30th at the Tour de France, in both races working for team leader Geraint Thomas. And for whatever it’s worth, he was the best placed rider from INEOS in the season-long ranking, well ahead of his presumptive team leaders: Richard Carapaz, Adam Yates, and Thomas.

9. Sergio Higuita (BORA-hansgrohe), 25, Colombia

SH

Higuita finished 12th in the World Ranking (behind those five sprinters so 7th among the all-rounders). He won the Colombian Road Race (Feb 13), won Stage 5 of the Volta ao Algarve (Feb 20), won the Volta Catalunya stage race (March 21-27), won Stage 4 of the Tour de Romandie (April 30), was 2nd overall at the Tour de Suisse (June 12-19), won Stage 3 of the Tour de Pologne (August 1) on his way to 8th overall, was a rather lackluster 23rd at the Vuelta (I expected better), was 2nd at Tre Valli Varesine (October 4) and 4th at Il Lombardia (October 8).

8. Alejandro Valverde (Movistar), 42, Spain

AV

At first I thought to put Valverde in the list as sort of a sentimental Lifetime Achievement Award but the more I pored over this year’s results, the more I felt he belonged, in this, his final season as a pro. He was 11th in the World Ranking or 6th among the all-rounders. He won Trofeo Andratx (Jan 29), was 5th overall at Volta Comunitat Valenciana (Feb 2-6), won the Gran Camiño stage race (Feb 24-27), winning Stage 3 and the Points jersey, was 2nd at Strade Bianche (March 5) and 2nd again at Fleche Wallone (April 20), 13th overall in his final Vuelta, 2nd at Coppa Agostini (Sept 29), 4th at Giro dell’Emilia (Oct 1), 3rd at Tre Valli Varesine, and finally a very respectable 6th at Il Lombardia, the last race of his long career.

So that’s this year, and a good year it was at age 42. But about that Lifetime Achievement deal: consider…

He won the Vuelta a España in 2009, the UCI World Championship Road Race in 2018 and was 2nd twice and 3rd four times. He won the Critérium du Dauphiné twice, won the Tour of the Basque Country once, won the Clasica de San Sebastian twice, won the Volta a Catalunya three times, Liege-Bastogne-Liege four times, Fleche Wallone five times, finished first in the UCI ProTour twice, first in the UCI World Ranking twice. He holds the record for most medals won in the World Championships. He entered 31 Grand Tours, completed 27 of them, 20 of which were in the top ten. He has 133 professional wins and an almost countless number of 2nds, 3rds, and top tens. The online database Cycling Ranking rates him the third most successful cyclist of all time, behind only Eddy Merckx and Sean Kelly. And through it all, he has been the classiest of gents. He will be missed.

7. Jai Hindley (BORA-hansgrohe), 26, Australia

JH

Hindley only finished 24th in the World Ranking but he won the Giro d’Italia and that gets him on this list, regardless of the rest of his season, which, frankly, didn’t amount to much. He was 5th overall at Tirreno-Adriatico (March 7-13), and 10th overall at the Vuelta. So he completed two of the three Grand Tours, both in the top ten, with one of them a win. That’s nothing to sneeze at! I think we’d better leave it there and wait to see what he does next year.

6. Aleksandr Vlasov (BORA-hansgrohe), 26 

AV

Vlasov ended up 5th in the World Ranking. He won the overall at the Volta Comunitat Valenciana (Feb 2-6) winning Stage 3, was 4th overall at the UAE Tour (Feb 20-26), 3rd overall at the Tour of the Basque Country (April 4-9), won the overall at the Tour de Romandie (April 26-May 1), winning Stage 5, and was in first place overall at the Tour de Suisse going into the final stage when he had to pull out because of a COVID positive. In his first Tour de France, he crashed on Stage 6, was beat up and lost time, but battled back gamely and eventually climbed to 5th overall at the end. Only bad luck will keep him from being well up this list next year.

5. Primoz Roglič (Jumbo-Visma), 32, Slovenia

PR

Talk about bad luck! This guy had more than his share in 2022. This is where I get into that thorny thicket: what does it mean to be considered one of the best riders of a given year? Is it only about results? Only placings and points? If those are the only metrics that matter, then Roglič might barely scrape into this list at the bottom but wouldn’t be up here in the top five. He had some good results but some gnarly adversity got in the way of even better results. That said, few people doubt that he is (still) one of the best cyclists in the world, no matter what the results say. One of the talking heads in the blog-o-sphere found a neat way to express this. Aside from the results, who are the three most feared riders in the European peloton right now? Roglič is one of them. (We’ll get to the other two presently.)

He opened his account for the year in a promising way, winning the overall at Paris-Nice (March 6-13). He appeared to be defending his winner’s laurels at the Tour of the Basque Country (April 4-9), winning Stage 1 and staying in the leader’s jersey through Stage 4. But over the last two stages he lost time, ending up 8th overall. They tell us he developed a knee injury. He was back in good form in June, winning the overall at the Dauphiné (June 5-12). He entered the Tour de France as one of the preemptive favorites but crashed over a hay bale on Stage 5, got busted up and lost a big chunk of time. There’s an old saying that you make your own luck. Presumably that means you can also make your own bad luck. Okay…so the hay bale was in the road, in a roundabout. 175 other riders that day somehow avoided hitting it. Roglič drilled it. He crashed out of last year’s Tour as well and also squandered a comfortable lead at the 2021 Paris-Nice by crashing not once but twice on the final stage. Are we seeing a pattern here?

Fast forward to the Vuelta a España, where he was the three-time defending champion. He was supposedly healed up from his Tour crash by then and held the overall lead, briefly, early in the race. The whole story of the Vuelta was covered in last month’s column but at the end of it all, he crashed again, on Stage 16, while in 2nd place, battling for the lead. Evidence is hazy but I’m willing to assert that the crash was down to Roglič…to operator error…more of his self-inflicted bad luck. Up to that point, his Vuelta had been a mixed bag: some brilliant moments and some vulnerable ones. Could he have won? Possibly. But probably not. It would have been close.

So not his best season. Not even close. But I agree with the pundits who still rate him as one of the most lethal road racers on the planet. At 32, his clock is ticking, but I don’t think he’s quite done yet.

4. Wout Van Aert (Jumbo-Visma), 28, Belgium

WVA

Wout Van Aert is the outlier in this group: the only one who is unlikely to win any serious stage races, at least as things stand today. And yet he is so insanely talented there’s no way to keep him out of any Top Ten list. He finished 2nd in the UCI World Ranking and 1st in the One-Day Race Ranking. He won at least 13 races this year and had at least 20 more top fives. And unlike his compatriot Arnaud de Lie, his results came in all of the marquee races, plus a few minor ones. Among his wins were Omloop Het Niewsblad (Feb 26), one stage and the points jersey at Paris-Nice (while helping his team leader Roglič take the overall win), E3 Saxo Bank (March 25), two stage wins and the points jersey at the Dauphiné (while again helping Roglič win the overall), three stage wins and the points jersey at the Tour de France. In this case, he was spectacular in helping team leader Jonas Vingegaard win the overall. He won the only time trial. He set a total-points record in winning the sprinter’s jersey. For whatever it’s worth, while winning the time trial and the sprinter’s jersey, he also finished 5th in the mountain-jersey competition…all of it while working as an indispensable super-domestique for the team. Finally, a 1st at the Bretagne Classic (August 28). Also 2nd at Paris-Roubaix and 3rd at Liege-Bastogne-Liege. 

The conventional wisdom at this point is that he is simply too big—too heavy—to compete with the true mountain goats who ultimately win the stage races. All of his very impressive mountain exploits have come out of breakaways, not going head-to-head with the best climbers. It’s not beyond imagining that he could reinvent himself: lose 20 pounds and climb just that little bit better, the way Laurent Jalabert did, back in the day. But really, he’s so good right now at what he does, why would he want to change?

3. Jonas Vingegaard (Jumbo-Visma), 25, Denmark

JV

Vingegaard won the Tour de France, vanquishing the seemingly invincible Tadej Pogačar and scooping up the 1000 UCI points that go with it. How he did it is known to all cycling fans by now. He earned it with his own prodigious skills but he also had the benefit of the deepest team and the best team tactics along the way, while Pogačar’s UAE team was making a hash out of their support and tactics. Which begs the question: if Vingegaard and Pogačar competed mano a mano, with neutral support and no teams or tactics involved, who would win? I think most would say Pogačar. But bike racing is a team sport and strong teams with clever game plans do make a difference. 

Although Jumbo-Visma management will insist that Vingegaard and Primoz Roglič were equal team leaders, it seems obvious that the latter was the senior partner in the firm and that, all else being equal, the team would work for him. That was the case at both Paris-Nice and the Dauphiné, where Roglič finished 1st and Vingegaard 2nd. At the Basque Country, where Roglič’s bum knee slowed him down, Vingegaard was let off the leash over the final two stages but only managed 6th overall. The big one of course was the Tour, where Roglič crashed early and lost time, at which point Vingegaard stepped in as the Plan B option and the team threw all its support behind him. Not only is he an amazing climber but he’s also a wicked time-trialer. Team tactics don’t help you against the clock.

Vingegaard only contested one other stage race this year, the relatively minor CRO Race (Tour of Croatia) (Sept 27-Oct 2). He was the team leader and coulda shoulda won it but didn’t. How he managed to lose it may or may not mean much but it is a little blot on his season (IMHO). He had an 8-second lead over Matej Mohorič after five stages but on the sixth and final stage, with the two of them finishing with the same time, he somehow frittered those eight seconds away by missing out on bonus seconds awarded at the finish and at intermediate points along the way. He lost the overall to Mohorič by one second. He was either too exhausted or too inattentive to scrap for those bonus seconds. I don’t know which. Minor race…no biggie. But not the look of a champion.

Okay…drum roll, please! We are down to numbers 1 and 2 and—Help!—I am absolutely stumped as to who to put on those two steps. Oh, I know who the two riders are: Tadej Pogačar and Remco Evenepoel (the other two “most feared” riders in the pro peloton). But who’s number 1? I cannot decide. I'm going to do the cowardly thing and call it a tie.

Tadej Pogačar (UAE), 24, Slovenia

TP

How can we have a rider at #1 who did not win a Grand Tour this year? Good question! But he did finish the season #1 in the UCI World Ranking. He banked 800 points for his 2nd place at the Tour, the same number of points Jai Hindley was awarded for winning the Giro or Evenepoel was awarded for winning the Vuelta. Like it or not; fair or unfair, the UCI high hats dole out more points for the Tour de France. 

But he did a lot of other good things as well. He won the UAE Tour (Feb 20-26), picking up two stage wins; he won Strade Bianche (March 5); won Tirreno-Adriatico (March 7-13), picking up two stage wins and the points jersey; was 5th at Milano-San Remo and 4th at the Tour of Flanders; 1st at the Tour of Slovenia (June 15-19), picking up two wins and the points jersey; then his battling 2nd at the Tour de France, winning three stages; 1st at the GP Montreal (beating Wout Van Aert in the sprint); 1st at Tre Valli Varesine, and finally 1st at Il Lombardia (beating Enric Mas in a two-up sprint). Altogether at least 13 wins and at least 14 other top fives.

He’s a brilliant climber, a superb time-trialer, and an above-average sprinter…pretty much the definition of an all-rounder. His team left him exposed and vulnerable at the Tour and he had a couple of other races where he looked merely mortal: fading on the Mur de Huy at Fleche Wallone and being dropped rather decisively by Enric Mas on the final climb at the Giro dell’Emilia. But most of the time he was as good as we have come to expect him to be. Still just 24…

Remco Evenepoel (Quick-Step), 22, Belgium

RE

This is the new kid on the block who has, as Phil Liggett would have said, “put the cat among the pigeons.” After his spectacular win at the Vuelta a España and then his crushing victory at the World Championship, all the other teams and riders are spending at least some of the off-season rethinking their goals and challenges for 2023. It’s a new ball game.

He’s been a pro since 2019 and has had some success prior to this year…enough to get people talking about his future potential. Well…it looks as if the future has arrived. But, as noted in my Vuelta review last month, the jury is still out as to his place in the peloton because of some past weakness in the biggest mountains. He may have laid that bogey to rest at the Vuelta with some astonishing mountain finishes. But I for one am still just the teeniest bit skeptical on that front and want to see one more season of big events under his belt before going all-in on the kid. But hey…I have him tied for 1st here so he’s already at the top of the totem pole, albeit sharing the top perch with Tadej Pogačar.

Aside from winning the Vuelta and the World Championship, what else did he do this year? He won Stage 1 of Volta Comunitat Valenciana (Feb 2-6) but couldn’t match the pace of the best climbers on Stage 3 and ultimately finished 2nd overall. He won the overall at the Volta ao Algarve (Feb 16-20), including winning the Stage 4 time trial by almost a minute. He was 2nd overall at Tirreno-Adriatico (March 7-13) through five stages but faded badly on the final climb on Stage 6 and ended up 11th. He was in 1st overall after five stages at the Tour of the Basque Country (April 4-9) but lost time on the final climb on Stage 6 and ended up 4th. It was these vulnerable days in the biggest mountains that had folks doubting his overall chops…up to this point.

On April 24, he won his first cycling monument, Liege-Bastogne-Liege. He went off the front on a 30-km solo breakaway and won by 48 seconds. His time of 41.397 kph (25.66 mph) is the fastest in the history of this venerable classic. He backed that up by winning the Clasica de San Sebastian with a 44-km solo breakaway to win by two minutes. Those are stunning, shocking victories…taking the whole peloton to the woodshed in two of the most important one-day races of the year.

In between those two wins, he finished first overall at the Tour of Norway (May 24-29), winning Stages 1, 3, and 5. At the Tour de Suisse (June 12-19), he won the ITT on the final stage but lost substantial time on the two preceding mountain stages and ended up in 11th, 4:04 back. After that he won the Belgian national time trial on June 23.

That brings us to the Vuelta (August 19-Sept 11). He donned the leader’s jersey after Stage 6 and never gave it up. He crushed the time trial on Stage 10 and was mostly dominant in the many big hills, although with just a couple of slightly off days. And he did it without the help of a strong team. Very impressive! And then the frosting on the cake: the World Championship Road Race on Sept 25, which he won the same way he won LBL and San Sebastian, with a solo breakaway off the front of the strongest assembly of riders in the world. A week before the road race, he took the bronze medal in the World Championship ITT, just nine seconds out of first.

What a season! And only 22 years old. I’ve stated my reservations about his possible weakness in the biggest hills. His performance at the Vuelta may have done away with that but we’ll see how he does next year.

 

There were quite a few big names from past years who didn’t make the Top Ten this year. Richard Carapaz, Enric Mas, Adam Yates, Mikel Landa, Nairo Quintana, Geraint Thomas, Egan Bernal, Joao Almeida, Mathieu van der Poel, Julian Alaphilippe…among them, six out of ten from my list last year. New riders are always coming up and pushing the old riders aside and also the fickle finger of fate is forever messing with people: wrecks and illness and injuries and mechanicals or just a bad day now and then. 

The winning margin at the Giro was 1:18, Hindley over Carapaz. At the Tour it was 2:43, Vingegaard over Pogačar. At the Vuelta it was 2:02, Evenepoel over Mas. That adds up to 363 seconds of difference spread over 6251 miles of racing…a little over half a second per mile. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to picture where a few handfuls of seconds could have gone in another direction on any given day. Just the slimmest of margins between being a winner and an also-ran. It’s unpredictable. It’s capricious and sometimes cruel. This is not Zwift. This is the real world in all its complex messiness. We love it! 2023 can’t get here soon enough.

Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net



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