Written by Spin Doctors at 23:15 28/2-2017
Season 39 draws to a close marking the end of a very successful season for Spin Doctors. The story of our season was the double SC win at the Volta ao Porto and Vuelta de los Castillos with Sherlock Toll. Our win in Portugal was a target at the start of the season, and Toll was in top form bringing home his second Porto SC victory ahead of an impressive but ageing Frederick Longosiwa.
The Vuelta win was a big surprise, and though the team were in good shape the hills of stage 5 and flat roads of stage 1 are a challenge for a technical sprinter like Toll, but he did enough, just, to nick the win from Wim Lowik by a single point after a good result in the final stage time trial.
The latter stages of the season belonged to Kirby Abner in top form. The team were lucky to get a place in Germany, and Abner brought home some nice results, particularly given his age being a significant handicap and managed a top 3 SC performance. Toll was injured for most of the race and any question of Abner's captaincy being questioned was put to rest at that point.
Abner's big target for the season was the youth classification in the Netherlands and the first stage was disappointing for a promising young prologuer. Several disappointing performances prevented Abner from clawing back the 7 seconds he lost from Ewoud Geurtsen in the prologue. A second place in the final stage despite a terrible lead out performance proved one step away from being enough with the Herinckx standing in the way of the bonus seconds we would have needed. It was enough to bring a top 9 GC and top 3 YC and a satisfactory reward for a spell of top form.
Abner will be back to have another go in Netherlandse Tour in the future, but to consider another shot at the YC we will have to wait for another trainee. Sherlock Toll is resting up for a late season top form peak, perhaps in Germany or Netherlands. We hope Toll will be back in time to captain in Norwich-London - a race that he is well suited for, and has somehow bypassed us in previous seasons.
We will welcome Sean Kean into the team in a month's time, and will be pleased to recruit a talented climber, Lincoln Hannity, before he heads off to Ello Ello.
The team's long term goal is to recruit a cobbler or hiller in an attempt to diversify from classic sprint races alone. In Toll's absence the short term goal is to find some money with Kyle Wyles (initially in Lisbon GP), after the team found the World Championships a surprisingly tiring and unrewarding affair!
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Comments
Great season with 5 tour participation and results in all of them. Impressive. It is always fun.
I did TvA for the first time last season with TTers and also did Haute-Normandie with SP team in the past. In both cases I was lucky in prologue so it makes sense to participate also for the non-CB team for partial successes. H-N is even better also because of the last SP stage.
I had a chance to sign up to Haute-Normandie too and given how Otto Skoglund did there that may have been worth a go. This season will be tougher as unless things go really badly I won't see too much of Div 2 - which is a shame.
Results in 5 tours in one season - wow! Just wow!
a very impressive season!!
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