As October kicks in and the road season slowly but surely winds down, the temptation to scour the internet for highpoints of the year’s racing steadily gets greater. And if you’re amongst those trying to find standout performances that may well have been overlooked the first time round, you could do worse than track down a Youtube video of the closing kilometres of stage 8 of the Tour of Turkey.
That was when Caja Rural-Seguros RGA rider Lluis Mas burst clear, and on the twisting narrow streets that follow, just managed to fend off the bunch - led in by no less a star than Mark Cavendish and the Etixx-QuickStep team. It’s a classic last-minute hot pursuit, with the one rider who has the strength and opportunity to get away just managing to stay out of the peloton’s clutches.
Winning that kind of David-versus-Goliath scenario has become familiar terrain for Caja Rural-Seguros RGA in 2015. In 2014, the Pro Continental team took just five wins, and this season so far they are on 17 and counting, the most recent in Thursday’s Coppa Sabatini and ranging from wins in the Vuelta a Burgos to victories in the Four Days of Dunkirk, the Philadelphia Classic and the overall of the Tour de Beauce. The squad’s increasing consistency stretches further down the classification too; by August, the team had already taken more than 100 top 10 placings.
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“It’s partly due to a group of younger riders coming through like Carlos Barbero [winner of five races this year] and Pello Bilbao [winner of three]. They're stepping up a level, maturing with the team, and one victory has led to another,” sports director Eugenio Goikoetxea told Cyclingnews as the Caja Rural-Seguros RGA prepared for its last two races, this weekend's Giro del Emilia and the GP Beghelli in Italy.
Although the first win of the year did not come until April, a stage in the Vuelta a Castilla y León, Goikoetxea says, “If you look back at the history of the team, that tends to happen. In February and March, we’re racing against WorldTour teams that are building towards the April Classics, they’ve come from San Luis or Australia and they’re already in form. We’re starting a lot more steadily, in Andalucia, a little more slowly, and so every year the first victories have tended to come in April or May.”
However, Goikoetxea says it wouldn’t be realistic to expect that a season like 2015 is going to become a benchmark for the future. They don’t have the budget to make big signings and as a result the team is not just looking for wins, but also to keep a higher profile during the race itself and be in the thick of the action. That makes repeating a bumper year like 2015 much more difficult.
You can read more at Cyclingnews.com
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