Spare a thought for the Cannondale-Garmin panda as he trundles home from school, report card in hand. Bereft of results, lacking in success, and shamed by a positively embarrassing end-of-season black mark – it's a report card that will not make for easy reading for Jonathan Vaughters and Doug Ellis. Poor endangered panda. If only you could hibernate for the winter like the riders on Cannondale-Garmin.
It took until the end of March for the team to win their first race, with a fine victory from Ben King on stage one of the Criterium International. But what could have been the start of a momentous surge only served as a rare high point in a spring of disappointment. Ramunas Navardauskas picked up a win in the Circuit de la Sarthe but the Ardennes saw little return with Daniel Martin crashing out of both Flèche Wallonne and Liege-Bastogne-Liege.
Like King's win in March, the team were given another shot in the arm at the Giro d'Italia with Davide Formolo taking a superb stage win during the opening week and Ryder Hesjedal bulldozing his way to finish fifth overall. The Cannondale riders secured two national time trial wins courtesy of Andrew Talansky and Navardauskas, and picked up a stage win at the Tour of Austria through Moreno Moser, but their Tour de France performance summed up their season, with three second-place stage finishes and one third. This was a season of almosts, as Andrew Talansky recently said in an interview with Cyclingnews, but the American at least provided bite and determination on his way to 11th overall in Paris.
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The second half of the season saw a mini-revival of fortunes and results with Joe Dombrowski wining a stage and the overall in the Tour of Utah, Tom Jelte Slagter wining two stages in the Tour of Alberta, and Lasse Norman Hansen signing off with the team by winning there, too.
Oddly, if you're looking for one of Cannondale's best collective efforts then you need look no further than the Worlds men's road race, where Navardauskas took bronze, Ben King animated the race, and Alex Howes finished 12th. That might seem like clasping at straws for some given that the riders were racing under national federation colours, but it goes some way to prove that talent is within the squad, even if that hasn't translated into results this season.
A new class
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