The votes have been counted, the result checked and then doubled checked, and we can now announce that Cyclingnews readers voted Team Sky as the best male team of 2016. The British squad took a resounding 34 per cent of the vote, with Movistar in second place (16 per cent), and Orica BikeExchange (15 per cent) in third.
With 39 wins on the road there can be little doubt that Team Sky enjoyed a successful year in terms of outright racing. They won their fourth Tour de France courtesy of Chris Froome, and picked up their debut Monument win via Wout Poels at Liege-Bastogne-Liege. There was also victory at the Critérium du Dauphiné, Paris-Nice, the Volta ao Algarve, a flurry of stage wins and a close-fought second place in the Vuelta – again courtesy of Froome. The men in black and blue were competitive from January to Japan, with their leader even showing off his maillot jaune at the Saitama Criterium in late October.
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Movistar, for all their might in the form of the evergreen Valverde and the ever-consistent Quintana, simply could not match up, and QuickStep, despite winning more races than other team, could only finish fourth in our vote.
The last few months have undoubtedly put the team and their leader Dave Brailsford under the microscope with the big boss called to Parliament to answer questions relating to the team’s ethics and the iffy-jiffy bag used to treat Bradley Wiggins in 2011. That’s right, 2011, and not 2016, and perhaps the fact that the UK is Cyclingnews’ fastest growing audience also played a part in explaining how Team Sky enjoyed such a landslide. Perhaps they won because they are the best team, or perhaps it was due to a number of reasons all rolled into one. It certainly wasn’t the strangest voting result of 2016, and as the band Sir Bradley adores once sang, the public get what the public want.
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