Welcome back to the lantern Rouge cycling podcast of familiar site for OG podcast fans or you probably can't tell given how well we produce this nowadays, if you listen, you're just on podcast players, but I'm back in Australia,

Benji's in Europe, well, depending on how you categorize it, and we are doing our team produce for 2024, starting alphabetically, it won't continue that way, Alpison, Dekernik, and yeah, it was their first year in world tool in 2023, we're going to review their season, talk about their transfers, and then talk about what we expect for 2024.

I guess Benji, we could also we can do world tour win over unders because there is a fixed number of world tour races in the season, one of our loyal listeners told me that I think at the end of our previous last year, I can't remember who exactly, but we could do that, and if we have someone, maybe I could be saying for Luke, he can taught up how many world tour races are actually are, how many do you reckon there are, including stages.

I actually have no clue, I'd say we've got 63, yeah, plus plus five monuments plus about 10 other classics, so we've got about 80 roughly in that with a bunch of one a one week races, I'd say 1332.

I'm going 140, I'm going 140, because I reckon you've underestimated like UA has seven days, you know, yeah, and Swiss has eight open air as open air eight, so I'm going to be 140, yeah.

So anyway.

We'll just do a by you for our person to kernic and yeah, we we're happy is the off season, I guess any other thing is any too much other housekeeping, obviously, there's been no new news from the unfortunate GCN plus

shattering since we did that podcast, so well, if any news comes out or as a reminder to people for next year when it comes to January next year, we will let people know whatever is the best place to watch various races.

Hopefully that situation improves over the next couple of months, but I'll listen to kernic. How was their 2023 season, Benji, after they were prevented from scamming the wild card, protein system and had to be promoted for this year.

Well, it was still a choice to be promoted, so they chose it. I reckon they go a letter.

I got to be honest, when you said five minutes ago that it had only been one year since they joined the world tour, my mind was like, oh, yeah, that's true, Jesus, because this team was really successful in 2023.

And yes, they were benefiting from the wild card system in the second division, the pro true division, the pro conti division in previous years, but still 17 Walter wins a 35 total victories and those aren't random like through the Polonia stage is mostly those are actually like the big races.

We starting off with Vanderpool as one of the key figures, Rubei, Sanremo, World Championships, if you consider that team related, if you don't then just skip it.

But next to him, we've got the likes of Jasper Phillips, and who was also very successful during the season, four stage at the Tour de France, green jersey, two stage attireno, second at Rubei, which is pretty good as well, and a stage at the Bingo Bongo tour.

And then Caining Groves, a stage at the Giro, three stage at the Veltables, the green jersey, and two stage at Catalonia, and then allows the victory in the World Tour for Carlos in an edge born Frankfurt.

So that's four riders doing the World Tour wins. I don't necessarily mind that. I think that's still a solid spread. It could have been just Vanderpool or just Philipson, but it is four riders in total and Caining Groves has really stepped up as the shadow leader.

Is that a good term for it, as in the rider that takes one of the top riders, he vacuums older straight up the slightly lower competition races.

He's kind of what Philips to me, he's Philipson, no, that's not true, he's not Philipson in 2021, but he's he's kind of Bauhaus plus, he's what bow, he's the Bauhaus of World Tour.

So yeah, if Bauhaus could do about originally did budding World Tour races and maybe that's a bit, I mean Caining Groves also I think there's some other races he could do well and that he didn't do in terms of just he didn't really do too many classics.

I'd like to see him do some of them next year, although this obviously when you have Philipson and Vanderpool, the best classic sprinter in the world, the best classics rider in the world, there's not so much space for Caining Groves to lead them.

But you sort of Lindbergh, Walter Lindbergh aka Luke's home race that I don't know if that's actually true, but he was super impressive, I watched that race because whenever an Australian is doing well, I have to watch and yeah, he was unbelievable that day, but I got an interesting start for you, Benji, those pulled up actually an interesting question.

To talking about depth and Caining Groves stepping up, who is the fifth highest scorer in 2023 for opposite to Kernick and how many UCI points did he score? Don't look at our see your fingers moving.

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