Lessyourimage.com Fantasy Cycling - Grand Tour Game - Giro d'Italia

swj

The first grand tour of the year, the Giro d'Italia, is now just
days away from making its most recent appearance. I believe
this race will be won by an Italian, maybe Simoni, Garzelli, or even with
his outstanding form of late, Cunego. The Giro is usually an all-Italian
affair with intermittent podium and top-10 places by riders like young
Popovych of the Ukraine and even wins by the Russian Tonkov some years
back.Not in any way rescinding my previous comments, but if an Italian does
not win this race I think Yaroslav Popovych will, or at the very least
he'll come close after his third place of last year. The Giro also, if my
memory serves me correctly from last year, tended to favor stage wins over
all the other possibilities for scoring points. The Giro tends not to allow
for the accumulation of as many mountain and sprint points as the TDF
(overbearingly so) does, they seem to think that fewer mountain-top finishes
make a better and closer race. In a sense I cannot argue with that
but a close race does not a great race make. The Sprinters are all here -
McEwen, Cipo, Petacchi, Quaranta, Strazzer, Backstedt, Svorada...etc.
Several 'flat' stages will go to one or more of these men. For the
mountains I would put money on the Colombians to attempt a domination of the
competition once again, Freddy Gonzalez of Selle-Italia or Julio
Perez-Cuapio of Ceramiche would not be bad choices here. After the main
categories
there are those that will likely finish down in the GC but grab one or two
nice stage wins for themselves, surely you must consider Igor Astarloa in
this category
for he is surely out for redemption after his much maligned stay/debacle at
Cofidis. Anyway, that is indeed enough, I will leave the rest up to you.
Last but
not least, feel free to notify my of any problems via the 'contact' page.
Choose wisely.

I almost forgot ;-> that I am going to leave the registration open for
roughly the 1st week of the race to maximize the # of participants this time
around and there will not
be a cost system in effect either, I simply lack the time to lookup and
enter the UCI pts values for each and every rider in the Giro with
everything else I have on my plate
right now. Regardless of its shortcomings it should be fun nevertheless,
the general idea in the first place.

Thanks for playing.

LSI Fantasy Cycling