Los Galacticos

[el Galactico]

1) Yeah it was a hard decision to sell him. But there would have been no races for him left as i already have my new climber and want to ride for him now, team was unfortunately to little to have 2 climbers in it, so i had to decide, problem was that the 3 GT's last year destroyed my team structure completely which was also not really good before that, but after a pure catastrophe.
I understand you and i hate me a bit for that, too! Sorry

2) I read the name somewhere in a newspaper (dont ask me in which, i dont know it anymore) and there it was written that Geniez is a "puncheur". For me a puncheur can be a climber as well as a classic rider or maybe pave rider, who likes to attack. I simply liked the name and took it for my next guy. Shame on me that i was bad informed! I will do it better next time. I give you my word.

[el Galactico]

Season start in Down Under
Can Callado make the same as Leandro did last year?

Last year the Season opening was a big success when Leandro da Souza won the Tour Down Under. This year the team is again motivated and stronger than last year. Adriano Perreira and the 2 oldies Demont Mitchell and Ignacio Castillo want to lead Guilhe through the 6 stages. A 5th place yesterday in the little criterium before the real tour start tomorrow was a first good sign that Guilherme is in a good form.
Like last year there is still missing a stage win in January so that Guilhe is under pressure to get this win.
The 12 rider big team is ready to start into the real season with big goals. Mailand-San Remo, the spring classics, the Giro, Tour de France and the Vuelta + autumn classics are the big goals for the team and they want to get at least one big victory this year even if its gonna be very very hard to win something.

The team structure with 12 riders is okay and the first goal is to bring Castillo and Mitchell into a successful retirement.

[el Galactico]

Tour Down Under
Callado becomes 4th at first stage!

The first stage of about 140 kms was not very difficult, pirati took the first points for mountain jersey, Tigre became second luckily.
At the end Guilherme Callado became 4th in the sprint from the wheel of his teammate Adriano Perreira. Kasper KindahlStrand won the sprint while the other favorite sprinter lost some points by hanging on each other.

[el Galactico]

Tour Down Under - stage 2+3
Again and again...

Like last year with Leandro daSouza the team is not able to win a stage in January. Tour Down Under is very good at the moment and the chances to win both green jersey and GC are very good but we still have to wait for a stage win. Yesterday Guilherme became third, today a finish with a +4% at the end. Normally a big advantage for him, but one guy was faster again. This time it was Puno Pozdrava (Team MiSa). The second place means that he takes over the leader jersey and he keeps his green jersey as well. Tomorrow is a finish with a +3, again a good chance to win, but the biggest chance is for sure on Saturday when it goes twice over the Willunga Hill with his steep 3 kms around 20 kms before the finish. This should be the stage where everything will be decided.

Going back to 2010 it was Leandro daSouza, who made sure his tour win by becoming 2nd and being again beaten by no other than Esteban Trueba, the cycling legend from team Alkworld, the best hill sprinter of all times.
This year Guilherme Callado wants to make it better and want to win Tour Down Under for the team again, and hopefully with a stage win this time.

[el Galactico]

Tour Down Under - stage 4+5
Callado able to win Tour Down Under...

Stage 4: A +3 sprint so we decided do help the pure sprinters as we have good chances to win this kind of sprint. Easily we were able to come to the finish line with nearly the complete peloton. The sprint then was easily made, from the wheel of Harry Applebey (Gnoien) Guilherme opened the sprint quite late so that he was not able to get back Stefan Strauss (Team-Mojabahs) who won the sprint after an early opening by Santiago Gonzalez (Luebeck-Oilers). 2nd place and the GC win was closer then ever.
On stage 5 we were the lonely favorite and we had to face a mass of sprinter teams but the Willunga Hill, which had to be taken 2 times - last time about 20 kms before the finish, was to steep so that they all had to surrender to stay in the first group. After the mountain the mass of flat monsters was able to close the gap from over 1 minute to 24 seconds at the end. The sprint was no problem for Callado! Today on the last day we only have to look for dangerous attackers because in the sprint nobody is able to take enough seconds back to win the tour.

[el Galactico]

Transfer news

After the win of the Tour Down Under by Callado yesterday the won money was immediately reinvested in a new rider. Ignacio Castillo retired from professional cycling and the new one is the 28 year old irish Slevin McGuigan who was sold by team Quick-Step 2 days ago. This chance had to be used as we had no riders between 25 and 30 years. With 28 Slevin fits perfect into this hole. He now will be the leader for the spring classics and he will be helper number 1 for the Giro and the Tour de France.

Ignacio Castillo

266 races
- 1x spanish champion
- 1 stage Vuelta a Pais Vasco
- 2. Ronde van Vlanderen 2010
- 5. Mailand - San Remo 2010

Thank you Ignacio for a great career. Unfortunately you didnt have so much moments where you rode for your own but when you always showed strong results even if there were often some faster guys so that you only won 2 stages in your whole career. But nevermind, your work for Callado and Gourgur during the last year was excellent and it shows a good character that you never complained about your position in the team even if you could have had a better one. My respect for 3 GT's during 2010!! Your big moment was the Ronde, where you was beaten only by one rider at the end, this could have changed your life forever but it didnt happen. Nevertheless you never gave up, this shows especially your stage win at the Vuelta a Pais Vasco only some days after you lost the Ronde on the finish line. Thank you, our fan favorite retires!
7598 eternal points

[el Galactico]

Season review

Month January is usually not a strong month for the team, not much races and nearly no success. This year it was a bit different. The team participated at 23(nr. 24 may follow this evening) races and after we missed a stage win last year we did it better this month even if we had to wait again for a long time. At the end it was Guilherme Callado with victory number 21 for him at the most important stage race this month. He won the 5th stage of the Tour Down Under which was won by his former team mate Leandro daSouza last year. Guilherme followed him by winning the green jersey and finally the tour as well. But Leandro was not able to win a stage during this tour.
The rest of the races this month were very unspectacular, mostly we rode with a very cheap line-up to make some money to buy new riders as we had several very old guys in our rows.
With over 1,6 millions € profit we did that very good so that we were able to sell our oldies Ben Gourgue(32), Ignacio Castillo(35) and finally today Luiz Foguete(36).
For them we could present 4 new riders, at the beginning of the month Sebastian Araujo and Oswaldo Iguacu, some days later Alexandre Geniez. At the end of the month team Quick-Step sold all his riders and this gave us the chance to buy the 28 year old irish Slevin McGuigan, a very talented guy who is now our new leader in classic races. For the next month we can now also present rider number 4 who was bought today after we sold Foguete.

Arturo Sarrabal 51-74-66-58-46-69,2; reg. 47

He should become the follower of Luiz on hilly terrain where he should become the guy for the last 50 kms to last sieb point as well as he is one of the stronger tt-riders in our team which automatically gives him a start place for the GT's.

At the end we want to say thank you to Luiz Foguete who is our new record rider with the most races ever for the team. He was his complete career in our team and even if he was only a helper he was able to win 3 races, the most importan for sure was the Tour de France-stage! Thanks!

[el Galactico]

Etoile de Besseges

The 5 day tour in France Etoile de Besseges was the first of 3 planned tours for the team in February. It should become the tour for Guilherme Callado, his goal was to win at least a stage and he wanted to get the tour win.

On the first 2 days it was ok when he became 2nd and 10th without losing so much on his opponents, but unfortunately Lecces new sprinter was able to win both stages so that he was from this moment on the favorite for GC. He defended this position on day 3 when he lost some seconds to Callado who won the stage out of a group of stronger climbers who splitted the field into parts on the last steep km about 13 km before the finish.

On day 4 the manager had some problems with the connection to the team and Lecce reacted to late so that a group of 4 riders came through with over one minute gap. This decided the tour for them because they had the luck that the sprinter always brought them back on the last stage.
The revenge took Guilherme then by winning his second stage in this tour very surprisingly. He already sprinted fot bonus seconds before. At the end this brought him Place 4 in GC and more important his 6th Green Yersey of his career.
Financially it was also not a bad tour, even if the team was not soo cheap we were able to make a win of about 300 k.

The won points were enough for Callado to become the second rider in our team who was able to get more than 10.000 eternal points in his career and this career is still going on. He is also only 2 wins behind Leandro da Souza, our current record stage winner with 25 stages.

[el Galactico]

Tour Mediteranéen
Araujo gets his first white jersey...

Our young leader Sebastian Araujo was able to win the white jersey of the Tour Med 2011. On the last steep kms of the tour up to the top of the Mont Faron he came in 14 seconds in front of his opponent Isacio Vizcaino (Franconia) as 10th of the stage. Therefore he also finished this Tour on P10 in GC. Guilherme Callado got the 2nd place in sprinters classement after he finished the stages 3+4 on place 2. in the sprint of the bunch. All in all the tour was a success with the white jersey which was the big goal for this tour. Some money was also won, so everything is perfect at the moment.

[el Galactico]

National Championships

Today were the National Championships and the team had to start in not less than 7 of them.

The first one was France with Alexandre Geniez alone on the road. He didnt play a role and finished the race as a relaxing training sessions over half an hour behind the winner.
Then it came to Ireland and with Slevin McGuigan we had much more hope but right from the beginnin we saw 2 of the biggest teams in Ireland online, Brio and EPO! Therefore we thought it could be a sprint, but Epo used the chance on the +4 5 kms before the finish to escape with Scott Rowdy and Gregg Butler, Slevin followed aswell as one rider of Aixteam. In the sprint Oconnel(Aix) started early with Rowdy in his wheel while Butler and Slevin waited to long. At the end Slevin finished 3rd after the 2 EPO riders.
Race number 3 was in Australia where Johnnie Walker had no chance to win anything on a very hilly terrain, he attacked and got some money at the sprint and then he fell back into the nowhere of this championship. Done!
Demont Mitchell was the only rider of our team on the Bahamas where he had to face a majority of Zanarkand riders. A group with 4 of them and Demont made their way to the finish and Zanarkand gave the 2nd place to Demont, this was the best he could have against 4 riders of Zanarkand.
Belgium with a strong Eddy Wouters then was a good championship with a lot of action. At the end Elbcoast won a very undeserved championship by outsprinting JPS. Eddy finished 17th.
Then came our big race with Brazil, the main goal of this day. An early group with Alkworld and nearly all the other famous teams with brazilian riders jumped away form the peloton. Tigre and Inacio Araujo were in this group. Behind in the peloton O. Iguacu made the tempo so that both could rest in this group. In front Alk attacked and Tigre fell behind but the riders in front were not able to ride together so that Tigre came back and made the deciding counterattack with only one weak rider in the wheel. This was the decision! Joaquim Tigre is the new Brazilian Champion!!

[el Galactico]

Transfer news

More than one week ago was our last posting. Since then nothing big happened on the sport side of this team. But again the team was able to buy a very good rider from the transfer market. Stephan Auge is 29 years old and had 3 teams before. bigmat sold him some days ago and after Demont Mitchell with 36 years became worserby every training session it was clear that we had to react to give Callado the chance to have a successfull end of his career. Auge was just a few days in the team when he immediately used the training and raised his flat skill up to 87, besides that he also has a enormous mountain skill of 69!! This guy will give us the chances for some big victories in the next months with Callado. With his strong ttt skill Stephan will be also a very important part of our TTT team for the Giro when he will be 32 years old. Beneath Mitchell it was our other oldie, the 33 year old Eddy Wouters who left the team. Goodbye to this 2 very important riders for the team and welcome Stephan!!

[el Galactico]

Bad circumstances or a lack of motivation?

At the moment our races become less and less and the motivation is somewhere near to the ground. Is it just because of the bad circumstances at the moment or are the races at the moment really that boring?
From where is this lack of motivation coming? The plans for a successfull Giro are working and the team is not that bad at the moment but nevertheless its often that we decide not to take part in a race where would have decided different just 1 month ago.
Hopefully this ends soon, otherwise we have to take some consequences out of this.

[el Galactico]

Omloop Het Nieuwesblad 2011
first classic of the year...

The Omloop Het Nieuwesblad is the first classic race of the year and we had several leaders which wanted to win here but nobody of them had only a little chance to do it. At the end of a more or less interesting race it was Stephan Auge who finished on a good 8th place while Joaquim Tigre came in on P16 and Perreira on 25. This is just the beginning and we hope to get better classic races for our team in the future.

[el Galactico]

***Statistic update***

With todays more or less boring sprint race and a 6th place for Callado he was able to get the missing points and to become new record rider of our team with the most eternal points ever. He is now in front of Benjamin Gourgue who lead with only a few points up to today. Congrats!

[el Galactico]

Tirreno - Adriatico 2011

Today starts the first big tour of the year for our team. This time it will be Tirreno-Adriatico while we participated and won Paris-Nice last year. The goals are also quite different to the ones of last year. The white jersey for our young climber Sebastian Araujo is the biggest goal and beside that we want to win at least 1 stage which should be very difficult finally. The first stage is a team time trial where we seem to have some unbeatable opponents like Skullz and ByZickl but the following 5 stages should become all open and our chance to win a stage there is hopefully not the worst. The tour will be finished again with a time trial, this time every rider has to fight for his own against the clock. Slevin McGuigan should be our best rider to win a stage.

Stage 1: TTT Marina di Carrara (17 km)

1. Skullz
2. ByZickl +0:38
3. RSC Uningen +0:51
4. Radlerinnen +0:53
5. Team Gismo +0:58
6. Los Galacticos +1:12
...

[el Galactico]

Tirreno - Adriatico
colourful Italy

At the end of our first Tirreno-Adriatico participation we had no stage win, GC place 9 and 11. But the most important were the 3 colours in our team at the end. Red, Green and White. What a success in a more or less boring tour.
Stephan Auge wins the red jersey by a good tactical race after he got the first 10 points on stage 1. After that a 2nd place and 3 points on stage 3 were enough to win the red jersey.
Furthermore there was Sebastian Araujo who showed his good sprinting skills on the first 2 stages which brought him into a good position for green. Continous strong places were enough at the end to win the sprint jersey by 1 point in front of a rider of Team Suessem, who also became second in the fight for red.

Our biggest goal for this tour was the white jersey with Sebastian, but it looked not very good until yesterday where he was able to win several seconds on the last steep km of the stage, but nevertheless he was 8 seconds behind his opponent Makkatu from RSC Unlingen who was supposed to be nearly that strong than Sebi is in time trial. With only 9 kms to go we had only less hope to get the white jersey but after the first km we already won 4 seconds and our hope grew until we took over the lead on after km 4, after that we lost our lead again on km 6 but on the last 3 kms he fought himself back and won 11 seconds at the end of this time trial to Makkatu which means that he finally won the white jersey for the best young rider.

Financially the tour was ok with a win of 355.554 €!

After the tour we finally were able to buy a new rider:

Sergio Tercero(24) 41-76-67-57-47-67,6, reg.40

[el Galactico]

Milano - San Remo
team loses first big goal by own fault

It is now 2 days ago when Guilherme Callado became 5th at Milano-San Remo as the winner of a group which missed to catch 4 guys by only 2 seconds. The race was easily controlled by Elbcoast and our team, but after Le Manie we lost to much energy in escaping from the pure sprinters so that our classic riders had not enough power to hold on the attacks at the Poggio. Stephan Auge was not able to catch them on the short 3 kms. It was our own fault when he didnt ride the last km of the Poggio on his own. This would probably have been enough to catch the attackers and this would have meant the win for Callado.
Like last year we were not able to reach our biggest goal of the beginning of the season, but this time it is much more frustrating as we lost it by our own mistake. So at the end Callado was not able to put the i-dot on his strong career as well as daSouza last year.
Now we have to look into the future even if the pain of this loss will stay for a long time. April is the month of the classic races, a month where we have again big hopes to win something big.
Less chances in the pave races at the beginning of April, but with Slevin McGuigan and 2 strong Araujo brothers in the back we hope to have some good chances to win one out of the 3 big races Amstel Gold Race, Fleche Wallone or Liege-Bastogne-Liege. Short after that in May follows the next highlight, the Giro d'Italia.
Much to do in the next months.

The team internal goals are to grow and have a rider basis of about 15 riders. The second important part is the developement of the teams structure, which means what goals we have in the future and what riders we need for that. Do we want to have another hill sprinter who tries to win MSR like the last 2 years or will it be a new type of rider who becomes new leader? It will be a interesting time in the next months where the face of the team maybe changes to bring back more fun in our races.

[el Galactico]

This is the end!



This is now the end of Los Galacticos after 2 1/2 years in this wonderful game. Over the winter months i had nearly no fun in the races and the chats, but i thought this would end with the start of the real season. It didn't!
I will not sell any riders for the moment (except Perreira with his 34 years) in case of that the motivation comes back for the Giro for example.

Thanks to all! There were much guys i had a good relation to, so i won't mention anyone by name here.

[Luna]

Have a good time, el Galactico. If you'll miss us, you know where to find us

[el Galactico]

Amstel Gold Race + Fleche Wallone

Since Sunday and the Amstel Gold Race the team is again in some time to time comeback at the moment.

Sebastian Araujo finished 5th at Amstel Gold Race and today he became 6th at the end at the Fleche Wallone. Second best climber out of the peloton, but there were 4 riders still in front. One out of them was Arturo Sarrabal who finally missed the win here by millimeters, argggghhh. So again we have to wait for our first big classic win. Maybe next year a new chance after this is the second podium in this race at the 3rd participation (Vidal became 3rd in 2009, Gourgue 5th 2010).

Now we are looking forward for Liege-Bastogne-Liege.

[el Galactico]

Liege-Bastogne-Liege
Spring Classic season over...

Yesterday the cycling monument LBL built the last of the so called spring classics. A somehow boring race with nearly no action and no attacks at all. Finally we were to stupid to decide if we should ride for Slevin or for Sebi at the end. We began to help Slev when all the other helpers were siebed, but then we changed to Sebi which would have been the best decision from the beginning on. Finally he came in 2 seconds behind the winner Christian Scabbia, maybe with a consequent ride for him he could have had that much more power to win here. A bit disappointing 4th place at the end for him. With a bit luck we can stay in D2 for May where we are thinking about our start at the Giro d'Italia, which would mean a complete comeback to RSF for at least 3 weeks. The feelings are a bit confusing with this thoughts in mind.

[el Galactico]

2 months after...

2 months after the retirement the team is going down to D5 where we were over 2 years ago for the last time. The line-up of the the team changed a lot during this time. Old legend Guilherme Callado retired and climber Sebastian Araujo was sold according to a bad training and no future in the team. Some new riders came but they didn't ride a race or just some less up to now.
I don't miss to ride even if I always try to follow what happens here. Maybe in the next time I try to do some races but for sure not that much as before my "retirement".
We'll see, maybe i try to defend my title in Brazil on Sunday if I have the time.

[el Galactico]

Transfer news

Even if we dont rider very much at the moment, we decided to buy a new rider today. After we went down in D5 yesterday this a new good sign that the team will some time come back in the higher divisions.
Joao Sabrosa is a 21 year old brazilian from Porto Alegre. He is maybe our upcoming pave star for 2012 with a skill of already 72,9.
His starting skills are: 54-72-73-48-50-72,9, reg. 42
Goal is to become at least a 60-86-73-48-50 which would mean a pave skill of 82,7.
Behind that he should be one of the helpers of Roberto Vargas if he succeeds in the training.

[el Galactico]

Transfer news (2)

Second transfer this month. With Ricardo Junqueira we welcome our first portuguese since Ricardo Oliveira 2009. He is the second Portuguese in team history and should become a 60-86 helper for our sprinter Vargas.
His starting skills are: 54-73-76-52-51-67,9; reg. 52!
Hopefully he gets to more chances to ride in the future.

[el Galactico]

Transfer news (3)

And number 3 for this month.
Inacio deLima is a upcoming talent for classic races. His skills after the first training are: 56-74-67-63-55-69,2.
Therefore we sold Alexandre Geniez and Sergio Tercero.