Team number two for my UCI World Tour 2018 preview, and it's the French lottery team.
Like Dimension Data, FDJ are a team who's goals and strategy don't really match too well with the World Tour points system. As with a lot of the teams in the bottom half of the World Tour FDJ really revolve around a couple of big riders, both of which had good if not stellar years. Arnaud Demare firmly placed himself among the world sprinting elite with stage wins in Paris-Nice, the Criterium du Dauphine and most of all the Tour de France. Illness curtailed his bid for more stages and a potential green jersey, but the speed was there to beat the best in the world. There are too many great sprinters right now for any single one to score a stackload of points through sprinting alone, but he did the job his team have him to do very well.
The other big rider is Thibaut Pinot. Pinot's a weird one, he was France's big chance to maybe with a yellow jersey, but that's now Bardet. He's a Frenchman, but his best results are consistently in Italian races. Pinot had some good results last year, third in Tirreno-Adriatico then fourth at the Giro. That Giro result was better than any normal fourth place though. He won a stage, and was very close to a podium in the most stacked field in years. He couldn't perform at the Tour after his exploits in Italy, and didn't race much on the world tour otherwise.
The new Vital Concept Pro Continental team has taken a chunk of the riders, mostly domestiques, including Kevin Reza (above), Lorrenzo Manzin, Johan Le Bon, Marc Fournier and Arnaud Courteille. Jeremy Maison moves to Fortuneo-Samsic and Odd Christian Eiking to Wanty-Groupe Gobert. All three of those teams are second tier pro-continental outfits, so it either says FDJ don't have many stars to lose or have kept hold of the ones they have.
A few more domestique rouleur types. Dutch champion Ramon Sinkeldam (above, middle) might show up somewhere in the classics and will certainly be a key part of Demare's train. Georg Preidler, who like Sinkledam joins from Sunweb, will be a decent mountain domestique. The rest of the signings are French neo-pros except Antoine Duchesne, a Quebecois classics rider joining from Direct Energie.
Demare may have some chances at the Tour de France, as bigger sprinters stay away from the very difficult route. He'll also pop up towards the back end of the spring classics but probably won't win any. Thibaut Pinot (above) is at the mercy of the rest of the peleton. If he goes to the Giro again there's a podium up for grabs, if he goes to the Tour, who knows? Chris Froome's attempt at the Giro-Tour double, coupled with his as yet unresolved doping case, make the grand tours very hard to predict. Avoiding a fresh Froome and Dumoulin will be the key to winning a grand tour in 2018, but being brave enough to race them might yield a relatively uncontested podium.
