Team of the Year 2017

The team of the year is often a difficult honour to bestow in the sport of cycling. All of the pitfalls which make the UCI World Tour points system so unworkable also apply when considering which team is better than any other. Is a Grand Tour stage win better than a victory in a one-day race? Is winning the Green jersey better than winning a classic? It’s all subjective so there can be no right answer.

Regardless, I’ve seen a few people make the case for Team Sunweb. Their highlights were the Giro d’Italia and the Worlds Time Trial via Tom Dumoulin, while also taking the Green and Polka-Dot jerseys at the Tour de France (with stage wins along the way) through Michael Matthews and Warren Barguil. A fantastic season for Team Sunweb, no doubt.

But I’m here to make the case for Quick Step. The Belgian team didn’t only beat their rivals regularly throughout the year 2017, if we consider certain statistics, they also took their place amongst the great teams in cycling history.

Firstly, to frame their achievements within 2017 only, they won more races than any other team with 56. Their closest challengers to that particular crown were BMC with 48 followed by Team Sky with 34.

But what is more interesting is to compare their achievements with every team that ever existed, because Quick Step achieved two things which allows them to consider themselves to have had one of the greatest years ever.

Across the three Grand Tours – Giro, Tour, Vuelta – Quick Step won 16 stages in 2017, which places them in joint fourth on the all time list, detailed in the table below.

Stage Wins	Year	Team	Giro	Tour	Vuelta
24	1977	Flandria	10 - Maertens (7), Demeyer (2), Pollentier	0	14 - Maertens (13), Pollentier
17	2003	Fassa Bartolo	8 - Petacchi (6), Gonzalez, Frigo	4 - Petacchi (4)	5 - Petacchi (5)
17	2009	Columbia HTC	6 - Cavendish (3), Boasson Hagen, Siutsou, TTT	6 - Cavendish (6)	5 - Greipel (4), Henderson
16	2004	Fassa Bartolo	9 - Petacchi (9)	3 - Cancellara, Pozzato, Gonzalez	4 - Petacchi (4)
16	2017	Quick Step	5 - Gaviria (4), Jungels	5 - Kittel (5)	6 - Trentin (4), Alaphilippe, Lampaert

They are also only the second team in cycling history after Columbia-HTC in 2009 to win at least five stages in each of the three Grand Tours in a single year. These kinds of achievements have become much more realistic for teams in recent years because before the ProTour began in 2005 it was very much the exception for a team to even take part in all three Grand Tours, rather than the rule. But actually managing to win this many stages, even in the modern era with larger squads competitive across more races is still very rare.

As you can see above, Quick Step were already one of the two teams who had done this before and now they’ve done it again. It might seem from the years above that I got bored very quickly while researching this and just presumed. However, this is not the case, I did check every year all the way back to the very first time when all five Monument classics took place in the same year, 1913.

Eddy Merckx actually came close to doing this on his own, twice. He finished on the podium of four Monument classics in 1969 and 1975 but never managed all five.