A reset might be as good as a rest. The season just past certainly wasn’t like any Sep Vanmarcke had experienced in his career, with injuries wrecking his spring and then a need to chase UCI points disrupting the rest of the year.
As Israel Premier Tech engaged in a forlorn attempt to preserve their WorldTour status, they found themselves racing to survive rather than racing to win in 2022.
Vanmarcke had initially been slated to ride the Tour de France, perhaps with an eye to the early stage over the cobblestones to Arenberg. By June, with Israel Premier Tech’s top-flight status ever more imperilled, he was pulled from the Tour longlist and handed a rewritten schedule composed largely of one-day races from there to season’s end. The vagaries of the UCI points system had it so.
The object of the exercise wasn’t necessarily to win – even if Vanmarcke did pick up his first victory in three years at September’s Maryland Cycling Classic – but to place multiple Israel Premier Tech riders in the top ten to try to maximise their intake of points.
“It changed my programme a lot, and it changed the way of racing, too,” Vanmarcke told Cyclingnews.
“At one point, it became more important to have a second or third guy sprinting also, which is something you normally would never do. Normally you would go all-in for one guy to try to win, but this changed the tactics. In that way, I’ll be happy to go back to the normal way of racing next year.
“The whole summer was really strange. It wasn’t the way we wanted to race, but the focus was a lot towards the points. Everybody prefers to race for the win and to get results, and not to worry about the points the whole time. In this way, it’s nice that the season is over.”
Israel Premier Tech were already in an almost irretrievable position in the three-year WorldTour standings by the time Vanmarcke was deployed expressly as a points-gatherer, but they also fell short in their attempt to finish in the top 20 of the 2022 UCI rankings, which means they miss out on the parachute of an automatic wildcard place at next season’s top-flight events.
In September, Israel Premier Tech owner Sylvan Adams threatened to mount a legal challenge to preserve his team’s wildcard status, while Chris Froome recently suggested that their relegation was not yet “definitive” given that the UCI has yet to approve the licences of the 2023 WorldTour teams. Vanmarcke was diplomatic on the subject at the Veneto Classic…
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