SAM DANSIE

BEST FEMALE RIDER

Amanda Spratt. Nobody travelled further than the Australian. Before this year, her previous best result in a WWT race was third on a 2017 Giro Rosa stage. In 2018, she was on the podium at Amstel and Liège, won Emakumeen Bira, took a stage and inished third at the Giro and was the only rider able to hold a candle to Van der Breggen in the Worlds road race.

BEST MALE RIDER

Thibaut Pinot. Others won bigger, but Pinot found himself in 2018. He’d have been on the podium at the Giro had he not collapsed with pneumonia on stage 20, and he was coruscating at the end of the season: two Vuelta stages, an Italian semi-Classic and Il Lombardia.

WHO ELSE IMPRESSED?

It was the year of perseverance. Geraint Thomas (embarrassingly, I always considered him a wasted Classics rider); Simon Yates for his unbreakability. Van Vleuten also proved herself a viable antidote to the hardest winter freeze: seventh in the Worlds road race, with a broken knee, was testament to her industrial reserves of grit.

BEST ONE DAY RACE

Paris-Tours with gravelly bits. Chosen partly to wind up Ed, and to celebrate the fact races can change and adapt. Paris-Tours was a provocative expression of that and it arrested the race’s slide into a jar of aspic. (Actual best one-day race: Il Lombardia).

BEST STAGE RACE

Giro del Trentino. Magni icent Alpine scenery, super weather, A-list peloton, no time trialling and the stage credits were rolling after three hours. The perfect pre-grand tour stage race.

TEAM OF THE YEAR

Mitchelton-Scott, because they won the event that is the quintessence of cycling-as-a-team-sport, the Hammer Series? Okay, possibly not. But they’re still my team of the year. Successful, fraternal, friendly and accessible.

UP AND COMING RIDER

Tour de l’Eurométropole winner Mads Pedersen. Oh, and he was second in the Tour of Flanders.

MEMORY OF THE YEAR

The visceral roar and tears of relief that streamed down John Degenkolb's dust-caked face on stage 9 at the Tour de France