After lurking near the bottom of the WorldTour rankings all year and finishing the year without a win in a top-tier race, Cannondale-Drapac’s strong Vuelta lifted them to eighth in the rankings and they ten wins in 2016.

"I think they were just near misses," DS Charlie Wegelius told Cyclingnews when asked about the team's disappointing results at the Giro d'Italia and Tour de France. "Unfortunately, it doesn't take much for things to go wrong with things like that but at the end of the day, we finished 8th in the rankings, one place behind Etixx-QuickStep, which is a really big team. I know that nobody is very interested in points, but you don't get points for finishing at the back of races so we must have done something right."

While signings like Rigoberto Uran and Pierre Rolland didn’t manage to win, it was Andrew Talansky, who was awful in the first half of the year, who emerged after the summer like a new riders, scoring big GC results in California, Suisse, Utah and the Vuelta.

"It was the Talansky that we know. He was very tenacious and consistent. He never really had a breakout but he never lost time, and that's how you do well in stage races," Wegelius said.