Fantasy Cycling: Vuelta final standings

Who'd have thought that Team Sky would get two men on the Vuelta podium? Not us, but this year's Vuelta a España was a good race and an unpredictable one, with Cobo edging out rising star Chris Froome to take the red jersey. But who's been making the running in the road.cc and Evans Cycles Fantasy Cycling game?

What with it being holiday season at road.cc towers and then Eurobike, we didn't chat about the Fantasy Vuelta as much as the other two grand tours. But that didn't stop 5,000 of you from getting involved, and luckily Gkam84 was on hand to keep the fantasy stages at the top of the forum!

Even before yesterday's final stage, second placed cherrypicked had posted on the forum congratulating top dog zueco for his Vuelta win. Mathematically he could have been caught, but in the end zueco pulled out all the stops on the final run in to Madrid to post the highest score of the day, 141, and cement top spot by a margin of 43 points. So it's zueco who's our Fantasy Vuelta champion, and they'll be the lucky recipient of a BMC Street Racer SR02 worth £1,199. Here's the final top ten; the other nine will get runners up prizes courtesy of Evans Cycles...

1  zueco                zueco        1965
2  cherrypicked         cherrypicked 1922
3  ARCA                 pclark007    1901
4  Seira                paqui        1883
5  MMMA                 mari         1875
6  gmancervelo          Gmancervelo  1861
7  Hombres de Hierro    lucas        1849
8  jauman               jau          1847
9  Titi Maggie's Team   titi         1816
10 Dallas Boys          orli         1811

Once again it's an international winning field. zueco is our first UK-based grand tour winner (he's in Sheffield) but there was another strong showing from fantasy powerhouse Spain with two in the top ten including Giro winner jau. Three teams from the US made it into the prize places, with Puerto Rico the dark horses with two spots.

Thanks to everyone who's joined us to make this year's Fantasy Cycling a big success. Just the World Championships to go now, and then it's time to look forward to the 2012 season. If you have any suggestions on how to make the game better for next year, there's a forum topic running where we're collecting everyone's feedback. We have some ideas of our own, too! Whatever we do, you can rest assured it'll be bigger and better for next year!