Fantasy cycling has gotten complicated with all the platforms and scoring systems flying around, and if you’re tired of finishing in the bottom half of your Velogames or Road.cc league, it’s time to borrow some tactics from people who consistently rank near the top. I’ve spent a few seasons obsessing over this, talked to some genuinely successful fantasy players, and here’s what I’ve learned separates the top finishers from the rest of us.
Understanding Scoring Systems
Before you start picking riders, you’ve got to understand how the points actually work — and they’re different across platforms. Velogames scores heavily on stage wins, jersey competitions, intermediate sprints, and GC placings. Road.cc uses a different weighting system entirely. Getting this wrong means you’re optimizing for the wrong things, which is basically a guaranteed losing strategy.
Here’s the key insight most casual players miss: both platforms reward consistency over single explosive performances. A rider who quietly finishes 10th on every mountain stage often outscores the rider who wins one stage dramatically but then cracks and loses 20 minutes two days later. Durability and steady performance beat flashy-but-fragile picks almost every time.
Budget Allocation: Where Top Players Actually Spend
The most common mistake I see (and one I made for years): blowing your entire budget on the two most expensive riders and then filling the remaining spots with minimum-cost warm bodies who score basically nothing.
What the top players actually do: They allocate maybe 40-50% of the budget on two or three premium picks they’re highly confident about. Then they use the remaining budget on mid-priced riders who offer genuine value — riders who are slightly underpriced relative to what they’ll probably do in the race.
Concrete example: Instead of Pogacar plus a roster of minimum-price fillers, consider Vingegaard plus two solid domestiques who’ll consistently pick up points. The aggregate total from a balanced team usually beats the star-plus-zeroes approach. I learned this the hard way after three Grand Tours of watching my expensive captain win while my budget picks contributed nothing.
Finding Underpriced Value
This is where the real edge lives, and it’s where deep cycling knowledge actually pays off in fantasy:
Breakaway specialists: Riders who consistently make and win from breakaways are chronically underpriced because they’re not household GC names. But in fantasy scoring, a breakaway stage win is worth just as much as a GC contender’s stage win. These riders are pure value.
Sprinter leadout men: The last man in a successful sprint train — the rider who peels off at 200 meters — often finishes top-10 on flat stages. Individually, these results look unremarkable. Across 8-10 sprint stages in a Grand Tour, though? Those points add up invisibly while everyone else is fixated on who won the sprint.
Improving young riders: Pricing algorithms typically reflect last season’s performance. A 23-year-old who’s made a big step forward over winter camp might be priced based on 2024 data while performing at a completely different level. If you follow team news and training camp reports closely, you can spot these before the market catches up.
Team leaders at smaller teams: A rider who’d be a domestique at UAE or Visma might be the protected leader at a smaller squad. Leadership means more opportunities to score — breakaway freedom, GC ambitions, sprint support. Context matters as much as raw talent.
Race-Specific Strategies
Tour de France
Three weeks is a long time, and the attrition rate is brutal. Prioritize riders with strong Grand Tour completion records — someone who’s finished seven out of eight Grand Tours they’ve started is more reliable than a wildly talented rider who’s abandoned three of the last five. Durability is a skill.
Don’t neglect the flat stages. Sprint stages are plentiful at the Tour, and having at least one consistent sprinter who reliably finishes in the top 2-5 provides a steady drip of points that mountain stage specialists can’t match in the valleys. You don’t need the stage winner — consistent top-five finishes across multiple sprints is often worth more.
Giro d’Italia
The Giro is a climber’s race. Mountain stages are proportionally more common, and the course usually includes absolute brutes that thin the field dramatically. Weight your team toward climbers and all-rounders. The points jersey competition is less fantasy-relevant because pure sprinters often struggle to survive the mountain stages.
Wild card picks land more often at the Giro because the favorite list is shorter and the racing is more unpredictable. In 2024, Ben Healy scored enormous fantasy points through aggressive breakaway riding despite being a mid-priced selection that most people overlooked. The Giro rewards bold picks more than the Tour does.
Vuelta a Espana
The Vuelta is a late-season race, and fatigue from the Tour and Olympics (in relevant years) reshapes the contender list. Fresh riders who specifically targeted the Vuelta outperform tired Tour veterans more often than you’d expect. Look for riders who skipped the Tour or took a substantial rest period afterward.
Transfers and Captaincy: The Difference Makers
Most platforms give you a limited number of transfers during the race. The temptation is to panic-swap after a bad stage, but in my experience, that’s almost always a mistake. Save your transfers for genuine crises — abandonments, confirmed injuries, illness. A rider who loses 30 seconds on one mountain stage might gain a minute on the next one.
For captaincy (on platforms that offer it), favor riders with a high floor rather than a high ceiling. Your captain’s points get doubled, so a captain who reliably scores 50 points gives you 100. A captain who might score 150 but might also score zero is gambling with double stakes. Save the high-variance picks for regular roster spots.
Pre-Race Research That Actually Matters
Study the route profile: How many sprint stages versus mountain stages? Which specific climbs appear — long, steady grinders or punchy, steep ramps? Is there a meaningful time trial? The route determines which rider profiles will score most, so build your team accordingly.
Check the startlists carefully: A sprinter without their main leadout man is significantly less likely to win. A GC contender whose team lost two key domestiques to injury is more vulnerable. These details are easy to overlook but meaningfully change rider value.
Follow the pre-race noise: Team press conferences, social media, Strava activities from training camps — they all drop hints about who’s in form and who’s struggling. It’s not insider information, just paying closer attention than most fantasy players bother to. That attention gap is your edge.
The Meta-Strategy
In a mini-league against friends, you need differentiation. If everyone picks the same obvious team, the league standings basically become random. Make at least two or three picks that diverge from the group consensus — if they hit, you gain ground that identical-team rivals can’t match.
In large public leagues with thousands of entries, the math shifts. You need some bold, contrarian picks to break away from the massive pack of players making similar safe selections. One correct bold pick can vault you past thousands of cautious competitors. The risk of being wrong is worth it because a safe team in a 50,000-person league finishes 20,000th at best.
At the end of the day, fantasy cycling rewards people who actually understand the sport deeply — team dynamics, individual rider tendencies, tactical patterns, how fatigue compounds across three weeks. It’s not gambling; it’s informed prediction. And the more you watch and learn, the better your picks get. Which, honestly, is just another excuse to watch more cycling. As if we needed one.
