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A Christmas quiz with 50 questions. Some are obvious, some odd, most can’t be Googled and a few are fiendishly. By all means have a go and there’s a prize for the winner but most will probably find fun in testing themselves and seeing the answers that will appear here in the coming days.

Festive Greetings
1. Can you name the joyous Noël pictured above? He’s now a sports director with a large team.
2. Jesus H! Nothing blasphemous, just the first name and initial of two World Tour pros. Name them.
3. Which Danish pro has a name that sounds like Christmas?

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For fun at the start of the year there were 10 predictions for 2015. If you make predictions for the future it’s valuable to revisit them and see what happened… and what didn’t.

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The UCI announced it had reached agreement with teams and race organisers for the upcoming World Tour reforms in a press release this week. Tomorrow’s World Tour will look a lot like today. A lack of vision or sensible stability?

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There’s a pressing need for a rider union. In fact there is a union, so what’s needed is a strong one that’s visible, in regular contact with riders and demonstrably acting on their behalf. Take the topical tale of disc brakes, they’re coming and the CPA union has decided to poll its members about it… days after the UCI press release saying disc brakes trials will continue for 2016 “with a view to definitively allowing them to be used in professional road cycling from 2017”.

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At the start of the year 10 riders were picked for 2015, some promised a breakthrough and others were trying to keep their career on the road. What happened?

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Spain’s had a rough time of it recently with only Movistar in the World Tour and Caja Rural in the Pro Conti tier, not much given the rich culture of cycling, the extensive calendar and the sheer number of Iberian pros, almost a national export. So news of a third Spanish team on the up should be greeted with cheers. Only there’s a catch: it’s run by Manolo Saiz.

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At the start of the year 10 neo-pros were mentioned as worth following. Time to examine how the predictions fared and more importantly to see how the riders got on this year and what might come next?

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The AIOCC, the Association Internationale des Organisateurs des Courses Cyclistes, yesterday issued a press release rejecting the UCI’s proposed reforms to pro cycling following a 77 to 6 vote. Ironically the press release isn’t public but L’Equipe broke the news and German website Radsport has a good synthesis.

Someone somewhere has a working copy of the UCI reforms. In recent years they’ve emerged buried in a PDF located in a dusty corner of the UCI website but these versions have been superseded by other proposals that are not public with only summary details sketched out by the occasional press release instead of a detailed masterplan to which everyone is working.

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Having looked at the highs, time to descent into the darkened valley of low points to see what went wrong and more.

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The last of five highlights is a hard call. Like any list half the story is in the omissions and it forces you to cut out plenty of good moments. The Vuelta? Even nominating this stage race is tricky as it had several great moments.

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