Fantasy Vuelta: it all goes down to countback but we have a winner!

Well would you believe it. After 21 stages of rough and tough fantasy racing there's literally nothing in it. Up the top, tied on an astonishing 2,189 points, are team saioarri and team meninblack, who've been exchanging the top spot stage after stage for all of the latter half of the race.

So, what do we do now? Well, the rules state that in the event of a tie the final scores of the riders in the player's final team will be taken into account. And that means that team meninblack (Cavendish, Danielson, Forster, Hutarovich, Nibali, Roche, Rodriguez, Tondo, Peter Velits) edge out team saioarri (Bak, Bole, Danielson, Farrar, Moncoutie, Mosquera, Rodriguez, Tondo, Peter Velits) by 1,914 points to 1,802.

So we can announce that team meninblack are the Fantasy Vuelta 2010 winners and the lucky recipient of a Giant Defy 3.5 worth £525, thanks to the super chaps at CycleSurgery! Congratualtions to them and commiserations to saioarri who couldn't have possibly run it closer. It's been a ding dong battle, and if we had two bikes to give away... sadly we don't. But there's always next year...

Also deserving of high praise are the other five jersey-winning teams that made it over the magic 2,000 barrier – Saeco par Cafe, Fisher MWRT, JRB RC, Farsan Bortalo and errekarte – and the next four teams who'll also be receiving a CycleSurgery jersey as a runner up prize: Ghostriders, im training for the worlds, fdringo and Team EPO.

Two spot prizes also need to be announced, for stages 19 and 21, and those go to unkemped erberts for a score of 127 on stage 19, and Team Rocket who blasted into the lead on the final stage to amass 115 points and take the road.cc tee on offer. Well done to you both.

There's one other winner to announce, and that's the winner of the purists' league: Team Tesla, who came 114th overall with a score of 1,565 points from their first choice nine of Ardila, Farrar, Gilbert, Intxausti, Kolobnev, Nibali, Rodriguez, Uran and Peter Velits. Since they're purists they probably won't want a prize or anything, but we'll sort one out anyway.

So that's it: the Fantasy Vuelta is over and that's our season closer for the year, fantasy-wise. We've got big plans for next year though, the main thrust of which is to combine our grand tour games together with some classics to have some kind of super-game going right through the season. Sound good? We think so, but we'd welcome suggestions on how to make the game better, and what you'd like to see for next season. If you build it and all that... Thanks for everyone who played, we had 1,800+ for the Tour de France and nearly 1,000 for the Giro and we hope to build on that next year to bring you a better game with bigger prizes, so stay tuned!