Analysis Date: Season 75, Day 51
The Don was always a legend in the peloton’s shadows—part cycling mastermind, part mob myth, and entirely allergic to stairs.
No one knew where he came from. One day he simply appeared at the OCM tables, already complaining about gradients and already plotting how to bend an entire virtual world to his will. Riders whispered that he trained on pizza and spite; rivals insisted he managed races the way other men managed crime families. Maybe that was exaggeration… but only maybe.
His early seasons were the stuff of confused folklore. Rank 875 to 19 across two empires and fourteen years, a dynasty built out of discarded talent and questionable paperwork, and a manager who swore the only “analytics tool” he ever used was his gut—and occasionally the leftover crusts in the box beside him. He spoke with the gravitas of a man who believed he’d been born into greatness, despite spending most mornings negotiating peace treaties with his own fear of staircases.
By the end of his rise he had constructed not just a team, but a legacy—part workshop, part cult, part criminal organisation no one could prove actually existed. He called it “management.” Everyone else called it “please stop switching nationalities mid-season, Don, you’re scaring the juniors.”
And through it all, there was the certainty, the lore, the unshakeable swagger of The Don. He wasn’t the strongest. He wasn’t the smartest. But in the strange, pixel-scented alleyways of the cycling underworld, he was inevitable.
They say every empire begins with a single act of audacity. The Don’s began with a typo.
July 19, 2011. A Dutch manager registered a team called don hamstre team—lowercase, unhyphenated, the kind of name that suggested either profound humility or a broken shift key. The Don later claimed the lowercase was strategic. No one believed him.
Season 17, he started at Rank 875. Nobody. Nothing. Just another dreamer in the endless peloton.
But The Don had something the others lacked: an unshakeable belief that he was destined for greatness, paired with a complete willingness to do whatever strange things greatness required.
His first true soldier came from the pomegranate orchards of Kharanaq.
Rostam Sirjani was an Iranian climber with a biography that read like poetry—raised near the Zoroastrian Towers of Silence, trained in mountains that touched the sky. The Don read this biography and saw destiny. “This man will win me races,” he declared.
Sirjani did not win many races.
Eleven seasons produced one national jersey—Iran, Season 27—and a series of press releases that documented his attempts with the rhythm of tragedy. “Sirjani attempts to rewrite history (again).” Then: “Sirjani fails to rewrite history (again).” Then, because hope dies hard: “Sirjani attempts to rewrite history (again).”
But Sirjani gave The Don something statistics couldn’t measure: loyalty. In a world where riders came and went like weather, Sirjani stayed. He believed. And when The Don finally walked away from the first family, Sirjani was still there—still riding, still loyal, still failing to rewrite history.
He’s riding today. Age 81. Team Oasis. Some soldiers never stop.
The Don liked to suggest he had connections. Important ones.
When he signed Timo Xerez from Guatemala, the press release noted: “He comes from Guatemala, a country with a lot of maffioso. So maybe he can also bring valuable contacts with him.” This was the entire vetting process.
The training camps served purposes that went carefully unspoken. In Italy, they traced routes from Lake Como to Rome, and The Don ate pizza the entire way because he “didn’t trust Italian food.” In Italy. The irony escaped only him.
The Czech excursion became legend.
Day one: The Don vomited on the bus. His PR Manager, a long-suffering soul who signed every article “LOL, PR Manager,” documented this with relish: “Fun to see the great leader vomit.”
Day three: They visited an Asian black market. The Don examined knockoff shurikens and katanas, then declined to purchase them because “he has better weapons himself.” What weapons? Where? Nobody asked.
Day five: The scheduled mountain climbing was cancelled. The Don “decided he found stairs scary enough.”
“Some say The Don is only going to the Czech Republic to get into contact with the Czech maffioso,” the PR Manager noted, “but those rumours are of course very untrue.”
Of course.
Through the chaos, through the pizza and the vomiting and the maffioso jokes, something unexpected happened.
The team got good.
Season 22: Rank 244. Two trophies—Entrecasteaux GP and Giro di Vicenza. Twenty-five victories across eleven seasons. It wasn’t dominance, but it was real. The Don had built something from nothing.
He surveyed his empire and felt… nothing.
He was respectable now. Stable. And stability, for The Don, was a kind of death.
“If you’re bored,” he wrote, “you will look for things to change that.”
On March 22, 2014, The Don killed his first family.
The press release was titled “The Final Day.” It announced that his final task—not winning a championship, not securing a legacy, but “collecting a squad containing the strangest or coolest names around”—was complete.
He added: “Most last PR’s of a team contain a list of successes. Mine however not, because I don’t like to brag (although some say that I just have had 1 success in my whole career and am a bit ashamed of that…)”
Then three words that revealed everything: “On to Italy!”
A second press release followed. Five words: “bye bye don hamstre team!”
Eleven seasons. Five words. The Don had never been sentimental.
Here is what nobody expected: The Don didn’t leave. He transformed.
March 22, 2014—the same day, the exact same day—a new team was registered.
Schiavi di Don.
Slaves of Don.
The name hung in the air like a threat, like a promise, like the kind of thing a man chooses when subtlety has never won him anything. The old family was dead. The new family would be something more.
don hamstre team didn’t disappear. The game wouldn’t allow it.
It became a ghost instead. Forty-seven seasons of zero victories. Zero points. And yet somehow, impossibly, a slow crawl from Rank 1,676 back to 588—as if the algorithm itself felt guilty.
The cycling underworld respects commitment. Even posthumous commitment.
The Italian empire needed a legend. It found one in a rider called Orsino Lamattina.
They called him “Rainbow.” Not for his personality—that was unremarkable—but for what he represented. The pot of gold at the end of every race. The promise that The Don’s madness might actually lead somewhere.
Lamattina was everything Sirjani wasn’t. He won. Three different tours. Yellow Cards in Division 1. Italian National Champion in Season 36, and again in Season 48 after years of patient rebuilding. He was, by any measure, the greatest rider The Don ever managed.
When Lamattina finally retired, The Don wrote something he’d never written before—genuine humility:
“Rainbow gave us wins in 3 different tours, and a YC in a Division 1 tour. These are the kinds of successes that The Don never thought he could achieve.”
A pause. A breath. Then, because he was still The Don:
“The upside is that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow contained 167k.”
There it was.
But Lamattina’s story didn’t end with retirement. He joined the training staff. For a while, things were good. Then came a press release titled “The Curse of the Lama”:
“Some stories are better off untold. This is definitely one of them. All looked great when Schiavi di Don Legend Orsino Lamattina joined the training staff…”
The article stopped there. Whatever happened, The Don wouldn’t say. Even he had limits.
Around Rainbow, The Don assembled a cast that read like fever dream.
Daniele Gatto—surname meaning “cat”—became Il Gatto Rosso, The Red Cat. The Don wrote a press release called “S48: 8 out of 10 cats.” Gatto won the Italian National Championship. Sometimes the universe rewards commitment to a bit.
Fico Nato was, according to official communications, a clone. “One day, the Don got the brilliant idea of cloning his riders. After years of experimenting, he felt confident enough to produce a clone.” The press release announcing this: “Nato Clone replaces Maffia.” Yes—the previous rider was literally named Maffia.
Pippino was the butler. “‘Get me a Pizza Arrabiata and quickly!’, the Don screamed at Pippino for the fifth time that day.”
When The Don needed allies, he announced: “The Famiglia is under siege. Times have never been this dangerous for The Don… Unfortunately, they had already sold out. So we decided to side with NATO.”
NATO. As in Fico Nato.
He’d waited years for that pun.
Season 51. Rank 19.
From 875 to 19. From vomiting on buses to the edge of the world’s elite. One hundred and twenty-seven victories across two empires.
The Don stood at the peak and looked around. He had become what he always believed he was.
And then, because he was The Don, he got restless again.
Italy wasn’t enough. The Don wanted… Greenland.
“A few days after winning his own Cup, the Don woke up with a strange feeling. He was missing something. His house no longer felt like home. He needed a new purpose…”
Normal people buy a boat. The Don relocated his cycling empire to the Arctic Circle.
The nation-hopping defied logic. Italy to Greenland. Greenland to Malta. Malta to Bangladesh. Bangladesh to Cambodia. Each move brought new jerseys, new confusion among rivals who couldn’t keep up with his geography.
Hjalmar Siegstad: Greenland, Season 56.
Axel Cassar Desain: Malta, four times—Seasons 66, 69, 70, 71.
Adra Deb-Shorma: Bangladesh, four times.
Anchaly Nuth: Cambodia, Season 73.
Fourteen national jerseys across eight nations. The sun never set on The Don’s empire, mainly because he kept moving it to different time zones.
There was a Norwegian named Vegard. The Don called him “The Forest.”
“Big things can be achieved just by planting a seed. And then another, and another, until you have a forest. A seed was planted in Bergen, when Vegard was born.”
It was the most poetic thing The Don ever wrote. Even the PR Manager was impressed.
Then came the retirement announcement:
“Our local glacier has started melting quite a lot recently. Don blames the trees, let’s get rid of those! Starting with our beloved Vegard, who will retire…”
He blamed climate change on his own rider. Then retired him for it.
This was leadership.
“2011 to 2025. Almost half my life filled with OCM. It has been such an amazing journey, but it is time for it to finally come to an end.”
July 30, 2025.
No jokes this time. No undercuts. No humble-brags wrapped in false modesty.
The Don was leaving for real.
Here is what the press releases never quite said: Don Hamstre wasn’t just a manager. He was an Administrator. A Game Developer. An actual godfather of OCM itself.
He organised the Tour Design competitions. He designed races and rebuilt the calendar, obsessing over every detail until the spreadsheets consumed him. He expanded the U23 calendar because he believed managers deserved side quests. He resolved conflicts. He mediated disputes. He posted over 5,000 messages on the forums.
“Me and Llotyhy really spent so much time on the calendar, trying to fit in every little detail and think of balance in every single way. Made me a spreadsheet lover forever.”
The man who couldn’t trust Czech food helped build the world.
When asked for his happiest memory, The Don answered:
“Walking in a supermarket, checking WT results, and seeing I won the WT with Italy. I will never forget that Lidl.”
He won the World Tour with Italy. Found out in a German discount supermarket. This is the most Don Hamstre sentence ever constructed.
His third-happiest memory: winning Coppa della Famiglia del Don—a trophy he created, named after himself—with a rider trained specifically to win it because “nobody would ever have trained him except for me.”
He made a trophy. Named it after himself. Built a rider to win it. Won it.
This was either genius or madness. Probably both.
Twenty-four comments on his final post. Fifty-three subscribers to his press releases.
Fourteen years. Two empires. One hundred and fifty-two victories. Fifteen national jerseys across eight nations. Three trophies, including one he invented. Five thousand forum posts. Countless pizzas. Zero successfully climbed staircases.
The man who vomited on buses, who declined black market katanas because he had “better weapons at home,” who replaced Maffia with a clone, who blamed glaciers on Norwegians, who found out about his greatest triumph while shopping for groceries…
…logged out.
don hamstre team still exists. Season 75.
Forty-seven seasons without a point. Rank 580 and climbing, somehow, through mechanisms no one understands. An empty shell that refuses to disappear.
Perhaps The Don thinks of it sometimes—the first family, the eleven seasons, the foundation of everything that came after. Perhaps he wonders what would have happened if he’d stayed.
Perhaps not. The Don was never one for looking back.
Schiavi di Don continues. Cambodia now—twenty riders training in a nation The Don chose for reasons he never explained.
Peak Rank: 19. Total victories: 127 and counting. Tour jerseys: 25. National jerseys: 14. One trophy named after himself.
Somewhere, a rider is preparing for a race. Somewhere, a manager is eating pizza.
The empire endures.
Tour Victories (25): Perm Tour (5), Giro di Montelbano (4), Cymru Taith (2), Norway Tour (2), Vuelta de los Castillos (2), Vuelta a Valparaíso (2), Odyssey of the Oryx (2), Volta ao Porto (2), El Corazón de México, Race of the Minutemen, Rundfahrt der Schlösser der Alpen, World Championships (U23)
Trophies (3): Entrecasteaux GP, Giro di Vicenza, Coppa della Famiglia del Don
National Jerseys (15): Iran, Italy (2), Malta (4), Bangladesh (4), Greenland, South Sudan, Gambia, Cambodia
“If you sign up your best rider for a race as captain, he has an off day and fails to get a result.”
“If you have a super talent, he will max too low. If you have a very poor talent, he will max high.”
“In general, a donkey doesn’t hurt himself on the same stone twice. If you’re even thicker than a donkey, you’ll get two chances.”
And the final logic, unwritten but understood:
When it’s time to go, you go. On your own terms. Preferably near a Lidl.
“Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”
— What The Don would have said, if he’d ever watched to the end