Road Cycling
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Surprised that Quintana was ditched as well. He was sitting as a bit of a smoky there for a few days. Within reach of the lead if some luck went his way and/or an opportunity presented itself.
Roglic just needs to stick to Pog now and not let him chip away with bonus seconds. Pog is riding so strongly I can't see him being left behind.
The TT could get very interesting -
@Crucial Quintana always seems to have a bad crack in him somewhere. He'll probably take it easy for a couple of days now and then solo a win up a climb.
Bernal - a bit like Alaphilippe - just hasn't brought last year's form to the party. I guess the writing was a bit on the wall from a couple of days ago, when he got dropped at the end of the climb and had to bury himself not to lose a chunk of time.
I was thinking Roglic would have an advantage over Pogacar in the ITT, but I see Pogacar is the 2020 Slovenian national TT champion and Roglic came second. Pogacar will be absolutely spewing about losing that time in the crosswinds, because otherwise these two look to be absolutely matched - if anything Pogacar, without the benefit of having the controlling team, looks stronger.
Richie Porte is going really well - the best I can recall him. He'll be spewing about the crosswind time loss, as well.
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@Machpants said in Road Cycling:
Geraint Thomas sends Dave Brailsford a timely reminder from Tirreno-Adriatico
The 2018 Tour winner finished second in the Giro d’Italia warm-up race while Ineos Grenadiers continue to struggle without him at the Tour de France
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@Machpants On the other hand, I see Froome is in 91st place!
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@Machpants I wouldn’t be surprised if Froome doesn’t ride GC at the Vuelta. I saw an article yesterday somewhere where he said he was building for next year. Given Bernal’s capitulation I think they might switch him to the Vuelta (if his back injury is not a problem), or even put Carapaz in.
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@Machpants said in Road Cycling:
@Chris-B Yeah Froome was not really in the frame but dropping Geraint was very odd
I think their original plan was to have all three ride - it was going to be Thomas, Bernal and Froome vs Roglic, Dumoulin and Kruiswijk.
The amount of science these guys have at hand, I'd imagine whatever Thomas' "numbers" were, they weren't good enough for him to be a realistic shot of winning the TdF. So, keep that powder dry and have him try to win the Giro.
Big loser in the situation is probably Carapaz, who presumably was targeting winning the Giro and instead has found himself as a (futile) super-domestique for Bernal.
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these fucking super teams do take away from the race a fair bit.
Sunday we had a brutal stage, mountain top finish, guys breaking all over the shop. And it meant zero for the Yellow Jersey because the leader was being towed up the hill (by a fucking sprinter) and there was nothing anyone can do about it.
The colour of the jerseys might be different, but this looks exactly like the Sky days, with one team sitting on the front doing exactly as they please, and no one can do a damn thing about it.
It's almost more interesting to just watch the stages as individual races, because there have been some great one day races.
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@mariner4life Yeah - Jumbo Visma has a crazy amount of firepower supporting Roglic.
George has been injured and sick and even then they didn't need to use Sepp Kuss on that climb - he just sat sat there in reserve.
Pogacar has been a bit fucked by losing Fabio Aru and Davide Formolo but, even then, I'm not sure they could have seriously attacked TJV on the climbs. The support riders have to be good enough to pull Roglic away from his support.
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That being said...
Tonight is going to be brutal.
If Pogacar is good enough he might be able to attack and isolate Roglic.
Stage 17 - Bollène > Valence - Tour de France 2025
Profile, time schedule, all informations on the stage
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That was a fun stage.
Poor old Mikel Landa has his team do all the work dragging everyone up the hill and then found he didn't have the legs. Cést la vie, but at least they had a go.
Unfortunately, that probably played into TJV's hands, since they didn't have to work and Gesink, George and Van Aert all fell away regardless. If they'd been left to work, maybe Roglic would have been left short-handed (or more likely they would have just gone a bit slower).
In the end, Lopez is the only guy to make up a bit of time on Roglic. Roglic puts another 15 seconds into Pogacar and now has almost a minute of advantage, with Lopez another 30 seconds back.
The others are out of contention to win, I think - Porte is 4th and 3.05 behind Roglic and I can't see him putting time into all three of the riders ahead of him.
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I only watched the first climb live and there was a lot of suffering on some faces. I'll watch the 2nd this arvo.
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@Machpants said in Road Cycling:
TJV were to conservative on the mountain and didn't ram home their advantage, came back to haunt them. Amazing come from behind victory. Are we seeing an era of one off young winners now?
I did keep thinking that they were resting on their laurels a wee bit and didn't pick a mountain stage to really have a crack at putting more time on Pog.
It may not have worked but they left the door open with what they did. -
Here's the list of entrants for the Men's World Champs later this week (the Road Race is on Sunday).
There will be an interesting dynamic in the Slovenian team room!
Not sure what the maximum number of riders allowed on a countries' team is - different countries qualify for different numbers of riders - but, not everyone listed will start. E.g. NZ's team is planned to be George, Patty Bevin, Dion Smith and Finn Fisher-Black. James Fouche is the reserve.
George says,
“I’ve been nursing myself here with a few injuries and things like that and I’m on my arse in terms of form but I’ve got a week to pull up so it could go either way,” .
“I’ll give it a nudge but it’s not that I’m coming full of confidence like I was a month ago, before I had to drag myself around France for three weeks with the [rib] problem.
“It’s sort of out of my hands now, I just have to recover and if I recover enough then I’ll probably be quite OK and if I don’t then it’ll be a great learning curve heading into Tokyo [2021].
It sounds like it's planned that he'll ride the Vuelta and then next year's Giro.
