Tour De France 2021
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@scribe said in Tour De France 2021:
@tewaio that’s not out of the ordinary. Elissonde has always been a bit flaky. van Aert is a machine.
Van Aert certainly is. I was thinking about this more yesterday, while on a bike ride myself actually.
There has been a change in the last 5-10yrs where the old stereotype of tiny 50-something kg climbers dominating the mountains / the muscular 6ft+ sprinters winning stages, doesn't really apply anymore. "Big" (relatively) riders who are great all rounders now regularly win the huge mountain stages. Think WVA dominating twice up Ventoux this year, Geraint Thomas smashing the smaller climbers on Alpe d'Huez a few years ago, and many other instances.
How can this be? I totally get @WillieTheWaiter point about power meters becoming ubiquitous, meaning smarter training at lower levels, but this should have less impact in the pros. Ultimately weight is everything for these epic climbs. These are the same riders that famously carve the plastic housing off their bike computers to save an extra 10 grams. There's just no good explanation that, at the elite level, a 70kg all-rounder can beat a 55kg climbing specialist on some of the hardest climbing stages in the sport. Yet it happens all the time now. The commentators on today's coverage just said we might have the unprecedented situation of WVA wearing the polka dot jersey on the Champs-Élysée, yet winning the sprint!
I have a hypothesis as to why this is happening now in the sport, whereas it never used to. Pre 2010-ish everyone was doping, so the playing field was level and physics still applied - tiny climbers won climbing stages.
These days, my hypothesis is everyone is mico-dosing, so technically not doping in terms of testing over the thresholds, but still deriving an artificial performance advantage. You only have to watch the documentary Icarus to see how effective the gains can be from a sophisticated micro dosing regime, while always testing negative.
If you accept this hypothesis, one possible side effect is that riders with greater body mass can micro-dose more in absolute levels, while remaining under the thresholds for testing. If you imagine the amount of whatever doping chemical you can take "safely" scales linearly with body mass, whereas the performance benefit scales exponentially or something, then all of a sudden being bigger/heavier is a huge advantage. This would manifest as........big heavy riders winning climbs!
I'm sure I've not considered many important points regarding biochemistry etc, but it makes sense to me.....
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@stargazer said in Tour De France 2021:
I love mountain stages like this. I hope Bauke Mollema can stay ahead and win this stage, after that long solo.
Mollema was really active in breaks in the Giro, without getting a reward, so nice to see him win one here. He was in a couple of the unsuccessful breaks with George and they seemed pretty evenly matched, so hopefully an omen than George might be able to win one some day.
Meanwhile Stage 17 was a great one - watching Pog, Vingegaard and Carapaz fighting it out up the final climb.
Hard to know quite what to make of this tour - in a way, it's no surprise that Pog would manhandle his closest rivals in this race, because prior to the start - of the current top 10 - probably only Pog and Carapaz would have been in my top 10.
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Shenanigans!!! I call Shenanigans!!
No fucking way you can do that 2 days in a row. No fucking way.
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@machpants said in Tour De France 2021:
That was a fucking amazing performance by Pog. Aaaand the cops are investigating his team.
They’re investigating Bahrain Victorious aren’t they, not UAE? (Colbrelli turning into a mountain goat , anyone?) Still, 2 days in a row Pogacar looks like he’s out riding to pick up the Sunday papers. I want to celebrate him as a cycling freak, but I can’t.
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@scribe It's failing my "If it seems too good to be true it probably is" test.
Haven't seen last night's stage yet, but Stage 17, some of the best riders in the world have fallen by the wayside and Tadej is then able to launch attack after attack.
I guess that they're investigating Bahrain Victorious suggests that all is not well in the peloton. (As well as Colbrelli, I thought Caruso's performance in the Giro was well beyond what he'd shown before).
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@tewaio said in Tour De France 2021:
So Wout Van Aert did win the final sprint on the Champs-Élysées. And the hardest mountain stage 2x Ventoux. And a time trial. Competing in a peloton of highly, highly specialised elite riders.
so, shenanigans?
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The optimist in me looks at the guys who were out injured who were expected to be winning the sprints or the whole thing and wonders if this might have been an unusually weak field. But the pessimist in looks at the past, and there's plenty of precedent for doping and not much for a guy demolishing everyone else just because the top couple of riders were out injured.
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@gt12 fuck David Walsh. You listen to him and he's convinced he's the single person who bought this all down by himself. Egotistical wankstain. I ain't listening to him again
And, as i have said before, great work on getting the ONLY guy in the peloton doping David, incredible investigative work
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@mariner4life said in Tour De France 2021:
@gt12 fuck David Walsh. You listen to him and he's convinced he's the single person who bought this all down by himself. Egotistical wankstain. I ain't listening to him again
And, as i have said before, great work on getting the ONLY guy in the peloton doping David, incredible investigative work
I'm not defending Lance in any way. But no wonder he is angry about being singled out. They are all juicing
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I completely missed the news that George is leaving TJV to join Pogacar at UAE - and that Finn Fisher-Black is already there.
