Recent content by Skip Madness

I'd say one mountain-top finish is about right for a nine-day race. Hopefully some good mountains in store. Meiringen means Grosse Scheidegg is a distinct possibility. Buochs could mean Ächerlipass and Bürgenstock. La Punt could be Lenzerheidepass-Albulapass. Just have to wait.

Montevergine is 5%, the French side of the Agnello is 6.6%.

Equally as cool as the Rettenbachferner is the fact that getting there from Italy would mean climbing the colossal Passo del Rombo (taken from the excellent CyclingCols.com). A finish at 2757m for the Stelvio is OK, but the Rettenbachferner wouldn't be?

Very entertaining stage today marred by another bad fall, this time for Bronzini. Hopefully she can recover quickly but like Armstrong she was very shaken up and it looked like quite a bad injury to her arm. Talk of a broken wrist.

Bizarre crash for Armstrong. The replays didn't really make any clearer what happened. I hope she's OK to continue, she looked in a lot of distress. This race is of personal importance to me because I correctly predicted the queen stage a month before we found out exactly what it was, giving me...

Of the three choices I'd go with below the monuments but important-ish, but more precisely I'd put it below a lot of other races. First of all, I'm not interested in what "the cyclists" or "the fans" or "the people" or anyone else thinks - I look at it as if I were a cyclist. And for several...

If the Giro goes over the Galibier before revisiting the Fauniera or the Sampeyre, I'll kill myself. or...

I don't see the problem. Everyone knows about it in advance. Better not to have time bonuses at all in my opinion, but it's a bit like when they suspended the last-3km-rule in the Castelfidardo stage last year. I don't have a problem with adapting the rules to specific stages.

"The many mountain-top finishes are balanced out by the fact that we've reduced the length of stages and taken out previous climbs." "For someone like me I'd have liked less time trial."

I gave it a 2, which is as charitable as I could be. The positives? A tough stage to Cueto Negro (yes it will probably come down to the last ten - or more likely three - kilometres, but at least there are prior difficulties and an outside chance of someone being bold from distance). The stage to...

Although it's a nice thought, given that women are generally lighter than men to start with there are issues about the effects on riders health in riding the same grand tour distances as men.

From La Robla and going via the Puerto de Pontón, you can put the (tough) Llomena, Mohandi and 3rd category Alto de Bada in the final 80 km of the stage, but there would still be considerable false flat in between the four climbs. But they'd help to tire the riders before Lagos and create bigger...

Yeah I'm not saying Vos didn't improve dramatically, but in 2011 Vos was Giro-conducive to a Giro that was (somewhat) Vos-conducive. Not saying it was a piece of cake or anything, but it wasn't as hard as the previous year, and 2010 still wasn't as hard as the Giro should be.

Marianne Vos is obviously an amazing natural athlete and potentially having problems staying motivated would not be hard to understand. But it would be nice if the women's calendar didn't make it so Vos-conducive. The Giro is he hardest race, and although the race she won last year wasn't easy...

I particularly like the way they innovatively dispensed with the same old, same old by placing the Aubisque, Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde on the stage to Luchon. I'm being facetious, I actually agree with you. Baby steps, but it's progress. But... bloody Aubisque... and Tourmalet... and...