2017 Omloop het Nieuwsblad, Feb 25th, 198.3km

[sprints n stones]

Re: Re:

Why some many people think Sagan's interview is funny? It's just childishly and indecent.

He doesn't have any humour. He needs to act normal and behave himself. Just give a normal answer to a normal question. You can give a humorous answer, but stop acting like you're some kind of a cool pathetic weirdo.

He really starts to believe he's Jesus. So sad. Because he's the most exciting rider on the road actually

he acts normal and thats literally him (part of it is his kitchen english)

i know people are expecting a professional to give a professional response,something like "we were sporting hard and in the end i was outsported by other athlete,good job sport" ...and im ok if 199 riders choose to do that, but i always appreciate if at least one guy is just like that - a guy

im 32 years old and in my 20+ years of following cycling and other sports i can probably count on one hand after-the event-interviews when i actually wanted to hear from the winner because they are boring and predictable

Re Sagan's strange answers to interviewers, think it might not be his fault and whoever compiled the Slovak - English translations/ dictionaries has been having a laugh. Just been trying to read a report on KBK race on Slovak site with auto translate here's a couple of examples.
" All the indicators are the winner will emerge from the socket on the forehead"
" This socket should be enough. Most of them have great legs to spurt, see if it'll riders leave the target plane"
After that Peter sounds quite clear !

 

[burning]

Re: Re:

God, some of you guys are very childish. Can't you just appreciate the fact that there are riders out there like Sagan and GVA? Why does it have to be one or the other?

Anyway Greg won THE race of the weekend, with style and it was great to see. Sagan wins 75% of his catalogue in bunch sprint. That's a fact.

LMAO, last year it was 6 bunch sprints (and I am being very generous for defining a bunch sprint, I even included his 3rd TDF and WC win as bunch sprints) out of 14 wins. You have no idea what the hell you are talking about.

 

[tomorrow]

Re: Re:

Why some many people think Sagan's interview is funny? It's just childishly and indecent.

He doesn't have any humour. He needs to act normal and behave himself. Just give a normal answer to a normal question. You can give a humorous answer, but stop acting like you're some kind of a cool pathetic weirdo.

He really starts to believe he's Jesus. So sad. Because he's the most exciting rider on the road actually

he acts normal and thats literally him (part of it is his kitchen english)

i know people are expecting a professional to give a professional response,something like "we were sporting hard and in the end i was outsported by other athlete,good job sport" ...and im ok if 199 riders choose to do that, but i always appreciate if at least one guy is just like that - a guy

im 32 years old and in my 20+ years of following cycling and other sports i can probably count on one hand after-the event-interviews when i actually wanted to hear from the winner because they are boring and predictable

Re Sagan's strange answers to interviewers, think it might not be his fault and whoever compiled the Slovak - English translations/ dictionaries has been having a laugh. Just been trying to read a report on KBK race on Slovak site with auto translate here's a couple of examples.
" All the indicators are the winner will emerge from the socket on the forehead"
" This socket should be enough. Most of them have great legs to spurt, see if it'll riders leave the target plane"
After that Peter sounds quite clear !

Heh, you amused me. However as Slovak and a programmer at the same time, its not that English is difficult to learn by a Slovak, but that machine translators are machine. In other words, they may be good in translating related languages, but when translating languages from different language families, its much more funnier. On the other hand, learning Slovak for any nonslavic native speaker certainly is very difficult.
Imho, the problem with Sagan's English is, that he does need it only for interviews. If he needed it for daily communication at his work, he would be much better at it, look at his speech in Italian.

 

[RedheadDane]

He (Sagan) actually seemed to improve in English a lot while on Saxo/Tinkoff, where the team-language was English. At least it was when Riis was still running the show, and crazy as Tinkov might be I don't suppose he'd insist that all riders on his team start speaking Russian. Dunno what the team-language is on Bora, but I'd imagine English as well, or - of course - German.

I do suppose, though, that we maybe should have this conversation moved to the Sagan thread...

 

[King Boonen]

Re: Re:

DQ them, there's a big difference between getting round a crash and using it to race. If they DQ'd 1, 2, and 3 in this race you wouldn't be seeing it again.

I agree with you here, fixie KIng.

Great race, great ending, great winner...except that the rules were broken, big time. There's no excuse. It's blatant, caught on tape, clear cut.

Too bad...

I like that name, maybe I should change my username!

Yep, the UCI are brilliant at randomly enforcing rules and applying them to some people but not all. If it happened so obviously in other sports there would be players striking but in cycling the riders just get on with it.

DQ them, there's a big difference between getting round a crash and using it to race. If they DQ'd 1, 2, and 3 in this race you wouldn't be seeing it again.

I don't believe that. In this type of racing it's become an instinct. They are doing it without thinking about it. But I also agree that the UCI seems hapless at enforcing rules most of the time. In track cycling it's the opposite but you have the advantage of an enclosed space where it is easier to spot the rule breaches. Road cycling is much more chaotic especially with the weather and the amount of vehicles on the road. Only last week riders were complaining about other riders drafting in a TT. This is basic. If it's filmed or spotted by a commissaire the riders should be disqualified and it happens in most TTs to some degree but you rarely hear of someone being DQed.

I played and coached rugby league to a pretty high amateur level during the time the shoulder charge was removed. It was something I was very good at and used to do probably more than a full tackle as I was generally hitting smaller backs and it would dislodge the ball a lot of the time. There was a lot of complaining about it softening the game, removing an instinctive skill etc. but when the change came everyone changed and there were very few people caught out for it. Those who were got punished and it was very quickly removed from the game. I see the same thing here. It's not hard for pro cyclists, who are paid to do nothing but cycling, to readjust and know they have to stay on the road. Those who don't do it get punished and it'll disappear very quickly. The problem is if the UCI don't punish them they will set a precedent for people breaking the rule like they have now. The easiest thing would have been to DQ the front group and anyone else caught doing it. The rest will very quickly stop.

 

[sQiD]

I have been saying this last year, and I think it will be the same this year. Sagan does so much work in the "training" races intentionally, because
1. He really doesn't care if he wins
2. He knows, if he comes to the line alone, he can't be Cioleked, and in Flanders it is perfectly doable for him. So he needs to get used to do a lot of work himself
3. He should get more stamina by doing this, and if he controls himself, his sprint after effort should get better with time(gw last year). This will get handy if he doesn't shake gva on patterberg. In this case, sep would be with them too, so they wouldn't have to be afraid of somebody else coming from the back
4. It makes him look beatable
5. He gets to test, where his opponents currently are with there form(I mean on cobbles). To me, it looked like he was playing with the field today. At first, waaaay back at the bottom of taaienberg, then bridges to sep and gva looking like on training g ride. The he literally drop himself on purpose from first to fifth place on the bottom of molenberg.

Let's just hope, that all the best cobbled specialists stay healthy in Flanders and Roubaix, so we can have enough excitement to remember, when the boring times of the cycling year will come again.

I think you went too deep into your analysis. Peter is a simple minded guy. After he finished the training camp in SN, he said it was boring and he was finally going to race.

In Omloop, he raced like crazy and was able to unleash his RAW POWER. In the race he did every possible mistake : not knowing it's world tour, doing 75% of the work in front, losing focus, taking corners like mad and screwing his sprint. The result was obvious. He was very very frustrated. The guy hates losing, especially to GVA.

The next day, he told his teammates that he's gonna win KBK and he did just that. He had the legs and the cool attitude required. I think his form is better than last year and when he's focused, he's unstoppable. GVA said just that : if Peter races smart, he will be unbeatable.

Looking forward to the next races.

 

[movingtarget]

Re:

Why some many people think Sagan's interview is funny? It's just childishly and indecent.

He doesn't have any humour. He needs to act normal and behave himself. Just give a normal answer to a normal question. You can give a humorous answer, but stop acting like you're some kind of a cool pathetic weirdo.

He really starts to believe he's Jesus. So sad. Because he's the most exciting rider on the road actually

Some guys like Horner always gave funny and interesting interviews while with Sagan it is always pretty basic at least in English. I just assumed it was the language more so than anything else.

 

[tomorrow]

I have been saying this last year, and I think it will be the same this year. Sagan does so much work in the "training" races intentionally, because
1. He really doesn't care if he wins
2. He knows, if he comes to the line alone, he can't be Cioleked, and in Flanders it is perfectly doable for him. So he needs to get used to do a lot of work himself
3. He should get more stamina by doing this, and if he controls himself, his sprint after effort should get better with time(gw last year). This will get handy if he doesn't shake gva on patterberg. In this case, sep would be with them too, so they wouldn't have to be afraid of somebody else coming from the back
4. It makes him look beatable
5. He gets to test, where his opponents currently are with there form(I mean on cobbles). To me, it looked like he was playing with the field today. At first, waaaay back at the bottom of taaienberg, then bridges to sep and gva looking like on training g ride. The he literally drop himself on purpose from first to fifth place on the bottom of molenberg.

Let's just hope, that all the best cobbled specialists stay healthy in Flanders and Roubaix, so we can have enough excitement to remember, when the boring times of the cycling year will come again.

I think you went too deep into your analysis. Peter is a simple minded guy. After he finished the training camp in SN, he said it was boring and he was finally going to race.

In Omloop, he raced like crazy and was able to unleash his RAW POWER. In the race he did every possible mistake : not knowing it's world tour, doing 75% of the work in front, losing focus, taking corners like mad and screwing his sprint. The result was obvious. He was very very frustrated. The guy hates losing, especially to GVA.

The next day, he told his teammates that he's gonna win KBK and he did just that. He had the legs and the cool attitude required. I think his form is better than last year and when he's focused, he's unstoppable. GVA said just that : if Peter races smart, he will be unbeatable.

Looking forward to the next races.

Stating, that he didn't know it was WT and he raced like crazy only confirms my hypothesis, not the other way. Even more, if he said he's going to win KBK and suddenly he rode with sense.