2019 Alien Awards

[F_Cance]

Pogacar? 20 years and winning the Vuelta queen stage outclimbing every GC contender.

 

[therealthing]

Pogacar? 20 years and winning the Vuelta queen stage outclimbing every GC contender.

Very odd this year with all the young riders winning so much.

 

[Huapango]

Very odd this year with all the young riders winning so much.

I have been following professional cycling more this year than I have since the early years of Lance's TDF streak. Ask yourself this: If cycling was being cleaned up, behind closed doors, what would it look like? To me, it would look like this year. It's late and I need to go to bed, so I won't get into the details...the one problem I have is the Tour of Poland reflector incident. That makes me feel like nothing has changed.

 

[tobydawq]

Wauw. You know you have entered a weird part of the internet when a young rider's tragic death from a horrific crash is apparently an indicator of the sport not having gotten any cleaner.

 

[brownbobby]

I have been following professional cycling more this year than I have since the early years of Lance's TDF streak. Ask yourself this: If cycling was being cleaned up, behind closed doors, what would it look like? To me, it would look like this year. It's late and I need to go to bed, so I won't get into the details...the one problem I have is the Tour of Poland reflector incident. That makes me feel like nothing has changed.

I’m not sure about Aliens, but this is definetely a contender for strangest post of the year

 

[Singularitarian]

Very odd this year with all the young riders winning so much.

Alternative 1: It looks pretty much as if cycling became cleaner years ago and suddenly CYNTs (Clean Young New Talent) like Delions or Bassons of this world started to kick ass of the established GODDs (Good Old Dirty Doper).

Alternative 2. The usual Clinician's standard: Hellyeah, we've seen it so many times that it's not even funny... so many New Heroes, randomly starting with certain post-Festina time uniballer superman whose name cannot be even whispered, random Floyds, Rasmussens, Riccos, Piepolis, or magic austrians here and there, then all those Contadors and Schlecks... (and don't get me wrong, most of them were obviously talented and would most likely shine even in cleaner era - i.e.no donkey-to-racehorse material like Chiappas or 60% Bjarnes of the Dirty Dark Age of cycling... or marginal BadzillaMan)

 

[Baldinger]

and the award goes to chloe dygert.

 

[F_Cance]

ridiculous. Even the commentators here referred to the Red Bull commercial and added "maybe something else is involved". Time is good enough for 11th in the men u23 ITT. Last year Vleutens winning time was good enough for 37th in the men u23 ITT. 'Nuff said.

 

[therealthing]

Winning margin is the largest in a WC TT since 1994- men and women.

Wow.

 

[del1962]

How much time was gained cornering in the wet?

 

[scapewalker]

Winning margin is the largest in a WC TT since 1994- men and women.

Wow.

Even more impressive when you consider she beat 2 already extraterrestrial riders in Van Vleuten and van der Breggen. Up there with the all time greatest/dogiest performances.
Hats off nevertheless.

 

[veganrob]

How much time was gained cornering in the wet?

Yeah. Who would have thought that riding around a 250m track would give her the superior bike handling skills

 

[yaco]

AVV rode around a minute off her best in the ITT and her power numbers were down - Then Dygert wins by 45 seconds which is still a surprise but not out of this world.

 

[F_Cance]

AvV with her all time top "Alien" (Longo Borghini) performance today, doing a Froome/Landis.

 

[IndianCyclist]

AVV completely destroyed the women who beat her in the TT by the biggest ever margin by the biggest ever long range attack(100+ km) from the front dropping everybody. Now thats ETing the aliens

 

[movingtarget]

Certainly a droidish win. Sometimes I wonder about the depth in women's cycling plus the Dutch had a very strong team. The one two was predictable a long way from the finish.

 

[F_Cance]

Sometimes I wonder about the depth in women's cycling

Exactly. That definitely played a role today. A 3k climb with more than 100 km to go would never have such an impact in a mans race, like it was the case today. Just saying that talent is a bit more equally spread in the mens peloton.

 

[the delgados]

Certainly a droidish win. Sometimes I wonder about the depth in women's cycling plus the Dutch had a very strong team. The one two was predictable a long way from the finish.

Memories of Genvieve Jeanson, for sure. She won races by more than twenty minutes riding solo.
I haven't seen the race and don't even know how many teammates she had; but I have no doubt most of whom could have won it themselves. No doubt she had many teammates who demoralized others to the point of clinical depression by immediately shutting down any attempts to organize a chase.
But yeah, 100 km solo for the win.
Wow.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Exactly. That definitely played a role today. A 3k climb with more than 100 km to go would never have such an impact in a mans race, like it was the case today. Just saying that talent is a bit more equally spread in the mens peloton.

For all the criticism of this, though, one of the problems is that there's so much depth in the Dutch squad that they could have submitted a team of "people that didn't make the squad" that would have been competitive - van Dijk, Wiebes, Wild, Riejanne Markus, Ensing, Rooijakkers, Stultiens, Koster - they could still have had a competitive team. And that the two strongest women in professional cycling right now are both Dutch. There are also a few top level riders who are always more or less alone when it comes to these big championship races, like Moolman-Pasio and Majerus, and I know you can argue "but Sagan is no different" in the men's races, but there isn't the same extent of difference between the haves and have nots in the men's péloton and Sagan can usually hop the train of one or other nation that isn't represented in a move and won't be expected to do so much pulling the work back on their own as we saw today where much of the péloton were happy for a long time to let the Poles try to pull back the move on their own because Niewiadoma was the highest profile rider to miss the move. The climbs weren't long enough to bring the likes of Hall or the Spanish riders into play, and a number of the riders who fell into the Sagan/Matthews mould who we thought the race best suited - Vos, Rivera, Brennauer, and so on - were never a factor because the péloton wasn't focused for a while and all of their teams had representation in the chase group. As we saw at the end, the péloton swallowed up the likes of Deignan and Cille, so they could well have got closer had there been more impetus in it, but really it was only very late on that the Germans committed to the chase after it seemed Koppenburg was the weakest of those up front, the Dutch did a spoiling job because of having their two big guns up front, and the chase group was very disunited.

For a long time they pegged Annemiek's lead, but you had a few problems for them that stopped it from getting across that gap.

Firstly, the isolated riders in the group would have looked to the Italians to do more of the work, as the Italians had the numbers advantage. However, Longo Borghini would need to win solo as she was the weakest sprinter of the group, and Paladin, great season though she's having, is hard to back in a H2H sprint against, say, Deignan. Plus, as we later found out, Soraya wasn't on a particularly good day either. So the Italians didn't really commit 100% to the chase. With the additional factor that if they DID, they would find it harder to respond to an Anna van der Breggen attack later.

Secondly, because the gap was generated so far from the finish, there were plenty of riders there who did not back themselves if they emptied the tank 100-70km from home, and were therefore not pulling 100% when they rolled through, in the hope that several riders pulling at 70% would pull back Annemiek going at 100%.

Thirdly, because Lizzie Deignan and, to a lesser extent Chloe Dygert, mostly Lizzie, showed themselves to be so strong when they were trying to push the group into pulling Annemiek back that it probably intimidated a lot of the riders in the group, that they would not want to go full gas until they had sufficiently tired Deignan out. When it turned out that, actually, Deignan wasn't quite as strong as she initially seemed, it was too late - the gap had been allowed to grow to an insurmountable size before Lizzie was finally left behind. I think there was a bit of - understandable - fear of Chloe Dygert as well - for a couple of reasons. Firstly that she had looked so strong early on, and secondly the fear of the unknown, as her being at the front end of a major race like this in Europe is a bit of a novelty. Her TT performance would have made people wary to an extent that they might not have been had they known that actually, 130km or so seemed to be about her threshold as she hit a wall then.

 

[Red Rick]

Think it's really underestimated how much you ruin your legs with the stop/start riding in a group like that.

 

[Koronin]

Not sure if this is alien or just how very poor the talent level is in general in the women's peloton. On the other hand, it is a great example of why women's racing isn't close to as popular as men's. The depth of talent just isn't there.

 

[hfer07]

when everybody thought Chloe Dygert's performance was too E.T. , AvV had to out do that with a jaw dropping 100k breakaway solo win ............... that performance puts to shame Froome's Finestre in Il Giro

I mean........... putting her performance in content: AvV literally didn't need her team at all - No pacers, no teammates to force the race, no teamwork to scramble/rattle the race - just brutal, raw, insane power to take off and never look back she could have raced the race by herself and yet get to drop the peloton at will and ease......

 

[42x16ss]

Not sure if this is alien or just how very poor the talent level is in general in the women's peloton. On the other hand, it is a great example of why women's racing isn't close to as popular as men's. The depth of talent just isn't there.

Alien.

Sure, the depth isn't quite the same as the men's WT but that was a ride the likes of Landis and Chiappucci would be proud of. The distribution of talent amongst nations atm is the real issue, with so many ridiculously strong Dutch riders as LS pointed out above.

When you have the same riders distributed amongst the WWT teams the dominance just isn't the same. DQS IMHO is more dominant than Boels Dolmans for example.

 

[movingtarget]

when everybody thought Chloe Dygert's performance was too E.T. , AvV had to out do that with a jaw dropping 100k breakaway solo win ............... that performance puts to shame Froome's Finestre in Il Giro

I mean........... putting her performance in content: AvV literally didn't need her team at all - No pacers, no teammates to force the race, no teamwork to scramble/rattle the race - just brutal, raw, insane power to take off and never look back she could have raced the race by herself and yet get to drop the peloton at will and ease......

Seems like the 8 hour training rides with the Yates brothers did the job..............

 

[TubularBills]

Ex-world champion cyclist Janez Brajkovic shares shocking pictures of his emaciated legs after his comeback race following a ten-month doping ban and debilitating battle with bulimia

• Slovenian cyclist Janez Brajkovic, 35, posted the picture of his legs to Instagram
• He was suspended in July 2018 for testing positive for methylhexaneamine
• The 2004 World Champion revealed his battle with the eating disorder bulimia
• He claims the meal replacement he was eating was contaminated with the drug

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7565535/Cyclist-shares-pictures-emaciated-legs-following-ten-month-doping-ban-battle-bulimia.html?ns_mchannel=rss&ico=taboola_feed

By EMILY WEBBER FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 06:13 EDT, 12 October 2019 | UPDATED: 06:36 EDT, 12 October 2019