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Very odd this year with all the young riders winning so much.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.
I’m not sure about Aliens, but this is definetely a contender for strangest post of the yearI 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.
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).Very odd this year with all the young riders winning so much.
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.Winning margin is the largest in a WC TT since 1994- men and women.
Wow.
Yeah. Who would have thought that riding around a 250m track would give her the superior bike handling skillsHow much time was gained cornering in the wet?
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.Sometimes I wonder about the depth in women's cycling
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.
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.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.
Alien.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.
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......