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2020 Tokyo Olympics - road race course

So I couldn't find another thread containing this (though pardon my inability to search properly if that isn't the case). The courses for the the men's and women's road races have been published. Profiles for them can be found here: http://www.uci.ch/pressreleases/tokyo-2020-challenging-cycling-road-race-courses-revealed/

The profile for men's road race looks quite challenging - total elevation is 4865 metres!
es2840.png
 
I really like the men's course, we could be in for fireworks and at least as hard and good race as in Rio.

I wonder about the length and gradients of Fuji and especially Mikuni, that looks like a really leg breaker.
Edit: Fuji is 14,3 km and only 6% while Mikuni is 6,5 km and 10,6%, basically a Mende on top of Mende (Croix Neuve). Thats a pretty scary climb, but I fear then the race will be ridden pretty conservatively up until that point since Fuji isn't that hard.
 
Not a huge fan of this one - it just looks too hard for most of the best one day racers in the world. The Olympics is such a rare event that it should give opportunities to both cobbled and Ardennes specialists imo - even if its always going to slightly favour one type of rider over the other. Rio was on the limit, but ultimately justified itself with GVA producing the ride of a century.

This is just like a very hard Lombardia. 5,000m of climbing is way too much.
 
Re:

DFA123 said:
Not a huge fan of this one - it just looks too hard for most of the best one day racers in the world. The Olympics is such a rare event that it should give opportunities to both cobbled and Ardennes specialists imo - even if its always going to slightly favour one type of rider over the other. Rio was on the limit, but ultimately justified itself with GVA producing the ride of a century.

This is just like a very hard Lombardia. 5,000m of climbing is way too much.
We thought that of Rio as well and it turned out a rider like GvA could win it. This looks harder though, but Im all for a harder race given how many rather bad WC-routes we have been served - riders like Sagan, Kristoff etc. have had their fair chances, heck even a pure sprinter like Cav should have won two golds.
 
So Nibali will ride till 2020? Great news :D
In all seriousness though, him winning this after what happened in rio would be absolutely amazing. It will be difficult though as the last big climb is far away from the finish and there isn't much terrain to make the race hard early which means it will be hard for an attack on that climb to stick. For that reason I think Sagan has a good chance to win this. He'll certainly be dropped at some point but if the pace isn't high all the way to the finish he can come back and win in a sprint. Then again nobody will work with Sagan in the group. The more I think about it I'd say this will be won by an outsider with an opportunistic attack.
 
Re:

Zinoviev Letter said:
I can’t even begin to understand why they would set out to destroy any chance of the women’s race being exciting. Even taking sexist attitudes for granted, surely it is in the organisers interests that the race be watchable.
It's hard sometimes not to feel that the problem is that the women putting on races that people are interested in has necessitated a lot more work developing and administering women's cycling. After all, when they've been given equally interesting courses to the men they've typically delivered equally interesting races. At many recent World Championships and places like Beijing as well where circuits were the order of the day, meaning the women's and men's courses were essentially the same but with the women doing fewer laps, we've seen similar quality of races developed by those courses. But somehow, suddenly, there is a fad for excising the most interesting and selective part of the men's race from the women's race, and bizarrely it coincides with the introduction of a stronger, more developed women's cycling scene - which completely removes the potential argument about depth of péloton and professionalism, because the women have shown themselves to be more than capable of handling some of the toughest obstacles out there. Annemiek van Vleuten set a Zoncolan time that would have put her in the top 40 in the stage Froome won earlier this season, for example, and the women have long been handling the Koppenberg and the Mur de Huy. Hell, compare the rather tedious stage 10 of the Tour de France, with the men having two days' more racing in the Alps to save their legs for, to the women's standalone event going hell for leather over the Romme and Colombière and the epic chasedown with van Vleuten hunting van der Breggen right to the line.

But now, apparently, they can't do the same course as the men, despite being deigned able to do that at a point where the women's péloton was far less professional than it is now. World and Olympic courses are moving away from the circuits model toward point-to-point races with finishing circuits, and one-off obstacles designed to create special attraction intrigue. Except, invariably thus far, those one-off obstacles have been withheld from the women. They didn't get to race in the desert in Doha, the only part of the race that produced any selectivity. They just got a pan-flat city centre course of the same tedious type they're already given by Ride London (another race which gives the men an interesting, potentially selective course but the women a criterium), ASO at the time (thankfully La Course has branched out, though it's still somewhat insulting as a one-day race and how it's run roughshod over established races in the calendar) and Unipublic. They don't get to do Gramartboden in Innsbruck, so they miss out on the one thing that people are building up the hype to pre-race. They don't get to do any of the actually selective obstacles in Tokyo even though, plausibly, they could include the Mikuni Pass loop and still be under the 160km max if they didn't do bonus loops of the circuit around the Speedway.

So why is it that, when the professionalism of the women's péloton is increasing, the average and maximum distances they race are increasing (which, with the men's races tending toward shorter stages in recent years, means the gap between the average men's and women's race in distance is at the lowest it's ever been as of late) and more coverage of women's cycling is available than ever before, at those biggest races of the year, those special races where the casual fan who isn't dedicated enough (and I don't necessarily blame them, it often takes plenty of dedication to closely follow women's cycling) to seek out the live streams for the final day of the Emakumeen Bira or the GP Vårgårda, or the newcomer fan who hasn't been aware of the availability of women's cycling, can watch and be absorbed in the women's racing, are they actively being sabotaged? They've historically put on as good a show as the men when given equal opportunity to make the race, so why are they being denied that?

I really don't care to analyse the possibilities of the men's race. I don't care how good the parcours is. This is just absolute horse**** from both the route designers and whatever the authority that sanctioned it is, and every rider, every director, every journalist and every fan of women's cycling ought to be absolutely disgusted with them.
 
Re: Re:

Valv.Piti said:
DFA123 said:
Not a huge fan of this one - it just looks too hard for most of the best one day racers in the world. The Olympics is such a rare event that it should give opportunities to both cobbled and Ardennes specialists imo - even if its always going to slightly favour one type of rider over the other. Rio was on the limit, but ultimately justified itself with GVA producing the ride of a century.

This is just like a very hard Lombardia. 5,000m of climbing is way too much.
We thought that of Rio as well and it turned out a rider like GvA could win it. This looks harder though, but Im all for a harder race given how many rather bad WC-routes we have been served - riders like Sagan, Kristoff etc. have had their fair chances, heck even a pure sprinter like Cav should have won two golds.
I think this one has well over 1,000m more climbing than Rio, so will probably be too hard even for riders like Kwiatkowski, let alone GVA or Sagan. And its got much longer climbs, which will probably turn it into an aerobic snoozefest, with a GB train dropping nearly all the exciting anaerobic riders.

I agree that big races have catered too much for the sprinters in recent years, but that's the fault of picking worlds venues with poor terrain where they couldnt do a whole lot else. No need to go too far the other way when they could have just put on a nice balanced course.
 
Re: Re:

DFA123 said:
Valv.Piti said:
DFA123 said:
Not a huge fan of this one - it just looks too hard for most of the best one day racers in the world. The Olympics is such a rare event that it should give opportunities to both cobbled and Ardennes specialists imo - even if its always going to slightly favour one type of rider over the other. Rio was on the limit, but ultimately justified itself with GVA producing the ride of a century.

This is just like a very hard Lombardia. 5,000m of climbing is way too much.
We thought that of Rio as well and it turned out a rider like GvA could win it. This looks harder though, but Im all for a harder race given how many rather bad WC-routes we have been served - riders like Sagan, Kristoff etc. have had their fair chances, heck even a pure sprinter like Cav should have won two golds.
I think this one has well over 1,000m more climbing than Rio, so will probably be too hard even for riders like Kwiatkowski, let alone GVA or Sagan. And its got much longer climbs, which will probably turn it into an aerobic snoozefest, with a GB train dropping nearly all the exciting anaerobic riders.

I agree that big races have catered too much for the sprinters in recent years, but that's the fault of picking worlds venues with poor terrain where they couldnt do a whole lot else. No need to go too far the other way when they could have just put on a nice balanced course.
Olympic teams are smaller which makes it a lot harder to control. Besides that, it's not like GB is that much better than other teams anyway. GB isn't sky after all.
 
Olympic teams are 5 men for some and less for other countries. Also anyone who races the ITT MUST race the road race at the Olympics. Spain could have an interesting team. Valverde has said he wants one more shot and I can't see how Spain doesn't take Landa and Soler.
 
The women's route is a shame. An absolute joke. A scandal. Someone should be fired.

The men's route isn't terrible, made for a small group (5-6 riders) sprint it seems. The sentimental in me thinks that if you put the sacred mountain on that course, it should be as a MTF: not in the middle. Otherwise, skip it, let helicopter views show Fuji-san towering over the race.
 
Tonton said:
The women's route is a shame. An absolute joke. A scandal. Someone should be fired.

The men's route isn't terrible, made for a small group (5-6 riders) sprint it seems. The sentimental in me thinks that if you put the sacred mountain on that course, it should be as a MTF: not in the middle. Otherwise, skip it, let helicopter views show Fuji-san towering over the race.

I usually don't engage much in design discussions but having a MTF in an Olympic race would be absolutely horrible.
 
tobydawq said:
Tonton said:
The women's route is a shame. An absolute joke. A scandal. Someone should be fired.

The men's route isn't terrible, made for a small group (5-6 riders) sprint it seems. The sentimental in me thinks that if you put the sacred mountain on that course, it should be as a MTF: not in the middle. Otherwise, skip it, let helicopter views show Fuji-san towering over the race.

I usually don't engage much in design discussions but having a MTF in an Olympic race would be absolutely horrible.
...as a rule I agree, not as a once in a while occurrence. The same goes for RRWC. There're no such one-day races on the calendar, it would be unique. And with national teams, it could be some great racing. I think...
 
Remove one of the sham events like the Team Sprint or the BMX and introduce a Hillclimb Olympic road medal, men's and women's hillclimb, and have the Fuji stage from the Tour of Japan!

No, really, definitely get rid of the team sprint and reinstate some of the proper distance track events, or the kilo.
 

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