2023 Tour de France route rumors

[houtdffan]

And would have been replaced by what riders? Mayby Rohan Dennis would have succeeded with transformation from time trialist to GC rider and maybe Tony Martin would have tried. But else? There are hardly any viable options for top time trialists that would have replaced the pure climbers in top 5 or 10 in GC.

Tony Martin would still have no chance. He'd lose 20 minutes on the mountain days

 

[houtdffan]

Nibali wasn't that good in the 2012 Tour anyway. It's also nice selection bias for Froome pulling back Nibali every time while Froome also the one punishing any weaker moment.

I don't think Wiggins was a top 3 GT rider on an average parcours in 2012, let alone any other year.

Wiggins did manage a 3rd in 2009, however. That included a true queen stage.

Only riders who finished ahead of him were Contador and Schleck, both of whom did not ride 2012

 

[Netserk]

Does anyone how "the descent" from Col de la Loze looks like?

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFSpiK-D5i4

 

[OlavEH]

There would be other riders, but they are a mystery because they never had the incentive to display or improve their climbing abilities.

So you can't provid only one example.

 

[OlavEH]

Tony Martin would still have no chance. He'd lose 20 minutes on the mountain days

Maybe. But he did well in some one week races. And except for Dennis, I can't really think of any other top trialists that could have been top GC contenders provided a route that suited them far better.

 

[Netserk]

So you can't provid only one example.

Would Contador be so all-round and good a TTer if he entered the scene today?

 

[tobydawq]

Wiggins did manage a 3rd in 2009, however. That included a true queen stage.

Only riders who finished ahead of him were Contador and Schleck, both of whom did not ride 2012

Armstrong also finished ahead of him.

 

[houtdffan]

Armstrong also finished ahead of him.

Lance was DQed. He also didn't ride 2012

Wiggins beat nobody who beat him in 2009 in 2012

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Tony Martin would still have no chance. He'd lose 20 minutes on the mountain days

Early in his career he climbed pretty well though, I know the 2009 Tour de Suisse was garbage but he won on Crans Montana and he was 12th to Verbier and 2nd to Ventoux in the 2009 Tour, albeit from the break. But he was only 24 then, so could feasibly have transferred skills towards climbing. He was 16th to La Punt in the 2010 Tour de Suisse, and although again the 2011 Paris-Nice route was garbage, he was 4th over Col de la Mûre which isn't shabby.

Also you might see somebody like Kiryienka become less of a domestique given his climbing credentials in his Tinkoff Credit System days and his escapades when off the leash in the leaderless Movistar team of 2011, somebody like Castroviejo develop his climbing skills earlier in his career as he's a solid ATV now, Dennis as mentioned, plus some decent time triallers among fringe GT riders, the bottom-end-of-the-top-10 hangers-on, would move into the picture of genuine threats that needed distancing, people like Tejay van Garderen, Jakob Fuglsang, Ilnur Zakarin, Richie Porte (again, a killer over one week but never really put it together over three until too late), or people like Rui Costa who were not elite at any one thing but very good across all terrains and against the clock, which is precisely the kind of rider that historically would contend a GC.

 

[YavorD]

Would Contador be so all-round and good a TTer if he entered the scene today?

Likely. Pog/Vingo/Rog are all-round and good TTers, despite the scene today.

 

[Netserk]

Only Vingegaard somewhat resembles Contador.

 

[Big Doopie]

I don't think most cycling fans were particularly excited about the Sky dominance and the victories of Wiggins, Froome and Thomas from 2012 to 2018. Most of these version saw a fairly dominant winner and 4 of these 6 wins were ranked in bottom 5 of the worst GTs in the 2010s by this forum.

okay, let me put it this way, can you please point to a single GT that was memorable that did not have a dominant ride of some kind?

it is simply what is memorable in cycling: epic rides and dramatic collapses.

it’s not really up for debate. It’s a fact.

You pick up any book about cycling history and it will be focused on the above events and not a race where you had ten riders superficially in the mix in the third week and riding defensively because they are afraid of losing a few seconds.

GTs are precisely created to crown the best most dominant rider. If you cannot enjoy that, this is not the sport for you. And I cannot imagine wanting things superficially kept close that they might even crown a rider who was not the best all around. That would completely suck.

 

[fbjim]

Apart from the "dominant rider vs dominant rider" tours which make up a lot of the stone-cold classics, 1987 is pretty highly regarded.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

okay, let me put it this way, can you please point to a single GT that was memorable that did not have a dominant ride of some kind?

it is simply what is memorable in cycling: epic rides and dramatic collapses.

it’s not really up for debate. It’s a fact.

You pick up any book about cycling history and it will be focused on the above events and not a race where you had ten riders superficially in the mix in the third week and riding defensively because they are afraid of losing a few seconds.

GTs are precisely created to crown the best most dominant rider. If you cannot enjoy that, this is not the sport for you. And I cannot imagine wanting things superficially kept close that they might even crown a rider who was not the best all around. That would completely suck.

Are you counting Basso to Zoncolan in 2010 as dominant (I think it's borderline)? If not, that one.

 

[fbjim]

A stage which would appear to fulfil this is this one:

It came in the middle of week 3. It has all the ingredients. And yet, somehow, some way, the riders steadfastly refused to make the race.

I think that's part of why the 2012 Giro is rated so poorly, actually - unlike the 2012 Tour which was always going to be heavy on the TT, the route gave the chances. But without significant gaps on GC and with a péloton too scared of losing to try to win, they just couldn't be incentivised to take any risks at all.

right and the most memorable long range attacking riding in years came on this stage

which everyone would totally have told you was a typical "grinder HC to MTF" "attack-in-the-final-1500m" parcours.

I think people are sometimes a bit too deterministic about routes and climbs - the Giro this year had Blockhaus which ordinarily is as selective as you can get, and yet it wasn't particularly exciting at all. Meanwhile somehow the Vuelta manages to luck its way into successive exciting stages at Formigal, which is about as unremarkable a cat-1 MTF as you can get.

This isn't to say that parcours don't matter but I do think it matters a bit less than some people might think. The TDF guys have been attempting to engineer exciting racing via the parcours for years now and about the only thing they've successfully done is make it so we don't have to sit through 5 sprint stages in the first week in a row, which is actually a good change.

 

[Extinction]

2012 TdF was by far the worse edition I have followed. Too much TT which was perfectly suited to Wiggins then of course Sky strangled the race. 2023 looks like a well balanced route suited to Remco should he choose to accept taking on the big two.

The problem wasn't too much TTing per se, but that it wasn't balanced by mountains of a big cojones.

 

[KZD]

Only Vingegaard somewhat resembles Contador.

I think he resembles Froome more to be honest but I get your point he is the pure GT rider while Pogačar and Remco are super versatile riders that resemble Merckx and Hinault more.

 

[fbjim]

the actual "guy who won a classic tour without really attacking" is probably Evans in 2011 and that was impressive in itself because he had to defend despite having an incredibly terrible team.

also LeMond was kind of tactically boring

 

[Netserk]

I think he resembles Froome more to be honest but I get your point he is the pure GT rider while Pogačar and Remco are super versatile riders that resemble Merckx and Hinault more.

I meant his physique, built. Similar height, weight and stature.

 

[ice&fire]

Only Vingegaard somewhat resembles Contador.

I recall that Vingegaard was reportedly unwilling to attack in Granon and he only did it at the insistence from the team car. He can't be more unlike Contador in that area.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

right and the most memorable long range attacking riding in years came on this stage

which everyone would totally have told you was a typical "grinder HC to MTF" "attack-in-the-final-1500m" parcours.

I think people are sometimes a bit too deterministic about routes and climbs - the Giro this year had Blockhaus which ordinarily is as selective as you can get, and yet it wasn't particularly exciting at all. Meanwhile somehow the Vuelta manages to luck its way into successive exciting stages at Formigal, which is about as unremarkable a cat-1 MTF as you can get.

This isn't to say that parcours don't matter but I do think it matters a bit less than some people might think. The TDF guys have been attempting to engineer exciting racing via the parcours for years now and about the only thing they've successfully done is make it so we don't have to sit through 5 sprint stages in the first week in a row, which is actually a good change.

Nah, Granon's too hard for it to be a final 1500m stage, especially after Galibier North, but I've said many times that I thought the Alpe d'Huez stage coming after it would mean that it would be a final climb shootout with Galibier used for attrition rather than what we got.

And of course the parcours matters - but it needs the riders to make it. The riders need the parcours on which to make the race, but the parcours needs the riders to make the race. When the riders don't have the parcours to make the race you get stuff like the 2012 Tour, where many of the best climbing specialists simply didn't bother turning up because the balance of TT vs. mountains was too much for them to believe they stood a chance (as I mention, you need enough mountain time to give the climbers enough to feel they can overcome their losses in the TTs, but ideally only if they pull out a climbing performance for the ages, à la Fuente '72 or Pantani '98); when the parcours doesn't have the riders to make the race you get stuff like the 2012 Giro, where some stages which were great on paper were dour because the riders simply didn't want to make the race.

However, the parcours is the part of the race that the organisers can control, and the parcours that they offer up often determines who shows up to the race (again, see why, say, Purito targeted Giro-Vuelta in 2012). At this stage in proceedings we don't know who will be starting in July, nor do we know who will or won't have form, get injured early in the season, get busted for doping, fall out with their teams, etc.. But we do know at least some of the details of the course, and as has been mentioned, there is a trend towards seeking lots of little bits of action, rather than a number of stages with major action. Sometimes major action turns up unexpectedly - and that's a bonus when it does - but the main focus, it seems, in recent years is not to make real queen stages or generate large gaps that require epic days out to overcome, but to try to minimise the days on which nothing at all happens, like, say, stage 5 in 2020 where there wasn't even a breakaway and it was diabolically bad.

This is also part of the result of the Tour's much larger appeal to casual fans than other races - the hardcore fans (that's us lot, we are on a cycling forum weeks after the season ends) may clamour for more TT mileage and real queen stages, but ASO don't need us. They need to ensure they don't run off the casual audience. In the 90s, real sprint trains were in their infancy, so although you'd get a lot of flat stages, late attacks and speculative attempts to foil the sprinters were much more common and much more likely to succeed; the sprint at the end was much less organised and slick, so there was more reason to tune in for those stages - plus they weren't broadcast for their entire running time, so you didn't have three hours of dead time between the break going and the break being reeled back, and the break would often get a much bigger lead in those days that made their chances of holding on much bigger anyway. Mountain stages, ASO can sell to a casual audience just by offering a few of the big names - Tourmalet! Alpe d'Huez! Galibier! Ventoux! It doesn't matter to the casual fan if all the stages are Unipuerto or suboptimal designs if they don't know any better, they just know these climbs are big and they're epic. But it does matter to the casual fan if they tune in and are bored, so ASO seem to be focusing more attention on making their flat stages less dull than they are on making their mountain stages the best they can be. After all, mountain stages draw the best audiences anyway.

And if we're honest, if that's their goal, then while it sucks for those of us that want to see epic stages and attacks from distance that can 90% of the time only be enticed with time gaps big enough to justify the risks... they're kinda succeeding.

 

[Red Rick]

Hard to say how hard Granon would have been without insane Jumbo and Pogacar aggression.

 

[fbjim]

I don't think you'll ever see the TDF get as bad with trying to engineer a specific result again as they did in like, 2009 where they extremely wanted to keep the GC close for the stage 20 Ventoux showdown.

I find the whole "Youtube"/"Low-attention-span generation" thing a little strange because it almost seems like the opposite. Yes, the Tour has been changed for coverage but it's specifically been changed for whole stage coverage, which is hardly "Low-attention-span". For gods sake we even broadcast the first four hours of Milan-Sanremo now. Look how people reacted when the Woman's P-R and the Markstein stage of the Woman's TDF started with about an hour left and the race already blown up - that would have been completely normal race coverage in the 1980s but isn't acceptable now.

I also think the full coverage has had a significant impact on how things are raced - I remember riders saying things about the Giro, where if they had a long flat stage, nobody would attack until they saw the RAI helicopters in the sky where the "real" racing would begin. That almost never happens nowadays, and it's very unusual to have a pure piano day like Gap-Privas 2020.

 

[OlavEH]

okay, let me put it this way, can you please point to a single GT that was memorable that did not have a dominant ride of some kind?

it is simply what is memorable in cycling: epic rides and dramatic collapses.

it’s not really up for debate. It’s a fact.

You pick up any book about cycling history and it will be focused on the above events and not a race where you had ten riders superficially in the mix in the third week and riding defensively because they are afraid of losing a few seconds.

GTs are precisely created to crown the best most dominant rider. If you cannot enjoy that, this is not the sport for you. And I cannot imagine wanting things superficially kept close that they might even crown a rider who was not the best all around. That would completely suck.

I do like stages where the peloton are shattered a long distance from the stage finish. That is my favorite type of race. But that could pan out in several ways. You could have two guys who are completely dominant like Pog and Vinge in the Tour this year. Or several guys attacking each other and having opposite form curves like in the 2016 Giro. There were none that were very dominant in the latter, but we still got some great racing.

What I don't like at all are that type where one guy is totally dominating in ITTs and beats the other with several minutes there, just to control the peloton in the mountains. Or is just a bit better than the rest in both ITTs and mountains and winning by several minutes or more without any great performances. Like a couple of Froome's wins and the last couple of Armstrong's.

 

[fbjim]

yeah, the ideal of "pure GC vs Climbers" is something like the 2017 Giro or especially the 2011 Tour where you have the dynamic of the climbers having to attack and the "pure GC" guys having to defend.

Froome was just - same thing as Armstrong in like '99 where "well this guy is the best TT guy in the race and also can drop every climber so uhhhhhh let's make a 60km stage and see what happens?????"