Gesink: We had a lot of Dutch posters, plus a lot of posters who liked to wind up said Dutch posters, at the time where he was legit a top prospect.
Betancur: First the usual hype of a new great climbing talent, then the discussion and debate of what was happening to him, then the conversion of him into some kind of forum mascot, with dedicated following to his every performance, underperformance and photo of him not looking in peak shape.
Greipel: I like André Greipel, but the thing with him is that there's a lot of talk of him in other peoples' threads, most notably Cav's, and other threads about his rivalry with Cav. The guy is seldom anything but class - despite the effective PR campaign Cavendish was able to run back in his days of petulance leading to a lot of people criticising Greipel or deriding his insistence that he had what it takes to ride the bigger races, he mostly kept what he had to say pretty dignified, so hasn't often given us juicy controversial statements; he's not lazy and is a willing workhorse for the team in situations that don't suit him, and even some that do (working for Gilbert in Milan-San Remo for example), he's not laughably bad at anything - sure his climbing is autobus level, but he's perfectly reasonable and hasn't had to be saved from the dreaded hors delais often or been exposed uphill the way the likes of Guardini, van Hummel or Quaranta were. There was little reason to set up an early career thread which leads to massive debate over his potential, because he was already pretty established by the time he attracted his own thread.
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