I feel like hottakes right now so here we go.
Based on the previous history of their riders JV should right now probably realize that they have one obvious horse to back for the tour, that being Dumoulin. I'll keep saying the thing I've regularly said last year, Roglic is insanely overrated. He keeps doing his last kilometer efforts in preperation races which impress people so much that they decide to ignore his actual gt performances.
He won the Vuelta, sure, and you have to be a very strong rider to do that, but it doesn't automatically make you the top favorite for the tour. And then what gt performance is supposed to convince me that he is the current gc top guy? Him climbing on par with a 21 year old in the Vuelta? Him getting dropped by Carapaz and Nibali at will in the last week of the giro? I genuinely believe his most impressive gt climbing performances came in the 3rd week of the 2018 Tour where he still wasn't climbing better than a number of guys who will be his rivals this year.
Sure his preperation race results so far look great but so they did before last years giro. I don't buy it.
Meanwhile Dumoulin is slowly building up his form just like he always did. The lack of TT's might become a problem for him, but if it's just about his shape I'd argue he looks just like his former self again. And I know it's easy to forget but that former self was labeled as the one to derail Ineos less than two years ago. If it's about peak performance I absolutely think Dumoulin is still a level above Roglic and I'm inclined to think he'll hit that peak in France this year.
I guess the favorite for me is still Bernal though, but I'm starting to think he'll be just a slightly better (not even sure about that bit) version of Quintana. He got the tour win Quintana never achieved but was 2019 Bernal actually any better than 2013 Quintana? 2013 Quintana didn't win because 2013 Froome was around and neither would Bernal with peak Froome as his opponent. A year gone and I don't feel like Bernal improved. Now that's not catastrophic because there is still no 2013 Froome in sight, so he could still very well win. But he's not gonna become the next tour dominator and he'll have to take his wins before the next one arises.
Then of course there is Pogacar, the other young and upcoming star. He's not gonna be the next big thing either and I'd bet quite a bit that the hype surrounding him will largely disappear after this tour. He will without a doubt become a great rider, he might very well win a gt one day, but I get serious Enric Mas vibes by him who basically did the exact same thing as him at the Vuelta, just a year earlier and nobody is hyping him now. Of course Pogacar was even younger but still. There is something about him that makes me think he just peaked very early and got lucky with a super weak Vuelta field.
Meanwhile I wholeheartedly think this could be Pinot's year. Just like it could have been last year. There are so many big names lining up for the tour (argubly much bigger than Pinot's) but to me it feels like the field isn't actually much stronger than it was a year ago. If he is as good again and I have the feeling he will be, I genuinely think he has a decent chance to win.
I feel like many people will disagree with some of these things so I just want to say that I did not intend to offend anyone. We'll see soon enough about which things I'm right and about which I'm wrong soon enough (and I'm very well aware some of the things I wrote might reeeeally not age well ^^). So yeah, I'm just really looking forward to the tour really curious how things will go.
So...well over a month has passed since I wrote this and I feel like I should take a look back. It's very well possible you don't care about what some armchair fan wrote a few weeks ago, in that case just ignore this. Anyway, point by point:
The Roglic prediction is possibly the one that looked worst a week ago and best now. Turns out he was pretty good, but it also turns out he just isn't the sort of guy who can dominate gt racing. He can win gt's like he did last year, he very well could have won this Tour (realistically he was just unlucky this was the first time in ages the Tour had such a tough TT so late. Pretty certain if this race takes place on last years route Roglic would have won), but he's not the sort of guy that can regularly drop everyone in the mountains, his recovery still looks like a question mark and his TT gets way worse in the 3rd week. He is probably the best in the world when it comes to sprints on the top of mtf's but if that's your main strength as a gc rider there is an issue.
Now the Dumoulin prediction doesn't look as good but I have to say my main point was that Dumoulin in top shape could have won this Tour and he didn't hit top shape. Now that is where I was wrong, I liked where his trajectory was going in the Dauphine but he hasn't improved much since. I'm still really curious how he'll do in the Vuelta.
Pogacar, yeah...well...should not have written this. I'll write a bit about the whole "Vuelta field strength" stuff later but even then I think he has improved quite a lot since then. Looking back it's still quite obvious that prediction was stupid in the first place. The whole thought process was basically a "my gut feeling is telling me this, I have no arguments to back it up, but I might be right anyway". I was not right. Turns out Pogacar might be a generational talent, he is already a Tour de France winner, he could never sit on a bike again and would still forever be a legend of his country and that TT was historically great. I actually disagree about the whole "greatest TT performance in Tour history, yada yada" stuff, but that's because I think most great TT performances like this get more or less predicted. Like, Indurain's TT winning margins were insane, but he won by that much so often that at some point it became the new normal. Nobody predicted this. And in terms of how far apart expectation and actual performance lie this might indeed be one of the the greatest TT performances in the Tour history.
I do want to add though, if Pogacar wants to become a gt dominator and multiple tdf winner this still must not be the end of his evolution. After this ITT it's easy to forget, but Pogacar got dropped not only by Roglic but also Lopez on the Col de la Loze and lost quite a bit of time. Now if he starts winning every TT by minutes climbing like he did in this Tour would be enough to become a cycling great, but if he doesn't his climbing has to become even better. One opinion of mine hasn't changed, if we have already seen the next guy to dominate the Tour for multiple years then we haven't seen his ceiling yet.
The Bernal and Pinot predictions are kinda hard to judge. Both were obviously pretty horrendous but both were actually so horrendous that there was obviously a deeper lying issue. What peak Pinot and peak Bernal could have done, we still don't know.
This also brings me to my Vuelta 2019 point, as I've repeatedly claimed the field of that race was simply very weak. This does of course look pretty stupid now as the guys who finished 1st and 3rd in that race then went to the Tour to get 1st and 2nd there, so yeah, I underrated the field. I think I underrated Valverde in particular as I kinda took him as the standard for Vuelta comparisons as he was there, fighting for the podium almost every year. And I still think that made sense, I still think that if a guy whose climbing seemed to have been on a slight decline since his crash in 2017 finishes a gt as highly as he hadn't done for 7 years the likeliest version is, he didn't have great competition. And I still think there is some merit to the idea. I think everyone will agree that even though it turned out Pogacar is pretty great, he just wasn't as good yet a year ago. Quintana was climbing pretty horribly in the Vuelta and even though people hyped MAL for a day after his incredible performance on the Col de la Loze he wasn't actually consistently great in this Tour either. He is still only a top tier climber on a very specific kind of climb.
So did I underrate last year's Vuelta field? Yeah
Did I underrate it substantially? I still don't think so
I also find it interesting to compare the Tour field from this year to the one from 2019 just because of how different they look. Just like I have repeatedly had my shots at the 2019 Vuelta many other forum members did the same to the 2019 Tour and because the biggest race of 2020 ended up being dominated from riders who rode in the former some have concluded this means the latter had a weaker field. I disagree with that. The interesting thing is that the whole podium from this year didn't participate last year or was substantially worse while the same could be said about the top 5 from last year plus Pinot. I honestly wonder if there have ever been consecutive Tours were the strongest riders were so dissimilar. All those discussions whether peak Bernal or peak Pinot could drop someone like Roglic on a big mtf were already there before the Tour and we can answer them just as well now as we did a month ago. Really, looking at guys like Landa or Uran I'd guess the field was about as good this year as it was a year ago. Still think peak Froome or even 2018 Thomas could have comfortably won this.
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