dirkprovin said:
Problem with your stirring defence is that he HAS had GT leadership in recent years and they DO have some relevance.
I will grant that the 2014 TDF was a case of unforseen circumstances to Froome seeing an early race shift to Richie. For better or worse, he melted under the pressure.
No point arguing he failed when he wasn't prepared to be the leader.
If you and/or your team have you as a backup plan and you train with that on your mind, then you'll fail if you don't accomplish anything, given the opportunity. That wasn't the case, so it's really a no-brainer.
dirkprovin said:
He was given leadership for the 2015 Giro with supposedly "full 5 star" treatment by the team. What happened when he had an untimely puncture, he had a brain fart, panicked and made decisions that cost him dearly. From then on, he was basically "out to lunch" before SKY decided to drag him on the 2nd rest day.
Yes, he had a dumb decision. But his team didn't warn him either. So it wasn't his sole responsability. But yes, I agree that almost all the responsability was his.
Either way, he had lost another 2/3 minutes due to a crash and nobody knows how that affected him.
dirkprovin said:
His ride last year was good but neither was it anything earth-shattering. Were there any stage wins or even any stage top 3's .... no. A couple of stage top10s and a 4th on the short uphill ITT was IT. Yes, he lost time with the untimely wheel change and arguably poor team support on that occaision but it was also the case that Richie "the super TTer" went AWOL during the longer ITT and was slower than significantly less credentialled TTers like AY & Quintana. His ride overall was one of someone playing more a game of attrition/survival and seeing how high he could end up rather than any display of going out there and carving a trail of destruction and leaving his rivals in his wake.
Contador also has 3 Giro's in the bag without having won any stage, so that's really a strange premisis you're trying to pull to sustain your argument.
Nobody has honestly argued that Porte would be head and shoulders above everyone, nor did I read the same about his performance in last year's TDF. But you did, apparently, so I ask you to show me those posts.
In fact, several people here have said that his ITT performance was subpar compared to what he has done previously.
dirkprovin said:
By no means am I saying that he cannot go out there and win the TDF and blaze his superiority across the expanses of France for us all to see ... he may do that. What I, and others, are saying that he HAS a record as a GT leader and at best its "equivocal" and that there are clear reasons to question his composure under pressure ..... and he WILL be under far more pressure at this year's Tour than he has ever faced before.
What I'm saying is that different GTs are mutually exclusive events, so the probability of "x" happening on a future GT isn't correlated with previous similar events on previous GTs. This is pretty simple to understand.
But even if we want to follow your logic, his most recent example of a GT performance was pretty good, so upward trend!
However, I agree with you. He's under more pressure this year than in the last.
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