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Teams & Riders Everybody needs a little bit of Roglstomp in their lives

Page 711 - Get up to date with the latest news, scores & standings from the Cycling News Community.
Yep. I think any time you don't let the road decide who's the strongest, you have a real problem. I get the motivations to give Sepp a win, but...they did give him the win. However one feels about it. Reasonable to say he deserved it, reasonable to say teams shouldn't attack one another, and also reasonable to say the strongest should have won.

To me the latter (merit by performance) is ultimately the most defensible position. I think Roglič was unfairly painted (in the US media anyway) as a bit of a villain in that case for arguing for his own ambitions. From his POV he got pushed out at the Tour, then had the Vuelta (his consolation) taken from him. Then again, if we apply the same metric (strongest should win) to the Tour team, he didn't really have any complaint that the team was all in on Vingo. And would he have ultimately beaten Vingo in the Vuelta? I dunno.

Tough situation. He did the right thing to leave. Bora simply didn't come together enough as a team for him to be competitive at the Tour this year, and the two mutants kinda made that moot. He's had a tough run the last few years.
It’s really hard to compare to other sports because while the wins and other placements go to individual competitors, teams make the decisions. There was significant blowback earlier this year about two Kenyan athletes letting a Chinese runner win a half -marathon, and somewhat similar issues re: maintaining the competitive integrity of the sport comes up in other disciplines as well. But not in cycling.
 

ftm

Mar 11, 2024
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So what do you think can be realistically done to improve his chances moving forward?

Sure, he will not be able to produce the same insane watts the other Big 3 have (Remco seems to be getting there, isn't he?), but he should still be good enough to put up a fight for the podium against them and would still be the no1 favorite in any race where the other 3 don't take part in... or is this the end of the road for him due to his ill-fated obsession with the Tour?

I get this might not be the best time to approach him and lay down the cold hard facts but the Tour is definitely not his type of race, it will never get easy, it will always be as nervous and as hard as it is and he's proven he cannot handle it. As much as I love the guy and want him to be there and give it his best shot I fear it's too late to change his way of riding so he'll always be in trouble and his chances of having a mishap will always be way higher than the others. It's not all bad luck even though it's played a huge part in most of his worst crashes. At this point it's obvious that there's a percentage of handling/awareness/whatever you want to call it that he's clearly lacking, and if he or the team don't want to face that truth and try to do something to work on it I think he will keep trying and failing and dooming his career due to this.

I don't want to sound so negative but this year has been so shockingly bad! not just his performance, which I think was decent in the Tour all things considered... it's the whole crashing every few days, I don't understand why it's been so out of control this year and I don't see how it can improve.
 
  • Wow
Reactions: Carols
I agree the crashing has been rough, Paris-Nice was bad, and all in all that amounts to a bad year so far, despite some bright spots. But I also think stage 11 provided some evidence for optimism. Had he paced that better, he likely would have finished ahead of Remco on a parcours that favor Remco. On stage 15, while it’s impossible to say, I think he likely would have finished with Remco. Roglic put out similar watts on Angliru. While that was an easier stage, he also didn’t have too much at stake, it wasn’t paced hard from the start, he pulled all of the hard part, and he seemed to ride within himself.

Regarding future outlook, while I thought he would have won in 2019 had he raced, should have won 2020 had he approached it differently, and could have won in 2021 and 2022, I don’t see any way he could have beaten Vingegaard last year or Pogacar this year. The problem is that he has no advantage against those guys on any stage type. Pogacar and Vingegaard can outclimb him, beat him in the ITT, outperform him apparently on gravel, and out position him on the flats. That doesn’t mean he should give up though. I’d really like to see another clean run at the Tour where he puts it all together and sees where he stands. That might be third or fourth, but it’s be great to see. Meanwhile, I hope he recovers and wins the Vuelta.
 
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It’s really hard to compare to other sports because while the wins and other placements go to individual competitors, teams make the decisions. There was significant blowback earlier this year about two Kenyan athletes letting a Chinese runner win a half -marathon, and somewhat similar issues re: maintaining the competitive integrity of the sport comes up in other disciplines as well. But not in cycling.
Yes. To be fair to the Kenyans; they were there to pace the Chinese runner as it turned out.
 
  • Haha
Reactions: Sandisfan

ftm

Mar 11, 2024
11
17
60
I agree the crashing has been rough, Paris-Nice was bad, and all in all that amounts to a bad year so far, despite some bright spots. But I also think stage 11 provided some evidence for optimism. Had he paced that better, he likely would have finished ahead of Remco on a parcours that favor Remco. On stage 15, while it’s impossible to say, I think he likely would have finished with Remco. Roglic put out similar watts on Angliru. While that was an easier stage, he also didn’t have too much at stake, it wasn’t paced hard from the start, he pulled all of the hard part, and he seemed to ride within himself.

Regarding future outlook, while I thought he would have won in 2019 had he raced, should have won 2020 had he approached it differently, and could have won in 2021 and 2022, I don’t see any way he could have beaten Vingegaard last year or Pogacar this year. The problem is that he has no advantage against those guys on any stage type. Pogacar and Vingegaard can outclimb him, beat him in the ITT, outperform him apparently on gravel, and out position him on the flats. That doesn’t mean he should give up though. I’d really like to see another clean run at the Tour where he puts it all together and sees where he stands. That might be third or fourth, but it’s be great to see. Meanwhile, I hope he recovers and wins the Vuelta.
I think the worst is not knowing how he'd fared against Remco in the race. Numbers-wise he might've expected to be slightly better but maybe this new, improved Remco would've been on top so imo moving forward it was really useful to know whether his chances against the rider closer to his level were the same or decreasing (or increasing, who knows). Oh well...

The biggest takeaway for me is this, all the weeks spent in training might amount to nothing because he might be missing some crucial information to truly understand where he stands now. His form might be OK, his age might not be a factor yet, but how can he progress if he doesn't give his all, in real-race conditions, against the best in the hardest race of the world? As of today the season has only shown that he's slightly better than Matteo Jorgenson & Derek Gee and that's not very reassuring (he should be way better than them but what if he really isn't?)

In any case I think the team should look at themselves too and aim to do better, way better. I read somewhere that they were not assigning any blame for the crash but honestly this weak-ass team couldn't have saved the best bike handler in the world judging by their poor positioning in 99% of the stages. I believe they have been doing their best with a team that's clearly 2 tiers below the other big teams (even Soudal has been more solid) but it's not enough and that's how you lose races in critical moments. It was the same in the Giro so again, this is not a team that will win big races and they would be stupid if they thought that getting another GC contender would improve their chances without assessing their weaknesses and working on them.
 

So it looks like the decision about Olympics to be finalised on Monday. Doesn't look like Rogla and Murn had a talk already, although reading in between the lines Murn is already somehow apologizing for his decision, that is claiming we know from media Rogla is not riding a bike ATM and other nations sending "classics teams", whatever that means anyway. We'll see.