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Escarabajo said:He was doing great until he flatted. He had a slim chance to get into the top ten, so I don't understand your comment?
Just saying that Roche is not a true GC contender. Top 12-20 is his natural position. I cant see Gadret refusing to give a wheel to a top 5 GC guy. Top 15-20, obviously. In my opinion he's a better climber than Roche and perhaps that's his opinion too. Clashing Egos I suppose.
Gadret is a fine rider, of that there is no doubt. As a team mate to Roche you would have to question his credintials.
Gadret : was riding to be first frenchman in the Tour on GC, this in it's self is good PR for Ag2r-Mondial, a french backed team, he was also looking at being the first Ag2r rider on GC(if he put enough time into Roche). He will be kept by Ag2r 'cause he is one of the riders who gets the team publicity.
Roche : Took an Irish licence so is seen as a foreigner, is on a team where he MAY be the best rider on the team but the difference between him and the following riders (Gadret,Riblon,Mondory & Nocentini) is not great. If he changes team where does he go? At the moment he's in a team where he gets oppurtunities, if he moves he may very well become a domestique.
Gadret as a "professional" rider was wrong to dis-obey team orders, but then again this "incident" is the most publicity Ag2r have gotten in the Tour so far (wheres the thread on Riblon's stage win?).
Gadret : was riding to be first frenchman in the Tour on GC, this in it's self is good PR for Ag2r-Mondial, a french backed team, he was also looking at being the first Ag2r rider on GC(if he put enough time into Roche). He will be kept by Ag2r 'cause he is one of the riders who gets the team publicity.
Roche : Took an Irish licence so is seen as a foreigner, is on a team where he MAY be the best rider on the team but the difference between him and the following riders (Gadret,Riblon,Mondory & Nocentini) is not great. If he changes team where does he go? At the moment he's in a team where he gets oppurtunities, if he moves he may very well become a domestique.
Gadret as a "professional" rider was wrong to dis-obey team orders, but then again this "incident" is the most publicity Ag2r have gotten in the Tour so far (wheres the thread on Riblon's stage win?).
Benotti69 said:Roche's agent is Darach McQuaid so don't expect any smart decisions soon.
Oh Holy Jesus, it gets worse. I didn't know he into that lot, I hear their don wears bullet proof shoes, don't keep the stink in, though.
Who Riblon? Probably answers itself there.
No. Nicolas climbed good today and could have been close or in the top ten.ericthesportsman6 said:
Escarabajo said:
i agree today roche proved hes the leader of the team by putting huge 9 seconds into his fierce rival
anyway none of them is strong enough to make big splash in TdF considering their poor flat TT,they can be co-leaders at best,if they leave the team there is nothing but domestique role for them
Escarabajo said:
which post? that roche climbed good today and could have been close to top 10? yeah you can say the same about gadret
my point is that none of them is clear leader of the team,i doubt gadret would have declined f.e. menchov,AC,AS...
Add maybe 4 minutes to Nicolas Roche in this classification. He would be very close. just pure speculation:
Ok. Fair enough.saganftw said:
For me Top Ten in the Tour is important. But that's just a personal opinion.
saganftw said:
Gadret would have done the same to anyone. When you go off tactic like that, directly say no to your teammate and to your DS, you're a T-O-O-L. Gadret is still minutes behind after shafting his team leader, and he will very likely get clobbered in the TT. He has not helped his marketability, period. BTW - he had loads of freedom in the Giro, and if he had been in a break or had a chance for a stage win, he would have had freedom in le Tour. However, he's been a complete Tard. I am, quite frankly, impressed that Roche just called him on it instead of breaking the f***er's nose.
saganftw said:
The actual point is the fact that Gadret's explicit job was to support Roche - not attempt to beat him in the GC.
There's really no room to argue this and try to justify Gadret's treachery by implying that his strength relative to Roche freed him from team orders. Furthermore, if I was building a team around a chosen leader, regardless of who that leader was, I'd want his support riders - his domestiques - to be as strong as possible. Stronger than the leader in their respective specialties would be even better.
The debate here isn't one centered on whether or not Roche had the "right" to expect team support, or if in fact Gadret had the "right" to abandon Roche because he sometimes climbs as well or better than the Irishman.
Team orders clearly dictated that Gadret was to support Roche in the mountains, which would include sacrificing his equipment in case of Roche's bike breaking down.
And when that happened, Gadret chose to ignore his contractual and moral responsibility and worry only about himself - not his leader or the team.
Finally, don't for a second buy the post-incident PR from the team, which would have you believe that Roche and Gadret have settled their professional differences. All is not well within that team, and Roche will never forgive Gadret, will never trust him, will never ride for him, and will never count on Gadret's loyalty. I wouldn't be surprised if the sponsor itself mandated the distribution of a follow-up notification that the team was stable, in order to protect its brand image and squelch further fall-out. It's in the director's interest to restore calm and order, too, but after what Roche wrote in his newspaper column...there's no repairing that.
And why would he want to? Gadret betrayed him. Roche properly called him out on it. Gadret didn't apologize. Roche made the decision that he couldn't risk further losses to Gadret by ever trusting him again. Of course we should expect the team to try to present a calm image, but no man implies that he truly wants to kill his teammate (as Roche - quite impressively - did) but then forgets his rage and lets bygone be gone within a matter of hours.
We as spectators should thank the Heavens for this drama, because it has the potential to become an epic, long-lasting feud that haunts those two for the rest of their careers. Five years from now we could see Roche ordering his team to the front to chase in some race, just because Gadret was away in the break and he wanted to deny him the chance to win.
Likewise, we might see a situation where Gadret starts giving interviews to French media in which he reveals a host of sordid, embarrassing details about Roche's bathroom habits, or claims that he used to call his daddy and demand that he try to force the team to select him for races...
Who knows?
All I'm certain of is that Gadret has balls for flicking Roche and not even attempting to express remorse or deny it, just as Roche has guts for telling it like it is and implicitly stating a desire to kill Gadret, and a fear that he might not be able to control himself.
So refreshing in an age of sterile media-management.
Gadret obviously did the wrong thing in terms of professional protocol, but I can understand how this situation might arise on a team with a couple of decent GC riders but no real contender for the overall. Rider A is trying to protect his place in the low teens; Rider B meanwhile wants to protect his place in the high teens. Unless something as tangible as a stage win were at stake, I personally would find it hard to sacrifice my seventeenth place to the other guy's thirteenth place. We're both pursuing modest personal goals; it's not like, if we team up, either of us is going to get into the top ten.
yetanothergreenworld said:
You could have stopped your post right here.
While heartfelt and I appreciate your opinion, it is an opinion reserved for amateur cycling. The Gadret incident happened in P-R-O-F-E-S-S-I-O-N-A-L cycling where rider and team roles and goals are discussed in 'team meetings' and direction on the road is given by a sports director.
Dissenting should be done in the pre-race meeting. Making personal judgment calls on the road that are in bold-faced contradiction of specific instructions from your director only erode the ability of the Director to remain in control of the team and creates a really uncomfortable working environment for everyone - riders and staff.
You should re-read Joe Papp's post.
Or imagine, if you went to work and you were more or less of equal ability to a co-worker:
* your boss tells you to work on a task together.
* you just decide you don't like the task, and you thought you should do something better for yourself which undermines your coworker's ability to complete the assignment your BOSS told you to work on together.
* your boss tells you a few times to stop doing what your are doing and go back and work with your co-worker on what she/he had told you to do in the first place
* you refuse
How long do you think you would keep that job? Or, how fun do you think it would be to work at a place that allowed this kind of stuff to go on all the time? Do you think people who worked at a company like this would have any respect for the boss/manager who let this kind of stuff go on unchecked?
Nice to see that John muthafeckin Gadret finished last in the ITT. Did Roche whack him in the knee with an iron bar on the way to breakfast or something?
I was just checking the standings today when I noticed that Gadret seemed to have dropped a lot of time to Roche. I burst out laughing when I checked his standing and saw he was dfl.
Thanks for bringing this little story to us Joe. My wife (who is not into cycling but has put up with me the last three weeks for all the lovely scenery they show) was highly gratified to hear how he finished.
John Gadret, meet Karma.
Thanks for bringing this little story to us Joe. My wife (who is not into cycling but has put up with me the last three weeks for all the lovely scenery they show) was highly gratified to hear how he finished.
John Gadret, meet Karma.
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