tobydawq said:
I like the length of stage 7 and 8.
Perhaps I just have a weird penchant for being entertained rather than not.
It is reaching the point where it's a self-fulfilling prophecy because either all mountain stages are short, or the long mountain stages are badly designed, so it continues to peddle this line that short mountain stages are automatically good, when in fact it varies based on circumstances, and when they have worked well, it's either been off the back of a harder or longer stage, which has been raced hard because nobody's afraid of the short stage (Alpe d'Huez 2011 after Andy's long distance raid on Galibier, Formigal 2016 after the four-climb Aubisque 200km stage) or off the back of a rest day (Andalo). Badly designed short stages have been just as bad as any other badly designed mountain stage (Oropa 2017, for example). And even then, if the short mountain stages cease to be the change-up and start to be the norm, then the impact of this will weaken up until the point when the action produced is indistinguishable from any other stage, only the long mountain stage will have been killed as an option because the riders have got used to short mountain stages and feel a real brute of an old fashioned long one to be a challenge worth protesting (look at how they justified the go-slow in the Formigal stage because of 'how difficult the race had been' - two days after a day that the péloton took as a day off, coming in half an hour behind the break, and four days after a rest day).
Also, a few years before that we had the Giro and Vuelta experimenting with short mountain stages that failed miserably, such as the 2004 Giro with its successive 120km mountain stages at the end, neither of which were particularly enthralling (the only really good stage in that edition was over 200km), and that era where the Vuelta was finishing with 120-130km mountain stages around the Sierra de Madrid with the race mainly being settled by TTs as a result. It's only in recent years with TT mileage becoming anæmic that the short mountain stages have been able to succeed as part of the whole.
Plus, of course, we use the examples of stages like Alpe d'Huez 2011, Andalo 2016, Formigal 2016 and so on to say "short mountain stages = excitement", but Alpe d'Huez wasn't even the best stage of that Tour - the preceding stage with Andy's long solo was. And that was... wait for it... 200km long. And even that wasn't the best GT stage that year. No, that accolade belonged to the Rifugio Gardeccia stage in the Giro, which was... 230km long. Why is it ok to say that the short stages being exciting means there should be more short mountain stages, but not ok to say that the long stages, done right, are just as exciting, and therefore bewail the fact that nobody is willing - or perhaps able, seeing as some of the route designing committees are either restricted too much by the requirements of the sponsors / hosts etc., or occasionally are just outright lobotomy-level stupid, to put out routes which include a good old fashioned difficult mountain stage of proper length anymore?
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