Except he didn't. Pogacar cracked pretty badly., and it made Thomas look better than he is. Thomas is generally a bit of a grinder with the occasional flurry.
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Except he didn't. Pogacar cracked pretty badly., and it made Thomas look better than he is. Thomas is generally a bit of a grinder with the occasional flurry.
The point is Thomas shouldn’t be anywhere close to what he’s able to do now.
According to a lot of people. As many posters have written over the years, going from a classics specialist to someone that can all of a sudden win or contend in the mountains is not normal. Same goes for Wiggins and Froome. And knowing what we know now about Sky, marginal gains, what fancy bear leaks told us, it’s par for the course for suspicious to sometimes blatant for British sports over the last 10-12 years.
"According to a lot of posters"
Oh right. Must be true then
Real experts.
Truth is, you people have built up your own little narrative, self-reinforced in here. No different to all the absolute beauts on twitter who have spent 2 years telling us that their unvaxxed sperms will be worth thousands and that the rest of us will start dropping dead real soon.
The narrative falls apart when you ask yourself why Ineos aren't dominating like they used to. It really wasn't all down to a few cheeky shots of cortisone.
Oh right. Must be true then
Real experts. Truth is, you people have built up your own little narrative, self-reinforced in here. No different to all the absolute beauts on twitter who have spent 2 years telling us that their unvaxxed sperms will be worth thousands and that the rest of us will start dropping dead real soon.
The narrative falls apart when you ask yourself why Ineos aren't dominating like they used to. It really wasn't all down to a few cheeky shots of cortisone.
Or it was and everyone else has caught up"According to a lot of posters"
Oh right. Must be true then
Truth is, you people have built up your own little narrative, self-reinforced in here. No different to all the absolute beauts on twitter who have spent 2 years telling us that their unvaxxed sperms will be worth thousands and that the rest of us will start dropping dead real soon.
The narrative falls apart when you ask yourself why Ineos aren't dominating like they used to. It really wasn't all down to a few cheeky shots of cortisone.
How do you feel about the prospectst of Jasper Stuyven or Søren Kragh Andersen as TDF winners?
Stuyven is too much of an heavy sprinter. Soren Kragh could go on the Sunweb-Dumoulin diet and have a try.
Thomas keeping his steady pursuiter pace on Alpe today, like he always did as a domestique or Tour winner/podium finisher.
Thomas keeping his steady pursuiter pace on Alpe today, like he always did as a domestique or Tour winner/podium finisher.
"According to a lot of posters"
Oh right. Must be true then
Truth is, you people have built up your own little narrative, self-reinforced in here. No different to all the absolute beauts on twitter who have spent 2 years telling us that their unvaxxed sperms will be worth thousands and that the rest of us will start dropping dead real soon.
The narrative falls apart when you ask yourself why Ineos aren't dominating like they used to. It really wasn't all down to a few cheeky shots of cortisone.
Is that a joke?
Do I need to explain what 'rest of the world' means? Surely somebody as omniscient and perspicacious as yourself knows?
So, come on, what was the wonder drug?
So, come on, what was the wonder drug?
Why don’t you read the leaks and reports that followed. Or are you too informed to do that?
I did. They pushed the TUE system to the max on steroids.
So come on O Grand Cogniscenti, please bestow your knowledge on this poor ignorant soul
So come on O Grand Cogniscenti, please bestow your knowledge on this poor ignorant soul
Ah...is this the latest narrative? And let me guess, every crash and broken bone by a Sky/Ineos rider is evidence of this.
(whilst conveniently ignoring all broken bones by non-Sky/Ineos riders). Never let anybody tell you confirmation bias is a real thing.
Talking of narratives and truism, gere's another classic of the genre:
"Geraint Thomas is a classics rider. How can he be competitive in GTs. Must be doping. Waaaaaaaah."
Who says he's a classics rider? He won E3 Harelbeke and that is about it. He may have used the classics as an entry to road racing, but it didn't last long.
You see, this is what you guys do. You build up a faith system with great truisms (that are actually bollocks) and cite these truism as part of your justification. It's so similar to the way anti-vaxxers have built up a narrative leading to an almost religiously zealous belief that the vaccine is actually part of a plan to seize control.
As an ex-pro mate of mine said to me years ago, whatever Team Sky are doing you can be sure that all the riders are doing it. Hence all the other broken bones in the peloton.
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And yet the time he spent focusing on the classics is, at this point in time, still a longer part of his career than his time as a mountain climber.
Plus, just because he 'only' won E3 doesn't mean that he wasn't a Classics rider, because the main problem was he kept crashing out of the biggest races or missing them due to earlier crashes. I mean, Sep Vanmarcke has 'only' won Omloop and Plouay - does that mean he's not a Classics rider? In fact, that was part of the reason Thomas re-focused as a stage racer, because the addition of day upon day action means variables like minor crashes can have their impact minimised, whereas in one-day races they can completely make or break a race because there's no tomorrow to make up time or conserve energy for.
When he won the Tour, people were using the comparison of Indurain as a heavier rider and somebody who had a late start as a GT climber. And yet at the age when Thomas won his Tour... Indurain had just withdrawn from the 1996 Vuelta and would never race again. The only valid comparison I could find in 2018 for his late start to GT contention was Tony Rominger, who started pro cycling late whereas Thomas had been a pro for over a decade at the time and entered a double digit number of Grand Tours without ever troubling the top 10 before becoming a winner of the biggest of the lot. But now he's four years older and putting in faster times than he did when he won the Tour.
He's not the only suspicious one at the front by a long shot. But he's the one that's hardest for me to un-see. To me, it feels like Wiggins was a case of a perfect marriage of convenience, ASO needed to replace that German audience and Sky needed a cyclist with profile in the UK to be the centrepiece of their push for success and with the London Olympics upcoming, he was the right guy at the right time. Froome was an opportunist who happened to hit his shock Vuelta success just as contracts were due and went from fringe participant at Sky to part of the inner sanctum and made hay while the sun shone until he could do that no more; after half a decade of dominance, Thomas felt like Brailsford et al just flexing, like "we are so dominant we can make a GT winner out of anybody, watch".
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Why would Ineos put forward such long and costly contract proposals to riders like Bernal & Pidcock and even try to sign Pogacar if they can just turn classics riders into GT winners? I mean as great as Thomas is, Ineos's long-term in terms of who they were signing wasn't Thomas, it was Froome until he crashed, Bernal until he had back issues and then crashed and wild cards with Martinez and Yates yet to step up to podium level, none of which are classics riders other than Pidcock who is simply not in any mould, he's another Wout or Remco type who can do it all.
Source:
"According to a lot of posters"
Oh right. Must be true then
Are you denying that an ex-conti level pro has no expertise?
Let me guess. You are an expert, because you "did your own research"
Let me guess. You are an expert, because you "did your own research"
Cos it helps to ensure that the super-talents coming through are with you rather than somebody else, because if they're with somebody else they might beat you? When you have the financial clout to strong-arm the competition, you can do that. It's just that others are now competing with them so they're not "the" super-team anymore. Even at the peak of their dominance, Sky didn't have all 30 riders going all guns blazing all the time. And you need people in the pipeline to take over and to man the train. I mean, that's Thomas, right? He was the leader of the Classics team but when he became a stage racer he did so by becoming one of Froome's inner sanctum of trusted helpers, just as Wiggins had Froome, Rogers and Porte, and then being the one best placed to assume leadership when Froome's salbutamol case meant he was coming into the Tour under par.
One of the reasons Sky/Ineos were able to dominate as long as they did and continue to be major players is that they spent their budgetary advantage far more wisely than other big money teams that preceded them like Katyusha and BMC.
I'm denying nothing but since it flew over your head I'll explain it in simpler terms: you don't lend credibility to what's being said because it's "just some posters' narrative" and yet you expect to have said credibility when you mention some anonymous ex-conti level pro who is your mate. That's the, check signature, "trace of irony" in this. And I'm not even pointing out the obvious fact that several people here may be able to make the same claim about knowing an ex-pro who may a different take (again with no way of knowing if it's true or not) or that the fact someone was a pro in itself means little considering how opaque statements from former pros tend to be regarding doping, regardless of their expertise.
Furthermore, you say stuff like "who says G was a classics rider" which is downright hilarious when Thomas himself acknowledged the switch: https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/...-ill-miss-classics-goals-different-now-321233 or "Thomas looking better than he is" while putting 2m on its AdH winning time from the same year he won the Tour - http://www.climbing-records.com/2022/07/fastest-alpe-dhuez-ascent-in-16-years.html
Apparently by "truisms" you mean facts of which you're ignorant of...
This is ridiculous. The Tour in Britain is shown on a channel which usually shows repeats of 80s cop shows. What money do you think ASO are getting? And why no resurgence of French cycling in the run up to the Paris Olympics. This is what macbindle is on about. Stupid opinions which which you still believe because they have only been exposed to people with even more stupid opinions
@ Philiz
You just said yourself "Thomas himself acknowledged the switch". The switch. Get it? He isnt a Classics rider.
As for my mate, I'll take his opinion over some bloviating forum obsessive, on any day of the week. He isn't opaque at all in private, to me. He explained the ins and outs of how and why people dope very succinctly to me, and it really is a matter of having to rather than choosing to at that level. It's also a risky calculation between committing to an expensive process with no guarantee of reward.
You can call him a liar if you wish, or me. But only one of us here actually knows what he is talking about, and that person isn't you.
You just said yourself "Thomas himself acknowledged the switch". The switch. Get it? He isnt a Classics rider.
As for my mate, I'll take his opinion over some bloviating forum obsessive, on any day of the week. He isn't opaque at all in private, to me. He explained the ins and outs of how and why people dope very succinctly to me, and it really is a matter of having to rather than choosing to at that level. It's also a risky calculation between committing to an expensive process with no guarantee of reward.
You can call him a liar if you wish, or me. But only one of us here actually knows what he is talking about, and that person isn't you.
I'm talking the loss of TV ad revenues etc. that came with the loss of German audiences following 2006-7. The UK has a similar population size and at the time relatively untapped audience potential. The ASO-run Tour de Yorkshire. The success of the GD in the UK. Are you trying to earnestly suggest British viewing figures for cycling haven't gone up in the last fifteen years? I would be absolutely shocked if so. Now, maybe it's not grown to become massively mainstream, but while still a niche sport it's a much larger niche than it was before the Olympic successes in Beijing and the translation of those to the road afterward. I would absolutely lay money on the Tour's viewing figures being far higher in the UK now than they were when London held the GD in 2007. Time has healed the wound in Germany, too, of course, as they've had a GD of their own since.
And no resurgence of French cycling? Maybe not in terms of GT winners, but compared to where they were in 2005-2009, the likes of Bardet, Pinot, Alaphilippe and Démare very much ARE a resurgence.
Nice to see all y'all back in one place though - good to get the band back together once in a while
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