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Geraint Thomas, the next british hope

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Re: Re:

samhocking said:
dacooley said:
DFA123 said:
dacooley said:
how comes that being a talented track rider, joining high-scale doping programme, losing weight and as a result becoming a great climber is far less OKish than being a talented little climber by nature and winning big races with an assistance of doping? why super elite racing should allegedly be a direct reflection of what took place in tour de l'avenir. damn, it doesnt make any sense imo.
The issue is that it's so blatant. It's impossible to suspend disbelief - to imagine that the most talented riders in the world are actually winning the race. If some guy like Valverde or Sagan wins a race then - looking at their youth results and progression - you can believe its plausible that they would be there or there abouts in a clean peloton. If someone suddenly transforms mid (or late) career to win the Tour - you know its not that much to do with talent any more. It feels like the Armstrong era all again - where having a huge budget, the best lawyers and friends in the right places is deciding races. Thomas is a bit different to Froome/Dumoulin I think because he's clearly talented, even by pro standards, but he's so tainted by the Sky brand right now, that it's difficult to have any faith in him.
the issue is that a lot of fans are desperately willing to search for some kind of bike racing fairness which is actually senseless, because the whole world is unfair by its nature. the model "the earlier talent is evident - the more credible and well-deserved champion" is valid to a certain extent, but clearly has multiple flaws, coming down more to the idealist attitude. nobody has a clue what would have happened in a completely clean cycling, the sport, that has histrorically been one of the hardest and dirtiest. so would you have a faith in valverde / quintana, had they won the tour by crushing thermonuclear sky?

The point i'm making is not that the 4km effort itself and of itself is indicative of Grand Tour success, it's that the training effort required in order to put such a high 4km effort onto, only comes from a very strong, basic aerobic threshold over much longer periods and why pursuit riders at least in man 2,3 & 4 also make great ITT riders too. Basically the 4km pursuit identifies riders with very good sustained power over an hour or so ,mbecause if you don't have that, you are not able to bolt on the numbers required to win a pursuit. The pursuit naturally selects those riders who, with weight adjustment and race tactics up climbs in Grand Tours can then tip the maths into their favour. All rider types have basic endurance to get around France, that's not the point.

The riders that are not very good at sustained power over an hour or so are guess who? Pure climbers. As discussed when the road goes uphill the 'maths and physics' tip in their favour as discussed above, so how do you negate that favour? You ride at sustained threshold from the bottom of the climb, so when you get to the more decisive last 3-4km the pure climbers can't then make the difference over a shorter effort and typical of where the Tour de France time is won and lost. The 'maths and physics' have been tipped into the favour of the heavier riders like Doumilin, Wiggins, Thomas, Indurain etc.

Well this is all massively obvious. What's also obvious is that there are numerous prohibited substances floating around cycling which can facilitate this 'weight adjustment' and 'tipping of the odds in their favour'. And that doing 'weight adjustment' without resultant power loss has been the holy grail of cyclists for over 100 years - with almost no success until things like Clen and Aicar came onto the scene.
 
Re: Re:

dacooley said:
what I'm trying to make emphasis on IS the difference you draw between quintana / valverde / sagan and froome / thomas / dimoulin is ridiculously big. it's virtually super atheletes with physique that enables them to be a world class cyclists since they were babies vs overly mediocre riders, who reached the top owning to enormous luck and top-notch doping regime. I just disagree. no doubt, each of three has physique, talent and determination to be big champions. certainly, looking back in the past, we accept that a doping free cycling would have looked completely differently. but speculation about hypothetical clean bike racing starts and ends in clinic subforum on cn and has very little to do with real life. reality is three so-called donkeys won 8 grand tours.
I disagree with this. I think there is a big difference between the natural talent of riders in the peloton and that doping obscures a lot of that. But there are ways that you can suspect who is talented - youth results being the most prominent example. I mean, if Raul Alarcon got a WT contract and won the Tour or Giro ahead of Bernal, for example, would you think they were similarly naturally talented?

Btw, determination is a completely different factor. Froome for example has incredible mental strength which has undoubtedly contributed to his prolonged period of success - and he is a worthy champion in that respect.
 
Mamil said:
I never realised that winning a GT was so simple. Big endurance engine + losing all possible weight = winning Le Tour.

Why are all these big engines British?

Why isn't Rohan Dennis, who is quite tall and clearly has a massive engine of his own and ability to maintain high watts for a long time, not destroying GTs left right and centre?

Oh, what's that, you need to dope too? Silly me. I thought maybe poor Roh was just fat :rolleyes:

Surely you mean dope correctly, unless you think Dennis did the fastest ever TDF TT clean?
 
Re: Re:

DFA123 said:
samhocking said:
dacooley said:
DFA123 said:
dacooley said:
how comes that being a talented track rider, joining high-scale doping programme, losing weight and as a result becoming a great climber is far less OKish than being a talented little climber by nature and winning big races with an assistance of doping? why super elite racing should allegedly be a direct reflection of what took place in tour de l'avenir. damn, it doesnt make any sense imo.
The issue is that it's so blatant. It's impossible to suspend disbelief - to imagine that the most talented riders in the world are actually winning the race. If some guy like Valverde or Sagan wins a race then - looking at their youth results and progression - you can believe its plausible that they would be there or there abouts in a clean peloton. If someone suddenly transforms mid (or late) career to win the Tour - you know its not that much to do with talent any more. It feels like the Armstrong era all again - where having a huge budget, the best lawyers and friends in the right places is deciding races. Thomas is a bit different to Froome/Dumoulin I think because he's clearly talented, even by pro standards, but he's so tainted by the Sky brand right now, that it's difficult to have any faith in him.
the issue is that a lot of fans are desperately willing to search for some kind of bike racing fairness which is actually senseless, because the whole world is unfair by its nature. the model "the earlier talent is evident - the more credible and well-deserved champion" is valid to a certain extent, but clearly has multiple flaws, coming down more to the idealist attitude. nobody has a clue what would have happened in a completely clean cycling, the sport, that has histrorically been one of the hardest and dirtiest. so would you have a faith in valverde / quintana, had they won the tour by crushing thermonuclear sky?

The point i'm making is not that the 4km effort itself and of itself is indicative of Grand Tour success, it's that the training effort required in order to put such a high 4km effort onto, only comes from a very strong, basic aerobic threshold over much longer periods and why pursuit riders at least in man 2,3 & 4 also make great ITT riders too. Basically the 4km pursuit identifies riders with very good sustained power over an hour or so ,mbecause if you don't have that, you are not able to bolt on the numbers required to win a pursuit. The pursuit naturally selects those riders who, with weight adjustment and race tactics up climbs in Grand Tours can then tip the maths into their favour. All rider types have basic endurance to get around France, that's not the point.

The riders that are not very good at sustained power over an hour or so are guess who? Pure climbers. As discussed when the road goes uphill the 'maths and physics' tip in their favour as discussed above, so how do you negate that favour? You ride at sustained threshold from the bottom of the climb, so when you get to the more decisive last 3-4km the pure climbers can't then make the difference over a shorter effort and typical of where the Tour de France time is won and lost. The 'maths and physics' have been tipped into the favour of the heavier riders like Doumilin, Wiggins, Thomas, Indurain etc.

Well this is all massively obvious. What's also obvious is that there are numerous prohibited substances floating around cycling which can facilitate this 'weight adjustment' and 'tipping of the odds in their favour'. And that doing 'weight adjustment' without resultant power loss has been the holy grail of cyclists for over 100 years - with almost no success until things like Clen and Aicar came onto the scene.

Do you honestly believe the other teams and riders don't know this? Crikey the majority of the teams in World Tour & Professional Continental level are continuations at ownership, staffing and ex-rider level who lived and breathed doping, cheating and evasion! One would not only think they might know just as much as a bunch of track riders coming over to France for the first time, but should know a fair bit more how all this corruption, collusion, evasion, omerta and substance abuse actually gets donkeys to be racehorses, because they've been doing it for 100 years before Brailsford & Keen were even born and those teams have direct unbroken lineage with all of cycling doping history. The best UK has is Simpson, who rode for a French team doping himself to death!
 
I'm talking about proven experience at doping to 'win' road races abroad at the highest level. Simpson was the most successful rider we had before Wiggins that we know doped. Robert Millar we assume, but he's not involved in British Cycling even though he wanted to be iirc. Point is as British Team he died, didn't win!
 
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Re:

samhocking said:
I'm talking about proven experience at doping to 'win' road races abroad at the highest level. Simpson was the most successful rider we had before Wiggins that we know doped. Robert Millar we assume, but he's not involved in British Cycling even though he wanted to be iirc. Point is as British Team he died, didn't win!
There is no proof Simpson ever doped.

Robert now Philippa got popped in Spain though.

Was and still is the best British rider ever known.

Still waiting for your list of pursuiters who kicked ass at TT's though?
 
Re: Re:

DFA123 said:
dacooley said:
what I'm trying to make emphasis on IS the difference you draw between quintana / valverde / sagan and froome / thomas / dimoulin is ridiculously big. it's virtually super atheletes with physique that enables them to be a world class cyclists since they were babies vs overly mediocre riders, who reached the top owning to enormous luck and top-notch doping regime. I just disagree. no doubt, each of three has physique, talent and determination to be big champions. certainly, looking back in the past, we accept that a doping free cycling would have looked completely differently. but speculation about hypothetical clean bike racing starts and ends in clinic subforum on cn and has very little to do with real life. reality is three so-called donkeys won 8 grand tours.
I disagree with this. I think there is a big difference between the natural talent of riders in the peloton and that doping obscures a lot of that. But there are ways that you can suspect who is talented - youth results being the most prominent example. I mean, if Raul Alarcon got a WT contract and won the Tour or Giro ahead of Bernal, for example, would you think they were similarly naturally talented?

Btw, determination is a completely different factor. Froome for example has incredible mental strength which has undoubtedly contributed to his prolonged period of success - and he is a worthy champion in that respect.
as far as i understand your logic, a rider should take his place in cycling hierarchy solely depending on what nature granted him with all other factors being entirely secondary. so we have thomas and froome, whose grand tour fame is massively founded on using doping as an overwhelming factor, on one side of the scales and god-gifted climbers quintana / bardet, hostages to their own doping-related inferiority, on other one. that's probably where we part our opinions. natural talent is a base but it can neither guarantee nor provide any result. result is a complex product, generated by dozens of variables starting from talent, doping, mental toughness and ending with discipline, will and determination. even one time grand tour allegedly lacking / not having talent is where i always chuckle while reading the forums.
 
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Re: Re:

thehog said:
Wiggins and Thomas? :lol:
I am still waiting for those statistics indeed ;)

dacooley said:
as far as i understand your logic, a rider should take his place in cycling hierarchy solely depending on what nature granted him with all other factors being entirely secondary. so we have thomas and froome, whose grand tour fame is massively founded on using doping as an overwhelming factor, on one side of the scales and god-gifted climbers quintana / bardet, hostages to their own doping-related inferiority, on other one. that's probably where we part our opinions. natural talent is a base but it can neither guarantee nor provide any result. result is a complex product, generated by dozens of variables starting from talent, doping, mental toughness and ending with discipline, will and determination. even one time grand tour allegedly lacking / not having talent is where i always chuckle while reading the forums.
The chuckling part is where we agree.

Never seen so much patriotism as with British people, sorry to say. Totally blinded by the medal count.

Brailswashed.
 
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wansteadimp said:
Surely you mean dope correctly, unless you think Dennis did the fastest ever TDF TT clean?

Yes, probably. But whatever he's on certainly doesn't work that well when the road starts going uphill. He's getting better at it, but it all looks relatively natural.

Point is he's pretty lean and proven to have a more than decent engine, whether assisted or not, but is still only so-so on the climbs. There's far more to being an exceptional climber than just sustained power and weight loss.
 
Here's a complete list of riders in the last 50 years who had their first GT top 10 at the age of 30 or above.

Tour de France
Geraint Thomas (1st, 2018, age 32)
Daniel Navarro (8th, 2013, age 30 - his 30th birthday was three days before the end of the race)
Thomas Voeckler (4th, 2011, age 32)
Jean-Christophe Peraud (9th, 2011, age 34)
Chris Horner (9th, 2010, age 38)
Christian Vande Velde (4th, 2008, age 32)
Cyril Dessel (6th, 2006, age 31)
François Simon (6th, 2001, age 32)
Roland Meier (7th, 1998, age 30)
Alberto Elli (7th, 1994, age 30)
Giancarlo Perini (8th, 1992, age 32)
Raymond Martin (5th, 1980, age 31)

Giro d'Italia
Yuri Trofimov (10th, 2015, age 31)
Przemysław Niemiec (6th, 2013, age 33)
John Gadret (3rd*, 2011, age 32)
Michele Scarponi (4th, 2010, age 30)
Marco Pinotti (9th, 2010, age 34)
José Enrique Gutiérrez (2nd, 2006, age 31)
Victor Hugo Peña (9th, 2006, age 31)
Patxi Vila (10th, 2006, age 30)
Marzio Bruseghin (9th, 2005, age 30)
Tyler Hamilton (2nd, 2002, age 31)
Andrea Noè (4th, 2000, age 31)
Heinz Imboden (8th, 1995, age 33)
Massimo Podenzana (7th, 1994, age 32)
Claudio Corti (5th, 1986, age 31)
Üli Sutter (10th, 1978, age 31)
Ronald de Witte (9th, 1977, age 31)

Vuelta a España
Michael Woods (7th, 2017, age 30)
Laurens ten Dam (8th, 2012, age 31)
Daniel Moreno (9th, 2011, age 30 - like Navarro he turned 30 during the race, this time on the second rest day)
Xavier Tondó (6th, 2010, age 31)
Paolo Tiralongo (8th, 2009, age 32)
David Moncoutié (8th, 2008, age 33)
Egoí Martínez (9th, 2008, age 30)
Ezequiel Mosquera (5th, 2007, age 31)
Félix García Casas (8th, 2002, age 34)
David Plaza (6th, 2001, age 31)
Claus Michael Møller (8th, 2001, age 33)
Roberto Laiseka (6th, 2000, age 31)
Gianni Faresin (9th, 1997, age 32)
Tony Rominger (1st, 1992, age 31)
Jean-Claude Bagot (9th, 1989, age 31)
Eddy Schepers (9th, 1988, age 32)
Pierre-Raymonde Villemiane (6th, 1982, age 31)
Jørgen Marcussen (4th, 1981, age 30)
Ventura Díaz (9th, 1974, age 36)
Roger Swerts (9th, 1973, age 30)

As you can see, a lot of these placements are low end top 10s, mostly placements from 6th to 10th, suggesting these are riders who were either backup options for their team or were simply not strong GC leaders but were able to compensate with nous and experience to get into the top 10 without threatening the podium. Many of them are also one-and-done top 10s; of those who hit the top 10 for the first time after the age of 30 above, several never made it again, and only a small handful became regulars up there - Rominger, Mosquera, Moreno, Scarponi, Bruseghin and Peraud are perhaps the main ones to point to. It's also harder to achieve this feat at the Tour - the Tour accounts for 25% of the number up there; the Giro is a perfect 33,33%, so the Vuelta accounts for 41,67% Of the 48 names above, only 4 have actually won a GT - and Thomas is the only one for whom that GT is the Tour; Tony Rominger won three Vueltas and a Giro, Chris Horner won a Vuelta, and Michele Scarponi won a Giro through forfeit after Contador was removed from the results sheet. Horner is a massive outlier even among this list which exclusively deals with late bloomers.

There is also a significant increase in the number of these post-30 maiden top 10s in recent times - of the 48, over 75% are since 1990, almost 66% are since 2000 and a little under a third are since 2010. It is not surprising that in the pre-Wende days, the Vuelta is the most common place for experienced stagers to get their first GT top 10 (6 first timers as opposed to 3 at the Giro and 1 at the Tour) seeing as it was by far the least established of the 3, and it is really since the 1980s with the takeoff of the skiing industry and the reintegration of Spain into Europe that its GT status is affirmed; the numbers start to be more in line with the other two GTs from that point onward. I would say that the increase in importance of the World Tour and its predecessors plays a large role in that, in that placements are increasingly important and so experienced riders drifting backward slowly are now quite a useful commodity as the ability to "Zubeldia" a top 10 is quite an effective tool for a team's continued World Tour ambitions. Also, I would argue that the increased quality of domestiques means that riders are better protected for longer; we may decry the lack of long-range action and aggressive racing, but more energy saved in the bunch is probably helpful in increasing riders' longevity.

In the early 90s you had a bit of an exception when you have the riders from the former Eastern Bloc who weren't previously able to ride the Grand Tours (other than a small handful of Soviet riders who did the Vuelta in the late 80s) although even they were mostly late 20s at their first GT (Ugrumov 29, Jaskuła 28 for example); they follow the example of Gösta Pettersson, who is probably the best example to point to as a precedent for the kind of performances that Wiggins and Thomas have put in after converting to being climbers late on; he didn't turn pro until he was almost 29, and top 10ed both the Giro and Tour in his first pro season (thus excluding him from the above list), then won the Giro in his second; he did however mostly race road as an amateur, though he did join in the track along with his brothers at times, such as the 1968 Olympics; his road palmarès as an amateur included some major stage racing credentials, however, winning the Tour du Maroc and the Tour de Tunisie as well as the Milk Race when it was two weeks long, and coming 2nd in the mountainous Tour de Yugoslavie, so he's not a perfect comparison. He is perhaps more directly comparable in the modern day with somebody like Niemiec, who for personal reasons (a private family connection) signed a much longer than is normal contract with a third tier team and therefore didn't get to do a GT until he was 31, or Tondó, who took to the sport late, and was buried by bad timing beneath Puerto exiles who were limited to lower level teams, that blocked his route to the top until he was nearly 30; Mosquera belongs in the same category, not having the chance to race the Vuelta until 2007, but obviously he also pushed his luck too far trying to win the race in 2010 and fell foul of doping controls.

There's also a lot of other convicted or otherwise known dopers there too - Hamilton, Vande Velde, Meier, Gutiérrez, Hesjedal, Scarponi (who may be unique in having served his ban prior to his appearance on this list). Very few podiums among these first top 10s, though there is the occasional late convert to at least this side of the sport (Jice Peraud being the most recent example of this, he of course later did podium) as well as those who didn't turn pro until a late age back in the pro-am days; Michael Woods is of course another outlier, having been in a completely different sport. There are quite a few fluke performances and ones where large time gifts played a role (Voeckler, Martínez and Dessel, for example, and I can't remember if Pinotti was in 'that' break). Quite a few of the most notorious 'late bloomers' in world cycling, regardless of their reasons for that, actually had their maiden GT top 10s at 28-29 - Ugrumov, Wiggins, Hesjedal, Joaquím Rodríguez, Pettersson - so in some ways using 30 as the cut-off is slightly arbitrary as if it somehow makes, say, Moreno or Navarro, who both finished at the bottom end of the top 10 in a race they had their 30th birthdays in, more significantly late bloomers than Wiggins or Hesjedal (Moreno had finished 12th, 12th and 11th in his 3 Vuelta rides prior to being 9th in 2011, so he was actually very consistent and it's his 5th the following year that's more of an outlier, whereas Hesjedal's and Wiggins' best GT results prior to their successive maiden top 10s were 47th and 71st respectively, so you'd say Moreno's performance is much less inherently eye-opening once that context is added - though I believe Moreno was one of the riders connected to Jesús Losa back in around 2009-10), but I thought its position as a milestone birthday and a point at which historical provenance suggests riders ought to start to decline made it a useful starting point, though of course the point at which a rider actually does stop improving and start to decline is never going to be at a uniform point for all athletes.

The number of first timers making the podium, as Thomas did, is pretty small too - counting Gadret is debatable because of Contador's presence in 2011, but even with him, there's literally only Thomas, Rominger, "Búfalo" Gutiérrez, Hamilton and Gadret among those over 30 in the last half a century who have had their maiden GT top 10 be a podium - not exactly company Thomas will be clamouring to be conflated with I should imagine - and furthermore, interestingly, Thomas is the only rider to achieve that at the Tour de France. And not only that - but he's the only rider to never hit a GT top 10 until 30 years of age, and then have their maiden top 10 be a GC victory.
 
Agreed, good post.

As far as being helped by breakaways, François Simon was in a break that got more than 35 minutes on the field. He would have finished mid-20s without the time he gained from that stage. Andrei Kivilev got 4th overall that year after being in the same break.
 
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Re: Re:

Fearless Greg Lemond said:
samhocking said:
Still waiting for your list of pursuiters who kicked *** at TT's though?

I'm not sure why I am helping him but both Boardman and Obree went from pursuit to the Hour Record, which supports some of his physiological argument.

The flaw is that track cycling requires upper body strength to resist the G force and constant acceleration - this then becomes a big problem when you hit the mountains in a road race. When in a steady state in the velodrome, or a flat prologue mass can be overcome by aerodynamics so both Boardman's and Obree's 'technical doping' worked. You can't do this in the mountains, there is no way of hiding mass from gravity.

The debate really is can you turn 85kg of trackie into 67kg of GT winner without them losing power? Not credibly to many of us...
 
How many of those 30+ first timers in the top 10 were super talented and amongst the elite in a different specialisation of pro cycling before turning their attention to climbing/GC?

Not to mention Thomas would almost certainly have had his first top 10 at the Giro last year were it not for his crash, and this is before even considering his role as a domestique the whole time.

Of course Thomas is suspicious, but the way this is being spun by some posters here is ridiculous. His performance on PSM was way more surprising at the time than this Tour victory is now
 
Re: Re:

Fearless Greg Lemond said:
thehog said:
Wiggins and Thomas? :lol:
I am still waiting for those statistics indeed ;)

dacooley said:
as far as i understand your logic, a rider should take his place in cycling hierarchy solely depending on what nature granted him with all other factors being entirely secondary. so we have thomas and froome, whose grand tour fame is massively founded on using doping as an overwhelming factor, on one side of the scales and god-gifted climbers quintana / bardet, hostages to their own doping-related inferiority, on other one. that's probably where we part our opinions. natural talent is a base but it can neither guarantee nor provide any result. result is a complex product, generated by dozens of variables starting from talent, doping, mental toughness and ending with discipline, will and determination. even one time grand tour allegedly lacking / not having talent is where i always chuckle while reading the forums.
The chuckling part is where we agree.

Never seen so much patriotism as with British people, sorry to say. Totally blinded by the medal count.

Brailswashed.

Well off the world pursuit champions that come to mind that also did very well on road in ITT and TTT I can immediately think of the following names. I'm sure there are plenty of others who've crossed over as it's an obvious choice to do well in ITT if you're a pursuit champion.

AUS
Jack Bobridge - UCI Road World Under–23 Championships ITT, National ITT Champion, 5th UCI Worlds ITT
Melissa Hoskins - 2nd UCI World Team time trial
Stuart OGrady - 1st Tour de France ITT 2013, 2nd Commonwealth Games ITT
Luke Roberts - 1st Endenhoven TTT
Brett Lancaster - 2nd World Team Time Trial Championships, 1st Junior National Time Trial Championships, 3rd Eindhoven Team Time Trial
Bradley McGee - 1st ITT Tour de Suisse, 1st Giro ITT

GBR
Thomas - we already know
Wiggins - we already know
Owain Doull - 3rd UCI TTT Championships, 2nd National Under–23 ITT, 2nd National ITT
Joanna Rowsell - 1st National Time Trial Championships
Chris Boardman - we already know
Graeme Obree - we already know

RUS
Viatcheslav Ekimov - 1st Time trial, Olympic Games etc etc

FR
Jeannie Longo - 1st World Time Trial Championship etc etc

NZ
Sarah Ulmer - 1st National Time Trial Championships, 1st ITT Oceania Games

HOL
Leontien van Moorsel - 1st Olympic ITT x 2, 1st National ITT, 2nd Commonwealth Games etc etc

US
Chloé Dygert - 1st World Junior ITT
 
Re: Re:

samhocking said:
Fearless Greg Lemond said:
thehog said:
Wiggins and Thomas? :lol:
I am still waiting for those statistics indeed ;)

dacooley said:
as far as i understand your logic, a rider should take his place in cycling hierarchy solely depending on what nature granted him with all other factors being entirely secondary. so we have thomas and froome, whose grand tour fame is massively founded on using doping as an overwhelming factor, on one side of the scales and god-gifted climbers quintana / bardet, hostages to their own doping-related inferiority, on other one. that's probably where we part our opinions. natural talent is a base but it can neither guarantee nor provide any result. result is a complex product, generated by dozens of variables starting from talent, doping, mental toughness and ending with discipline, will and determination. even one time grand tour allegedly lacking / not having talent is where i always chuckle while reading the forums.
The chuckling part is where we agree.

Never seen so much patriotism as with British people, sorry to say. Totally blinded by the medal count.

Brailswashed.

Well off the world pursuit champions that come to mind that also did very well on road in ITT and TTT I can immediately think of the following names. I'm sure there are plenty of others who've crossed over as it's an obvious choice to do well in ITT if you're a pursuit champion.

AUS
Jack Bobridge - UCI Road World Under–23 Championships ITT, National ITT Champion, 5th UCI Worlds ITT
Melissa Hoskins - 2nd UCI World Team time trial
Stuart OGrady - 1st Tour de France ITT 2013, 2nd Commonwealth Games ITT
Luke Roberts - 1st Endenhoven TTT
Brett Lancaster - 2nd World Team Time Trial Championships, 1st Junior National Time Trial Championships, 3rd Eindhoven Team Time Trial
Bradley McGee - 1st ITT Tour de Suisse, 1st Giro ITT

GBR
Thomas - we already know
Wiggins - we already know
Owain Doull - 3rd UCI TTT Championships, 2nd National Under–23 ITT, 2nd National ITT
Joanna Rowsell - 1st National Time Trial Championships
Chris Boardman - we already know
Graeme Obree - we already know

RUS
Viatcheslav Ekimov - 1st Time trial, Olympic Games etc etc

FR
Jeannie Longo - 1st World Time Trial Championship etc etc

NZ
Sarah Ulmer - 1st National Time Trial Championships, 1st ITT Oceania Games

HOL
Leontien van Moorsel - 1st Olympic ITT x 2, 1st National ITT, 2nd Commonwealth Games etc etc

US
Chloé Dygert - 1st World Junior ITT

You are asked to provide names and you list 6 female cyclists, U-23 riders and guys who only even won TTTs, i.e O'Grady, Roberts. That is too funny. Really scraping the bottom of the barrel there.

The irony being that you listed riders who did well at TTs at U-23 level which is something Thomas didn't do, so I guess that is like an o.g in the Thomas narrative. Didn't look like a GT rider, didn't look like a TT monster early road career either.

The most glaring omission is Lech Piasecki(World Pursuit Champion) and regular performer in TTs on the road. Who beat LeMond in the final TT stage of the 89 Giro? you know, the one where he showed the first signs of his turnaround. Piasecki was a class all round rider, won 3 stages in the 89 Giro including a road stage. Such a pity his pro career only lasted 5 seasons as he was already quite old by the time he was allowed to turn pro by the Polish federation. Could probably throw Francis Moreau in there as well. Had some decent results on the road and in prologues.

So take out the females, U-23s , TTT riders and we are left with Boardman, Obree??? Piasecki, Berzin, Moser, McGee, Ekimov and below that the likes of Moreau etc. Considering that covers a 40 years period, it is hardly a long list. In fact it highlights the opposite of what you want it to illustrate.

Funny, went back and pulled out an edition of ProCycling from 2007, remember there being a G feature in it as part of a British takeover themed issue, also featured Cavendish and Ben Swift. After waxing lyrical about Thomas and his talents, the article finished by saying "probably not a future Tour contender, but a big future in the sport". Ouch, even the biased British cycling media didn't envisage G as a Tour contender.
 
So now you're moving the goalposts 'after' you've realised what you said was false?

It was a simple fact I stated. that pursuit riders (all are world pursuit champions in that list) also make great TT riders and that list proves it. Clearly most pursuit riders don't cross over to pro road careers and don't because the demands of the pursuit means that's not possible within an Olympic year/cycle. Even Wiggins never crossed over much, if at all in the same Olympic year, he was either road or track. Many never cross over, so we'll never know how good they might have been. However, most of those that did enter a pro road career either from pursuit or while still pursuit riders at the highest level, also competed at the very top level at TT and TTT on the road.

If being a world pursuit champion in that list 'didn't' translate to TT, there would be nobody in that list with TT results at the highest level, among established road riders and timetrial specialists who do it day in day out and is their entire career! One would assume there were at least a handful of decent-enough road riders to beat a 3 or 4km pursuit rider in a long road TT, but clearly not!
 
Re:

PremierAndrew said:
How many of those 30+ first timers in the top 10 were super talented and amongst the elite in a different specialisation of pro cycling before turning their attention to climbing/GC?

Not to mention Thomas would almost certainly have had his first top 10 at the Giro last year were it not for his crash, and this is before even considering his role as a domestique the whole time.

Of course Thomas is suspicious, but the way this is being spun by some posters here is ridiculous. His performance on PSM was way more surprising at the time than this Tour victory is now
There is actually a glaring factual inaccuracy in my analysis - while Thomas is the only one to have their first top 10 be a podium in the Tour, he isn't the only one to have their first top 10 be a GT win, as Rominger's 1992 Vuelta is his first top 10 too.

Also, there are very few riders who have already specialised and been among the elite in a different specialisation who have given that up to try to be a completely different type of rider, let alone succeeded, so it's hard to really see too many people that you could put a legit comparison to Geraint with. Jean-Christophe Péraud was a European champion and Olympic silver medallist in mountain bike before switching to the road at 32, but he didn't do any road racing at the top level before that, so his maiden top 10 is in fact in only his 2nd GT (similarly, Ezequiel Mosquera has never finished a GT outside of the top 10, and Michael Woods' maiden GT top 10 was only his second start), whereas Thomas was a veteran of 12 GTs before making his maiden top 10 with his Tour win (and even had he top 10ed the Giro last season that would still have been his 11th). Gadret is perhaps a better call, his first top 10 was his 9th GT, and he had two top 20s in the preceding season and an earlier top 20, relatively akin to Thomas who had two 15ths before his win; Gadret was a two-time national cyclocross champion and twice top 10 in the Cyclocross World Cup. Ryder Hesjedal is another possible comparison, having started off as a mountain biker, winning a silver medal in the XCO in 2003, but having 5 nondescript years between his conversion to the road and his discovery of GT skills in 2010.

I actually found more experienced stagers hitting their first GT top 10 than I anticipated, and the fact that so many of them are comparatively recent suggests that the profile of GT riders is getting older, but it's worth noting that 35/48 of those finished between 6th and 10th, so only 13 were top 5s (just over 25%), only 5 were podiums (just over 10%) and Rominger was as mentioned the only other one to win from the criteria listed. The late conversion for Thomas is indeed exacerbated by his crashing out and his domestique role, however the fact that he was there to domestique in the high mountains in 2015 was surprising enough given, while he'd shown some decent performances that suggested he was a better climber than most Northern Classics men (winning one of the few editions of the Bayern Rundfahrt that weren't "win the TT win the race", having a Winklmoosalm MTF), in 2015 he really steps up his climbing big-time, with major performances on Monchique, Croix de Chaubouret and, most surprisingly, the Rettenbachferner. But he's still a Classics man at 29 - he still wins E3 and podiums Gent-Wevelgem that year. It's not like he's transitioned through the Ardennes and Lombardia as you might expect from somebody moving from the Classics to becoming a stage racer in the mountains. He had been 22nd the previous year in the Tour admittedly, but that was the one time he wasn't really domestiquing, with Froome crashing out. And in that race he lost 15 minutes to Nibali across two Alpine stages and more than double that over the Pyrenees, so realistically we can say that he still had a lot further to go. The last 3 seasons he's more or less abandoned his Classics aims, but in 2015 he was becoming a guy who can finish 2nd in the Tour de Suisse at the same time as hitting the podium of Gent-Wevelgem.

But because of what you say about riders being at different stages in their career and having different specialisms, and the different starting points with potential late starters to their cycling career such as Peraud mentioned above, here's 30 years' worth of GT winners, and how many GTs it took them to register a top 20, a top 10, and a win, and I've asterisked those who were 30 or more when they won their first GT.

* Séan Kelly: 4 - 4 - 15
Andrew Hampsten: 1 - 2 - 4
Pedro Delgado: 2 - 4 - 5
Laurent Fignon: 1 - 2 - 3
Greg LeMond: 2 - 2 - 6
Marco Giovannetti: 1 - 2 - 8
Gianni Bugno: 5 - 7 - 7
Melcior Mauri: 6 - 6 - 6
* Franco Chioccioli: 2 - 4 - 10
Miguel Indurain: 10 - 12 - 14
* Tony Rominger: 8 - 8 - 8
Evgeni Berzin: 2 - 2 - 2
Laurent Jalabert: 9 - 9 - 10
Pavel Tonkov: 1 - 1 - 7
* Bjarne Riis: 11 - 11 - 16
Alex Zülle: 4 - 5 - 9
Ivan Gotti: 2 - 3 -6
Jan Ullrich: 2 - 2 - 3
Marco Pantani: 2 - 2 - 8
Abraham Olano: 3 - 4 - 10
Lance Armstrong: 5 - 5 - 6
Stefano Garzelli: 1 - 1 - 5
Roberto Heras: 1 - 1 - 6
Gilberto Simoni: 6 - 7 - 10
Ángel Casero: 1 - 7 - 12
Paolo Savoldelli: 2 - 3 - 11
Aitor González: 2 - 2 - 3
Damiano Cunego: 2 - 2 - 2
Ivan Basso: 4 - 5 - 9
(Floyd Landis: 4 - 6 - 8)
Óscar Pereiro: 1 - 4 - 7
Aleksandr Vinokourov: 2 - 6 - 9
* Danilo di Luca: 6 - 9 - 13
Alberto Contador: 2 - 2 - 2
Denis Menchov: 3 - 7 - 11 (7 depending on your position on the 2005 Vuelta)
* Carlos Sastre: 2 - 2 - 18
Alejandro Valverde: 2 - 2 - 10
Andy Schleck: 1 - 1 - 5
Vincenzo Nibali: 1 - 4 - 6
* Michele Scarponi: 1 - 9 - 10
* Cadel Evans: 1 - 3 - 12
* Juan José Cobo: 3 - 5 - 6
* Ryder Hesjedal: 7 - 7 - 9
* Bradley Wiggins: 6 - 6 - 11
Chris Froome: 4 - 4 - 7
* Chris Horner: 3 - 8 - 11
Nairo Quintana: 2 - 2 - 3
Fabio Aru: 2 - 2 -5
Tom Dumoulin: 5 - 5 - 8
* Geraint Thomas: 7 - 13 - 13

There are a couple of names that seem to fit with Thomas a bit more readily there; Indurain and Jalabert, notably. Jalabert doubly fits because of his excelling as a sprinter with two maillots vert and multiple GT stages, though he'd also top 10ed Liège and Lombardia and podiumed Paris-Nice back in 1991, and his 1995 self-reinvention came aged 26. Indurain was doing 2 GTs a year from the age of 20, so although the number of GTs looks huge, he was still only 26 when he started to hit podiums, and at the age at which Thomas hit the top step of the podium last month, Miguelón had already withdrawn from his last race. Riis doesn't have the background of being hugely successful in a different format of racing, which impedes his usefulness as a comparison though obviously his self-reinvention at 29 does invite parallels. Di Luca and Armstrong were both strong in hilly classics before reinventing themselves as GT riders, but Armstrong has the medical interlude and di Luca already had Oil For Drugs in his back pocket before he became a GT winner, and every time he actually finished a GT he was in the top 25 to that point. Lots of crashes and planned withdrawals though. Scarponi was not dissimilar with plenty of hilly classic results, but four top 20s in his first 6 GTs. Sastre and Evans both had a huge number of top 10s and podiums before finally managing to make it to the top step so though they didn't score a maiden victory until well into their 30s, they were both staples of the GT leaderboards so not comparable at all to Thomas (Sastre had 9 top 10s including 3 podiums before finally winning the Tour, Evans had 7 including 3 podiums of his own likewise). Quite a few of the most similar riders to Thomas don't enter as many GTs before their breakouts (Wiggins most notably) as Thomas has, which is a slight problem for the data as while it may account for late converts to the sport, it doesn't account for injuries and team policies (Chioccioli for example only did the Giro for a whole decade, while Indurain was doing two GTs a year from age 20 onward) as well as normalizing riders who have long gaps in their palmarès due to not doing GTs like Cobo and pre-2011 Froome, whose level in 2010 meant neither were selected for several consecutive such races, while Horner's paltry number of GTs due to his very late return to Europe in his mid-30s makes parsing his numbers for any meaningful conclusions very tricky indeed.

Of the four riders who took more GTs to get to a win than Thomas, however - Séan Kelly had 6 earlier top 10s (as well as withdrawing from the Vuelta while leading a year earlier), Carlos Sastre had been racking up top 10s for almost an entire decade, Miguel Indurain was six years younger than Thomas at the point he made it to the top step and retired by Thomas' age which limits his usefulness in a discussion of late bloomers, and Bjarne Riis is Bjarne Riis (and doesn't have the previous successes in other fields that Thomas has to point to).
 
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Yes, it's perfectly normal in a 6-year period for dom's to jump out and win the TDF after the leader is somewhat off. 2 times(almost 3) - On the same most transparent team ever!! - and all "brits" of course.
 
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So what your saying is he is doping and it all good because others are doping to. Then why the 1000 posts trying to explain he had pedigree for it?
 

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