Gigs_98 said:
I really think that if Etna is ridden relatively hard Froome will lose every chance to win the giro tomorrow. This just looks too much like Contador in the 2016 tour. Somehow there seems to be less discussions about Froome's potential injury than about Contador's potential injury back then (not just in this forum, but also by the media which seems to be convinced Froome will be back at his best very soon. I'm definitely not) but todays stage imo was just another display of Froome's weakness. Froome in half decent doesn't slip back in the peloton on the final ramp. There were no splits in the group so he finished same time, but really, that didn't have anything to do with him getting better. He once again looked bad and I just don't see him looking better tomorrow.
Yeah, really agree, I mentioned this in one of the other Giro threads after the ITT. I thought, though, that Contador crashed when the TDF was in seriously hilly stages, and he couldn't keep up. I went back and checked the situation, and hadn’t realized that Contador crashed so early—on both stage 1 and 2—and that he hung on so long: he abandoned on stage 9. I think of crashes as either taking riders out very quickly, or not at all, but clearly that doesn't have to be the case. Contador had flat stages to deal with till stage 5, and there wasn't a serious climb till stages 7 and 8. Both of those ended in descents, but the climbing before clearly took too much out of him. Stage 8 in particular would have been a killer, with 1 HC, two Cat 1s, and one Cat 2.
Froome's situation seems very reminiscent of Contador's, with several mostly flat stages before any serious climbing. It looks a little easier, though, with just Etna and stage 8 before a rest day, and neither of those stages i think is as demanding as stage 8 in the 2016 TDF. We shall see.