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Grand Tour Elimination Game ( 2010s )

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Gigs_98

Gigs_98

Feb 18, 2015
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Kainabru said:
I don't really get the hype for 2019 Tour. It had one good mountain stage in Pyrenees and a half of a good stage in Alpes. On top of that the cancellation as well as Pinot weird injury made it into kind of a joke and the end of the race was really disappointing.

On the other hand last year Giro was backloaded, and Gavia was cancelled (it still hurts) but practically every mountain stage was enjoyable, had a lot of action and serious attacks.

For me it is a choice between potentially great race, which in the end was really underwhelming (Tour) and overally very good, proper GT, with the drawback of being slightly backloaded (Giro). So for me in 2019 Giro was definitely more solid and also more likeable race than 2019 Tour.
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I wouldn't exactly call this forums view on the 2019 Tour "hyped", though it maybe was before the Alps. Your points are all fair, especially that pretty much all but one mountain stage under delivered, but there was still a lot to like about the race. Alaphilippe's first stage win was pretty exciting, the stage where he and Pinot attacked on a hill with almost 20k to go, the crosswind stage, Alaphilippe's shock win in the TT. There were a lot of decent stages, not to forget the whole narrative of Alaphilippe defending yellow in the pyrenees and the huge hype coming with that.

Crucially though, I think the main reason why people enjoyed it was because it felt so different from the previous Tours. Those late attacks by Alaphilippe and Pinot on hilly stages, when was the last time before that we saw gc contenders going for similar moves and actually succeeding? Sky not being capable of controlling things, not even managing to take the yellow jersey from a guy who wasn't even there to ride for gc, Pinot dropping the guy who was supposed to be their next big thing. Those were the things all of us had been waiting for since the Sky era began in 2012.

Now, as we all know, all of this went to sh*t in the third week, with Pinot suffering from freak injury, a hail storm keeping us from what could have been the first succesful long range attack in the Tour in almost a decade and finally a completely neutralized final mountain stage. For that reason the 2019 is also not among my top picks for this game, in fact it's not even anywhere near my top picks, but I have to acknowledge that the 2019 Tour at one point looked likely to become the best edition of the Tour since probably 2010 and not even the horrible ending can undo that.

Red Rick said:
I keep being baffled by the amount of people saying Jumbo should've raced the Grand Colombier much more aggressively when Roglic was in the lead while IIRC nobody was saying Pinot raced the Tourmalet way too passively last year.
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Well, it's very simple really. Pinot didn't get far enough for that to come back to hurt him.
 
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Red Rick

Red Rick

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Gigs_98 said:
I wouldn't exactly call this forums view on the 2019 Tour "hyped", though it maybe was before the Alps. Your points are all fair, especially that pretty much all but one mountain stage under delivered, but there was still a lot to like about the race. Alaphilippe's first stage win was pretty exciting, the stage where he and Pinot attacked on a hill with almost 20k to go, the crosswind stage, Alaphilippe's shock win in the TT. There were a lot of decent stages, not to forget the whole narrative of Alaphilippe defending yellow in the pyrenees and the huge hype coming with that.

Crucially though, I think the main reason why people enjoyed it was because it felt so different from the previous Tours. Those late attacks by Alaphilippe and Pinot on hilly stages, when was the last time before that we saw gc contenders going for similar moves and actually succeeding? Sky not being capable of controlling things, not even managing to take the yellow jersey from a guy who wasn't even there to ride for gc, Pinot dropping the guy who was supposed to be their next big thing. Those were the things all of us had been waiting for since the Sky era began in 2012.

Now, as we all know, all of this went to sh*t in the third week, with Pinot suffering from freak injury, a hail storm keeping us from what could have been the first succesful long range attack in the Tour in almost a decade and finally a completely neutralized final mountain stage. For that reason the 2019 is also not among my top picks for this game, in fact it's not even anywhere near my top picks, but I have to acknowledge that the 2019 Tour at one point looked likely to become the best edition of the Tour since probably 2010 and not even the horrible ending can undo that.


Well, it's very simple really. Pinot didn't get far enough for that to come back to hurt him.
Click to expand...
They were complaining long before that, even after he'd lost that sprint to Pogacar. Assigning him magical legs to drop everyone despite evidence to the contrary just to fit the paradigm.
 
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Kainabru

Sep 18, 2020
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Gigs_98 said:
I wouldn't exactly call this forums view on the 2019 Tour "hyped", though it maybe was before the Alps. Your points are all fair, especially that pretty much all but one mountain stage under delivered, but there was still a lot to like about the race. Alaphilippe's first stage win was pretty exciting, the stage where he and Pinot attacked on a hill with almost 20k to go, the crosswind stage, Alaphilippe's shock win in the TT. There were a lot of decent stages, not to forget the whole narrative of Alaphilippe defending yellow in the pyrenees and the huge hype coming with that.

Crucially though, I think the main reason why people enjoyed it was because it felt so different from the previous Tours. Those late attacks by Alaphilippe and Pinot on hilly stages, when was the last time before that we saw gc contenders going for similar moves and actually succeeding? Sky not being capable of controlling things, not even managing to take the yellow jersey from a guy who wasn't even there to ride for gc, Pinot dropping the guy who was supposed to be their next big thing. Those were the things all of us had been waiting for since the Sky era began in 2012.

Now, as we all know, all of this went to sh*t in the third week, with Pinot suffering from freak injury, a hail storm keeping us from what could have been the first succesful long range attack in the Tour in almost a decade and finally a completely neutralized final mountain stage. For that reason the 2019 is also not among my top picks for this game, in fact it's not even anywhere near my top picks, but I have to acknowledge that the 2019 Tour at one point looked likely to become the best edition of the Tour since probably 2010 and not even the horrible ending can undo that.
Click to expand...

Well said, I can only agree. In fact I had the very same fellings during the race. I was just trying to make a case for 2019 Giro, which for me was better compared to 2019 Tour, which was underwhelming for me but mostly because of the way how it ended.
 
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