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A great all-rounder indeed.
saganftw said:TMP402 said:
thats former track champion turned cobble specialist turned best climber among time trialists and best time trialist among climbers and best sprinters among non sprinters to you ,put some respec on his name
A great all-rounder indeed.
- Feb 10, 2015
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I hope you realize that the crowds in mountain stages are remarkably international.yaco said:
- Apr 29, 2017
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Amazing how Sky seem to just keep discovering these late career nobodies who were secret Tour winners all along. Even more amazing the succession of marks willing to lap it up and tell us all that there’s nothing surprising about it.
We’ve had the late 20s track rider and second tier prologue specialist who it turns out always had the ability to win GTs. Then we had the late 20s low grade career domestique best known for winning the anatomic jock race and getting thrown out of a Giro for needing a motor vehicle to get to the top of an incline. He also always had the secret ability to win a GTs. Now we have the thirty two year old failed cobbled classics contender who has never come close to even troubling the top 10 of a GT in a dozen previous rides, reaching early middle age as a GT non entity and guess what? Sky knew all along that he was a future GT contender.
I’m thinking of giving “Sir” Dave Brailsford a ring myself, to see if he’ll order a few lab tests for me. After all, I fit the pattern. I’m in my thirties. To the foolish among us I’ve never yet shown any indication that I have capacity to contend for a GT. I would certainly need the help of a motor vehicle to finish a Giro mountain stage. I’ve generally been better at cycling on the flat than uphill, but crucially I’ve never been so good at cycling on the flat that I’m in any danger of winning a cobbled monument or dominating longer TTs. I’ve missed testing myself in the Junior Tour of Wales, but Im pretty sure that I too wouldn’t have been good enough to win it. I could probably do with losing a few kilos too.
All Dave needs to do is provide a contract and a few training plans and I’ll be skipping my way up the Alpe, guiding the last guy to go through the same process behind me. Best of all, there will be an endless supply of slack jawed yokels willing to assure anyone sceptical of my apparent ability that it’s all perfectly normal, expected even. I won’t even have to pay them. They will embarrass themselves for free.
willbick said:
Amazing how Sky seem to just keep discovering these late career nobodies who were secret Tour winners all along. Even more amazing the succession of marks willing to lap it up and tell us all that there’s nothing surprising about it.
We’ve had the late 20s track rider and second tier prologue specialist who it turns out always had the ability to win GTs. Then we had the late 20s low grade career domestique best known for winning the anatomic jock race and getting thrown out of a Giro for needing a motor vehicle to get to the top of an incline. He also always had the secret ability to win a GTs. Now we have the thirty two year old failed cobbled classics contender who has never come close to even troubling the top 10 of a GT in a dozen previous rides, reaching early middle age as a GT non entity and guess what? Sky knew all along that he was a future GT contender.
I’m thinking of giving “Sir” Dave Brailsford a ring myself, to see if he’ll order a few lab tests for me. After all, I fit the pattern. I’m in my thirties. To the foolish among us I’ve never yet shown any indication that I have capacity to contend for a GT. I would certainly need the help of a motor vehicle to finish a Giro mountain stage. I’ve generally been better at cycling on the flat than uphill, but crucially I’ve never been so good at cycling on the flat that I’m in any danger of winning a cobbled monument or dominating longer TTs. I’ve missed testing myself in the Junior Tour of Wales, but Im pretty sure that I too wouldn’t have been good enough to win it. I could probably do with losing a few kilos too.
All Dave needs to do is provide a contract and a few training plans and I’ll be skipping my way up the Alpe, guiding the last guy to go through the same process behind me. Best of all, there will be an endless supply of slack jawed yokels willing to assure anyone sceptical of my apparent ability that it’s all perfectly normal, expected even. I won’t even have to pay them. They will embarrass themselves for free.
- Jun 27, 2013
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Not when you finish 11th on GC. If he'd have "chilled to the finish" he'd have finished half an hour behind and taken it easy in the time trials instead of riding them faster than LeMond.
No, Indurain dropped 15 minutes on Alpe because he spent most of the stage hammering on the front on the flat while LeMond sat in the wheels because Pensec was in yellow.
You're misremembering. While LeMond took more pulls, they both worked. And it wasn't a sprint, LeMond just couldn't take the pace and eventually lost the wheel. Unless you consider riding in the saddle for 500m without any accelerations "a sprint"
This discussion is "Was Indurain clearly strong enough to win the Tour even before he won it?"
The answer is an unequivocal yes.
Here are the time gaps between the two. On every other stage they finished s.t.
Read it and tell me exactly where, in your words, "Indurain dropped time because he wasn't strong enough"
woodburn said:
Not when you finish 11th on GC. If he'd have "chilled to the finish" he'd have finished half an hour behind and taken it easy in the time trials instead of riding them faster than LeMond.
woodburn said:
No, Indurain dropped 15 minutes on Alpe because he spent most of the stage hammering on the front on the flat while LeMond sat in the wheels because Pensec was in yellow.
woodburn said:
You're misremembering. While LeMond took more pulls, they both worked. And it wasn't a sprint, LeMond just couldn't take the pace and eventually lost the wheel. Unless you consider riding in the saddle for 500m without any accelerations "a sprint"
This discussion is "Was Indurain clearly strong enough to win the Tour even before he won it?"
The answer is an unequivocal yes.
Here are the time gaps between the two. On every other stage they finished s.t.
Read it and tell me exactly where, in your words, "Indurain dropped time because he wasn't strong enough"
- Apr 29, 2017
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I remember Phil Liggett predicting Geraint would be a future tour winner back in 2010. Then again I remember him saying Tony Martin was in 2009.
Zinoviev Letter said:
I remember Phil Liggett predicting Geraint would be a future tour winner back in 2010. Then again I remember him saying Tony Martin was in 2009.
I think when you have a physique like Thomas's (or Dumoulin's, or Wiggins's), it's not unrealistic to move between various specialities. Clearly, someone with tiny bones like Bardet or gangly like Froome is not going to be a good track rider. Or a thicker guy like Sagan probably won't ever be a climber. But those three (just to point out a few examples) look like normal "athletes" who have focused on cycling.
I don't particularly think Thomas's ascent is all that remarkable in the context of Sky. He and Froome spent 80 percent of the day behind 6 teammates, whereas the rest of the teams looked like the Keystone Kops. But, let's see how it pans out. I recall a recent race in Italy with a surprise leader who looked invinceable.
I don't particularly think Thomas's ascent is all that remarkable in the context of Sky. He and Froome spent 80 percent of the day behind 6 teammates, whereas the rest of the teams looked like the Keystone Kops. But, let's see how it pans out. I recall a recent race in Italy with a surprise leader who looked invinceable.
Big Doopie
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- Oct 6, 2009
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Debatable. Simply no way of knowing that.
Absolutely false. Lemond dropped everyone and led the entire way up the last 7-8 km. It was quite normal that the one guy who managed to cling to his slipstream would be able to out kick him in the last few hundred meters.
That is really stupid talk, since the entire race would have played out differently with different tactics. And same could be said for other riders who lost most of their time on one unlucky event (Rominger comes to mind, Quintana in 2015, perhaps Dumoulin this year...)
Also, everything to do with indurain has to be taken with a grain of salt as his meteoric assent from strong (though ridiculously large) rider to absolute dominator also went hand in hand with the latest clinic advances.
Debatable. Simply no way of knowing that.
Absolutely false. Lemond dropped everyone and led the entire way up the last 7-8 km. It was quite normal that the one guy who managed to cling to his slipstream would be able to out kick him in the last few hundred meters.
That is really stupid talk, since the entire race would have played out differently with different tactics. And same could be said for other riders who lost most of their time on one unlucky event (Rominger comes to mind, Quintana in 2015, perhaps Dumoulin this year...)
Also, everything to do with indurain has to be taken with a grain of salt as his meteoric assent from strong (though ridiculously large) rider to absolute dominator also went hand in hand with the latest clinic advances.
- Mar 19, 2009
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What's delusional about that opinion? It's not implausible - he hadn't showed any real weakness at that point and was definitely strong enough to be with the group that fought out the finish. It's not as if he said he definitely would have won.willbick said:
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Read my other post after that one. I responded to all that
The stage breakdown clearly shows Indurain gaining on LeMond stage after stage, flat or time trial
Read my other post after that one. I responded to all that
The stage breakdown clearly shows Indurain gaining on LeMond stage after stage, flat or time trial
Big Doopie
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Those of you disappointed by Quintana, or even Adam Yates or other underperforming small climber, do not understand the history of the Tour and the reason why a more powerful all-rounder is almost always crowned.
The fact that there were nine flat stages with nary a single climb is terrible for pure climbers most of all. It is precisely in those long boring flat sprinter stages that everyone complains about that the climbers legs are ridden out of them and they are rarely as scintillating/dominant once they reach the actual climbs. It is all that is left to even the race (since GTs have horrendously curtailed the ITTs).
A GT is not supposed to be made up of nothing but MTFs and won by tiny little climbers. GTs are for the best all-rounder - the guy who can ITT, climb, and not get worn out by the high speed flat stages and cobbles.
Same with the green jersey. Traditionally this is not necessarily meant for the best pure sprinter -- while they done much to try and make it so (crazy distortion depending on the type of stage and intermediary sprints. It is traditionally there to recompense the most consistently placed rider throughout all the stages. That's why Kelly won it, Van Springel (no sprinter!) won it, Merckx won it, etc...
Dumoulin is - quite frankly - the historical prototype of a GT winner. Had he raced in another era we would be a multiple Tour winner. Imagine Dumo with over 100 kms of ITT. LOL!
The fact that there were nine flat stages with nary a single climb is terrible for pure climbers most of all. It is precisely in those long boring flat sprinter stages that everyone complains about that the climbers legs are ridden out of them and they are rarely as scintillating/dominant once they reach the actual climbs. It is all that is left to even the race (since GTs have horrendously curtailed the ITTs).
A GT is not supposed to be made up of nothing but MTFs and won by tiny little climbers. GTs are for the best all-rounder - the guy who can ITT, climb, and not get worn out by the high speed flat stages and cobbles.
Same with the green jersey. Traditionally this is not necessarily meant for the best pure sprinter -- while they done much to try and make it so (crazy distortion depending on the type of stage and intermediary sprints. It is traditionally there to recompense the most consistently placed rider throughout all the stages. That's why Kelly won it, Van Springel (no sprinter!) won it, Merckx won it, etc...
Dumoulin is - quite frankly - the historical prototype of a GT winner. Had he raced in another era we would be a multiple Tour winner. Imagine Dumo with over 100 kms of ITT. LOL!
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