luckyboy said:
broppo said:
so bernal just gives away the KOM, what an idiot, at least Froome was sprinting in the last stage to get the green jersey. This is a **** joke, the KOM is a prestigious price not to just gift to someone!
Would've been good to see him take the stage and KOM jersey, yeah. Bardet really isn't a very good KOM winner this year.
In fairness, if they don't cancel the Roseland, then Bardet goes in the break and probably takes max points on it unless Yates is there, as nobody else in the break would have designs on the classification most likely and would be preserving their energy for Val Thorens.
The problem with the KOM at the moment in the Tour is that they've colossally over-valued MTFs, to the point where a Unipuerto stage with a HC MTF has more points available than the 2009 queen stage with four cat.1s and a cat.2. This has led to a move away from the 'king of the breakaways' stigma of the winners being combativity candidates rather than real climbers (though I do feel sorry for Charteau being singled out as the reason it had to change, that was largely the result of a deal made to protect Jérôme Pineau in the St-Jean-de-Maurienne stage, and then Radioshack defending the lead in the Teams Classification and nuking any break with a Caisse d'Epargne rider in it on the Tourmalet stage, preventing Christophe Moreau collecting points on those two days. If Moreau picked up the KOM as a career parting gift, much like Garzelli in the 2011 Giro, then nobody decides the classification needs a revamp, as Moreau would probably have been seen as a 'worthy' KOM), but while much of the time it has been won by a secondary contender or somebody who has lost out on the GC but come into form late in the race (Majka's wins both fall into this category), it has also on occasion been won by a GC candidate basically by accident (Froome in 2015, for example). While a big GC candidate can definitely win the KOM in the 'right' way, by competing for the win collecting points by being combative in the mountains - Quintana's win in 2013 and Rasmussen's was-going-to-be-a-win in 2007 for example - it's not like Froome ever really went on the kind of escapade to win the jersey that made him visible as the "king of the mountains" even though he was obviously the best climber in that race (his reward for which, of course, was the yellow jersey).
By the way the jersey has functioned since the revamp in 2011, the logical winner of the KOM for me would have been Simon Yates, and his attack with a few kilometres to go was likely with this in mind. He's won two stages and been visible on the attack throughout the mountain stages. Nairo Quintana was also within striking distance of the jersey, and had the two been fresher, we could have seen them battle on the front once Bardet was dropped, being one point apart and both having won major mountain stages in the race. Bernal has at least been decently aggressive, but it wasn't like Landa in the Pyrenees - that was the type of move he was on when the Tignes stage was neutered, and had that stage been able to be completed and THEN he'd won or top 3ed today's stage, he'd feel more like a GPM winner.
Bardet simply doesn't feel like a GPM winner here. I mean, as a calibre of rider, he fits in well with the kind of riders who've won the jersey in recent years. But he had a catastrophically bad GC campaign, and he only had the one real mountain exploit, which he didn't exactly set the world alight in either. This isn't just a Tour problem though - a few years ago Giovanni Visconti won the Giro GPM almost by accident; Carlos Betancur and Beñat Intxausti had been duelling over the jersey for most of the race, and Visconti got into the break on one key day which had the Cima Coppi, originally to try to protect Intxausti's lead in the classification, but because of the crazy overvaluing of the Cima Coppi and the idiosyncrasies of the Giro's GPM (such as the number and difficulty of uncategorized ascents) he wound up winning the jersey on the strength of that one day.