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Most Underwhelming Giro d'Italia Performance

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What rider had the most underwhelming/non-existent 2019 Giro?

  • Ben O'Connor

    Votes: 10 13.3%
  • Ion Izagirre

    Votes: 8 10.7%
  • Sepp Kuss

    Votes: 2 2.7%
  • Antwan Tolhoek

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Alexis Vuillermoz

    Votes: 1 1.3%
  • Iván Ramiro Sosa

    Votes: 6 8.0%
  • Bob Jungels

    Votes: 34 45.3%
  • Other

    Votes: 14 18.7%

  • Total voters
    75
Re:

Oliver said:
Sosa: I could be wrong but I don’t expect him to be a really big rider.

Sosa won GC at Burgos as a 20 year old ahead of Lopez and a pretty good field of minor GC men. He finished second on GC at the Tour of Colombia this year as a 21 year old, behind Lopez but ahead of an absurd list of riders. The 3rd to 9th place finishers were Martinez, Bernal, Quintana, Uran, Alaphilippe, Henao, Carapaz.

Maybe he will never be a consistent three week racer. Or maybe his TT will always crucify him. Or maybe he is a freak early developer and won’t improve much. Maybe. But he is certainly extremely good for a 21 year old. So it’s a little surprising that Sivakov and Dunbar, the latter a last minute call up, were so much more visible. There was more hype about Sosa and based on palmares to date deservedly so.
 
Sosa was unimpressive after Colombia except for one stage in the Paris-Nice and disappeared from the provisional Giro startlist quite early while Sivakov won the Tour of the Alps and was very good in the last stage in Catalunya

Edit: also, is there a hidden Ben O'Connor fan club on this forum? I had no idea that so many people seem to have had high hopes for him despite him showing nothing this year
 
Re: Re:

Zinoviev Letter said:
Oliver said:
Sosa: I could be wrong but I don’t expect him to be a really big rider.

Sosa won GC at Burgos as a 20 year old ahead of Lopez and a pretty good field of minor GC men. He finished second on GC at the Tour of Colombia this year as a 21 year old, behind Lopez but ahead of an absurd list of riders. The 3rd to 9th place finishers were Martinez, Bernal, Quintana, Uran, Alaphilippe, Henao, Carapaz.

Maybe he will never be a consistent three week racer. Or maybe his TT will always crucify him. Or maybe he is a freak early developer and won’t improve much. Maybe. But he is certainly extremely good for a 21 year old. So it’s a little surprising that Sivakov and Dunbar, the latter a last minute call up, were so much more visible. There was more hype about Sosa and based on palmares to date deservedly so.

On the other hand, he was a no-show in Innsbruck and didn't live up to his potential in L'Avenir, where topriders like Sivakov, Lambrecht & Bernal (all his birthyear) were no longer participating. He simply isn't as far ahead of his peers, like Bernal was, for instance. And he seems to lack that consistency and isn't as allround for the time being either.

I wouldn't have been surprised had he been better, but on the other hand you can't automatically expect all these 20 - 21 year olds to hit the ground running. Also, more hype based on palmares, compared to f.i. SIvakov?

roundabout said:
Edit: also, is there a hidden Ben O'Connor fan club on this forum? I had no idea that so many people seem to have had high hopes for him despite him showing nothing this year

Indeed. Puzzling. He got dropped by Kudus, Evenepoel, Conti & Grossschartner in Turkey, and to my knowledge didn't ride any race since, before the Giro.
 
I would say Simon Yates performance was a dissapointment againist odds he should be one of biggest Giro climbers, then ofc Bernal but it happens that you are not able to even ride, I would like to see him in Giro mountains, then probably Lopez
 
Re: Re:

tobydawq said:
RedheadDane said:
tobydawq said:
RedheadDane said:
I dunno… the guys I'm most underwhelmed by, are the guys I forgot were there.
But if I forgot they were there, I can't really be underwhelmed by them.

Maybe Hiroki Nishimura was the most underwhelming rider of the Giro.

Mostly I remember the fact that he pretty early wasn't there!

I saw that PCS had somehow made a list of the most anonymous riders in the race (I don't really know what their criteria were). The most anonymous was - according to them - Andrea Garosio (and I don't remember the rest, so perhaps the real most anonymous would be number 2 on the list, since number 1 de-anonymouses himself by being too spectacularly anonymous).

I can't really be underwhelmed by a guy I didn't even know existed! I'm not talking didn't know he was in the race, I'm talking didn't know there was a guy called Andrea Garosio.
 
Re: Re:

Logic-is-your-friend said:
roundabout said:
Edit: also, is there a hidden Ben O'Connor fan club on this forum? I had no idea that so many people seem to have had high hopes for him despite him showing nothing this year

Indeed. Puzzling. He got dropped by Kudus, Evenepoel, Conti & Grossschartner in Turkey, and to my knowledge didn't ride any race since, before the Giro.
He's been struggling quite a bit with illness this spring, so I guess there were hopes that he had put those problems behind him come the Giro.
 
Re: Re:

Squire said:
Logic-is-your-friend said:
roundabout said:
Edit: also, is there a hidden Ben O'Connor fan club on this forum? I had no idea that so many people seem to have had high hopes for him despite him showing nothing this year

Indeed. Puzzling. He got dropped by Kudus, Evenepoel, Conti & Grossschartner in Turkey, and to my knowledge didn't ride any race since, before the Giro.
He's been struggling quite a bit with illness this spring, so I guess there were hopes that he had put those problems behind him come the Giro.
He's been "bad" all year and he didn't ride for weeks/months before the Giro. Seems like wishful thinking. Even if his illness had been over, what could you realistically expect?
 
Re: Re:

Logic-is-your-friend said:
Squire said:
Logic-is-your-friend said:
roundabout said:
Edit: also, is there a hidden Ben O'Connor fan club on this forum? I had no idea that so many people seem to have had high hopes for him despite him showing nothing this year

Indeed. Puzzling. He got dropped by Kudus, Evenepoel, Conti & Grossschartner in Turkey, and to my knowledge didn't ride any race since, before the Giro.
He's been struggling quite a bit with illness this spring, so I guess there were hopes that he had put those problems behind him come the Giro.
He's been "bad" all year and he didn't ride for weeks/months before the Giro. Seems like wishful thinking. Even if his illness had been over, what could you realistically expect?
O'Connor himself said that while he was putting out the numbers in training he wasn't sure he'd be able to figure in the overall. He set himself a goal of top 10 but also knew it could be too much.

As for me I'm a bit of a fan of his after meeting him a few times with mutual friends when I lived in Perth, he's a nice kid.
 
Re: Re:

klintE said:
Escarabajo said:
Yates by far.
So you trusted him so much when he trashed he's the one favorite? :)
I didn't like the trash talk but he was one of the clear favorites and one of the reasons why I was so excited about this Giro. First Bernal, then DuMoulin crashes and we had few hopes left for Yates, Nibali and Roglic. Lopez was always an outsider. So with Yates not delivering the Giro became a 2 way race which usually becomes a boring race if they don't deliver.

So for me it was Yates.

Jungels was bad but I never got excited about him or even had any high hopes for him. Maybe other forum members did have high hopes, but not me.
 
Re: Re:

42x16ss said:
Logic-is-your-friend said:
Squire said:
Logic-is-your-friend said:
roundabout said:
Edit: also, is there a hidden Ben O'Connor fan club on this forum? I had no idea that so many people seem to have had high hopes for him despite him showing nothing this year

Indeed. Puzzling. He got dropped by Kudus, Evenepoel, Conti & Grossschartner in Turkey, and to my knowledge didn't ride any race since, before the Giro.
He's been struggling quite a bit with illness this spring, so I guess there were hopes that he had put those problems behind him come the Giro.
He's been "bad" all year and he didn't ride for weeks/months before the Giro. Seems like wishful thinking. Even if his illness had been over, what could you realistically expect?
O'Connor himself said that while he was putting out the numbers in training he wasn't sure he'd be able to figure in the overall. He set himself a goal of top 10 but also knew it could be too much.

As for me I'm a bit of a fan of his after meeting him a few times with mutual friends when I lived in Perth, he's a nice kid.

Even with a perfect preperation a top 10 would have been hard enough.
 
The thing is O'Connor didn't struggle to make the Top10. He struggled to make the top30 and finished more than an hour behind the leader. And never even managed to enter a break in the process.

As bad as his preparation was, you'd think a talented rider would slowly get into shape and at least have a decent performance in the last week. But he was completely anonymous. This was a guy fighting for a top10 in his first ever GT at 22 years old before crashing out.

To me he was surely more disappointing than Sosa, an unknown quantity in GTs and not even in the tentative roster for the Giro a couple of weeks before it started. More disappointing than Izagirre, who clearly peaked for one week spring races and came here as a dom. More disappointing than the Jumbo gregari, who had to fill a role that was never meant to be theirs. Some would argue Vuillermoz was more disappointing, it was a very comparable (invisible) effort but he managed to finish 29th while O'Connor was 32nd.

And then there's Bob Jungels, who was terrible indeed. But he didn't disappoint me during the Giro. He disappointed me two months ago when he opted not to ride a few Classics he could have won. We all knew that was a stupid decision so I was actually pretty happy (not disappointed) when he was dropped again and again on every climb of the Giro.
 
Re:

SafeBet said:
The thing is O'Connor didn't struggle to make the Top10. He struggled to make the top30 and finished more than an hour behind the leader. And never even managed to enter a break in the process.

As bad as his preparation was, you'd think a talented rider would slowly get into shape and at least have a decent performance in the last week. But he was completely anonymous. This was a guy fighting for a top10 in his first ever GT at 22 years old before crashing out.

To me he was surely more disappointing than Sosa, an unknown quantity in GTs and not even in the tentative roster for the Giro a couple of weeks before it started. More disappointing than Izagirre, who clearly peaked for one week spring races and came here as a dom. More disappointing than the Jumbo gregari, who had to fill a role that was never meant to be theirs. Some would argue Vuillermoz was more disappointing, it was a very comparable (invisible) effort but he managed to finish 29th while O'Connor was 32nd.

And then there's Bob Jungels, who was terrible indeed. But he didn't disappoint me during the Giro. He disappointed me two months ago when he opted not to ride a few Classics he could have won. We all knew that was a stupid decision so I was actually pretty happy (not disappointed) when he was dropped again and again on every climb of the Giro.

One can read this post as saying that bad preparation is an excuse for Sosa, but not for O'Connor.

Going back to the OP's question, did you really have high hopes for O'Connor prior to the Giro?

You even wrote yourself on page 1 that his performance was in line with what he showed this season, so I guess he was the most underwhelming because he did not magically improve out of nowhere?
 
Re: Re:

roundabout said:
SafeBet said:
The thing is O'Connor didn't struggle to make the Top10. He struggled to make the top30 and finished more than an hour behind the leader. And never even managed to enter a break in the process.

As bad as his preparation was, you'd think a talented rider would slowly get into shape and at least have a decent performance in the last week. But he was completely anonymous. This was a guy fighting for a top10 in his first ever GT at 22 years old before crashing out.

To me he was surely more disappointing than Sosa, an unknown quantity in GTs and not even in the tentative roster for the Giro a couple of weeks before it started. More disappointing than Izagirre, who clearly peaked for one week spring races and came here as a dom. More disappointing than the Jumbo gregari, who had to fill a role that was never meant to be theirs. Some would argue Vuillermoz was more disappointing, it was a very comparable (invisible) effort but he managed to finish 29th while O'Connor was 32nd.

And then there's Bob Jungels, who was terrible indeed. But he didn't disappoint me during the Giro. He disappointed me two months ago when he opted not to ride a few Classics he could have won. We all knew that was a stupid decision so I was actually pretty happy (not disappointed) when he was dropped again and again on every climb of the Giro.

One can read this post as saying that bad preparation is an excuse for Sosa, but not for O'Connor.

Going back to the OP's question, did you really have high hopes for O'Connor prior to the Giro?

You even wrote yourself on page 1 that his performance was in line with what he showed this season, so I guess he was the most underwhelming because he did not magically improve out of nowhere?

I think the difference is that Sosa was a late call-up for the Giro so hadn't done any specific prep, whereas O'Connor was preparing his whole season around the race...

The expectations on O'Connor are based on the fact that he was on for a solid top10 finish last year (completely out-shining his team leader Meintjes) before he crashed out in the closing stages, and had then targeted this season around the Giro, publicly stating a top 10 as his goal.
Obviously backing up a breakthrough GT performance isn't in any way easy, but he did seem to miss the mark by a surprisingly long way...
 

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