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No one expected him to win the first TT in such a dominant fashion. Although, yes, it was a short one. But many posters on here said that he likely wouldn't win because his form was bad, IIRC. I know I was laughing out loud when it became apparent that he blitzed the course and made the rest of the field look like amateurs.
That's true, i forgot about that. Let's say the difference between him and Cavagna could have been a tad bigger, but it would have been relatively close nevertheless.
Yeah, I was talking about Van Aert. Some people think / thought the TT had too much climbing in it even for WVA. Even WVA himself, IIRC. The ITT may not be ideal for him, but IMO he's still the favorite.
Ah, i thought you were talking about Ganna. I also don't know how his preparation for the track will influence his performance.
How narrow a subskill would it have to be to not have Van Aert in the top-50?
What he he did in the last two Tour is not enough to be top 50 climber? And that considering Prati di Tivo this spring an outlier because otherwise he should go in the top 25, maybe even 20.
I bet you can as easily name 50 better climbers at present than Van Aert as Ryo could name 20(?) better Colombian climbers than Nibali.
I still remember Ryo listing the best climbers ahead of 2012 Giro and he listed only Scarponi and South Americans. Then the best South American rider finished 7th on GC and they didn't win a single mountain stage.
In your defense one could probably make a list of 50 riders who are arguably better climbers than Wout. But let's take a look at Kruijswijk for example. On paper he is without a doubt a better climber than WvA. But is he really at the moment? I can't remember his last strong climbing performance. So in the last couple of years there's nothing wrong to consider Wout a better climber.
Alright this is just for the memes
How is Mollema a clearly better climber than Van Aert after being outclassed by him on Mont Ventoux? There's another five to ten riders on that list who haven't done a climbing performance of that magnitude any time this season, and with the exception of Pinot that isn't down to injury.
Taking that stage as the end-all be-all of climbing ability just ignores all consistency and day-to-day variation. I've included a few guys based on results from 2020 and 2019 if there's no reason other than injuries they couldn't do a similar level.
That's fair. My point wasn't that Van Aert is a clearly better climber than Mollema, but rather that it shows that Mollema isn't clearly better and therefore that they're roughly in the same bandwidth of climbing ability at this stage of their respective careers, as far as we can tell based on a limited sample size on Van Aert's end in particular.
Hence I also understand this reasoning and mostly agree with it, although I'd rate Van Aert's climbing a bit more highly. I'd say we haven't seen enough of Van Aert as a climber to accurately judge whether he makes this cut, because a) the sample size is small, b) the sample is fairly mixed, and c) he doesn't have the top-end performances to compensate that someone like Mark Padun does. I think he's shown enough pedigree to say that he probably makes the cut somewhere in the not-too-distant future, but it's too early to draw a conclusion either way for the time being.
Far be it from me to proclaim my own opinion to be official CN doctrine, but it's still probably more hype than the "is the new Zdenek Stybar" the thread had for years.
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