Fight.The.Power said:
The Hitch said:
Fight.The.Power said:
fungusbear said:
ILovecycling said:
Probably the best Tour since 2011, so 6/10.
Yep. At least in his tour there was some suspense on stage 20. We have not had that since 2011
Hitch - get down from your horse sometimes eh ?
Yep you are right. No one who disagrees with you is allowed an opinion.
Now that's not fair.
Hitch you are THE KNOWLEDGE and I I know that as does everyone else. Therefore you require to be criticised.
I'm no KNOWLEDGE. I'm just a guy with an opinion, especially on something as subjective as race enjoyment. Ive already said if people enjoyed this, good for them.
Me, and a handful of other regular old school posters I think - LS, hrotha, Descender, perhaps Eshnar, Serious Sam, simply hold cycling to a higher standard than many (maybe some of these will now disagree with me and say this was a great tour, but im betting from previous experience, they won't).
I don't tune into cycling for the scenery or to hear commentators blabber on about breakfast while the peloton holds hands day after day week after week. I want to see a gc battle, tension, finger biting, changes in the storyline, unpredictability, like I do for any sport. Without that cycling can really be as boring as most non fans claim. Just some riders riding around a country.
This TDF had none of those. I don't recall anything particularly special or unpredictable. Different non gc guy winning a stage every day. Quintana settled for 2nd very early. Take a look back at the mountain threads in week 2 and 3. Some people argued that Quintana was dumb to settle for 2nd, others said it was clever of movistar to settle for 2nd and 3rd. Either way it was clear he had settled for 2nd. All the mountain stages went to waste. They just settled for mtfs. They might as well have used the 2012 Vuelta profiles, cut out the mountain stages and just have loads of mtfs cos thats how they raced it.
SS can maybe post the odds graphs for Froome winning the TDF. He was favourite before the Tour. Favourite in the first week. His odds rose steadily basically every day and by the end of PSM were well above 50 and never dropped from there. It was never in doubt.
To give this race anything above 5 is to suggest that there isn't much room to improve and perfection is only slightly better than what we saw. I'm more optimistic. It was a below average gt that had no surprises or turns. Like quite a lot of TDFs recently. And its not even in the same league of entertaiment, as those gts that actually have a battle.