Time bonuses and substitutions are too artificial. Shorter stages, I've already said my piece on, I don't think they have any benefit other than as an occasional thing. The Vuelta in the early 2000s and the Giro in 2004 experimented with short stages, and it was crap. The Tour got the bug because of one good stage in 2011 which came after an even better 200km+ mountain stage, and now we never get any well designed long mountain stages, so the short ones invariably produce more action simply because there has to be some action somewhere. And with only a couple of exceptions (Andalo), the short mountain stages that have been great (eg Formigal, Sant'Anna di Vinadio) have come directly off the back of either "normal length" (Risoul 2016) or "long (200km+)" (Aubisque 2016, Galibier 2011) mountain stages.
Really, Grand Tours are a bore because of a few factors:
- Broadcast saturation. We really don't need to see four hours of coverage of a flat stage.
- The proliferation of the train template has led organizers to look for ever steeper garage ramps at the end, which guarantees time gaps but only in the last 15-20 minutes of stages.
- The mountains themselves have become brands, especially at the Tour where the mountains are concentrated in a couple of key areas (not a problem for the Giro and Vuelta, which are never more than a stage away from a potential mountaintop finish), meaning repetitious mountain stages using the same climbs riders know like the back of their hands, often neutralizing their impact because everybody knows who is going to attack and where
- lack of TT mileage because organisers are scared of large time gaps being set up early on making things dull - which has a balancing effect of meaning the climbers don't really have a big deficit to overcome, so they don't have to make big gambles like people like Fuente or van Impe or Pantani or Jiménez etc., except in fairly unusual circumstances where we get desperation plans, or a one-off "go from deep" stage like Quintana on Alpe d'Huez in 2013 or Heras on Pajáres in 2005. After all, the Alpe d'Huez stage that started the "short mountain stages are great!" fallacy was only like that because Andy Schleck had raced the Pyrenees so poorly despite being clearly the best climber in the race that he had no choice but to go for broke on the Agnello, which generated a great stage where everybody was tired the next day.
- the devaluation of the GPM as a consequence of Virenque's pioneering the "king of the breakaways" method (helped by some generous points categorizations at the Tour, giving double points for the final climb even if it was 90km from the finish, eg in awful mountain stage designs like Pau 2010 or Tarbes 2009) meaning the GPM only tends to go to a top climbing name either a) by accident, like Froome at the 2015 Tour, due to the massive overvaluing of MTFs to try to redress that balance, or b) if they already lose a truckload of time early, like Pellizotti or Majka.
- Grand Départs are now being actively sought to be boring. Organizers don't want to eliminate any major contenders before they get back to the country the race is supposed to be in, and so they are deliberately neutering overseas stages. Belfast in the Giro, Israel in the Giro, Brussels in the Tour, all actively going out of their way to avoid anything that could generate close racing. Zeeland in the Tour and Giro and Sheffield in 2014 are the only exceptions in the last decade.
- too many TTTs, which puts the balance of power towards the teams which are already the strongest anyway
- the effective killing off of the Pro Conti level for wildcards, partly helped by the end of the "quarantine for doping" era, has meant that the wildcard teams seldom provide any genuine candidates to win or threaten to podium the race, and maybe a sprinter here and there and the hope for some breakaway successes are all that they have. The WT level is now almost locked off, and we have gone from an era of genuine GC hopefuls on ProConti teams doing one GT a year - Mosquera, Pozzovivo, di Luca, Garzelli, Scarponi, König - to these riders all being stockpiled as helpers by WT teams, leading to a vast reduction in the cast of characters at the front of the race
- the success of train techniques by a small handful of teams (and one team in particular) has meant we do have a generation of young riders who have never known GC racing to be anything other than trying to hang on to the pace of the train as long as possible, and so open wildcard racing is not something they are adept in. Louis Meintjes has become the poster boy for this, but there's a lot of riders out there whose entire modus operandi is a negative one, building a GC result out of falling backwards as slowly as possible. The importance of a GC result also means that they will defend an utterly irrelevant place - Pierre Rolland pointed out IAM riding to defend Matthias Fränk's 14th place in a GT he eventually finished about 9th in a few years ago; in 2010 Garmin rode like billy-o to decrease a breakaway's advantage because Chris Horner and Rubén Plaza threatened Ryder Hesjedal's 10th place.
I'm sure the idea of shortening stages will find some support amongst the péloton though. It plays into the narrative they want to present, of how hard the job is, that they need to have a good rest once in a while, like the Formigal stage where the grupetto didn't even try to make the time limit, because of how hard the race was. Four days after a rest day, and two days after they soft-pedalled an entire stage that the organizers had actually taken all the decisive climbs out of. The reason they needed that rest? "It's been a really hard race" and it was one day after the ONLY multi-mountain hard stage in the entire race. That's why stuff like the Hammer Series has come about - it's three days of racing with one day's worth of distance.
A 110km mountain stage is fine as a change of pace, but not as the norm, because then it won't work as it does now. Things will normalise. Just as when they tweak the routes of one day races, it often produces better racing for a couple of years before the riders get used to where to make moves and dose efforts on the new course, if short mountain stages become the norm, the racing in them will in time tend toward the same position that it was. The reason the short mountain stages in the early 2000s failed was because they were badly designed and riders didn't really know what to do with them, so played "wait and see". The reason the short mountain stages in the early 2010s succeeded was they were decently designed and placed in the right place (after a hard mountain stage, so domestiques would be tired, and because GC riders wouldn't be afraid of a short stage because of lesser effort, they didn't neutralise the previous stage).
Design and pacing are vastly underrated as stage race tools for good racing. The 2019 Giro was not so boring in the first half because the stages were long. It was boring because the race was colossally backloaded, and so you either had Lotto-Jumbo under no threat in a flat stage, or once they'd shipped the jersey to the breakaway, UAE riding because they were just happy to have the jersey. It's a lot like happened in the 2009 Tour, with the super strong Astana team happy to let AG2R ride to keep Nocentini in yellow through a week of boring transitional stages, and AG2R happy to do that riding because they were just happy to have the jersey. Or 2008, with Visconti's odyssey in the maglia rosa for Quick Step, before the real mountains came from stage 14 onwards. Nobody in their right mind was ever going to peak for the first half of this Giro, unless they were a sprinter. One of the reasons the Vuelta has been popular with fans in recent years has been that it sorts out its GC mix early, and doesn't give a week to the sprinters early on, so you have to be in form from quite early on. We've had in recent memory Lagos de Covadonga on stage 4 (2007), Sierra Nevada on stage 4 (2011), Arrate on stage 3 (2012), Monte da Groba on stage 2 (2013) and Andorra on stage 3 (2017). It's possible to peak for the first half of the Vuelta and try to hang on (and for that not to work).
The 2011 Tour was a great example of a badly paced race that people let off because the final week was so good they forgot about the racing before that; after stage 11, almost every relevant contender was still on their TTT time from stage 2, give or take a few seconds Cadel Evans gained on Mûr-de-Brétagne, or had crashed out because the failure to sort out the GC meant everybody still had something to protect, lots of people were fighting for space at the front and crashes took out people like Wiggins and Vino. The Pyrenées were then raced very conservatively because the riders were scared of all the consecutive efforts taking a toll coming the end of the race because there was only one transitional stage left, and it was only once you were into the final four or five stages that action really commenced. The 2012 Giro was even worse, because the riders never shook off that stupor, riding conservatively because of fear of the dangerous stage 20 so far into the race that it literally took until stage 20 for anybody to try to win the race, and even then the gang of contenders were only shaken into action by the very real possibility that Thomas de Gendt would steal the GC from under their nose by actually daring to try something. The 2009 Tour and 2014 Giro are other examples of races that set their stall out all about a stellar stage 20 (MTFs at Ventoux and Zoncolan respectively) only for them to be a damp squib because the GC was already settled.
The other thing with the mountain stages is the pacing of mountain blocks. If you have transitional or less dangerous stages among the mountain stages, it incentivises attacking more because there is a day that can be used for recovery. The 2009 and 2010 Vueltas offer perfect examples of how it should, and shouldn't, be done.
The 2009 Vuelta featured a three mountain stage block on stages 12 to 14. Stage 12 was a strong multi-col stage with Velefique, Cálar Alto and Velefique again. However, stage 13 had the queen stage, with La Ragua and Sierra Nevada. Because it was the first of three straight mountain stages, everybody was too scared to give too much on Velefique, leading to conservative racing, because they didn't want to gain 30 seconds that day only to lose half an hour the next. Stage 13, to Sierra Nevada, did see decent action on the final climb, but only after Samu was dropped, and then Evans had his mechanical. But even then, it was all initiated by the wildcard guy, Mosquera, because climbing was ALL he could do; with stage 14 being the steepest of the mountaintops, La Pandera, people were content to leave racing to the last few kilometres and not pay for it on La Pandera. La Pandera was a Unipuerto stage, so all the action was in the last 8km anyway. Geography didn't allow for it, but the stages would have been better served in reverse; La Pandera is steep enough that it would create gaps anyway; once gaps were created, you could then have the queen stage to Sierra Nevada, because the final climb being 25km long at 6% or so would ensure time taken, then the domestiques would also be too tired to produce race-stifling control over the Velefique stage meaning leaders isolated earlier on.
In 2010, you had stages 14-15-16 as a triple mountain block. Stage 14 was to Peña Cabarga, 15 to Lagos de Covadonga and 16 to Cotobello. Peña Cabarga is a shortish climb which will only open up smallish gaps by itself, but it's steep enough that it will create gaps. Especially approaching it from the north, where you can chain some medium climbs to it to soften the legs, but you know that the final climb will be decisive. With some small gaps now opened up, you had Lagos de Covadonga. Most stages to Los Lagos are Unipuerto in effect; you can climb Fito or Tornos or whatever you want beforehand, but it's coming down to the final climb. However, with that final climb being a prestigious and legendary one, racing was strong regardless, and with some time already taken on Peña Cabarga, the stage wasn't so threatening as to stifle action. And then the final stage of the three was the queen stage with San Lorenzo, La Cobertoria and Cotobello, the longest and hardest multi-col stage of the race, with Fränk Schleck trying to attack on La Cobertoria, and then Euskaltel TTTing Nieve up to the front of the race to do his solo on Cotobello because of Antón crashing out a couple of days earlier. Had Los Lagos been after Cotobello, that doesn't happen because Los Lagos being an iconic summit makes people conservative about previous mountain stages in case they lose time on Covadonga.
The short mountain stages that have worked have, to a man, come either before a transitional stage, after a queen stage, or both. The short mountain stages that have failed, such as Oropa a couple of years ago, have been ones which have been placed poorly. The short stage should be a bullet that the course designer has in their gun, but it shouldn't be the only weapon that they have at their disposal, and it feels at times in recent years that that has been the default option - solve problems by making races shorter. It's part of a trend we're seeing across a number of endurance sports, with a drive toward shorter disciplines in cross-country skiing and biathlon too. And yet, if we name some of the best stages of recent years, it's highly likely that among the first stages to get mentions will be Rifugio Gardeccia 2011 (229km), Galibier 2011 (201km), Montalcino 2010 (215km), Aprica 2010 (195km), Jafferau 2018 (185km) and Fuente Dé 2012 (187km). Sure, things like Formigal 2016 (119km), Andalo 2016 (132km) and Le Semnoz 2013 (125km) will be there too, but it shows you that it's not the length but the stage as a whole, and how it fits into the stage race as a whole, that is the decisive factor; short stages are not by themselves an answer.
Let's also remember that Dumoulin crashing out on stage 4 will have had a significant impact on this race, as he would have added a different dynamic too - however you always have to legislate for things like that. Remember the 2014 Tour with Contador and Froome both crashing out in week 1?
The biggest problems for the Grand Tours right now are over-saturation of broadcasting (look, a flat stage will be boring, don't watch the first three hours of it), poor pacing and limited innovation in design. When the design is done right, long stages, medium stages and short stages all complement one another into the ultimate challenge for a cyclist. A Grand Tour is supposed to be difficult to complete, and that's the point of the final day parades and so forth, and why the winners are lauded as the biggest champions in the sport. Introducing substitutes and shortening all the stages will just serve to dilute that. It's an endurance sport, and the Grand Tour is the grand daddy of all endurance. It's also why Le Mans, which doesn't allow driver substitutes, is more prestigious than Daytona, which does (one year, the winning car had 7 drivers, because one of the team's cars broke down so they used all of the drivers from that car too). And also, with ASO having its strong stake in Unipublic and having a fad for the short stage at present, the mix of longer stages becomes one of the Giro's Unique Selling Points.
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