*** like this is what makes it hard to feel any sort of sympathy for cyclists when they suffer. One day they suffer and the next they are back with alien performances once again.
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Not quite. Landis lost 10 minutes and gained more than that back.
Doping stuff aside, it is likely after dropping early and hard that he took the rest of the day easy, making it easier to bounce back. Having a sh*t day, without being sick or injured, is something that happens, speaking from experience in stage races. So, doping is not required to explain a bad day or a bounce back, but it can certainly be a possibility.
We must be talking about different Landises because Floyd lost 10 minutes and gained back 5 the next day. In similar fashion to Remco where he basically just TT’d the whole thing and steadily dropped everyone else.
And yeah you can have a bad day and feel better the next day but dropping after 20 minutes at 7% while sat in the peloton and then basically soloing for 3 hours over multiple climbs with the peloton unable to catch you the next day is too much of a swing to be believable.
Landis was a threat to the GC guys and he won the tour (on the road). Remco is not a threat to the GC. They let him go. After that he rode superbly (his normal level). He’s still not a threat to the GC. It’s yesterday that there is no known explanation for.
I don't think he did a bag.
I think he mentally zoned out yesterday (a form of rage quitting) once the gap exceeded 5 minutes or something & his Vuelta GC was dead. Almeida fought until the bitter end & got no plaudits, nor did he get any today either when he struggled in the bunch but fought on all the same.
27 minutes was basically not representative of Evenepoel's level, or even yesterday's form. He's one of the top 5 climbers in the race with one hell of an engine (all clinical considerations included, but that applies to everyone else as well).
But what was the point of the solo raid for the win today? To reassure himself? I doubt he gets much actual info from a two man breakaway with Romain Bardet. His fans are a smorgasbord of various types, ranging from rational to completely irrational (everyone knows this), but some of the reactions I've seen (like handwaving his bad performance yesterday & using today's stage win as evidence of his GT potential) won't do him any favors either. And that's the problem with this rider, i.e. there's a dream (a Belgian winner of the Tour de France & a new Merckxian dominant rider) which Evenepoel, his inner circle & his fans have all fuelled at various points.
That's why I said in the main forums he should ride the rest of the Vuelta 'normally', in the bunch, beating (if he can) the other GC riders man against man. Today made for emotional (& hyperbolic tbh) headlines but this is a guy who is going to the Tour de France next year for the first time with impossible expectations on his shoulders. A little battle versus Vingegaard, Rog & Ayuso on the Angliru would go a long way to clearing some doubts, insofar as he doesn't take the day off on Tuesday.
FYI I'm posting this here in the clinic because the point I'm making is simple: today's breakaway win wasn't so impressive as to 'deserve' a sudden outpouring of clinical references. He even had one of the self-anointed "Mr Cleans" of the peloton on his wheel until a couple of km's from the finish ffs.
i wonder if he dropped a bag thursday night, Tyler Hamilton said in his book you could feel "blocked" the day after but then absolutely fly the next day.
The whole situation just doesn’t feel right. I’d give it a 50% chance the collapse had something to do with clinic stuff one way or another.
eh I dunno, clean riders can have a random bad day too. i don't think he's clean but it's possible his body just shut down for a day, it happens.
I can't remember seeing this before. With Landis he was completely dominant the whole race until one stage where it seems pretty obvious he got dehydrated and then forgot to eat. That's happened plenty of other times as well and they often seem to come back really strong the next day. But Remco surely couldn't have suffered hunger knock - he got dropped after about half an hour of racing. And there's no doubt about how bad he was - he lost a minute and a half in about 10 minutes to a large peloton still containing non-climbers. Basso reportedly had stomach trouble in the Giro where he finished in the grupetto one day before coming right back to his previous level - well at least he offered a plausible explanation.
I seriously doubt he dropped a bag the day before. It's a fairly well known phenomenon you can have a crap day the next day, and Friday would not be the day to take that risk.
Might be have? Sure. But pretty unlikely.
I should add - I would be very surprised if bags of blood are even present during grand tours now.
he might not have had a choice. setting up when you take BB's is a logistical nightmare for obvious reasons. it's possible that the only way he could pull it off before the two big mountain stages was to get it on thursday.
but yeah i mostly agree with you, i think it's unlikely that transfusions are going on anymore but i wouldn't completely rule it out.
Do you think anything acute is being done at grand tours other than microdosing?
Vino too. lost almost the same amount of time as Remco on the Plateau de Beille stage in the 2007 Tour and then demolished the field the next day.
what was weird about that was that he demolished everyone in the TT the day before PdB too, so I dunno what was going on there.
Who knows?! I honestly do not know.
I strongly, strongly suspect that various medication cocktails, and on better budgeted teams, highly personalized regimens, are utilized to squeeze maximum performance and enable maximum recovery. I doubt most of these require a TUE.
I think other means might be more leveraged between races.
I think Vino and Kash f*d up and used each other's blood, or somehow cross contaminated. Same with Tyler and Santi
Him and Vinge competing, who can look/be the most emotional after every stage. It is just a lot of love.
He also said that his wife and Klaas Lodewyck convinced him not to evenequit the race after the Tourmalet stage.
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