del1962 said:
They are not actually understanding what your saying, but keeping to their prejudices
If Froome hadn't come from nowhere in quite the fashion he did, there would be a lot less suspicion on this board.
There are people on this forum who watch a lot of cycling. Real cycling fanatics who will read everything they can about the sport, consume themselves in the history of races, watch old videos, get up on a Sunday morning to scratch around online to stumble across a scratchy stream in Flemish and sit transfixed for 2 hours, and search for snippets of race highlights for races they don't catch a stream of (eg. the French races that get 3 minute highlight slots on French news - I'm sure there's countless guys on here who know what I'm on about).
You could take five people off this forum (not at random, but I'm sure a lot of members know who the most knowledgeable members are), sit them in a room with a WT race startsheet and between them they could cover probably 95% of the riders, and tell you what type of rider they were, what results they'd had, what races they can remember them seeing them in, and the odd interesting snippet too (eg Arthur Vichot's TDU fanclub, Langeveld's epic crash in the classics last year, Burghardt's front Lightweight etc.).
To me, it speaks volumes how many "wait, who?!" moments that these people had in the 2011 Vuelta during Chris Froome's rise to prominence. Go back and check the Vuelta race threads, they're all still there. It was almost universal - raised eyebrows all-round as he beats Cancellara in the ITT. He wasn't even bad - people remember Kenny Van Hummel's Tour debut, for sure. Froome was merely anonymous, the kind of rider that our assembly of cycling fanatics might have looked blankly at each other about his capabilities when handed a Vuelta '11 startsheet. They'd probably all know that he was the Kenyan guy who'd taken British nationality, and remember that he'd ridden for Barloworld before joining Sky. But other than that, little else. Look how hard mastersracer had to dig to find a glimmer of a good performance in his Tour debut.
Now I agree with mastersracer - no-one should be expecting this guy to rock up and finish top 20 on a GT debut. It's not even that unusual for the guys who do progress to being GT contenders to show next to nothing in their first GT. What is unusual however is that a rider makes a meteoric rise to GT contention without showing those capabilities off in minor races.
There are a lot of planets that need to line up you to be contending for the win in a GT, the very first time you've got your sh*t together and there's nothing holding you back anymore. Is it really any wonder that some people aren't willing to give the rider who pulls that off the benefit of the doubt?
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