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Tejay Van Garderen Discussion Thread

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Re: Re:

Moviefan1203 said:
Valv.Piti said:
Moviefan1203 said:
Man, you guys are cruel. He's a human being. Having said that, it will be best for both parties if he and BMC go their separate ways after the season. He has tons of talent, but Tejay obviously needs a fresh start in a different team.
Tons ot talent? I saw glimpses of that talent in Dauphine 2015, but other than that, I think he has been pretty unspectacular going up against good WT-level competition.

Results have been lacking lately for sure, but he is a two time top 5 Tour finisher. Talent isn't his problem.

Even a shitty clock is right two times per day.
 
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Re: Re:

Moviefan1203 said:
Valv.Piti said:
Moviefan1203 said:
Man, you guys are cruel. He's a human being. Having said that, it will be best for both parties if he and BMC go their separate ways after the season. He has tons of talent, but Tejay obviously needs a fresh start in a different team.
Tons ot talent? I saw glimpses of that talent in Dauphine 2015, but other than that, I think he has been pretty unspectacular going up against good WT-level competition.

Results have been lacking lately for sure, but he is a two time top 5 Tour finisher. Talent isn't his problem.
2012 tour didn't have a single attack. 2014 tour had the worst field since 2006
 
Re: Re:

Moviefan1203 said:
Valv.Piti said:
Moviefan1203 said:
Man, you guys are cruel. He's a human being. Having said that, it will be best for both parties if he and BMC go their separate ways after the season. He has tons of talent, but Tejay obviously needs a fresh start in a different team.
Tons ot talent? I saw glimpses of that talent in Dauphine 2015, but other than that, I think he has been pretty unspectacular going up against good WT-level competition.

Results have been lacking lately for sure, but he is a two time top 5 Tour finisher. Talent isn't his problem.

Don't overrate those Tour top 5 finishes, 2012 was a horribly designed TT heavy course and 2014 was a weak field. He's a mid to good 1 week stage racer who's wasted a good portion of his career chasing a podium in a GT, he needs to step back a level and re-find his confidence and love for racing as this can't be very good for him.
 
Re: Re:

Moviefan1203 said:
Valv.Piti said:
Moviefan1203 said:
Man, you guys are cruel. He's a human being. Having said that, it will be best for both parties if he and BMC go their separate ways after the season. He has tons of talent, but Tejay obviously needs a fresh start in a different team.
Tons ot talent? I saw glimpses of that talent in Dauphine 2015, but other than that, I think he has been pretty unspectacular going up against good WT-level competition.

Results have been lacking lately for sure, but he is a two time top 5 Tour finisher. Talent isn't his problem.

My theory is Tejay is an early bloomer, early fader. Too bad, I had high hopes in 2012 alas he just wasn't able to progress and in fact has regressed. Nobody can blame him for hoping though. Cops a lot of crap in my opinion but now is the time to seriously assess his future since it seems there is no longer any doubt he is on the downwards slide.
 
Re: Re:

portugal11 said:
Moviefan1203 said:
Valv.Piti said:
Moviefan1203 said:
Man, you guys are cruel. He's a human being. Having said that, it will be best for both parties if he and BMC go their separate ways after the season. He has tons of talent, but Tejay obviously needs a fresh start in a different team.
Tons ot talent? I saw glimpses of that talent in Dauphine 2015, but other than that, I think he has been pretty unspectacular going up against good WT-level competition.

Results have been lacking lately for sure, but he is a two time top 5 Tour finisher. Talent isn't his problem.
2012 tour didn't have a single attack. 2014 tour had the worst field since 2006
Whatever. You don't finish 5th twice in the Tour without talent. You can try to minimize those performances all you want but the bottom line is, he just doesn't have it these days for whatever reason. Besides, trying to play down his previous accomplishments doesn't explain his current performances. It's not like he's finishing 8th, 10th, 15th in GTs now. His last 5 GT performances will be 3 DNFs, finishing over an hour back, and whatever this fiasco winds up being. He's flat out lost it.

It's certainly not the first time we've seen a guy come out and do big things in his early years as a pro only to regress terribly when he should be in his peak years. Some guys seem to peak in their early to mid 20s for whatever reason. No telling if his issues are physical, mental or both.
 
No, but the point that some guys here, including me, are trying to magnify is that his 2 top-10 results were inflated because of circumstancial factors, which made him an overhyped rider.

If 2012's Tour wasn't so heavy on the ITT side (and with little MTF) and 2014's field was better, chances are he would have finished lower than 8th most likely. And if that was the case, would we still be here talking about how badly is he doing nowadays compared to those days?

No, because he wouldn't be so hyped.

Kreuziger, for example, wasn't so overhyped, because he finished 7th or 8th between 2009 and 2010, a time when the field was way stronger than in 2012, or in 2014, yet people don't ever talked that much about it.

And I don't even want to bring Robert Gesink to the matter lol
 
I don't want to shoot at an ambulance, write things like " now BMC has LRP and RIP". Oooops I just did :eek: .

In all fairness to TJVG, a couple of years ago he had a TdF podium pretty much in the bag. '12? OK. '14? Many here are dismissive of a Tour when none other than Piti finished 4th. Nairo gone early on, playing his own card. Bardet 6th. Yes, no Froome, no Contador, no Quintana in Paris: don't blame the guys who can stay on their bikes instead of the ones who don't. So many of you are so knowledgeable yet you make that big mistake. It was a tough TdF: don't take away the achievements of the ones who made it through.

TJVG was a very good GC rider: let's give him that. But now, as I wrote two months ago in this very thread, he's done. Lack of talent? Not sure. Pressure of being the next great American hope? Possibly.

He probably reads this, like Oleg was, like they all do. This is the #1 site. They all read this. Good luck Tejay, go for PN or Romandie, be a Spilak. You can do it. I wish that I was as good as you are. But the GT thing, nope.
 
Tonton said:
I don't want to shoot at an ambulance, write things like " now BMC has LRP and RIP". Oooops I just did :eek: .

In all fairness to TJVG, a couple of years ago he had a TdF podium pretty much in the bag. '12? OK. '14? Many here are dismissive of a Tour when none other than Piti finished 4th. Nairo gone early on, playing his own card. Bardet 6th. Yes, no Froome, no Contador, no Quintana in Paris: don't blame the guys who can stay on their bikes instead of the ones who don't. So many of you are so knowledgeable yet you make that big mistake. It was a tough TdF: don't take away the achievements of the ones who made it through.

TJVG was a very good GC rider: let's give him that. But now, as I wrote two months ago in this very thread, he's done. Lack of talent? Not sure. Pressure of being the next great American hope? Possibly.

He probably reads this, like Oleg was, like they all do. This is the #1 site. They all read this. Good luck Tejay, go for PN or Romandie, be a Spilak. You can do it. I wish that I was as good as you are. But the GT thing, nope.

I disagree with this. I don't think the majority of us are being oblivious to this, but rather we're considering that 2014's Tour would have been ridden harder if the field was better. I guess this is a tautology. Taking this premise in account, the conclusion is that TJVG would very likely have finished in a lower place than 5th, thus not much of an achievement.

This is the maint point here Tonton, nothing else.

The same can be said about Peraud and Pinot and even Valverde.
 
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Re: Re:

Moviefan1203 said:
Valv.Piti said:
Moviefan1203 said:
Man, you guys are cruel. He's a human being. Having said that, it will be best for both parties if he and BMC go their separate ways after the season. He has tons of talent, but Tejay obviously needs a fresh start in a different team.
Tons ot talent? I saw glimpses of that talent in Dauphine 2015, but other than that, I think he has been pretty unspectacular going up against good WT-level competition.

Results have been lacking lately for sure, but he is a two time top 5 Tour finisher. Talent isn't his problem.

2x top 5 TDF finisher. Hm.. he can't even climbing closely to the rest of the contender in the Giro. Look at Pinot, podium of the Tour (at which TJ was there too). He is still in contention. Look at Dumoulin, never close to anything like top 10 or top 5 at the Tour. He is holding the Maglia Rosa now. That's a GC talent to me.
 
Sometimes it baffles me how we know how good/bad a rider really is than his team. Why do team chose a rider as their designated leader if they don't believe he could do anything remotely close to the expectation? Do we believe that BMC really have no idea that TVG is a better or worse GT rider than Hermans?
It seems more realistic when an experienced leader deliver a megacrap performance, it's about some things go wrong at the wrong time, and not really about assessment of talent/capabilities.

I've never taken TJVG too seriously as GT talent material, he's a Brajkovic at best, but this is so bad you can't say this is his real level.
 
Re:

lenric said:
No, but the point that some guys here, including me, are trying to magnify is that his 2 top-10 results were inflated because of circumstancial factors, which made him an overhyped rider.

If 2012's Tour wasn't so heavy on the ITT side (and with little MTF) and 2014's field was better, chances are he would have finished lower than 8th most likely. And if that was the case, would we still be here talking about how badly is he doing nowadays compared to those days?

No, because he wouldn't be so hyped.

Kreuziger, for example, wasn't so overhyped, because he finished 7th or 8th between 2009 and 2010, a time when the field was way stronger than in 2012, or in 2014, yet people don't ever talked that much about it.

And I don't even want to bring Robert Gesink to the matter lol

I don't agree with you. Even if you assume his top 5s were overinflated, I don't think him finishing 7th or 8th would have made any material difference in the amount of hype, which by the way, I don't think was that all that much, really. Maybe in the US it was a bit high, but probably nowhere near as much as Kreuziger was hyped in in the Czech Republic or Gesink was hyped in the Netherlands.

As for this forum, TJ wasn't hyped any more than any other young rider with multiple top 10 GTs at a young age. Some have been hyped more, some less. And really, EVERY young rider who does anything promising gets hyped WAY out of proportion on this forum. I mean, guys who haven't completed their first GT get hyped as future multiple time champs. Certainly a lot of it is in fun but I don't ever remember TJ being insanely hyped around here. In fact, I think both riders you mentioned were hyped at least as much as TJ, Gesink certainly more.
 
Re: Re:

jaylew said:
lenric said:
No, but the point that some guys here, including me, are trying to magnify is that his 2 top-10 results were inflated because of circumstancial factors, which made him an overhyped rider.

If 2012's Tour wasn't so heavy on the ITT side (and with little MTF) and 2014's field was better, chances are he would have finished lower than 8th most likely. And if that was the case, would we still be here talking about how badly is he doing nowadays compared to those days?

No, because he wouldn't be so hyped.

Kreuziger, for example, wasn't so overhyped, because he finished 7th or 8th between 2009 and 2010, a time when the field was way stronger than in 2012, or in 2014, yet people don't ever talked that much about it.

And I don't even want to bring Robert Gesink to the matter lol

I don't agree with you. Even if you assume his top 5s were overinflated, I don't think him finishing 7th or 8th would have made any material difference in the amount of hype, which by the way, I don't think was that all that much, really. Maybe in the US it was a bit high, but probably nowhere near as much as Kreuziger was hyped in in the Czech Republic or Gesink was hyped in the Netherlands.

As for this forum, TJ wasn't hyped any more than any other young rider with multiple top 10 GTs at a young age. Some have been hyped more, some less. And really, EVERY young rider who does anything promising gets hyped WAY out of proportion on this forum. I mean, guys who haven't completed their first GT get hyped as future multiple time champs. Certainly a lot of it is in fun but I don't ever remember TJ being insanely hyped around here. In fact, I think both riders you mentioned were hyped at least as much as TJ, Gesink certainly more.

Neither Netherlands nor Czech Republic had in the last 20 years a GC contender of the level of Armstrong and since he abandoned cycling (well, in 2005, at least), USA cycling fans are looking for a GC contender as hard as Macauley Culkin is looking for drugs. So, when TJVG got two 5th places, americans started wondering if they had a new golden boy GC-wise.
Anyway, like I said before, TJVG's curriculum compared to Kreuziger's and especially Gesink's is a joke. It's like comparing a Fiat with a Lexus.

Considering this forum has a considerable amount of americans (and other people who, for one reason or another, have some sympathy for american riders), it's fair to assume this forum has always been overhyping TJVG.
I mean, Bardet's thread, who has been showing way more promising results than TJVG has ever had, doesn't have half of the pages this one has, or Cancellara, Boonen. Even Gesink has a thread here with only a couple more pages (3 or 4, in fact) than TJVG and the dutch has had a lot more good results than the american.
Kreuziger's thread has also a lot less pages than this one

Anyway, I agree with you on something: people here tend to overhype lots of riders who show some promise. It's ridiculous the hype that Kelderman got.
 
Re: Re:

lenric said:
jaylew said:
lenric said:
No, but the point that some guys here, including me, are trying to magnify is that his 2 top-10 results were inflated because of circumstancial factors, which made him an overhyped rider.

If 2012's Tour wasn't so heavy on the ITT side (and with little MTF) and 2014's field was better, chances are he would have finished lower than 8th most likely. And if that was the case, would we still be here talking about how badly is he doing nowadays compared to those days?

No, because he wouldn't be so hyped.

Kreuziger, for example, wasn't so overhyped, because he finished 7th or 8th between 2009 and 2010, a time when the field was way stronger than in 2012, or in 2014, yet people don't ever talked that much about it.

And I don't even want to bring Robert Gesink to the matter lol

I don't agree with you. Even if you assume his top 5s were overinflated, I don't think him finishing 7th or 8th would have made any material difference in the amount of hype, which by the way, I don't think was that all that much, really. Maybe in the US it was a bit high, but probably nowhere near as much as Kreuziger was hyped in in the Czech Republic or Gesink was hyped in the Netherlands.

As for this forum, TJ wasn't hyped any more than any other young rider with multiple top 10 GTs at a young age. Some have been hyped more, some less. And really, EVERY young rider who does anything promising gets hyped WAY out of proportion on this forum. I mean, guys who haven't completed their first GT get hyped as future multiple time champs. Certainly a lot of it is in fun but I don't ever remember TJ being insanely hyped around here. In fact, I think both riders you mentioned were hyped at least as much as TJ, Gesink certainly more.

Neither Netherlands nor Czech Republic had in the last 20 years a GC contender of the level of Armstrong and since he abandoned cycling (well, in 2005, at least), USA cycling fans are looking for a GC contender as hard as Macauley Culkin is looking for drugs. So, when TJVG got two 5th places, americans started wondering if they had a new golden boy GC-wise.
Anyway, like I said before, TJVG's curriculum compared to Kreuziger's and especially Gesink's is a joke. It's like comparing a Fiat with a Lexus.

Considering this forum has a considerable amount of americans (and other people who, for one reason or another, have some sympathy for american riders), it's fair to assume this forum has always been overhyping TJVG.
I mean, Bardet's thread, who has been showing way more promising results than TJVG has ever had, doesn't have half of the pages this one has, or Cancellara, Boonen. Even Gesink has a thread here with only a couple more pages (3 or 4, in fact) than TJVG and the dutch has had a lot more good results than the american.
Kreuziger's thread has also a lot less pages than this one

No, it's not fair to assume. I've been around here from close to the beginning of the forum and I'm telling you that hasn't really been the case. TJ hasn't been extraordinarily overhyped and I don't think people on this forum are very sympathetic to American riders at all - the opposite is closer to the truth. I'm not going to go back and re-read this thread in its entirety but I wouldn't be shocked if more than half the posts were critical, not hyping.

Please don't start trying to use number of posts in a rider's thread as evidence of anything. It's probably the worst metric you could use. There are SO many factors that go into why a rider's thread has more posts than another - It's a useless statistic.

And yes, TJ was certainly overhyped some in the US cycling media but you're overstating it and acting as if it's something unusual.

Who cares about the complete results of those 3 riders? We're just talking about GT hype based on early results. I mean, of course Gesink has a much better overall palmares, that goes without saying
 
"For Tejay it wasn't the day," Sciandri said afterwards to Eurosport, "so obviously he's now completely out of contention. We need to reassess it a bit.

"This morning I still had some real hopes that we could try to get in the GC in a different way, in a breakaway like Ben [Hermans] did today, and just try to gain a little bit of time on the top GC riders.

"But no, Tejay went through a bit of a bad day. We need to go through things this evening and see where we're at."
 
Re: Re:

jaylew said:
Please don't start trying to use number of posts in a rider's thread as evidence of anything. It's probably the worst metric you could use. There are SO many factors that go into why a rider's thread has more posts than another - It's a useless statistic.

It may not be a very good metric, but it is one of the only ones. And, although not perfectly, it serves its purpose: trying to gauge their hype.

jaylew said:
And yes, TJ was certainly overhyped some in the US cycling media but you're overstating it and acting as if it's something unusual.

You can interpret whatever you want from what I write. However, what I have actually written is that TJVG has always got an amount of hype that isn't nowhere closely correlated with what he has shown so far.

jaylew said:
Who cares about the complete results of those 3 riders? We're just talking about GT hype based on early results. I mean, of course Gesink has a much better overall palmares, that goes without saying

We're (me included; or me, at least) talking about GTs and stage racing.
Now, even taking into account GTs, Kreuziger has shown better and more consistent results. Not hugely better (like Gesink), but still better.
 
Re:

movingtarget said:
"For Tejay it wasn't the day," Sciandri said afterwards to Eurosport, "so obviously he's now completely out of contention. We need to reassess it a bit.

"This morning I still had some real hopes that we could try to get in the GC in a different way, in a breakaway like Ben [Hermans] did today, and just try to gain a little bit of time on the top GC riders.

"But no, Tejay went through a bit of a bad day. We need to go through things this evening and see where we're at."

I hope that some day this year will be the day where TJVG decides that he'll either start working for Porte, or he'll resign.
 
The more I think about it, the more it seems Tejay is/was a victim of the (US?) tendency to for everyone to, as soon as someone shows any talent in stage racing, to start shouting:

"AAaaah! Next big GT guy! Next big GT guy!"

People saw that he obviously did have talent, and then instantly assumed that he could win a GT, then - when he didn't - some of the same people who had been lauding him as the Next Big Thing started criticising him for not winning, which if - as it seems - he's not the strongest mentally, just made it even harder for him to win, or even simply finish in the top. Yet, despite all that, there were still people - team management, sponsors, himself - who kept expecting him to finish in the top of a GT, instead of someone realising that maybe, just maybe there are other things to focus on than getting a top-result in GTs.

Though, I don't think he should retire, but maybe step down to (pro) Conti level, where he'd be able to race without the pressure.
 
Re: Re:

lenric said:
movingtarget said:
"For Tejay it wasn't the day," Sciandri said afterwards to Eurosport, "so obviously he's now completely out of contention. We need to reassess it a bit.

"This morning I still had some real hopes that we could try to get in the GC in a different way, in a breakaway like Ben [Hermans] did today, and just try to gain a little bit of time on the top GC riders.

"But no, Tejay went through a bit of a bad day. We need to go through things this evening and see where we're at."

I hope that some day this year will be the day where TJVG decides that he'll either start working for Porte, or he'll resign.

We need to reassess a bit.........try to gain a bit of time............a bit of a bad day. Why not call it what it is ? A bit of a disaster.
 

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