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