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Teams & Riders The official Egan Bernal is the new Egan Bernal thread

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It doesn't vary at all. Subtract 25 from the current year, and you get the year where the oldest riders competing for the youth competition were born (1998 this year). At least for all makor races. For some smaller races, it's 3 years younger.
This year the women's Vuelta a Burgos forgot to update their rules for some reason, which meant the youth competition was suddenly for U24 riders instead of U23, but I doubt ASO has made a similar mistake.
 
Today's tt at the Dauphine' showed how much more work Egan needs to do to be in serious contention of a GT. I admire him for getting out there and hope for some results to bolster his prospects. It looks very much like what he does this year will be a foundation for next year at best.
He did a bad TT, he can do better than this, but the true is that he was never great in the TTs.
 
He did a bad TT, he can do better than this, but the true is that he was never great in the TTs.
Yeah, he also did a decent amount of bad TTs in 2021 in races where he was good (Tirreno and the Giro, mainly the opening TT). Frankly he only did one good TT since his back problems became a thing in 2020, the hilly 2021 Vuelta TT.
 
Mediocre TT, but many if not most of the GC guys, bar Yates, Hindley, Martinez, Haig, O'Connor, and, of course, Vingeegard, did fairly mid TTs today. Sure, Bernal has tended to do mediocre TTs and very few good ones throughout his career. I think the best comp would be Martinez at the Giro, flatter TT but equipment was likely very similar as well as distance and he lost 32 seconds in 2021 and 1m30s this time. But then again it's pretty safe to say that Martinez has logged more miles on his Bolide since then.

So while it's hard to get a good read at this point he's somewhat below par but also not far off the pace, we'll see how it goes in the mountains. What we can also surmise is that he did poorly enough that unlike Martinez he's probably out of contention for a top-5 but he did well enough that Ineos will likely want him to keep riding for GC.
 
He did a bad TT, he can do better than this, but the true is that he was never great in the TTs.
Looking at his younger bike position it looks like coaching led him to an extremely unsustainable aero approach. He was reasonably good but that can be a killer position for young riders that don't also do strength and stretching work to balance the stresses. He's definitely paid a price for his sport.
 
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Mediocre TT, but many if not most of the GC guys, bar Yates, Hindley, Martinez, Haig, O'Connor, and, of course, Vingeegard, did fairly mid TTs today. Sure, Bernal has tended to do mediocre TTs and very few good ones throughout his career. I think the best comp would be Martinez at the Giro, flatter TT but equipment was likely very similar as well as distance and he lost 32 seconds in 2021 and 1m30s this time. But then again it's pretty safe to say that Martinez has logged more miles on his Bolide since then.

So while it's hard to get a good read at this point he's somewhat below par but also not far off the pace, we'll see how it goes in the mountains. What we can also surmise is that he did poorly enough that unlike Martinez he's probably out of contention for a top-5 but he did well enough that Ineos will likely want him to keep riding for GC.
So most of the GC then? Outside of Mas who’s obviously not quite right.

Oh and Gaudu (I forgot about him)
 
So most of the GC then? Outside of Mas who’s obviously not quite right.

Oh and Gaudu (I forgot about him)
I mean that's why I said many if not most. But if I were doung the counting I'd say outside of Mas and Gaudu, Jorgenson, Rodriguez, Carapaz, Alaphillipe, Buchmann, Martin, Landa, Lenny Martinez, Ciccone, Majka, Chaves and De La Cruz did fairly mid-to-mediocre TTs. You can easily add Meintjes as well, but given he was better than most of those I'd give it to you if you want to say that's a good TT for him. In any case what I was getting to is over a month out from the significantly-shorter Tour TT many of those guys are likely still slightly undercooked and have some miles left to do on their skis.
 
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