What they say in public, might not be how they feel in private.
20%? How do you get to that number? How many times did he crash out of a race? 20% of the time?
That's just a guess on how often a rider is prevented from challenging for GC because of crashing. It's not meant as a dig against Remco, I don't necessary believe that he will crash out of contention more often than anyone else.
Agree with this, mostly. It's incredibly rare that a GT podium ends up as predicted before the race. Seems like this is very often forgotten on here. Last month was a prime example.
Out of his five career GTs, three of them have not gone to plan.
Really? That's interesting. I have seen nothing to indicate that Evenepoel has improved this year, while Almeida certainly has improved a lot. Why do you reckon that?
Yeah. Last year he had the Basque crash and Dauphine was the first race back.
Because his path to the Dauphiné was much better this year than last year. And I don't think Almeida has improved compared to his level in Suisse last year.
Do you think it's unlikely that he will deliver a single performance in the Tour this year that is on the level of or even better than what he did on Beille last year?
I think he will be better but Vingegaard and Pogacar will improve too (even Almeida). The question is, can he reduce the gap to Pogacar? I don't think so. He lost almost 5 minutes in 2 stages and two days ago, it was an "easy" mountain stage.
This alone says enough about the value of your predictions about Remco. It’s very clear why you say such things about him.
I agree that all the best will improve, and I dare not bet that anyone can reduce the gap to Pogi.
If we had a poll, I know a decent amount of people would agree with me. If Remco raced the Giro to win, he would not be in the Tour podium. I gave the example of Bernal which is a very good argument. Broke his collarbone and went on to win the Tour. It is not the perfect preparation but it is still miles better to be in shape than doing the Giro.
Almeida has to domestique for Pogacar semi often anyway, so a bit of that also just depends on the level of the other UAE riders.
Good to see you respond again. Your argument was that Pogacar had a worse preparation because he did the Giro, and you say Evenepoel or Bernal wouldn’t be able to do the Giro and then be as successful in the TDF. That’s correct, because Evenepoel and Bernal aren’t Pogacar. Pogacar is miraculously able to perform all season long and is never tired. So him being able to ride 2 GT’s back to back isn’t as hard as it would be for others. Evenepoel’s preparation was much more difficult than Pogacar for last year, and it’s ridiculous to say otherwise, imo.
Pog is more selective with his race days though, which helps being able to target races with much more focus. Mostly one-day races as well.
As you know, you were on my ignore list (by any means I'm taunting you, I'm just replying to you for saying "Good to see you responding again") but let's at least try to respect other opinions even if I strongly disagree with you most of the time.
I didn’t necessarily see that he was much better than in TDF, but let’s wait for the TDF results. If you are correct, he should put more than 9min into Evenepoel this year.
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