To be fair on the Schneider signing, she has shown a lot of talent and Boels, despite their very strong position in the sport, have to do a bit of keeping up with the Joneses when it comes to bringing in young talent as, because of their super-strength lineup, they have the problem of needing workhorses, because they are seeing top talents either running out of opportunities for themselves and wanting to move on, as has happened with van Dijk and Pawlowska recently, while the team's workhorses of choice such as Canuel and Majerus merit plenty of freedom for themselves; a couple of years ago Dideriksen was a domestique du jour development project, but her winning the Worlds meant she had to be accommodated as a potential leader as well; having riders like van den Bos and Schneider who have a good turn of pace and are young enough that they still have plenty of learning to do means they will be well-served - especially in Skylar's case because she's a good time triallist too - serving their apprenticeship with the team, while for them it has the benefit of the team not placing any undue expectations on them this early in their careers either. The team has been very quiet in the transfer market, not without reason of course - they have a team which is already flush with incredible talents and a good mix that can cover almost all races with a legit option for victory - so with Pawlowska having a decent turn of pace that she seldom needed to use and being used primarily as a domestique by the team you could even argue it's a like-for-like replacement but with Schneider having much much better room for improvement as a 19-year-old who is hotly tipped. When you look at some of the more active teams in the transfer market, Boels' leadership is a bit more experienced and they want to make sure they have young riders coming through to take up the mantle of leadership.
La Course... mixed feelings as usual. The actual course is pretty good, you know. It's back to having a proper length, and it includes the Romme and Colombière, giving us a genuine climbing race, plus also with the Tour being arranged a week later they have moved it forward in Le Tour. So, first up, my issues with it. I'm a bit concerned by the race being just one rest day after the finish of the Giro Rosa; I think this may affect the startlist simply from a logistic point of view, although admittedly before we know the Giro Rosa route this could be premature - if the Giro is taking a route across the north like in 2015 and we're going to end somewhere in, say, Piemonte, then it will be fine as it's drivable, although obviously it might mean the Giro is reluctant to finish with a major climbing stage in case it affects
their startlist or riders whose GC bids aren't going well drop out to focus on La Course. The fact that this move of the Tour to accommodate the World Cup also has a minor problem to me which is that La Course is somewhat buried in the middle of the race (also, it's the
first mountain stage of the Tour, so will inevitably garner the majority of the attention) as opposed to at a focal point, as well as being a midweek race again, limiting potential audience. The fact that it's been reduced back to a one day race doesn't in and of itself raise my ire, however the absolute BS justification about the unpopularity of the pursuit suggesting that there isn't the clamour for a longer race absolutely does. Boiling blood level. What absolute level 10 BS. The pursuit race was unpopular because it was announced late in the day, meaning riders and teams didn't have the organization and accommodation all sorted until quite late in the day; the race was unbalanced, omitted several of the riders who might have made for an interesting pursuit, the pursuit didn't pay WT points so was seen as a bit of an exhibition race, and the cameras didn't follow the places where there was an actual fight for positions, because they were far down enough that they weren't really relevant to the result. Of course, that Annemiek won at Izoard was a problem for them because of the strength of her TT, but the problem was not that there wasn't the interest in a multi-day women's race, far from it. The problem was that ASO experimented with a new format in front of one of the biggest audiences the women will see all year, and clearly there were some teething problems that continuing to run the format in smaller races might be able to resolve, or might not, and that they brought it in late in the day, and screwed over organizers of long-standing and long-running women's races to accommodate their event. I'd say that actually, there's plenty of clamour for a longer race. They just didn't do a great job of the one they put together last year. That isn't an issue in and of itself; not every idea you have will be a great one. But the problem was not the women's racing. The problem was the particulars of last year's La Course, and ASO should learn from that and produce a better race by tweaking the format or revisiting how they operate the format, rather than say "that didn't work, so we'll give up" and return to a one-day race, because that reeks of token gestures rather than any actual commitment to developing the sport, which when you consider the coverage for La Flèche Wallonne compared to the Flanders Classics is not a difficult accusation to level at ASO sometimes.
Now for the positives. This is the best one-day race parcours the women have had since... possibly ever. Certainly as long as I can recall. It's a bigger climbers' race than any Worlds in living memory, than any of the one-day editions of the Giro del Trentino. The climbs are markedly steeper than those in the Trofeo Binda and longer than any in the Emakumeen Saria and the Ardennes. There's more than the one, so it has more sustained climbing than we saw in the Rio Olympic road race. And it's not just a mountaintop finish either, so it benefits all-rounder skills which gives an added dynamic since often descending skills are more important in the women's péloton than the men's. It's like a Lombardia, but tougher. The climbing is also sustained enough that team trains are unlikely because the absence of a large number of such mountains in women's racing mean that there aren't really the opportunities to develop a climbing train of the kind we see in the men's races all too often, and a lot of domestiques are likely to disappear as soon as they hit the Romme properly. What's more, the proximity to the Giro does potentially mean that form will not have the chance to wane; this year Anna van der Breggen took a break directly off the Giro and didn't grace La Course, will we see the Giro winner seek to put an exclamation point behind their triumph by winning in a super-tough mountainous one-dayer straight after? Another real benefit of La Course being held like this is that a 120km race with genuine tough mountains will mean that the Giro has to produce something proper to assert its importance as the biggest test of climbing in the women's sport; 2017's Giro was roundly criticised as too lacking in decisive climbing by both fans and riders alike (Annemiek van Vleuten in particular asking the organizers for more selective and harder climbing in the 2018 edition) and they will need to pull out the stops to make sure they don't see some of their prestige eroded. A Romme-Colombière double is going to need some stops pulling out to beat it, so the impact of a good parcours for La Course could go further than just ASO's race in its implications.
Oh yea, but one final negative point: they give us this course after Pooley, Abbott and Lichtenberg have all retired
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