Teams & Riders Tom Dumoulin discussion thread

[Waterloo Sunrise]

Re:

Seeing Dumoulin doing an okayish job at limiting his time losses on the Zonc and today's very tricky stage with a long multi-climb finale, I think Dumoulin would have had a good chance on a more balanced route, even against such a strong Yates.

Would be a strange definition of balance to find a route where this Tom beats this Simon. TD has lost time to Yates on 6 stages and gained time on 1 so far. He's riding incredibly effectively for the skillset he has, but when you're losing time on every single up hill finish, whether high mountain or finishing hill, it's hard to see how you could be a worthy winner.

 

[Dekker_Tifosi]

Don't agree. A GT should be a balanced route of all trades.

An offset of 8 mountain stages vs 40km ITT is not even slightly lopsided but extremely. That's not even including all the tiny hill top finishes as well.

 

[Red Rick]

Re:

Don't agree. A GT should be a balanced route of all trades.

An offset of 8 mountain stages vs 40km ITT is not even slightly lopsided but extremely. That's not even including all the tiny hill top finishes as well.

Also add bonifications to that equation

 

[DFA123]

Re:

Don't agree. A GT should be a balanced route of all trades.

An offset of 8 mountain stages vs 40km ITT is not even slightly lopsided but extremely. That's not even including all the tiny hill top finishes as well.

Of course it's balanced. Because it's much easier to gain or lose time in a TT than it is on a normal stage, where tactics, drafting and team dynamics all complicate matters.

Even in the last 20 years, when TT kms have been reduced, loads more TT specialists have won grand tours than sub 60kg climbers.

Putting in something stupid like 100km of TTs would kill the race the way it is nowdays. It wouldn't balance things at all. You'd just see the likes of Froome, Roglic and Dumoulin accruing 10 minutes over the climbers and then just TTing up the climbs each day, comfortably limiting their losses. It would be incredibly tedious for everyone apart from the most partisan fanboys.

 

[Dekker_Tifosi]

Boni's aside (they do make it worse yeah), it's been going on for at least 6/7 years already that organisers are doing everything possible to have a climber win a Grand Tour.
Especially Giro/Vuelta, but lately TDF is going the same way. They've already cut back from 50km TT to 40/30km ones. That wasn't enough. Then they decided to cut 1 prologue or TT out. That still wasn't enough, now they but a ridicolous amount of TT in (~30-40km). And every hill top or mountain top finish you can find. That seems to be enough.

 

[Maaaaaaaarten]

Re: Re:

Seeing Dumoulin doing an okayish job at limiting his time losses on the Zonc and today's very tricky stage with a long multi-climb finale, I think Dumoulin would have had a good chance on a more balanced route, even against such a strong Yates.

Would be a strange definition of balance to find a route where this Tom beats this Simon. TD has lost time to Yates on 6 stages and gained time on 1 so far. He's riding incredibly effectively for the skillset he has, but when you're losing time on every single up hill finish, whether high mountain or finishing hill, it's hard to see how you could be a worthy winner.

Actually, I should have posted that after Tuesday's TT. It's possible Yates has stepped up his TT game as well and will actually limit his losses in that department, in which case my post might look quite silly in hindsight.

But based on SPY's TT pedigree so far, with the addition of another medium length TT, or if Tuesday's medium length TT would be a proper long TT, someting like ~50km, I could see Dumoulin winning the Giro. A prologue and two medium length TTs or a prologue and a long TT isn't even a TT heavy route as far as I'm concerned. Unless Yates improved his TT as well, Dumoulin would beat him fairly comfortably on a TT heavy route, imo. (Like Yates is currently beating Dumoulin fairly comfortably on a TT light route.)

 

[Red Rick]

Re: Re:

Seeing Dumoulin doing an okayish job at limiting his time losses on the Zonc and today's very tricky stage with a long multi-climb finale, I think Dumoulin would have had a good chance on a more balanced route, even against such a strong Yates.

Would be a strange definition of balance to find a route where this Tom beats this Simon. TD has lost time to Yates on 6 stages and gained time on 1 so far. He's riding incredibly effectively for the skillset he has, but when you're losing time on every single up hill finish, whether high mountain or finishing hill, it's hard to see how you could be a worthy winner.

Well, Yates has attacked from more than 2km out on exactly 2 stages, one of which was even arguably the hardest climb in cycling, and Dumoulin has gotten 5th and 3rd on those stages respectively.

The route is such that the better climber likely has negated all the ITTs after half of the mountain stages with action. That is not a balanced route. Quite the opposite. It's a very unbalanced one. The fact that Dumoulin is a favorite to come 2nd is a big credit to him.

 

[tobydawq]

Re:

Boni's aside (they do make it worse yeah), it's been going on for at least 6/7 years already that organisers are doing everything possible to have a climber win a Grand Tour.
Especially Giro/Vuelta, but lately TDF is going the same way. They've already cut back from 50km TT to 40/30km ones. That wasn't enough. Then they decided to cut 1 prologue or TT out. That still wasn't enough, now they but a ridicolous amount of TT in (~30-40km). And every hill top or mountain top finish you can find. That seems to be enough.

I don't understand why people are arguing against the reduction of TT kilometres.

In the past, the differences between riders were bigger, and it was possible to gain huge amounts of times in the mountains because riders were more liable to crack because they didn't ride as smartly as they do now (these days, everybody knows which wattages they can be putting out for a given amount of time and this makes it less likely for someone to dig too deep early on a climb).

Nowadays, you don't see these differences on the mountain stages - especially not in the first couple of weeks in Grand Tours.

In the time trials, however, the same differences as in earlier times are for some reason still possible to make. These two facts combined mean that if the amount of TTing wasn't reduced, the TT's would have a relatively much bigger influence than in the past and that wouldn't be fair either.

I think the organisers have done right in rolling with the times.

 

[Valv.Piti]

Re: Re:

Seeing Dumoulin doing an okayish job at limiting his time losses on the Zonc and today's very tricky stage with a long multi-climb finale, I think Dumoulin would have had a good chance on a more balanced route, even against such a strong Yates.

Would be a strange definition of balance to find a route where this Tom beats this Simon. TD has lost time to Yates on 6 stages and gained time on 1 so far. He's riding incredibly effectively for the skillset he has, but when you're losing time on every single up hill finish, whether high mountain or finishing hill, it's hard to see how you could be a worthy winner.

Well, Yates has attacked from more than 2km out on exactly 2 stages, one of which was even arguably the hardest climb in cycling, and Dumoulin has gotten 5th and 3rd on those stages respectively.

The route is such that the better climber likely has negated all the ITTs after half of the mountain stages with action. That is not a balanced route. Quite the opposite. It's a very unbalanced one. The fact that Dumoulin is a favorite to come 2nd is a big credit to him.

Well we had this discussion before where I wanted to see more time trialing in this year's Giro and you argued there definitely shouldn't be more considering the favourites for the race where Dumoulin and Froome which would make them even more favoured then

 

[Red Rick]

Re: Re:

Boni's aside (they do make it worse yeah), it's been going on for at least 6/7 years already that organisers are doing everything possible to have a climber win a Grand Tour.
Especially Giro/Vuelta, but lately TDF is going the same way. They've already cut back from 50km TT to 40/30km ones. That wasn't enough. Then they decided to cut 1 prologue or TT out. That still wasn't enough, now they but a ridicolous amount of TT in (~30-40km). And every hill top or mountain top finish you can find. That seems to be enough.

I don't understand why people are arguing against the reduction of TT kilometres.

In the past, the differences between riders were bigger, and it was possible to gain huge amounts of times in the mountains because riders were more liable to crack because they didn't ride as smartly as they do now (these days, everybody knows which wattages they can be putting out for a given amount of time and this makes it less likely for someone to dig too deep early on a climb).

Nowadays, you don't see these differences on the mountain stages - especially not in the first couple of weeks in Grand Tours.

In the time trials, however, the same differences as in earlier times are for some reason still possible to make. These two facts combined mean that if the amount of TTing wasn't reduced, the TT's would have a relatively much bigger influence than in the past and that wouldn't be fair either.

I think the organisers have done right in rolling with the times.

They've done absolutely terrible in how they've done it.

It's obvious you can't lay down the old routes with 150km of ITTs and expect a competitive fight. But the action is hard to find. They go out of their way to take away the need for climbers to even take risks to win.

Even today, Yates soloing from 18km wasn't that big of a risk, as everyone was on the limit already anyway and most of what followed was up or downhill.

This Giro route enables the best climber in the race to win it very comfortably by doing nothing until the last climb and then even wait until the final 2km for the majority of climbs. It's not balanced, it's not even a competitive Giro, cause the winner is already 95% certain.

If you want a very good Giro route, look at 2015. Hardeset MTF was Campitello Matese, which probably juuust barely makes HC in the Tour, and it was on stage 8. All the rest of the mountain stages are go big or go home.

 

[Red Rick]

Re: Re:

Seeing Dumoulin doing an okayish job at limiting his time losses on the Zonc and today's very tricky stage with a long multi-climb finale, I think Dumoulin would have had a good chance on a more balanced route, even against such a strong Yates.

Would be a strange definition of balance to find a route where this Tom beats this Simon. TD has lost time to Yates on 6 stages and gained time on 1 so far. He's riding incredibly effectively for the skillset he has, but when you're losing time on every single up hill finish, whether high mountain or finishing hill, it's hard to see how you could be a worthy winner.

Well, Yates has attacked from more than 2km out on exactly 2 stages, one of which was even arguably the hardest climb in cycling, and Dumoulin has gotten 5th and 3rd on those stages respectively.

The route is such that the better climber likely has negated all the ITTs after half of the mountain stages with action. That is not a balanced route. Quite the opposite. It's a very unbalanced one. The fact that Dumoulin is a favorite to come 2nd is a big credit to him.

Well we had this discussion before where I wanted to see more time trialing in this year's Giro and you argued there definitely shouldn't be more considering the favourites for the race where Dumoulin and Froome which would make them even more favoured then

Busted.

Yeah, I general I argue that competitiveness>balance. But now people argue that because the strongest rider has already won even though there's still 3 MTFs and an ITT to go it's a right amount of ITT.

I anticipated that Froome and Dumoulin would be near the best climbers of the race, which is why I thought it would be competitive with only the prologue and mid length ITT. Now I see that it isn't.

In reality, competiveness of a route isn't just one thing but it's a range of scenarios, and this route had plenty of scenarios where the route gonna make the race uncompetitive.

 

[Logic-is-your-friend]

I'm still rooting for him, but he shouldn't ask the others to take turns. Especially on semi flat roads. He's number two in the GC, not only is it his responsibility, he's the TT expert, and the others aren't just going to hand him the victory. Why should they. He should have done the work, especially if he thinks he would have been faster. Then why didn't he? He decided to lose the Giro, just to stick it to the guys that didn't want to take turns? Either he's lying or he's stupid. Either way, he's frustrated.

On the topic of TT km's in GT... i'm all for more TT, as long as they don't bring back team time trials. A prologue, a long flat ITT and a mountain ITT would do it for me.

 

[tobydawq]

Re: Re:

Boni's aside (they do make it worse yeah), it's been going on for at least 6/7 years already that organisers are doing everything possible to have a climber win a Grand Tour.
Especially Giro/Vuelta, but lately TDF is going the same way. They've already cut back from 50km TT to 40/30km ones. That wasn't enough. Then they decided to cut 1 prologue or TT out. That still wasn't enough, now they but a ridicolous amount of TT in (~30-40km). And every hill top or mountain top finish you can find. That seems to be enough.

I don't understand why people are arguing against the reduction of TT kilometres.

In the past, the differences between riders were bigger, and it was possible to gain huge amounts of times in the mountains because riders were more liable to crack because they didn't ride as smartly as they do now (these days, everybody knows which wattages they can be putting out for a given amount of time and this makes it less likely for someone to dig too deep early on a climb).

Nowadays, you don't see these differences on the mountain stages - especially not in the first couple of weeks in Grand Tours.

In the time trials, however, the same differences as in earlier times are for some reason still possible to make. These two facts combined mean that if the amount of TTing wasn't reduced, the TT's would have a relatively much bigger influence than in the past and that wouldn't be fair either.

I think the organisers have done right in rolling with the times.

They've done absolutely terrible in how they've done it.

It's obvious you can't lay down the old routes with 150km of ITTs and expect a competitive fight. But the action is hard to find. They go out of their way to take away the need for climbers to even take risks to win.

Even today, Yates soloing from 18km wasn't that big of a risk, as everyone was on the limit already anyway and most of what followed was up or downhill.

This Giro route enables the best climber in the race to win it very comfortably by doing nothing until the last climb and then even wait until the final 2km for the majority of climbs. It's not balanced, it's not even a competitive Giro, cause the winner is already 95% certain.

If you want a very good Giro route, look at 2015. Hardeset MTF was Campitello Matese, which probably juuust barely makes HC in the Tour, and it was on stage 8. All the rest of the mountain stages are go big or go home.

The 2015 Giro was indeed awesome for that very reason but I think they tried to do something similar in the Tour last year and that just did not work at all and everybody hated the route in advance (I didn't because I thought Valverde could win on it but it wasn't a very good route in order to bring spectacle).

I'd like to see one Grand Tour where they would forgo the high mountains but that is never going to happen.

 

[Logic-is-your-friend]

Re: Re:

I'd like to see one Grand Tour where they would forgo the high mountains but that is never going to happen.

Interesting. How would you suggest they make the race hard? More "classics" like stages? RVV, PR, MSR...? Strade Bianche even? Longer flat stages (250+k's)? More ITT? I'd be all for that. But not if it turns into a snorefest with more sprinting stages.

 

[Waterloo Sunrise]

Amazing how with such an unbalanced and unfair route, Tom was the bookies favourite until 6 hours ago.

If you want more TT miles back, ban power meters and force Tom and Chris to use some skill in judging their efforts. As it stands, going back to 80km+ of time trialling and letting somehow who has been comprehensively outgunned on the climbs just chuck along at threshold and then win it all based on 1 or 2 TT stages would be a depressing travesty.

With this route, Yates only managed to become favourite finally today by attacking on the penultimate climb with 17km to go, after having maintained being the best climber all race so far and not missed a single chance to gain time. 1 mess up from him and Tom would still be favourite.

 

[tobydawq]

Re: Re:

I'd like to see one Grand Tour where they would forgo the high mountains but that is never going to happen.

Interesting. How would you suggest they make the race hard? More "classics" like stages? RVV, PR, MSR...? Strade Bianche even? Longer flat stages (250+k's)? More ITT? I'd be all for that. But not if it turns into a snorefest with more sprinting stages.

Yes, as much classics terrain as possible. The Binckbank Tour spiced up with medium mountains, sterrato and Paris-Roubaix cobbles.

I wouldn't suggest a significant increase in TT kms, since that would probably skew the race too much in favour of the specialists in that discipline.

 

[Dekker_Tifosi]

80km isnt even a TT heavy Tour. Yeah in recent standards, but historically speaking not even close.

If you lose a GT with 80km TT because you lose too much time in that amount of TT vs a lot more climbing, you're not allround enough. But that's my opinion

 

[JosephK]

Dumo's performance in this Giro seems very strong, so far. His form now seems no worse than last year's. Last year the course suited him better, and last year, there was no 2018 version of Simon Yates. Oh, and one other thing -- Tom D. is doing it again without the same kind of support in the mountains that some of the other teams (MS) are able to provide.

 

[May0maniac]

Re:

80km isnt even a TT heavy Tour. Yeah in recent standards, but historically speaking not even close.

If you lose a GT with 80km TT because you lose too much time in that amount of TT vs a lot more climbing, you're not allround enough. But that's my opinion

For the Tour you're totally right, but the Giro wasn't TT heavy until the Moser/Saronni era in the 80ies, before that it wasn't TT heavy, correct me if I'm wrong, but Eddy Merckx won the race 5 times and every single one of those routes featured less km of ITT than the 2015 Giro, so the Giro adding more TTs was actually just something that happened in the 80ies and 90ies (and even later), before that it was never a TT heavy race.

 

[Koronin]

Re: Re:

I'd like to see one Grand Tour where they would forgo the high mountains but that is never going to happen.

Interesting. How would you suggest they make the race hard? More "classics" like stages? RVV, PR, MSR...? Strade Bianche even? Longer flat stages (250+k's)? More ITT? I'd be all for that. But not if it turns into a snorefest with more sprinting stages.

They had a Strade Bianche stage in the 2016 edition and it was very good stage.

 

[tobydawq]

Re: Re:

I'd like to see one Grand Tour where they would forgo the high mountains but that is never going to happen.

Interesting. How would you suggest they make the race hard? More "classics" like stages? RVV, PR, MSR...? Strade Bianche even? Longer flat stages (250+k's)? More ITT? I'd be all for that. But not if it turns into a snorefest with more sprinting stages.

They had a Strade Bianche stage in the 2016 edition and it was very good stage.

It wasn't really a Strade Bianche stage, just the final climb that was gravel (but for us Valverde fans it was a nice show he gave with countless attacks). In 2010 they had a Strade Bianche stage which was one of the best Giro stages I have seen and has passed into legend.

There is so much potential there.

 

[Climbing]

Montalcino 2010 was epic.

 

[Rollthedice]

Why argue about TT length? It is what it is. Tom knew what's the challenge and took it. With Froome in Zonc mode all this Giro he would've been 3 minutes down by now with a TT where he could've taken back a handful of seconds. Nobody guessed Froome will be crap and Yates would be Purito and Basso rolled in one.

 

[Logic-is-your-friend]

Re:

Why argue about TT length? It is what it is. Tom knew what's the challenge and took it. With Froome in Zonc mode all this Giro he would've been 3 minutes down by now with a TT where he could've taken back a handful of seconds. Nobody guessed Froome will be crap and Yates would be Purito and Basso rolled in one.

I think the main thing is that TT's (just like mountaintop finishes etc) are being used to cater a route more towards a certain athlete, and against another. Watch the TDF reintroduce team time trials when a French contender has a strong team :lol:

 

[Koronin]

Re: Re:

I'd like to see one Grand Tour where they would forgo the high mountains but that is never going to happen.

Interesting. How would you suggest they make the race hard? More "classics" like stages? RVV, PR, MSR...? Strade Bianche even? Longer flat stages (250+k's)? More ITT? I'd be all for that. But not if it turns into a snorefest with more sprinting stages.

They had a Strade Bianche stage in the 2016 edition and it was very good stage.

It wasn't really a Strade Bianche stage, just the final climb that was gravel (but for us Valverde fans it was a nice show he gave with countless attacks). In 2010 they had a Strade Bianche stage which was one of the best Giro stages I have seen and has passed into legend.

There is so much potential there.

True it was just the final climb (yeah, our boy did put on a show). They really need to put more of this into the Giro for a stage every year. There is so much potential there.