tobydawq said:
Dekker_Tifosi said:
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.