Tour de France 2018 stage 5: Lorient > Quimper 204,5 km

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Mar 10, 2009
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yaco said:
Poor Sagan - He's overweight, had one day in TTT and died, while he's not a top level sprinter,. even though he's always up there in flat sprints


"Poor Sagan" Lol. National Championships jersey, World Championships jersey, green jersey, 2 out of 5 TDF stage wins.
 
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Zinoviev Letter said:
Sagan is great, but the puncheurs played into his hands. If you let sprinters hang around to contest a finish, of course you won’t win.
The climb wasn't hard enough, it eased off near the finish. Tough to make a solo attack stick. Tomorrow should be different.
 
Mar 15, 2016
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Zinoviev Letter said:
Sagan is great, but the puncheurs played into his hands. If you let sprinters hang around to contest a finish, of course you won’t win.

Sagan is as much puncheur as sprinter.
 
del1962 said:
SKSemtex said:
What a pity Sagan had a bad day on TT. they could definitely be within 30 sec.

Maybe he took to long turns on the front before TTT climb. could be knocking back on yellow
I had not seen him taking any turns :).
Yes. He would be back in yellow now.
But probably is better this way. His team has "free ride" and they can help him to get more wins.
 
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Bolder said:
Sagan is a ridiculously good rider. Can win anything short of a full mountain stage.

Tony Martin almost won on Mont Ventoux, if Sagan really wanted to add a stage like that to his palmares and he sacrificed other things for it, no reason to doubt he could do it.
 
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spalco said:
Bolder said:
Sagan is a ridiculously good rider. Can win anything short of a full mountain stage.

Tony Martin almost won on Mont Ventoux, if Sagan really wanted to add a stage like that to his palmares and he sacrificed other things for it, no reason to doubt he could do it.

Back in the day...Martin was a good climber. Not great...maybe comparable to Rohan Dennis. Many thought he would be the next German GC winner when he entered the cycling world...he simply never tried to go for the GC and I think it was the right thing to do. Being a 4x TT world champion + multiple GT stage winner + winner of smaller world tour stage races is better than finishing 10-15th in a GT.
The same can be said about Sagan...he could potentially lose some weight and be a lot better in the mountains but he still wouln`t be as good as Froome, Quintana and Nibali.
Both did the right thing and focused on their strengths.
 
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Dekker_Tifosi said:
when he was younger Sagan won a pretty hard mountain stage in Tour de Suisse. But I think nowadays he is a lot heavier and actually not such a good climber anymore

That climb was ridden very slow until the last kms, so the actual climb was only the last little bit of it.
With the very long descent afterwards, he managed to come back and win.

Anyway, as Sagan said a few months ago he will never have any chance of ever winning LBL or Lombardia much less a proper mountain stage, because he weighs 79kg not the usually reported 73 and if he goes below that he loses a lot of power so climbs even worse (and does everything else worse), which is what happened during his worse 2014/2015 period

skippo12 said:
spalco said:
Bolder said:
Sagan is a ridiculously good rider. Can win anything short of a full mountain stage.

Tony Martin almost won on Mont Ventoux, if Sagan really wanted to add a stage like that to his palmares and he sacrificed other things for it, no reason to doubt he could do it.

Back in the day...Martin was a good climber. Not great...maybe comparable to Rohan Dennis. Many thought he would be the next German GC winner when he entered the cycling world...he simply never tried to go for the GC and I think it was the right thing to do. Being a 4x TT world champion + multiple GT stage winner + winner of smaller world tour stage races is better than finishing 10-15th in a GT.
The same can be said about Sagan...he could potentially lose some weight and be a lot better in the mountains but he still wouln`t be as good as Froome, Quintana and Nibali.
Both did the right thing and focused on their strengths.

Both have already tried to lose weight and be better in the mountains. Martin in 2011. He won Paris-Nice but then it backfired.

Sagan in 2014/2015. There's an interview with his coach where he goes into detail and explains that it didn't work because he simply doesn't have potential to improve his climbing much. What happened was that instead his sprinting and sustained power on the flat got worse for no noticeable climbing gain.

He's lucky he managed to regain it. Some guys try it, then go back and can never regain their sprinting ability. See Baden Cooke.
 
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yaco said:
Poor Sagan - He's overweight, had one day in TTT and died, while he's not a top level sprinter,. even though he's always up there in flat sprints


Poor Sagan indeed.

With a grudge like this, people tend to talk about themselves.
 
It would have been extremely difficult to have not had Sagan and possibly Cobrelli there at the end today. Valverde said something about today's stage not really being very good for him but if he felt good he'd give it a shot. After the stage he said he screwed up his placement on the climb and that even if he hadn't it's unlikely he could have gotten better than 4th considering Sagan, Cobrelli, and Gilbert are faster than he is. He said tomorrow is more to his liking and if he feels good he'll go after it.

Top 5 not really surprising in pretty much any order from today's stage.