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Tour de France Tour de France 2021, Stage 18: Pau – Luz Ardiden, 129.7 km

Page 22 - Get up to date with the latest news, scores & standings from the Cycling News Community.
This, that has bothered me the most with the mountain stages with a flat start: the pack fodder breakaways (climbing wise) with no chance at all.
Also, the breakaway forming uphill makes the race so much harder early on improving the potential for the rest of the stage. I can't remember any stage that was really backloaded that ended with anything else than just action on the final climb unless it was a Mortirolo sort of idea.

Even Finestre is worse off with nothing but flat before.
 
He is the best since Indurain

Roglic would not have beaten him
Nor Bernal nor any of the rest in top form

He is is a field of his own
talent and killer instinct

But that he is so cool and so enjoys racing is the main reason he is the man to beat for the next x years or so

Hard to say..Roglic and Bernal + Ineos A-team (this tdf-team isn not Ineos A-team nowadays) would have made thing quite a bit taxing. Plus as said many key players were lost in the first week-first half.

Absolute VAM times are of course one measurement and w/kg derived from that, but..Overall Pogi is not still lookin that much of an absolute superman that Froome was his peak years, but closing. Still looking forward to see great downhill escapes, running race uphill with Vingegaard, doing small group escape from the front of echelon at lightspeed flat stage..Ganna included perhaps aso.
 
Castroviejo hasn't stopped getting better, some would never thought he would be more than decent tt-ist and flat/lower slope dom years ago, now he's up there among the best 15 or 20 GT riders while slaving hard and ahead of everyone else in Ineos train hierarchy.
Ineos looked more like their old selves today. Only Porte disappeared early. Certainly killed off Uran but Carapaz knew he was racing for third overall.
 
The double-points thing isn't great but Woods summed it up perfectly: the four guys who've taken points off each other is what brought Pogacar back into the mix.

Still, I'm glad Pog has won it as hopefully, we'll see a points system change.

Starting the last two mountain stages off with a mountain near the beginning instead of around 100 k of flattish roads would have given them a proper chance to fight even under the current rules. Giving out double points for MTF on a stage where there was no chance for a proper climbers breakaway to form was utterly ridiculous and basically setting the jersey up for a dominant GC man.
 
Hard to say..Roglic and Bernal + Ineos A-team (this tdf-team isn not Ineos A-team nowadays) would have made thing quite a bit taxing. Plus as said many key players were lost in the first week-first half.

Absolute VAM times are of course one measurement and w/kg derived from that, but..Overall Pogi is not still lookin that much of an absolute superman that Froome was his peak years, but closing. Still looking forward to see great downhill escapes, running race uphill with Vingegaard, doing small group escape from the front of echelon at lightspeed flat stage..Ganna included perhaps aso.
I mean the kid is 22. If you look at Froome's wins, 2013 and 2015 was decided on the first mountain stage where he got out climbed numerous times in the last week of both Tours - mainly by Quintana. 2016 and 2017 were just straight up bad years with horrible competition, raced extremely conservative with an extreme amount of talent on Team Sky which basically killed the race.

Sure, very impressive. I would rate Pogacar's win this year with Froome's in 2013 - the rest I dont consider that impressive at all.
 
I mean the kid is 22. If you look at Froome's wins, 2013 and 2015 was decided on the first mountain stage where he got out climbed numerous times in the last week of both Tours - mainly by Quintana. 2016 and 2017 were just straight up bad years with horrible competition, raced extremely conservative with an extreme amount of talent on Team Sky which basically killed the race.

Sure, very impressive. I would rate Pogacar's win this year with Froome's in 2013 - the rest I dont consider that impressive at all.
also seeing Pogacar slaughter everyone to LGB was much more exciting than seeing Ritchie Porte slaughter everyone at Ax 3.
 
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If the routes were 'balanced' then GTs would be even more boring than this because climbers would have no chance. Watching two guys take minutes in time trials and then easily match everyone else in the mountains is not interesting.

fair opinion to have.

but that is actually the traditional history of GTs. And particularly the TDF.

lemond even said that in reality there were only 3-4 riders who could win at the start of the tour. So now we have Pog, Rog and Vingo!!

To me, by far, the most important is that the very best all round rider wins
 
I'd like to see more TTs, it's pretty clear that the days of only British Cycling superstars competing for them are past. I understand them being scared after the Sky years but I think we've got a pretty good selection of top riders who are excellent at TTs now, rather than it just being like, Froome vs Quintana and all that.


e) like this year you'd have Pogacar, Roglic (who was hurt!), Vingegaard, and even guys like Wout Van Aert up there. And Carthy was TTing with Roglic at the Vuelta last year, as another fringe contender.
 

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