given how poorly this route was received looks like The Riders Make The Race crew once again easily notches another win
in all seriousness though this was a 130km mountain stage, that's about as "new school" as you can get lol. maybe I'm just overreacting to a single post.
"The riders make the race" still requires a course for them to make the race on, though. Riders wanting to make the race given 21 flat stages with no obstacles, wind, cobbles or anything will fail, but riders not wanting to make the race can ruin even the best of routes - see the 2012 Giro Passo Giau stage for a particularly obvious example.
The thing is, the parcours is one of the only things the organisers can control ahead of time, so that's one of the things they should maximise. In fairness to ASO, they have massively stepped up their game in terms of the flat and rolling stages in recent years. It's also a domino effect, racing the first stage of a mountain block hard means that there are more tired domestiques on the ensuing stages, hence the whole overreliance on the short mountain stage because of one great stage in 2011 (which was so good because of the fatigue and the GC gaps created by the even better 200km stage the day before) that plagued GT design for a period. This stage being short - and none of the climbs being particularly hard - mean that riders weren't afraid of it, so they didn't all shut up shop and race defensively yesterday. I feared that stage 18 being as tough as it was would neuter racing this last two days but thankfully that hasn't been the case. The mountain stages have become a bit too identikit with these 50km flat then 3 huge climbs type stages they seem to like at the moment, and the pacing of mountain blocks (usually the result of geography) has been a problem, but if the riders really do want to make the race, they at least have the tools at their disposal to do so, and thankfully lately they have - but we also have to consider that riders have to feel that making the race is worth the effort expended to be able to make it, and when there is a totally dominant team with several riders in the group, it tends to disincentivise others from attacking, as we've seen in recent years with Jumbo spending the whole day riding to the pace of their third best climber, using their numerical advantage and, usually, Kuss' freshness to scare others out of attacking, or before them with the Sky train tapping out a tempo that can haul back speculative moves even from elite GC men like Vincenzo Nibali and Cadel Evans.
If Jumbo had their entire train intact and were able to flood the front with van Aert, Kruijswijk, Roglič and Kuss all day, we probably don't see the attacking from deep, and fewer guys close on time get allowed into breakaways to make the bunch have to control them, and the tighter the GC mix the more risk is involved in attacking, which tends to lead to conservative racing (this I believe is the 'new school cycling' mindset that BR refers to, the idea that a close GC mix is automatically a good GC mix, when from the perspective of the racing, quite often the opposite is true because the need to make up bigger time gaps means the need to attack from further out to achieve that). Lots of riders who are just outside the top 10 or are at the bottom of it are far enough back that they need to get into the breaks, but Jumbo's depleted resources means they can't just chase everybody down all the time, and the fact that these riders are 10 minutes or more down mean that there isn't the urgent need for Jumbo to chase them immediately either - but for teams of riders at the bottom end of the top 10 whose position is threatened, maybe there is.
I mean, we certainly can't complain about that, it isn't great that crashes, illnesses and injuries have caused the weakness of the top 2 contenders' teams, but the effect for the race has been positive as the leaders have had to race mano a mano far more frequently than has been seen in most GTs for a long, long time. Even a single super-dominant rider can head up interesting races, if they are strong enough to not worry about having a weaker team, such as last year's Tour or the 2011 Giro. It's never just "the course rules/the course sucks" or "the riders make the race". The two are dependent on one another, and there's a lot more variables involved on top of that too.
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