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United Kingdom | 6 TDF Wins in 10 Years?

After none over the last 100+ years?

(6 in 7! I stand corrected!)

Oh boy... What is the probability? Statisticians/Gamblers can you calculate the odds?

Discuss.

By the way, inspired by Wales!

I hope GT is clean... but... hard to believe in miracles.
 
Decades of immensely promising French riders training for GTs all their life to finally break the French duck at the race that is the pride of the nation and UK just saunters along and does it three times with a couple of track guys and a domestique.
 
Jul 24, 2015
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Saint Unix said:
Decades of immensely promising French riders training for GTs all their life to finally break the French duck at the race that is the pride of the nation and UK just saunters along and does it three times with a couple of track guys and a domestique.

In all fairness, the French duck at the race indicates that whatever their riders were doing over recent decades might not have been ideal.
 
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ebandit said:
brownbobby said:
Awesome....so what new angle are we going to use the bash the Brits/Sky in this thread that we haven’t covered in the previous ones?

actually ........3 different winners in so few years is rather surprising

so have team sky beaten the odds and found 3 perfect responders?

do team sky have a magic cocktail and could in fact turn any decent pro into a tour winner?

in a clean race it's the marginal gains/ dedication of all involved making it possible?

Mark L

Yep, all legitimate questions debated endlessly in every other Froome/Wiggins/Thomas/Sky/Brits don’t dope threads...but eh why not have another option, can never have too many I guess
 
TubularBills said:
After none over the last 100+ years?

Producing three different individual winners is much more surprising.

The next Eddy Merckx could be sitting on a bicycle for the first time right now, and a mega talent who wins 5 Tours in a row can come from anywhere. But having three different guys win Tour de Frances in such a short amount of time?

When no Frenchman has won the Tour in 30 years, no Dutch no Belgian in 40, only two different Italians in 50 years, only one German ever?
I mean, potential Tour de France winners are really rare...
 
Aug 15, 2016
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The case for the defence here is that you could equally write this as "6 TDF wins for Team Sky in 7 years". But I take the point - it's part of a wider context. It's Cavendish. It's the Yates brothers. It's the track cycling team since Sydney. It's Britain's unprecedented success in other sports at the same time. If sport in the late 2000s belonged to Spain and the early 2000s belonged to Australia, the mid-2010s has been Britain's

I think I must be one of the few sceptics that doesn't believe each of the three winners' transformations are as inexplicable as some make out. I mean yeah, they're all incredibly suspicious. But I do think their pre-Sky successes (on the track for Wiggins and Thomas, and at the Commonwealth Games for Froome) count for something, even if it isn't much

Wiggins is the interesting one for me. Even if his final step up came at Sky, he was still living with Contador, the Schlecks and Lance at the 2009 Tour while still at Garmin. It was one of the most bizarre, inexplicable performances at the Tour I can remember, because it largely came out of nowhere. And yet later he proved it wasn't a total fluke. I suppose the great What If is if he'd avoided trouble in 2011 - history since then suggests he may have had a good chance of winning it

Over time I've learned to accept the cognitive dissonance that you need to put up with all of this. But there does need to be a bit of a change, and certainly more competition. Once again we've had a Sky rider win the Tour without really being attacked or facing too much of a challenge. That's the big issue for me. But granted, Froome went out and won the Giro himself - in that performance, he proved a lot more than he ever did winning his Tours, because he actually went on the offensive for once

That sort of thing matters more to me than team or nationality - it's the manner of the victory that makes the difference. Michael Schumacher made F1 boring not just by winning 5 years in a row but the way he won. Similarly, Sky winning the Tour every year hasn't been boring in and of itself, but the way they have won it has been totally tedious. That's the bigger issue for the sport of cycling - its headline event has been turned into a procession because of the way Sky have controlled it and the way other teams have been too weak or cowardly to challenge them
 
spalco said:
TubularBills said:
After none over the last 100+ years?

Producing three different individual winners is much more surprising.

The next Eddy Merckx could be sitting on a bicycle for the first time right now, and a mega talent who wins 5 Tours in a row can come from anywhere. But having three different guys win Tour de Frances in such a short amount of time?

When no Frenchman has won the Tour in 30 years, no Dutch no Belgian in 40, only two different Italians in 50 years, only one German ever?
I mean, potential Tour de France winners are really rare...

Great Points!

Regarding nationalism... It seems reminiscent and familiar... Imperialist Doping? We do have a global history for evidence...

What have we called it in the past? ...systemic... sophisticated...

Examples and historical evidence point to a clear determinant for unusual success that defies reason.
 
i remember laughing when Sky announced they wanted to win the Tour with a British rider in 5 years time.

It seemed so far fetched with the talent they had at their disposal at that time (climbing wise especially). Now look who's laughing. They now won the Tour with 3 british riders. 2 of them ex-track olympic champions as well. And 1 freak of nature.

Wonder who's next.
Tao?
Stephen Williams?
Or good ol Harry Tanfield?
 
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Dekker_Tifosi said:
i remember laughing when Sky announced they wanted to win the Tour with a British rider in 5 years time.

It seemed so far fetched with the talent they had at their disposal at that time (climbing wise especially). Now look who's laughing. They now won the Tour with 3 british riders. 2 of them ex-track olympic champions as well. And 1 freak of nature.

Wonder who's next.
Tao?
Stephen Williams?
Or good ol Harry Tanfield?

All thanks to hard work, attention to details and sports science according to blind British fans. Frankly the arrogance with which they think they can manufacture Grand Tour winners is sickening. Time for a Zwift session I think.
 
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Bwlch y Groes said:
The case for the defence here is that you could equally write this as "6 TDF wins for Team Sky in 7 years". But I take the point - it's part of a wider context. It's Cavendish. It's the Yates brothers. It's the track cycling team since Sydney. It's Britain's unprecedented success in other sports at the same time. If sport in the late 2000s belonged to Spain and the early 2000s belonged to Australia, the mid-2010s has been Britain's

I think I must be one of the few sceptics that doesn't believe each of the three winners' transformations are as inexplicable as some make out. I mean yeah, they're all incredibly suspicious. But I do think their pre-Sky successes (on the track for Wiggins and Thomas, and at the Commonwealth Games for Froome) count for something, even if it isn't much

Wiggins is the interesting one for me. Even if his final step up came at Sky, he was still living with Contador, the Schlecks and Lance at the 2009 Tour while still at Garmin. It was one of the most bizarre, inexplicable performances at the Tour I can remember, because it largely came out of nowhere. And yet later he proved it wasn't a total fluke. I suppose the great What If is if he'd avoided trouble in 2011 - history since then suggests he may have had a good chance of winning it

Over time I've learned to accept the cognitive dissonance that you need to put up with all of this. But there does need to be a bit of a change, and certainly more competition. Once again we've had a Sky rider win the Tour without really being attacked or facing too much of a challenge. That's the big issue for me. But granted, Froome went out and won the Giro himself - in that performance, he proved a lot more than he ever did winning his Tours, because he actually went on the offensive for once

That sort of thing matters more to me than team or nationality - it's the manner of the victory that makes the difference. Michael Schumacher made F1 boring not just by winning 5 years in a row but the way he won. Similarly, Sky winning the Tour every year hasn't been boring in and of itself, but the way they have won it has been totally tedious. That's the bigger issue for the sport of cycling - its headline event has been turned into a procession because of the way Sky have controlled it and the way other teams have been too weak or cowardly to challenge them

Wow!

Great post with heartfelt insights... thought provoking...

Maybe? They're all just honest blokes, doing what they do best?

Winning 3-Week Tours...

With zero history.
 
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Bwlch y Groes said:
The case for the defence here is that you could equally write this as "6 TDF wins for Team Sky in 7 years". But I take the point - it's part of a wider context. It's Cavendish. It's the Yates brothers. It's the track cycling team since Sydney. It's Britain's unprecedented success in other sports at the same time. If sport in the late 2000s belonged to Spain and the early 2000s belonged to Australia, the mid-2010s has been Britain's

You can add China to that. Since Sydney they've been killing it at the Olympics, and especially at the Beijing Games, although to be fair they dominate in traditionally "Eastern" sports like martial arts, gymnastics, badminton, weightlifting and table tennis, as well as niche sports like diving and shooting, where the competition isn't as hard. Russia also killed it on their home turf in Sochi.

And we know how they did it. All the money and science in the world didn't stop Spain, Russia and China from relying heavily on the old dopity-dope-doping in the end, and Australian sport has its fair share of controversies. It isn't exactly a massive leap to assume that Team GB and Team Sky, behind the smokescreen of sports science and marginal gains, is just another country doping their athletes to the eyeballs to impress the home crowd at their Olympics, and that they're still reaping the benefits of it to this day.
 
Jul 24, 2015
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I think sky may be doping on a small scale or gaming the rules, but not any more than other teams. I agree with the post above about how much of a turn off it is to watch them dominate races the way they do. Hoovering up the best talent to use as disposable super domestiques is a luxury no other cycling team can afford. It's ruined the race for me.

But the anti-brit stuff is all a bit silly. It's clear that even with 'help', it's a stretch to take someone without any natural ability and turn them into a grand tour winner. Its also very clear that Brailsford (who I despise) is not wrong in his methodology of taking good track cyclists and getting them to physically transform into skeletal, tunnel-visioned freaks. It's also worth considering that much like the NFL, cycling as a sport is heavily reliant on physiology that can be moulded to fit the purpose, so expanding the pool of potential cyclists as happened around 2000 in Britain (there has been a big push in schools since then) was always liable to yield results.

Put it this way, I was in a minority at school in the 90s cycling. There was very little visible success to emulate and events weren't televised. Now there are cycling tv shows and coverage of track events, every grand tour etc.

I guess from outside it probably looks worse, but I strongly believe you could do the same in pretty much any reasonably developed country and over 10-20 years get a return. The tour wins are 90% down to sky working out a formula to protect their lead guys.

Anyway, as someone also mentioned, the rank hypocrisy of people talking about this from France leaves as bitter a taste in my mouth as if anything. Virenque, Cofidis and Festina (with a huge French contingent) were the people I looked up to as a naive youngster. They were some of the people who truly destroyed the sport.

On Thomas, there seems to be a bit of an attempt to ignore his past performances and the context, eg: the crashes and injuries when in good form. The guy has more pedigree than most, and this has been a weak tour. Froome is off the asthma and there is no natural big opponent now. Dumoulin maybe, but everyone else is just not good enough to beat the soul destroying sky train.
 
The disgust that many cycling fans feel for Team Skybutamol has nothing to do with being anti-British. I have nothing against Pippa Middleton, John Cleese or Elton John. I liked Robert Millar and Chris Boardman, I can even appreciate the Yates brothers. I do however detest Team Sky, because I see them as a bunch of protected doping users who have ruined what used to be the greatest sporting event in the world since 2012.

In the days of US Postal cycling fans were accused of being anti-American; today they're accused of being anti-British. This is nonsense. It's like saying someone is anti-Canadian if he dislikes Ben Johnson. We're sick of Team Sky because of their hypocrisy, their arrogance and because of the preferential treatment they receive as the richest team; not because of their nationality.
 

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