jsem94 said:
Good point in the end LS. It makes it seem that Sky are even more ruthless and less likable.
And the classifications are a joke in many ways anyway. I love that Barguil won the KOM jersey this year, it was well deserved. But when Anthony Charteau won it was a proper joke. And that's a jersey that's supposed to mean something as opposed to the KOM jerseys in the Giro and Vuelta.
I've always felt sorry for Charteau, because it was heavily implied in the jersey overhaul that it was him winning it that devalued the polka dots. There was more to it than that.
Firstly, the points system at the time did not adequately reward
winning summits, instead giving bucketloads of points well down the line, including some ridiculous idiosyncrasies. For example, at the time, cat.3 gave 4,3,2,1 but cat.2 gave 10,9,8,7,6,5 then stopped.
Secondly, the points system doubled the points for HC, cat.1 and cat.2 climbs if they were the last climb of the day, but made absolutely no distinction between those, so if there was a 50km flat run in after a cat.2 climb it would pay double points just the same as if it was an MTF there.
This second problem was exacerbated by a spate of terrible mountain stage designs which coincided with Comeback 2.0, mountain stages with extremely long distances from the final summit to the line. Not descent finishes, which would've been fine, but stages like Tarbes 2009 and Pau 2010, which gave absolutely no incentive to the main GC riders to attack. The removal of bonus seconds from the Tour at the time meant there was very little interest among the main contenders to fight for stage wins, so the breakaway was allowed to contest almost every mountain stage while the GC contenders saved their energy.
2010 then followed this up with some additional issues. Stage 9, over four major mountains with a descent finish, was set up well for a battle for the polka dots (which would eventually become crucial), however in exchange for co-operation with the riders there for GC purposes, it was agreed by the DSes not to interfere with Jérôme Pineau's points-gathering, so that a Frenchman would wear the polka dots on Bastille Day. This proved crucial because one of the riders who had been targeting the first summit of the day but was then asked not to compete was Christophe Moreau. Moreau was poised to pass Charteau in the classification late on, but in the later stages Radioshack were chasing down any break with Caisse d'Epargne in it to defend their lead in the Teams Classification, preventing him from overhauling Charteau. You have to think that if Christophe Moreau, a veteran French GC rider on the hunt for one last hurrah at the age of 38, took the GPM, it wouldn't have been received the same way as Charteau's win was, more as a nice final send-off prize for a long-time veteran, same as Garzelli's in 2011's Giro, and they might not have redressed the points scale so drastically, if at all.
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