gingerwallaceafro said:
On British Eurosport, someone tweeted in asking if there was one thing you would do to make the Tour more interesting what would you do?
Sean Kelly said 'Shorter stages'.
Have to agree, also smaller teams for me. No radios is the other frequent one. Any more?
Glad you asked
I can't believe the Tour is currently considered as the greatest cycling race.
It is soo boring:
- 1st week - sprints, 1 or 2 uphill finish but no time gaps, small teams desperately trying to get on TV through breakaways, GC riders trying to avoid crashes and not waste any time
- 1st Mountains - a few climbs but not to much, because ASO thinks it's important to keep the suspense until the last Saturday. No moves from GC riders trying to save it for the last week
- Between Alps and Pyrenees - useless stages for breakaways, no changes to be expected in GC. Will any French rider manage to win a stage this year ?
- 2nd Mountains - real mountain stages
- Last Saturday: long ITT scaring climbers, and pushing them to attack in the few days before
- Last Sunday: useless Champs-Elysees stage, beautiful but the race is already over since yesterday.
It definitely needs some changes. We need balance. We need stages that look like classics. We need surprises when ASO unveils the profiles..
Here are my suggestions:
1) Start on Friday evening - prologue by night, with road lights, in a big city. The Tour needs to be a show as well.
2) Have 3 rest days, well balanced during the Tour:
* Every 5 stages, Thursday of 1st week, Wednesday of 2nd week, Tuesday of 3rd week.
* It can be useful to make the riders travel a long distance, and for injured/sick ones to get better.
* Before every rest day, stage should be really hard and 250km + long. They have a day to recover.
* The 4 splits should have minimum 1, maximum 2, flat stages for sprinters.
Between 5 and 7 flat stages in the whole Tour. We should NEVER have 2 "sprinters" stages in a row. Please ASO I beg you.
3) Ban Team-Time Trial.
If a team is strong, it already has 20 other stages to show it...
4) Prevent the boring first week by putting more hilly stages.
* By hilly, I mean an Amstel Gold Race or Liege-Bastogne-Liege profile, with at least 10-12 short climbs, 250km+ long, which Ardennes Classics riders would enjoy, and where GC riders could make some moves.
* With proper hilly stages, no need to have time bonuses to make the first week more interesting.
* We can go in Jura, Vosges, Massif Central, French Flanders, etc. Believe me there are some hills everywhere in France, even if ASO does not realize it.
5) Why not try a 1st week stage in some of the gravel roads used in Tro Bro Leon ?
6) Have 1 or 2 steep uphill finish (same kind of finish than Mur de Huy), once again there are some steep roads everywhere in France. The issue is that ASO is just not looking for them.
For example, in the Tour du Haut-Var they have this kind of finish every year.
7) 3 ITTs including Prologue
The 2 remaining ITT would have completely different profiles. (This year the 2 long ITTs are identical, it's a shame)
* One 55-60 km long, all flat. If ridden in north of France, why not include a few cobblestones sections ?
* The other one would be either a mountains ITT: 20km + in legendary climb: Mont Ventoux, Tourmalet, Galibier,...
either a 40km+ hilly ITT (with three or four 3rd/2nd category climbs)
8) Have a few mountain stages (around 4), including 2 "queen" mountain stages:
* 1 in the Alps + 1 in Pyrenees, ideally before a rest day
250 km+, almost no flat section, 6 climbs - like the stage Nieve won on the Giro, where riders arrived 1 by 1 and exhausted.
9) Get rid of the useless Champs Elysees stage (or maybe have it once every three or four years).
We could have the Tour ending in Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Nice, Strasbourg - maybe even have a real stage, with climbs who knows ?
10) Otherwise, I'm fine with the team radios. And by the 9 riders per team.