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Who would have Two Big Wins in their Career?

Page 3 - Get up to date with the latest news, scores & standings from the Cycling News Community.

Who among these will have Two BIG Wins?

  • Zdenek Stybar (31)

    Votes: 3 5.9%
  • Wout Poels (29)

    Votes: 5 9.8%
  • Sep Vanmarcke (28)

    Votes: 3 5.9%
  • Rui Costa (30)

    Votes: 5 9.8%
  • Esteban Chavez (27)

    Votes: 26 51.0%
  • Ian Stannard (29)

    Votes: 1 2.0%
  • Diego Rosa (27)

    Votes: 7 13.7%
  • Mikel Landa (27)

    Votes: 4 7.8%
  • Greg Van Avermaet (31)

    Votes: 30 58.8%
  • Niki Trepstra (32)

    Votes: 5 9.8%

  • Total voters
    51
Re: Re:

portugal11 said:
BigMac said:
I don't see how Valverde cannot not be considered a legend.

I'll be telling my grandchildren about him and how he probably was the most talented rider I've seen racing, on par with a Peter Sagan, and that despite him not achieving half of what he could have, few, if any, looked as dominant as him for such a long time.
Because true cycling fans don't like riders that normally suck wheels until 500 m to the finish line. ( please, i'm talking in the big races and not in these spanish classics like murcia or valencia)
You can stick nonsense like that up your a**. Who are you to say what a true cycling fan is.
 
Re: Re:

portugal11 said:
BigMac said:
I don't see how Valverde cannot not be considered a legend.

I'll be telling my grandchildren about him and how he probably was the most talented rider I've seen racing, on par with a Peter Sagan, and that despite him not achieving half of what he could have, few, if any, looked as dominant as him for such a long time.
Because true cycling fans don't like riders that normally suck wheels until 500 m to the finish line. ( please, i'm talking in the big races and not in these spanish classics like murcia or valencia)

I take it you never saw his victory early in his career in the Vuelta on La Pandera? Valverde is a victim of his immense range of talent. His rivals know that they have little chance of victory if they don't dispense with him before the final few km's if its a hilly one day race, or in the mountains. His sprint for a man of his size is extraordinary and a beautiful thing to behold. For a rider to be capable of contending in virtually every race that he enters for an entire season, year after year, for almost a decade and a half is exceptional.
 
Re: Re:

Valv.Piti said:
portugal11 said:
BigMac said:
That statement has held more truth than it does now. Bala is not that boring, that side him has been totally blown out of proportion.
Tell me one memorable win from valverde...
Thats not borderline stupid, its just stupid. Its like telling you do mention one memorable win from Boonen...
All his Ardennes wins were a sprint. He won the Vuelta without any single great performance. Valverde does attack, but mostly when he isn't in contention for the win, or when racing in smaller races.

Boonen on the other hand has the longest solo win in Roubaix in recent time, another Roubaix solo, and a solo in Ronde. Not to mention how he countless of times attacks from far out, only to win in a sprint.
 
Re: Re:

Netserk said:
Valv.Piti said:
portugal11 said:
BigMac said:
That statement has held more truth than it does now. Bala is not that boring, that side him has been totally blown out of proportion.
Tell me one memorable win from valverde...
Thats not borderline stupid, its just stupid. Its like telling you do mention one memorable win from Boonen...
All his Ardennes wins were a sprint. He won the Vuelta without any single great performance. Valverde does attack, but mostly when he isn't in contention for the win, or when racing in smaller races.

Boonen on the other hand has the longest solo win in Roubaix in recent time, another Roubaix solo, and a solo in Ronde. Not to mention how he countless of times attacks from far out, only to win in a sprint.
Thats your subjective definition of memorable. It can be very memorable even when you don't finish it off alone.

La Pandera 03, Courchevel 05, Liege 15 just to take a mention a few - all won in a sprint, yet still memorable and super impressive victories. Raw strength, tactics and an incredible talent to finish races off. You can add Gallina in 12 to that kind of victories.

He doesn't have many long raids, but not many of his type of rider does have that. Its simply not possible to stamp your authority like Boonen or Cancellara have done a few times in the Ardennes. And he has never really been the best climber in the biggest races (TdF, which he often as focused at bit to much on), thus always been left to defend himself in the big mountains.
 
Wow! I thought that this day would never come:me defending Alejandro Valverde. I'm on the record as a critic of his. I'm no fan of his. But I don't hate him either, not to the point of slander. And out of fairness, we can't criticize some riders for not knowing how to win (i.e. Sagan or GVA last year), then turn around and criticize Valverde for finding ways to win.

The bottom line is: Valverde won a ton of races, including a GT. Look at his record: it's amazing.

For Nibali, same thing: even if you think that he's lucky, what an impressive record! And since when is luck not part of sports? Nibali also knows how to provoke his own luck by attacking, i.e. in the first part of the TdF in '14. Or the Giro last year (although it seems mostly due to SK lacking concentration).

Interesting to see how Froome gets little love: with 3 TdF wins, he's in very select company. I can guess why, and understand why...many skeptics out there...

Excellent take on sprinters who used to be more than jus one-dimensional. The debate Cippo vs. Cav is always a good one. For Cavendish to be a legend, I still think that he needs to beat Eddy's 34 TdF stage wins.
 
I said nothing about memorable. I just stressed how Boonen and Valverde aren't comparable. Valverde does have an image of a passive and conservative racer, who prefers to bank a secure podium place than risking everything for the win. There's a good reason for that. He is the antithesis of Vino as a racer, which is why the later is more legendary despite slightly inferior palmares.
 
Re:

Netserk said:
I said nothing about memorable. I just stressed how Boonen and Valverde aren't comparable. Valverde does have an image of a passive and conservative racer, who prefers to bank a secure podium place than risking everything for the win. There's a good reason for that. He is the antithesis of Vino as a racer, which is why the later is more legendary despite slightly inferior palmares.
Stating that as a fact. :eek:

Well, needless to say we disagree here. You are a huge Boonen fan, I am well aware of that. On top of that you don't like Valverde, so there really isn't an argument to be had here anyways. Altho I do realise that Boonen's ride in Paris-Roubaix 2012, and probably also in 2009, triumphs any of Valverde's victory.
 
Memorable Valverde wins?

The aforementioned 2003 Vuelta La Pandera stage (early Valverde was a ton of fun)
Courchevel 2005 (yes, it was a sneaky one and hardly a 70km solo panache win, but it was memorable)
Liège-Bastogne-Liège 2008 (you seriously going to argue that a three-up break is a sprint?)
Plumelec 2008 (one of the most dominant puncheur bursts in living memory, along with Purito Montelupone '08 and Gilbert on the Mur de Huy 2011)
Dauphiné GC 2009 (one of his most memorable performances, going from afar on Mont Ventoux and gifting the stage win to Szmyd even though he almost had to stop to let the Pole pass, then sticking like glue to Evans' back wheel on the Col de la Madeleine with a little assist from Contador)
His comeback win on Old Willunga Hill (basically a typical Valverde uphill sprint, memorable only really because of the unprecedented level of feathers being spat, measured at an 0.86 on the Leipheimer-Cunego scale)
Roma Maxima in 2014 (when he made repeated attacks to thin the group)
Cumbres Verdes 2014 (where the infamous wheelsucker paced the leaders the whole way up the climb where the last 2km are a straight line and still nobody could get around him)
Andalo 2016 (where the battles were on all day long)

There's also some pretty memorable performances where he didn't win. For example the 1st road stage of Paris-Nice 2010 where Don Alejandro was in the polka dots and led in forming an echelon 40+km from home. And the aforementioned Szmyd stage in the Dauphiné in '09. Plus the races that were taken away from him - the País Vasco stage where he started going crazy on uncategorized repechos and dropped people like Samu in stage 1, losing the sprint to Freire only for Óscarcito to be relegated and Valverde given the win, then Freire given it back when Valverde's results were annulled, and the last stage of Romandie in 2010 with the GC on the line and him, Špilak, Antón and Menchov battling.

Let's be fair. Valverde does retreat into his shell somewhat too often in the biggest races, and he is sometimes too tentative when it comes to attacking to gain time, instead relying too heavily on his sprint. That does happen. But he's not Simon Gerrans, who thinks racing is something that other people do around him. Valverde attacks hard and often in smaller races whereas guys like Gerrans would be sucking the wheel of cadets to win a car park crit in rural Australia, and has a wide variety of wins at the top level even if the majority are won in his trademark "sprint at the mountaintop" way; he's got GT stages won from the break (Peyragudes), in flat stages where the bunch has been split up (Soria), in uphill sprints (Plumelec), and he's even won time trials at the top level before.

It is fair to say that El Imbatido has proven himself rather too beatable too often and has also made a couple of pretty high profile screw-ups that have prevented him from accumulating the palmarès he could have (Firenze springs to mind most readily of course even if ironically that was a situation where wheelsucking was clearly the right thing to do with Purito up the road, he just got fixated on Nibali and fell asleep at the wheel when Rui made his move), but to say he's not had a single memorable win in his career is complete hokum. Even people like Cavendish have memorable wins in their career (Aubenas, Sanremo) and we deride pure sprinters for the interchangeability and ultimate irrelevance of most of their wins.
 
Re:

Netserk said:
I said nothing about memorable. I just stressed how Boonen and Valverde aren't comparable. Valverde does have an image of a passive and conservative racer, who prefers to bank a secure podium place than risking everything for the win. There's a good reason for that. He is the antithesis of Vino as a racer, which is why the later is more legendary despite slightly inferior palmares.
Not by everyone. I take Valverde's style of racing over Vino any day.
 
Re:

Libertine Seguros said:
Memorable Valverde wins?
Great post!

For other memorable Valverde moments I want to mention him rising from the grave at La Pandera in 2009, and when he attacked countless times on the flat run-in just for fun in the Avila stage of the Vuelta 2015, long after the break had made it to the finish.

Of course there is also the devastating 7km solo on Peñas Blancas in the Ruta del Sol last year. Hoping to see more of that this week. :D
 
Several have been mentioned here but there are quite a few more in my book. I even found his Liège win in 2015 to be memorable. He was pretty much isolated in the finale, everyone in the race was looking at him, and he still took it upon himself to push the pace on the front with less than 10k to go. When Moreno attacked and everyone sat on Bala, I didn't think there was any way he was being brought back. Of course it was Bala who eventually chased with everyone on his wheel and he still wound up winning the sprint. I thought it was an incredible performance and completely memorable.
 
Re: Re:

portugal11 said:
Zinoviev Letter said:
The word legend is a bit misleading because most people probably reserve that title for a smaller, more elite, subset of these riders. But "two really big wins" is a useful metric when thinking about a rider's place in history. There are plenty of guys who got lucky and took home a big race, particularly the one day races. There really aren't many who've done it twice. Devolder is probably the closest thing there is to a recent rider who won two of these races without obviously belonging to a top tier, and Devolder was very good.
Gerrans beats devolder...

I strongly disagree. Gerrans has a stronger palmares, as befits a stronger rider, and there's little flukey about his wins. He is the punishment the cycling Gods inflict on puncheurs when they ride boringly enough to bring his set of skills into play.
 
Re: Re:

Zinoviev Letter said:
portugal11 said:
Zinoviev Letter said:
The word legend is a bit misleading because most people probably reserve that title for a smaller, more elite, subset of these riders. But "two really big wins" is a useful metric when thinking about a rider's place in history. There are plenty of guys who got lucky and took home a big race, particularly the one day races. There really aren't many who've done it twice. Devolder is probably the closest thing there is to a recent rider who won two of these races without obviously belonging to a top tier, and Devolder was very good.
Gerrans beats devolder...

I strongly disagree. Gerrans has a stronger palmares, as befits a stronger rider, and there's little flukey about his wins. He is the punishment the cycling Gods inflict on puncheurs when they ride boringly enough to bring his set of skills into play.
Without a doubt. Gerrans gets criticized a bunch (undeservedly in my mind) but even without his monuments, he's got a really nice palmares and his 2014 was terrific.
 
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Voted Van Avermaet and Chaves, they both "only" need one more big victory and still have years left, certainly Chaves.

I hope Vanmarcke will have 2 at the end as well, because there is no one from the current peloton that goes faster on cobbles in Paris-Roubaix.
 
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I see people mentioning Cavendish as legend and he is for sure the fastest from the past years, but looking at palmares I would consider Freire much more a legend (I still don't by the way), but he was World Champion 3 times, won San Remo 3 times, hilly races (Brabantse Pijl amongst others), cobbled race like Gent-Wevelgem, stages in the Tour, Vuelta,... He is the sprinter with the best career from this century.
 
Re: Re:

Zinoviev Letter said:
portugal11 said:
Zinoviev Letter said:
The word legend is a bit misleading because most people probably reserve that title for a smaller, more elite, subset of these riders. But "two really big wins" is a useful metric when thinking about a rider's place in history. There are plenty of guys who got lucky and took home a big race, particularly the one day races. There really aren't many who've done it twice. Devolder is probably the closest thing there is to a recent rider who won two of these races without obviously belonging to a top tier, and Devolder was very good.
Gerrans beats devolder...

I strongly disagree. Gerrans has a stronger palmares, as befits a stronger rider, and there's little flukey about his wins. He is the punishment the cycling Gods inflict on puncheurs when they ride boringly enough to bring his set of skills into play.
Completely agree, he's been on of the best one day riders in the world in the last few years. Winning the combination of MSR and LBL is a huge achievement as well when you think of the different skill sets required; especially to do so within a couple of years of each other. How many other riders in the current peloton would you even give a small chance of doing that? From memory, I think only Kelly, Bettini, De Vlaeminck and Merckx have won both of them in the last 50 years. So he's in pretty exalted company.
 
zlev11 said:
roundabout said:
Early 'fun' Valverde looking lost without a wheel to suck

https://youtu.be/qcyGRyEIiwU?t=1328

It was a great finish, but ultimately without Sevilla Froomeing him he was never going to win that one.

this is a terrible post. who is sucking wheels on a 10% grade? he got dropped.

What's exactly terrible?

Are you going to deny that Valverde waited for Sevilla at that point in the video?
 

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