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Tour de France 23 Thread

Whoa, Vingegaard attack with no Pogacar response.
 
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Well, exactly as I predicted...wait, no, exactly as NO ONE predicted...today turned out be to a monumental battle for the GC and the mountain jersey was just an afterthought.

With hindsight, maybe Vingegaard and Pogacar and their teams should have paid more attention to the fact that last year's winner of the Giro was up the road by 4+ minutes. They finally did react but it was too late.

Vingegaard is still in good shape but Pogacar showed that his preparation has been negatively affected by the broken wrist that he suffered in the spring. Working out on a trainer is not the same as riding in a top pre-Tour race or spending a month training at altitude. Pogacar should rebound and stay competitive but now he has to worry about two great climbers and GC competitors in front of him and not just one.

Jumbo's tactics were interesting. Was Wout van Aert trying to win the stage on his own or was he trying to tire out Pogacar and the UAE team or both? I guess he did help tire out Pogacar and UAE but I think he was mainly going for the stage win. Luckily Sepp Kuss stepped up big time, as he always does, to help Vingegaard.

As for the Mountain jersey, it is still up for grabs. We have not seen the last of Powless. He will try to get it back tomorrow after missing the right breakaway today.
 
Is the UAE setup (team/tactics) just that much worse than Jumbo? Like last year, it just seems that the UAE team doesn't have the guys to help Tadej compared to Jonas' team. Didn't UAE finish with half their team last year?
 
DiscoverFrance is a rad company. My wife and I did our honeymoon through them in Provence
 
What’s the doping status these days? Has it become an accepted part of the sport?
 
Ball State Deac said:
What’s the doping status these days? Has it become an accepted part of the sport?
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Doping is definitely not an accepted part of the sport, but that doesn't mean it never happens anymore. When carefully supervised by an expert, it's still hard to detect, relatively safe and, most of all, it works!

But the doping situation today seems way better than it used to be. There is no longer a culture of doping in cycling, i.e. a wide acceptance among riders, teams and officials that doping is inevitable, everyone is doing it and you have to do it to win. I think Lance Armstrong's unmasking, confession and humiliation brought an end to the culture of doping.

The Armstrong revelations were important but not the only factor. Doping tests and controls are not perfect (watch the Netflix documentary Icarus for evidence of that fact) though they are much better than they used to be. The penalties for getting caught are more severe than they used to be-if a rider is caught in an even minor doping violation then he will probably lose a couple years of his career or maybe his whole career). The sponsors of the teams are very anti-doping-many of them would quit the sport if there was a doping scandal on their team. There are also much more severe legal sanctions for doping, particularly in France where new anti-doping laws were passed in the wake of the big doping scandals of the 90s and early 2000s. French police have a lot of leeway to search (without needing a court order) team personnel, hotel rooms, vehicles etc. They don't do it a lot right now but they have done it in recent years and the threat is always there. There is also now much more focus on and suspicion of the doctors who used to design and manage the doping programs. Any rider who is seen to get friendly with a doping doc puts his reputation and career at risk.

The current generation of riders has grown up in an era when doping is much less accepted. Even in the past, most riders did not want to dope but they felt pressured to do so by their team leaders and managers such as Armstrong and (his team director) Johan Bruyneel. There was a conspiracy of silence among Armstrong's teammates for a long time but when it finally broke, the revelations flooded out from most of them.

Doping is also not as necessary as it used to be. Training camps conducted at altitude are now a perfectly legal and acceptable method of "doping." All the top teams and riders go to these high altitude camps for weeks at a time during the preseason and while preparing for big races. Supposedly, altitude training has the same favorable effect as EPO (increasing red blood cell counts). Training techniques and programs in general are also much more advanced and scientific than they used to so riders don't need doping as much.

So doping is no longer an accepted part of the sport and it is no longer a common practice. But I don't think it can ever be completely eliminated, anymore than we can completely eliminate corruption from government, business and other human institutions.
 
Vegas Jethro said:
Is the UAE setup (team/tactics) just that much worse than Jumbo? Like last year, it just seems that the UAE team doesn't have the guys to help Tadej compared to Jonas' team. Didn't UAE finish with half their team last year?
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UAE's tactics are fine, but they just don't have the same horses that Jumbo Visma has-no one else has a locomotive like Van Aert to go up the road by a few minutes, then wait for his leader to help him out during the last 20-30 KM.

In any case, it looks like this Tour will ultimately be a mano a mano battle on a mountaintop between 2 or 3 riders. At the moment it looks like Vingegaard and Pogacar are the strongest but that can change from one day to another. A rider can look great on one day and then just OK then next. A rider's ability to recover from day to day and week to week is just as important as his performance on a single day.
 
Weren't there suggestions that Froome was going to fail a test for 2019 and that's why he didn't compete? I think they blamed it on a crash.
 
I'm a little behind (like I always am with TDF), but this climb is brutal. People are just falling off the tail.
 
Tadej is a savage.
 
That was a great finish. Tadej wouldn’t have been able to do that to Wout.
 
An American to watch is Sepp Kuss.

Sepp Kuss is Vingegaard's chief helpers on the climbs. Van Aert was more visible today, but Kuss helped by staying with Vingegaard until their group caught up with Van Aert's group. Kuss' role is to stay with Vingegaard until he can no longer keep up.

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Van Aert's role is well, who knows? It's not always clear. But like today he often bolts away at a fast pace to try to tire out the opposition and to wait for Vingegaard to help keep up the pace as the stage nears its end. Van Aert really sacrificed himself today as he could barely stay upright on his bike when he finally blew up on the last climb. he went from even with the leaders to 5+ minutes behind in the last several KM. It's unusual and admirable to see a rider of Van Aert's quality and high ranking sacrifice himself like that.

wout-puxando.jpg
 
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TownieDeac said:
Kuss is absurd. Not Wout level absurd but pretty crazy.
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Kuss is a pure climber, better than Van Aert as a climber on the big climbs but not nearly as good as Van Aert in hilly terrain, time trialing, sprinting, etc. Very few riders have Van Aert's all-around abilities though Pogacar is one who does.

Kuss is totally focused on and dedicated to helping Vingegaard. He will sacrifice his own chance to win a mountain stage in order to help his team leader. But it would be great to see Kuss win a stage as he did in 2021 on stage 15. However, that was before Vingegaard had fully emerged as a potential Tour winner and it was on a day when eventual Tour winner Pogacar and Vingegaard were 5 minutes behind the stage leaders. Kuss is not likely to get the same chance this year, but anything can happen with more than 2 weeks to go.
 
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