I imagine such a strategy relies on requiring you’re opponents to sprint after someone, expending energy in short bursts, whereas you can just simply keep your own pace and attack later. It would only work in a limited number of cases, for instance only in those in which your team mate presents some reasonable challenge himself. If it is just someone in 150th place, 3 hours behind the yellow jersey, their attacks would not impress anyone, and your opponents would just taunt him and say ‘Go! Bike up that mountain faster than me, you insane driveling clown! See if I care!’.
Today’s (Sunday July 6, state 8) was intersting. A relatively short route, but with a bunch of ups and downs (ending in a decsent). I have no dog in the hunt but it would have been more interesting if Kessiakoff couold have gotten closer (he didn’t even finish in the 1st pack)
Brian
Well, so much for the moderately lumpy ITT course playing towards Evans’ favour. Nearly 2 minutes down and likely to lose more time in the final ITT, his only hope for repeating now looks to be Wiggins imploding in the high mountains.
The tour finishes in 12 days.
How many years until we know who won? :dubious:
Hey man, thanks for your contribution! :rolleyes:
Sorry if that post seemed random, but I just watched two Sky riders annihilate the world’s best time trialists, after annihilating the entire peloton on a pair of Cat 1 climbs in the first week of the tour.
No one had ever heard of one of those riders 11 months ago.
There’s a discussion on Sky doping allegations on the CyclingNews forum (here). I’m paraphrasing, but the quote that best summed up my attitude was something like:
“Sky are either taking the sport a quantum leap into the future… or back 10 years.”
Sadly anyone who has a great performance is now going to be accused of doping.
I don’t know that anyone who has a “great” performance will get accused. But when someone seems to be generally mediocre but occasionally puts in astonishing preternatural performances, questions are going to get asked.
Is this a joke? Really? That YOU had never heard of them is not in any way the same as NO ONE ever having heard of them.
Maybe. Yet, sometimes those questions deserve to be answered just as Wiggins did yesterday at the post-TT press conference…
or, as retorted by his Sky companion…
I’m not sure what your point is, frankly.
As to Froome:
Do you believe that the riders he is extremely sporadically able to thrash but who he generally isn’t in the same league with aren’t dedicated and haven’t sacrified? Really? Or is it that Froome is generally not dedicated and doesn’t sacrifice, but every now and again is dedicated and sacrifices and turns into a giant killer?
I meant one of the two annihilators, namely Froome.
Look at his achievements before last year’s Vuelta. It wasn’t just me who had never heard of him.
[QUOTE=Wiggo]
“I say they’re just fu***** wankers. I cannot be doing with people like that. It justifies their own bone-idleness because they can’t ever imagine applying themselves to doing anything in their lives. It’s easy for them to sit under a pseudonym on Twitter and write that sort of shit rather than get off their arses in their own lives and apply themselves and work hard at something and achieve something. And that’s ultimately it - c**ts!”
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Chris Froome]
Critics need to wake up and realise that cycling has evolved. Dedication and sacrifice = results. End of story!"
[/QUOTE]
…and today’s reading is from the book of Armstrong. 
I was merely adding the recent responses of the riders (mainly for the lurkers here) so that a full picture could be had, rather than just hearing the standard accusations being rolled out without context or retort. I think that is very relevant when hearing the usual cries of ‘cheat’ every time someone beats someone else.
Now is is me who isn’t sure what your point is - who says he’s not in the same league as the other riders (as clearly he is) and who are these other riders you think as so much better anyhow, really? On what do you base this comparison? Fabian? Tony Martin? Cadel? (Are you aware that he has had major issues with a tropical disease, if you are simply questoning his consistency?)
Maybe they have, maybe not quite as much. Who can tell? Maybe they have dedicated just as much but still can’t reach the same level as it’s a ‘genetic freak’ thing, like a lot of cycling hangs on.
Silver in the British TT championships 2010? He was mostly riding in Africa before that, so off the radar a bit in world terms, but so what?
Aside: Who’d heard of Peter Sagan until last year too, is he and his teammates all doping too? Must be, to win a stage (or two). So quick to judge and condemn, it’s sad really.
Yes well thanks for adding context. Until you did I had no idea that cyclists accused of doping tended to deny it.
And no he is not clearly in the same league as other riders except every now and again. Froome is a guy way down the order 95% of the time. Then out of the blue he can blow away the best in the world for a couple of days, then he’s way back down the order again. There may be some complex explanation for this. May be. But like I said, given cycling’s history, you are naive if you don’t start asking certain questions.
This is the issue for me. In any other sport, a guy starting to put it together properly at age 26/27, as Froome has done over 2011’s Vuelta and the Tour this year, would be deemed evidence of the flowering of talent as he reached his peak. But this is cycling.
I am currently in the middle of a house move, so I don’t have access to a TV or the internet when I am at home. As such, I have not seen any of the race since Thursday night. Even as a Brit, I looked at the result yesterday, saw how much time Wiggins and Froome put into Cancellara and raised my eyebrows. Was Cancellara on an off day? Did the course not suit him? Or is it looking like he is trying to peak for the Gold Medal in London in the TT? Because, absent something like that, Froome in particular putting that amount of time into Cancellara is pretty unexpected.
With the number of times that cycling fans have discovered their favourites are actually cheaters, it’s no wonder a lot of them are cynical about unexpectedly great performances. Which is sad, because unexpectedly great performances are wonderful - if they’re genuine. But it’s rather insulting to blame cycling fans for their cynicism instead of the rampant doping that has been and to some extent still is going on.
I saw an interview with one of the BMC guys yesterday before the TT asking who he thought the course would suit best, Evans or Wiggins. He said it’ll suit who ever recovers best after the past week of racing. I don’t know that it’s completely unexpected for some odd performances to turn up on the first major TT of the comp after a week of hard competition. Anyone who’s done regular physical activity would know that sometimes you just have off days, and even though these guys all put a lot of time into getting the training and recovery just right, it doesn’t take much for the recovery to be a bit off and the legs to feel lethargic. The question I’d ask is if Froome was doping why isn’t he that good all of the time?
Missed the edit window.
Something else to consider is how much of the work these guys have been doing over the past week. I haven’t been paying much attention to Froome but if he’d been staying in the pack and avoiding doing the hard yards right at the front he may well have expended a whole lot less energy than some of the other guys. I know that Wiggins and Evans worked pretty hard on the stage prior to the TT as Evans tried to put a gap on Wiggins and Wiggins pushed to keep him in check. Wiggins then has the advantage of being a specialist time trial cyclist with a track background who has leaned down recently and possibly has a bigger TT advantage than some had expected. Where was Froome at the end of the previous stage? Was he pushing hard in the chase with Evans and Wiggins or was he taking it easy in the peloton? (Genuine question, I wasn’t paying attention to him.)
Froome won the stage the day before the TT, didn’t he? At the top of a Cat 1 climb? Froome has probably done the same work that Wiggins and Evans did. For me the question mark is Cancellara - he wouldn’t have featured up the climb and would likely have taken it relatively easy to give the TT a crack at winning the stage. Plus he’s a noted TTer, the World Champ if I’m not mistaken, and Froome still put time into him. This is why I wondered what those who actually saw the race thought of how Cancellara looked/rode.
Just checked the results. It was a flat finish. Froome didn’t win but he was in the chase group with Wiggins and Evans so he would’ve been putting some work in. So much for that theory.
Cancellera looked pretty good and he had the time to beat until the very end. Froome only put 22 seconds on him which is very little over 50kms. Part of it could be the advantage of going at the end having seen everyone else’s times.