It’s that time of the year. Time for the King of the Grand Tours- Le Tour de France.
Good on Geraint Thomas, FTW, and Chris Froome for a strong finish. Sky looks unbeatable, again.
Day 1 claims its first victim: Alejandro Valverde - out in the prologue due to a fall and broken knee. What a shame. I always root for him. He’s such a great rider and a real veteran of the tour. He’ll be missed.
News to me: Juraj & Peter Sagan are racing together on Team Bora. I had no idea Peter had a brother in professional cycling. Reminds me a little of the days when Frank and Andy Schleck were racing. So, for fun, I looked up some other pro-cycling families.
And congrats to him for winning the KOM, even if “mountain” was stretching it a bit. And 12th place is good in my mind. As I type this Nate Brown, also of the USA is KOM.
Yeah, I really thought Matthew had it when I saw him coming.
The commentators on my feed were talking about this giving Richie Porte confidence and I’m not sure I quite but that, that will take a couple days.
As far as the tour as a whole goes, I’m pretty nervous this is going to be a three week parade of sky controlling every aspect of the GC. I have/had high hopes for Bardet and Aru, but they lost about a fair bit of time on stage one. Not insurmountable, but a few of these guys might have to work together a bit or this might get a bit boring in week three.
Either way, I get to watch the darn thing in 4k, so that’s pretty cool!
I think today’s finish is similar to yesterday’s - road kicks up in the end. Another perfect finish for Sagan, I think.
I’ve resigned to the fact that Sky will run the race this year. They’re simply too strong and well staffed for the GC and TT. A lot of depth for the mountains. But anything could happen. Froomey can fall off his bike (again) and it can all be a toss up for the yellow.
Cavendish will be an interesting story. Hell of a thing to be in the TdF with only 5 days of racing under his belt because he’s been sick. He’s a scrappy guy so I expect he’ll give the other sprinters a run for their money. I think the mountains will take it out of him so he may not last the entire tour.
Me too. It looked like Sagan’s elbow came out after there’d already been contact. He may have just been shifting his weight to try and maintain his own balance.
Watch it again and see how much space there is on the other side of the road. Everybody seemed to be trying to pass on the right, and that side of the street just closed down.
Agreed. Cav is like a cat. He thinks he can squeeze through spots no human can. By the time Sagan’s elbow came out, Cav was aleady under Sagan’s wheels and the hole was closing.
Rules say riders must keep their lane but I think the larger share of the blame lies with Cav on this one. I hope they don’t DQ Sagan.
I dunno, DQ is a bit strong but the head on shot seems like Sagan welcomes contact and does what he can to be sure Cavendish doesn’t get through.
Either way, the powers that be need to decide what they want. If they want a clean sprint, fine, call things like this and all others who create an unsafe work environment, but recognize you will be DQing 3 or 4 people every sprint - because you can’t just DQ after a crash. Otherwise, let them push and shove and live with the consequences.
Personally, I’ve never really liked Sagan or gave a crap about the green Jersey, so I was fine either way, but from a larger perspective, some consistency would be nice.
(Just to clarify, I love watching sprint finishes, I just don’t care about the green jersey)
I’m not a Cavendish fan, either. I remember when I first started paying muh attention to the TdF Cavendish leaned on a guy in a sprint and knocked him down, and no penalty that I recall. I may not be totally impartial on today’s incident.
The announcers didn’t say very much about the two guys who crashed into Cavendish. Their falls looked pretty damn nasty, too, but I didn’t hear if either was injured or is continuing in the Tour.
I seem to recall the other incident although I’ve never been particularly good with years but he may have lost some points. He definitely wasn’t kicked out of the race, that’s for sure.
As for tomorrows stage, I’m pretty excited about this one. We might get lucky enough to find out exactly who fancies himself a real player in this thing (aside from Froome).
If Froome would get dropped on even one of these climbs, it would make the next few weeks so much more interesting!