Going to be some selection on the Planche des Belles Filles - that new finish looks absolutely savage.
The death of Geraint Thomas was greatly exaggerated. It looks like he will be strong this year. Pinot looked good and finished strong over the top. If he can avoid his one bad day, he could be a factor as he can kinda time trial.
I’m super excited for the really high mountains.
Must admit I’m not a great believer in Thomas (think last year was the one where the stars aligned for him, he’s too nice, and he’s not burning with desire to win another GT) but he made a statement there. Looked the class of the field on what was a vicious final few k.
Was it Bardet who got his front wheel to the finish line and then had a mechanical and looked as if he’d lost the will to finish the race? Brutal.
Was cool to see Valverde doing yeoman’s work on the climb for NQ.
TJ is having a rough day of it today.
Wow. That was a brilliant finale to a stage. The profile wasn’t all that promising - minor mountain/hilly stage with a bunch of 2nd and 3rd cat climbs and a flat finish. Ho hum, break takes the stage and the peleton arrives in an uncontested bunch 5 minutes later. But nooooo. Stupidly strong break with de Gendt and de Marchi, Terpstra and King along with a couple teams not in the break really wanting a shot at a stage win combined with Alaphilippe laser-focused on bonus seconds to retake the yellow jersey for Bastille Day resulted in some brilliant racing. Chapeau to Thomas de Gendt for pulling off a wonderful hard man win from the break. How he stayed in front of Alaphilippe and Pinot at the end is beyond me, since they’d been sitting in the bunch all day and should have had much fresher legs and only 20 seconds to pull back. And what a fun attack from Alaphilippe and Pinot. I just love moments where guys from different teams work in perfect unison because their interests align. Each knew they could trust the other to give their all, because neither of them was really fussed about the order they finished in so long as they had a gap on the bunch behind. Alaphilippe gets to play the hero of French cycling for the next week, and Thibaut Pinot has now moved himself from the outside chance to podium category firmly into the podium place is his to lose category. He’s a decent ITT away from being a threat to win the whole thing, actually.
And let’s not diminish the fact that G was involved in crash in a critical part of the stage and still came back to the head of the peleton to finish strong. So G still very much in it.
WvA throws it down in a GT sprint - great to see him win a stage, supreme competitor to go with his talent. I wonder if he can become a GC rider in the future - he seems to have more of that strong cyclocross build so perhaps the climbing won’t ever be on the cards.
Bit of a shake-up in the GC, Thomas looking extremely well-placed. Would love to see Alaphillipe in the mix for as long as possible but reckon the Ineos machine will take over in the mountains.
Maybe the last day for GC standings as they are, but well done Caleb Ewan. He’s got to be one of the smallest guys in cycling, but man, he can throw down.
It baffles me that such a tiny guy can be a pure sprinter, frankly. He can’t be much bigger than Estaban Chavez, ffs.
It’s got to be because he’s got the lightest bike in the peloton. 
Sedate stage yesterday - Ineos rolling 8 deep at the front looked sort of ominous for everyone else. Rowe and van Baarle driving the peloton over a cat 1 climb tells you that none of the GC men were interested, with an ITT today and Tourmalet tomorrow.
Time trial not usually the best spectator sport but think I’ll tune in to see their set-ups as I like a bit of testing myself. Apparently a lot of the peloton are not all that aero, which sounds counter-intuitive, given the Tour is usually the pinnacle of bicycle technology. Lowering your cda (measurement of 'aero-ness) takes dedicated experimentation and training in the TT position, and is just not worth the time for most of the field outside of the top GC men (where the test is obv critical) and TT / track specialists who focus on testing outside of grand tours.
Hoping Alex Dowsett does a good ride - most dominant UK timetrialist of recent years and currently riding for Katusha. He will totally empty the tank today, whereas the GC guys will need to be a little more measured. He’s not got many grand tours under his belt, though, so his legs might be in bits - TT in the middle of a GT is obv a different game than tapering for an isolated 25 mile test, say. He’s also a haemophiliac, which is sort of an interesting fact. Probably wants to avoid crashing.
Rohan Dennis - beast of a timetrialist and one of the favourites for today pulled out yesterday for reasons that have not been made public. This usually means personal issues and I guess must have been pretty serious for him to abandon when he did, hope he is alright.
:eek:
I had to read that sentence three times because I missed the “1” on the two first passes.
Yeah, that bit about “internal investigation” into Rohan Dennis abandoning is ominous sounding. Still nothing today.
Serious crash for van Aert there - hope he is OK but he’s stayed down and an ambulance is being called 
Was going extremely well, couldn’t see exactly what he hit but he was railing a corner and clipped something on the barrier.
I had Alaphilippe doing well, but not win the stage well. Good job by him, he has won TT stages before, but nothing like this. I feel like he was underestimated in this respect before the stage…not anymore though. My understanding is that he does better with the “shorter” punchier climbs, but he clearly has the power, so it should be interesting. If he rides with a power meter, I would figure out your max sustainable effort for each finishing climb and stick to it and ignore the inevitable attacks (to a point). Kind of like Dumoulin.
As a Pinot fan, that 1:40 lost in the wind appears more and more crushing as he can really climb in the high mountains. That’s racing though and it ain’t over yet. Great ride today though.
I’m interested in someone other than Ineos winning so let’s see if some other contenders can work together a bit.
I suspect Alaphilippe might prove disconcertingly difficult to get out of yellow, kinda like Voekler back in 2011 when every day in the mountains he’d predict that he’d lose yellow and then somehow always hung on, at least until Alpe d’Huez. Alaphilippe’s never had any particular reason to try to finish well on real mountain stages before - he’s at grand tours to hunt stages, which is best accomplished (for him) by taking it easy on high mountain stages and saving his energy for rolling stages with punchy finishes. But if he’s trying, I expect he should be able to climb with the GC guys for a good long ways.
All that said, it looks pretty good for G to defend his title at the moment.
Reckon Ineos will put Ala and Quickstep straight to the test tomorrow, Brailsford is aggressive. Saying that, the Tourmalet is a beast of a climb but it’s very steady, something like 8 or 9% consistent until you’re right at the top where it kicks a little. Can’t see Ala getting blown up or anything like that, esp as he’s in such rocket form, but he’s in for a hard day.
Should be good racing whatever happens.
I think Alaphilippe will have his hands full with GT and EG giving him no rest. And those are just the immediate threats. He’ll be on the defensive all day.
I doubt G or Bernal will attack. Ineos will do Ineos things. They’ll set their train climbing at a vicious pace intended to prevent the likes of Pinot or Yates from attacking. That pace will eventually drop at least some GC-focused riders. Finally, in the last km or so, G or Bernal might attack and gain 20 seconds on whatever remains of the GC group. Alaphilippe doesn’t have to do anything besides sit in the wheels of the Skytrain. (Ineos train just doesn’t have the ring, so we can’t call it that.)
Remember, he’s not expected to win the GC. If Yates or someone attacks, Alaphilippe isn’t obliged to chase down the attack. Thomas, as the presumptive leader of the “real” general classification is obliged to chase down attacks (or have his domestiques do it for him).
Why wouldn’t team fracking send Bernal up the road? It could be devestating, Ala forced to chase and G sits in along with 3 other teammates.
It’s true that the modern Tour is often anticlimactic in these scenarios, you think we’re nailed on for an absolute ding dong stage but what actually happens is like you say, brutal, attritional pace but no real attacks, only small time gaps. But with Ineos 90 secs back I think they’ll try and assert their authority tomorrow.
I don’t think Ineos think they are racing against Alaphilippe. They won’t attack him because they don’t think he’s in the race. G has 45’ on Kruijswijk, and 2+ minutes on everyone else they though was going to contend for GC. Bernal may well attack in the final kilometres to try to move past Mas and Kruijswijk, but aside from that they’ll play it conservative in the Pyrenees. If somehow Alaphilippe doesn’t get dropped by Ineos mountain domestiques this weekend, they still have plenty of mountains in the last week to get rid of him.
Or at least, that’s how they’ll race, is my prediction. They’ll play defense, not offense.