Punchy? No. Long hard climbs, preferably at high altitude are his forte. Very slightly surprising that he bailed on the other leaders for the last climb, but it’s clearly pretty miserable out there and he’s got the polka dots. Maybe figures it’s better to save energy for the coming weeks.
Yeah, wrong descriptor. I mean more like he’s got one hard hit in him and then he’s spent. Back when Froome was winning, I recall Quintana going head to head with Froome and Quintana just not having that deep of a tank. Do I remember wrong?
I mean, he’s won long, hard mountain stages. He’s won two grand tours and several mountainous one-week races. It is true that he hasn’t had that peak form the last four years or so, and some of his attacks in recent years attempting to win stages and the like may have matched your description.
Sonny Colbrelli in the break chasing what have to be the hardest green jersey points since Thor Hushovd won a mountain stage back in the peak Cavendish years.
I don’t think anyone could write a better ending to this stage.
Biggest suspense of the day: waiting to see if Cav can make the time cut.
He’s in with huge margin of 2 minutes.
Hilarious how DeClercq and Morkov were celebrating having pulled Mark in.
Looks like there are some guys OTL here.
My commentary on the first week that’s worth every penny you’re paying for it:
General Classification
Obviously Roglic’s crash out is super disappointing. Both the Slovenians had looked head and shoulders above the other GC competition in the early races this year, and Roglic beat Pogacar pretty convincingly at the Tour of the Basque Country, so the race had been shaping up to be a huge battle between them. Now obviously Pogacar is the strongest rider by a large margin, and the only way he loses is by major misfortune.
On the other hand, the remaining podium places are shaping up to be an interesting battle. Ineos are pretty clearly very keen on getting Carapaz onto the final podium, and now with O’Connor suddenly having a big edge in time there should be a fair tussle between the various contenders. Lutsenko lost a minute today, but even so Uran in 3rd to Lutsenko in 8th are less than a minute apart. These guys should just ignore Pogacar completely and ride solely against each other. I’d give the edge to O’Connor in virtue of having time in hand, and Carapaz in having the strongest team, but don’t expect the others to go without a fight.
Points
I haven’t reviewed the course enough to know who has the edge - Cav who suddenly has an almost open road in the flat sprints, or Sagan/Matthews/Colbrelli who can contest points that are over hills too hard for Cav. But the real story here is of course Cavendish. Not only has he won 2 of 3 sprints (and he was delayed by a mechanical in Stage 3 so he didn’t even contest that one), but the two other fastest pure sprinters are gone, with Ewan crashing himself out in Stage 3 and Merlier climbing off the bike today. Plus Demare and Coquard were over the limit today, not that they were on Tour stage-winning form. With 5 remaining flat finishes and the top competition being Jasper Philipsen and Nacer Bouhanni, 3 more stage wins suddenly doesn’t look impossible. Coming in to the race I figured he’d probably get a stage, but that Ewan would be cleaning up for most of the race.
Mountain points
Looks like this might be an actual battle this year. If Woods, Pouls, and Quintana all really target polka dots we could have a pretty intriguing subplot.
Excellent synopsis. Thx.
TIL: Carapaz’s nickname is “Billy”.
People sometimes make fun of sprinters struggling to make the time cut, but according to Tim Merlier who abandoned yesterday after he got dropped from the gruppetto, he set a personal record for 20 minute watts, recorded his second-best ever 60 minute watts, and his third-best ever 90 minute watts. And despite putting out as much sustained power as he ever has in his life, he was dropped by the guys bringing up the rear.
Puts the difficulty of alpine grand tour stages in a bit of perspective.
Surely Tim Declercq has earned some sort of official tour prize for pulling an entire peloton day in and day out.
Least impressive win by Cavendish of the race so far. I don’t think there’s a sprinter in the race that couldn’t have won from the position he was in when Morkov dropped him off. He said himself in the interview, “I didn’t do anything. I just did 150m. The team did it all.”
That said, at this point it will be almost surprising if he doesn’t surpass Merckx’s record.
Double Ventoux tomorrow. Not quite sure what to expect with that downhill finish, so I’ll predict the usual for overhyped mountain stages - hardly any attacks and no real GC movement except a couple guys in the bottom half of the top ten will crack and lose a bit of time.
How was that not an unbelievably well-executed sprint?
Making stuff look easy is the hardest part.
I wish they would knock it off with the downhill finishes on major mountain stages.
It was an unbelievably well-executed sprint. Incredibly impressive on DQS’s part. Cavendish himself, however, had very little left to do in the end. It wasn’t actually meant to be a negative comment.
What was INEOS’s plan today? Lets keep Pogacar out of the wind and lose some seconds to him?
Here we go. Mount OneTwo.