Tour De France 2020

To repeat something that only Merkcx has done, that's pretty incredible.
Especially in the modern era.

This TDF was the first sporting event my lad has followed From start to finish...we watch the highlights every evening. He just lost his shit, he kept asking if someone could win yellow, white and polka-dot

But he did win yellow, green and polka dots in 1969.

Postmodernism started in the sixties.

That won’t finish him off, he’d borrow a team mate’s bike. Something even more dramatic required.

The time he got some help from a peloton friend, and got penalised several minutes by getting help from another team....

Congrats Bernal on the win

Never seen this before! Question of doping?

Really hope not. What a fantastic victory. But it was the first thing me and Christine said to each other when it looked like he was going to smash DuM's time.

It might be a little easier to believe what had happened today if I didn't know that Gianetti was the UAE manager and I hadn't read the Operation Adderlass findings about artificial haemoglobin use in cycling in recent days. I guess I'm a romantic at heart and want the highs (and lows) of the sport to be real, even though I know that drugs have always been part of the sport. However when even my girlfriend , hardly the most knowledgeable cycling fan , watches Dumoulin and Van Aert's horrified faces at the end and unprompted says 'they know Pogacar's doping' we have definitely found ourselves in a place where the description 'unbelievable' is sadly likely to mean just that.

The Youtube data guys are saying it was 7.0w/kg for the climb

A case of "When something is too good to be true it probably is"?

It was 16 mins or so and Contador said that 6.9w/kg for 20 minutes (not including a 40 min flat TT beforehand) meant he was TDF ready. Voldemort himself is in awe.

Personally I think the generation of kids coming up racing with power meters and proper nutrition will shit on riders who think getting towels round their neck after the finish is a marginal gain

the generation of kids coming up racing with power meters and proper nutrition will shit on riders who think getting towels round their neck after the finish is a marginal gain

There is that.

What is this towel round the neck marginal gain? Not tried that one yet.

Supposedly Pogacar has been prepping hard for the final TT, clearly with the watts to back it up too.

A summary of an interview with Mikel Bjerg:

They spend days reconing the ITT accompanied by Mikkel Bjerg (3x U23 ITT world champion) with whom Pogacar rode the stage numerous times.
They found at least 25 seconds on the flat part and Pogacar and Bjerg has trained ITT together this season.
They experimented with bike changes in advance during the recon so UAE didn't spend hours today experimenting like Jumbo did.
All season Pogacar's ITT bike has been set up in regs to seat height and BB angle etc to be identical to his roadbike (Something Bjerg always have done) to ensure a smooth transition. Bjerg pointed out that the difference in bikesetup for Roglic was noticeable.

He was also Slovenian Cyclocross champion in 2018, which explains everything of course.

Exciting stage and end of the Tour, my 2 cents on this:

• For this whole third week TJV seemed to be less aggressive and just controlling, confident 1' would be enough, with Roglic keeping Pogacar under control at most, rather than attacking to gain more margin.

• Great for Pogacar, he deserves it and really hope he isn't on juice. Also hope he doesn't blow next year like Bernal did.

• Strong final stage from Bernal

Wow what an end to the tour. Amazing.

If we are speculating about who is doping, my money is on the sprinter Wout van Alert.

I think I’d have changed my helmet at the bike swap too. The tail on Roglic’s lid looked like it was poking him in the back when he was more upright. God knows how much the discomfort cost him.

Imagine all the well-meaning but nevertheless pitying slaps on the back Roglic is going to get today. Poor guy.

So pleased for Porte after all of his shit luck over the years.

What a strange (but compelling) Tour in every sense. I don’t even know what comes next in cycling. Flanders and Roubaix still on the horizon. Plus two more grand tours. The world has gone fully upside down.

Worlds from friday .

... and annemiek may still ride the worlds road race... : O

I think the looks on Dumoulin and Van Aert's faces were disbelief at Roglic's collapse as much as they were to do with Pogacar.

The fundamental essence of sport is its capacity to surprise; that instance where an athlete or a team pulls out a performance which goes so much against the received wisdom or expectations that we are all left shocked and astonished. We saw that yesterday. The expectation was that Roglic would defend his lead and win the Tour, as we thought would happen before the race and was reinforced throughout by his, and Jumbo-Visma's, performance.

I don't know if Pogacar is doping or not, but his evolution as an athlete follows the usual pattern of a young prodigy; he won the Tour de l'Avenir two years ago, as Bernal did before him, put in an amazing first season as a WT pro, as Bernal did before him, then wins the Tour with a stand out performance deep into the third week of the race, as Bernal did before him. He's looked like Roglic's main challenger since the Pyrenean stages and a lead of less than a minute going into a final TT as hard and unusual as yesterday's was never enough to be certain of victory. If you look at Roglic's performances in a final TT in a GT, he's always done worse than expected so when you break it down, his performance yesterday wasn't atypical. With Pogacar, because of his youth and lack of a body of results, we don't have a yardstick with which to measure him. His final stage win in the Vuelta last year, which also secured his podium place, was a 40 km attack on the penultimate stage of the race, so clearly he has the recovery characteristics a Tour winner needs.

Time will tell if he's doping or not, but I don't think you can tell from a one off performance like yesterday's, no matter how surprising it might have seemed.

I'm comfortable with a shit load of prep, the advantages of youth and a bad day for Rog (and everyone else, really) accounting for Pog's performance over everyone else.

I’m in the don’t know what to think camp.
I really like Pogacar but I didn’t feel any sense of joy for it weirdly.
He won it by 1:30, those more knowledgeable might be able to recall someone winning a late tough TT by so much...

LAD

https://youtu.be/Bfy2YBaotVU

It's been a long time, 2014 I think, where the final TT has been an hour long effort. The tendency in recent years has been to shorten them to around a 30-40 minute effort, precisely because they tend to distort the overall standings so much. Chris Froome has been extremely effective in gaining significant time on his rivals in late race TTs.

If you look at the 2014 race, where the GC had been long decided by Nibali's dominance in the mountains, Tony Martin won by over 1:30 from Tom Dumoulin. Neither was riding for the overall classification, but gaps that size in TTs of this duration aren't unusual.