Pro-cycling thread

Wasn't Egan Bernal going to dominate the Tour for a decade?

I think Pog was going to 😆

lmao

I don't think their is any winner that has not had a major crash .

At this rate, if Poggy doesn’t recover before Saturday he could be off the podium.

Carlito and The Yates’ look most competitive for podium

I don’t think you needed to hear him say he was dead to realise it tho..?

Wout Van Aert won’t start this morning, he’s returned home to be at the birth of his second child.

Job done (touches wood)

It would be a collapse for the ages if Vingegaard lost from here. Although the threat of a race ending crash is always hanging over any rider.

On that note, cobbles next year pls

I'm going to go out on a limb here:
why cobbles on the tour? cobbles are cobbles.

Because we want the riders to suffer for our entertainment.

Also adds a bit of unpredictability to the race.

Also cobble races are great to watch.

Somone who was on that corner where the moto stalled said there were already a huge number of vehicles coming to a dead halt from the publicity caravan etc. ahead of the race that had to be pushed by the crowd to get them clear. Lucky it didn't really affect the result much.

Everyone has a different level of Insta bants. The dude is in front of the TV to millions. The introvert ship has sailed whether he liked it or not. The dude is a leading GC rider he's hardly got time to curate a monster IG account.

Can't be that private taking and post selfies?
https://www.instagram.com/p/CjwaMeGBwS1/
https://www.instagram.com/p/Cci69PkMhrL/

We never had race radios broadcast before. You have no idea what either of them tell their teams.

I don't even know what point I'm arguing now. Two bike races have different personalities, oh noes.

Cobble races are great, but they're great for different reasons to tour races. Throwing a cobbled stage in just feels performative, a bit like "let's make them ride up ever steeper higher paths".

I mean if you want to get the riders to jump through hoops why not have a grand tour with a cyclocross TT stage.....

One of the commentators 'joked' about having gravel bike swap stages...

BMX freestyle stage ftw

Is it me or is there an unusual amount of ‘this is supernatural’ chat on social media (even hinted at on Eurosport) about Vingegaard’s performance? I must admit I did raise an eyebrow at the winning margin in the tt, but I’ve not seen anything else that’s really surprised me given his performance last year.

Seems like a usual amount for a performance on another level. Last response like this was in response to Pog on Peyresourde (I think).

It’s fine to question where performances come from. It doesn’t have to be as a naysayer, but more as someone interested in the mechanics of the sport. What training, nutrition, supplement, equipment, psychology…? led to such an incredible performance? Of course we all want to know that. It doesn’t have to be about doping. It’s about understanding how the sport is progressing.

Otherwise, how are you watching the sport? Just sitting back and saying ‘Wow!’. Of course anyone with a half analytical brain will question How?

I think the thing a lot of people miss about the peak EPO years is that the dope gave so much of a performance improvement that there was absolutely no need to worry about anything else.

Teams weren’t allocating any of their resources to nutrition and recovery, and barely gave aerodynamics a thought.

I think there’s been huge successes in looking at those properly and thus the performance levels are inching closer to what was possible when everyone was up to the eyeballs in EPO.

I was actually thinking I haven't seen as much of that this year, but it could be because I've stopped looking at Cycling News and Twitter's feed is crap

https://twitter.com/Scienceofsport/status/1681340256023355393

^
Ross Tucker

Was wondering about this, this morning. Is the reason we're seeing lots of amazingly talented cyclists winning top races younger and younger, and seemingly getting better and better because they came through at the age when the sport as a whole turned away from doping and started paying attention to these other factors?

Older riders, Thomas etc, would have been coming through the ranks at a time when doping was still around and maybe training, nutrition etc was still pretty rudimentary compared to now. If you're 18-26 you'd have been riding as a 10 year old around 2011/2012 onwards when teams started paying more attention to sport science and would have benefitted from these advances that might have trickled down to junior and feeder teams. Those advantages then add up and mean that nowadays younger riders are crushing it and seem to get better and better.

All of us, including juniors, have access to training, recovery, nutrition and aero insights that were for the privileged few or didn’t even exist. Imagine a 13yo following Xavier Disley and Stephen Seiler. It’s a different world of knowledge to your local club legend spouting off a load of hunches.

The speeds and power is increasing at the lower end, too. Cat 3 races are getting faster, etc, etc.

It doesn’t prove that doping isn’t present, but I think it does explain a lot of the progress.