Le Tour and Other Cycling Talk

[Sharpie66]

Even though the standings didn't shift much today (except for Nibali losing another 30 seconds to Froome), it was still pretty fun to watch. The Col de Tourmalet is always a challenge, and seeing Dan Martin absolutely kill that climb and crossing over to the breakaway was great. Although my biggest WTF moment was seeing the cows deciding to cross the road at the same time that the riders were moving 90 km per hour on the descent!

[caprice]

Good grief, those cows! That's a very real danger in that part of France, too. Now I wish I could remember whose tweet it was about how he just stared at the cow and passed on the left.

 

Cauterets is so beautiful. m. caprice and I went on a ski vacation there a few (nearly ten) years ago with some friends and I actually recognized some of the area on the approach AND the finish line!

 

The rain and hail today were insane.

[Humbugged]

Purito keeps on rollin' at 35

 

 

Cows are a new one .But there have been sheep and goat related race incidents in previous tours.And of course the idiots with dogs who have them unleashed

[Sharpie66]

Boy, some fans are getting nasty towards Team Sky! Richie Porte being punched in the ribs, Chris Froome getting a cup of urine thrown in his face (!!)--I am not surprised that the team are blaming the press for inciting fans' doubts over doping.

In the actual racing, I loved seeing Cummings win! MTN-Qebeka is a story that couldn't have been written better, and winning the stage on Mandela Day was perfect.

And I loved seeing Peter Sagan horn in on Froome's interview. He is just great.

Edited July 19, 2015 by Sharpie66

[selkie]

Damn, Geriant Thomas is a very lucky man to be able to ride away from that crash. A few more inches and a little more speed, and that could have been fatal. As is, I wouldn't be surprised to see him turn up with a concussion on the rest day. If I'm his team manager, I'd try to keep him from seeing the video of the crash as long as possible since during his interview, I don't think he was aware of just how bad that looked from the outside.

 

I suspect it will be a very long time before Warren Barguil has any friends outside his team in the peleton for that.

Edited July 20, 2015 by selkie

[Sharpie66]

Between that bump with Thomas and his move causing the big crash early on that took out Fabian Cancellara as well as so many others, the rest of the cyclists are going to be avoiding him like the plague.

 

And I was really scared that Thomas was a dead man. That crash was definitely the most frightening thing I think I've seen on the race in a long time.

[Sharpie66]

Holy, shit--Tejay just abandoned! He is such a strong rider that it must have been more than just a headache, maybe more along the lines of a migraine.

[Sharpie66]

Just finished watching the rest of the morning's broadcast. I was rather amused when they were trying to cut to commercial with the theme music beginning to play and then had to return quickly for Pinot's fall on the descent and then again when first Nibali and then Quintana attacked Froome on the climb. I don't think they were able to take the break until a good five minutes later.

[Sharpie66]

Hee--Mark Cavendish tweeted, "Looks like the @letour profile page has chicken pox today...I am sick of red spots. So so sick of them." Just an insight into how the sprinters feel about the mountains!

[Sharpie66]

Finally, Quintana attacked and was able to gain at least a little time on Froome. Boy, that took long enough--Team Sky has just been so strong this year.

I did see another taste of the backlash on Froome when an old man was in his face giving him the full arm flip-off several times on the first climb of the day.

[Shimmergloom]

Thank you NBCSN for cutting away from the presentations of the final stage of the Tour de France, so we could see a meaningless Nascar race that hadn't even started yet.

 

It's not like I wanted to see the Yellow Jersey presentation or anything or the final podium.

Edited July 26, 2015 by Shimmergloom

[Moose135]

Didn't they switch it to the main network?  I saw Tour programing listed there at 3pm Eastern. And I've heard complaints from other NASCAR fans wondering why they are showing one of the biggest races of the year on NBCSN, which their cable system doesn't carry, so they can show some bicycle race from France on NBC...

[Sharpie66]

The NBC broadcast was a 90-minute recap of the entire race. They did end up showing the final awarding of the yellow jersey on NBCSN after a few minutes of the NASCAR footage, but that was all they showed. The end of the recap on NBC did have a brief showing of the final jersey ceremonies and a nice shot of Froome, Quintana, and Valverde on the podium at the end.

 

Overall, I think it was an excellent race this year! I had resigned myself to Quintana staying in second after the first Alp stage when he couldn't gain any time on Team Sky, but at least he made a decent showing on the final Alp stage. I hope that he does some time trial training over the next year, since the rumors are that the organizers are going to add some more of that style to the 2016 race and take away some of the purely mountain stages, thus appeasing the non-climbers that were bummed about this year's course.

 

When they were showing the stats of the most green jerseys to active racers, I was surprised to see Bradley Wiggins' name on the bottom--is he still actively racing? He hasn't been in the TdF since at least 2013, and maybe 2012, to my knowledge, but maybe he's just concentrating on the Giro and Vuelta.

[selkie]

Wiggins won a gold at the world road racing championships last year and set a record for the one hour distance earlier this year so he's still kind of drifting around n the sport even though his Grand Tour days are over.

[Humbugged]

Wiggins won a gold at the world road racing championships last year and set a record for the one hour distance earlier this year so he's still kind of drifting around n the sport even though his Grand Tour days are over.

His last road race for Sky was the Paris - Roubaix (Degenkolb became the first German since 1892 to win it).The peleton nearly got wiped out by a TGV !!!!

https://youtube/6M1KpnbDuug?t=54m11s

 

He is back on the National squad for Rio 16 .But has since started his own team on the Continental Tour (the ones that need invites to the big races) so he can keep up his race fitness

Edited July 29, 2015 by Humbugged

[selkie]

Okay, there is the 'sticky bottle' when a dropped rider is trying to get back into the peleton, and then there is Nibbles effectively super glueing himself to the team car in order to get a 50 mph tow.  He really shouldn't be surprised at a DQ from the Vuelta for something that blatant. 

 

http://as.com/videos/2015/08/23/portada/1440352301_273355.html

[Humbugged]

Okay, there is the 'sticky bottle' when a dropped rider is trying to get back into the peleton, and then there is Nibbles effectively super glueing himself to the team car in order to get a 50 mph tow.  He really shouldn't be surprised at a DQ from the Vuelta for something that blatant. 

 

http://as.com/videos/2015/08/23/portada/1440352301_273355.html

 It was so blatant is was incredible

 

He was in the Grupetta and the team car came up and suddenly he was gone

 

If you are going to get a tow (as does happen a lot as well as the drafting in among the cars) at least  try to be sneaky about it

[Humbugged]

Sagaaaaaaaaaan is World Champion.

 

He is clearly insane though .The descent was nuts,resting the elbows on the handle bars on the run in (the casual realization he still had a bottle on board and then tosses it into the crowd) and the fact he will not be managed after the finish - going back an getting the congrats from every rider coming in and tossing his gear into crowd (and refusing to let his girlfriend be hustled off by the marshals)

 

Great reaction as well to the Eritrean team from all the exiles living in the States .The reception Tek got after you would have thought he had won it

 

 

Good win for Lizzie Armitstead from just a few miles away from me in the Womens RR yesterday

[selkie]

Sagan's become my favorite of the current sprinters both for his free spirit and because, ulike a Cavendish, he doesn't need the perfect stage and the perfect lead out to do well. He's kind of at a fork in the road in terms of career- does he keep aiming for the kind of sprint jerseys he's done so well at hunting, or does he take a shot, try to drop a little weight and turn himself into a GC guy?

[selkie]

From the files of scandals that never seems to end, Operation Puerto is back in the Spanish court system

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/othersports/cycling/12092102/Blood-samples-in-a-Barcelona-freezer-could-spark-biggest-ever-doping-scandal-as-Operation-Puerto-resurfaces.html

[Sharpie66]

TdF preview is on NBCSports tonight!! 

[Sharpie66]

What I learned from the preview:

Talansky is the only big name who won't be there (he's concentrating on the Vuelta instead). 

Froome seems to be the favorite again this year, of course.

it was nice to see Daniel Teklehaimonot (sp?) featured!

Quintana was pinpointed as the number two to Froome, with Contador as the third of the big three.

Nibali is the #2 guy on Astana, which surprised me.

Already have next weekend's stages set up on my dvr! 

[Sharpie66]

Interesting opening weekend! Nice to see Mark Cavendish win two stages, with Peter Sagan winning his first yellow jersey in between. Too bad that Richie Porte had that flat tire at the end of yesterday's stage. But everyone else seems to be performing as expected. 

[Sharpie66]

Exciting stage today as they reach the Pyrenees! Steve Cummings gets the stage win after being rejected for Rio by the British cycling selection committee, which he has accused of favoring the members of Team Sky (and Team Dimension Data gets its fourth stage win). Greg Avermaent (sp?) gains minutes for his yellow jersey lead. And, most strangely of all, the 1-km inflatable sign comes crashing down on Adam Yates, blocking the road entirely for the majority of the peleton. 

[selkie]

This is a fun Tour this year, and I'm not just saying that because I'm a Dimension Data fan. This time last year, a couple of major contenders for the GC got themselves caught up in a split peleton on a sprint finish on about day three and effectively took themselves out of contention before they got to the mountains. This year, the GC is far less predictable and I'm no idea who will be in yellow three days from now.

They've also managed to come up with exciting spring stage finishes that, for a change, also don't create those 25 rider collarbone-crunching crashes. Seven stages in, and there have been no abandons so far, not even from bad food poisoning from 'tainted meat' (Hola Alberto!) that seems to take out a few riders every grand tour.

[Sharpie66]

Yeah, the new professional broadcaster they have with Bobke and Christian is an obvious newbie to the sport, but he's picking up the lingo as he goes along. His favorite thing to point out is the "0 riders abandoned" factoid. 

[Sharpie66]

Turns out the 1-km sign came down because some fool in the crowd accidentally unplugged the generator! Poor Adam Yates went flying when it hit the ground just in front of him, and he ended up with stitches in his chin and a scraped-up thigh. They showed the barricades that they put around the generator today, but as Bob said, "A day late and several hundred thousand dollars short for Yates."

[Sharpie66]

As good as Froome is, I have never been a huge fan, since he has always been so strong a rider and he was never an underdog to me. But he really has made this year's race interesting with his new tactics! First, he faked out Quintana last week, and then yesterday, he joined Sagan on the attack and ended up in second place on a sprinter's stage! Very exciting. 

Too bad that the wind has cut today's short by 6 kilometers, but they showed how some riders were completely unable to cope with 60-70 mph winds at the summit yesterday.

[khyber]

Holy crap! That was something.

[selkie]

Definitely weird. You get a holiday crowd pushed into a smaller space than planned by the wind-shortened climb, and it's not surprising that The Incident that people talked about for years finally happened when the moto had to brake sharply to not hit a fan.

I think Froome was in one of those low blood sugar-poor judgement head states where he just kind of assumed a bike would magically appear in his hands as long as he did the proper Kenyan thing and kept running up the hill. (I do think he should have gotten a minute penalty for running without the bike after part 1 of the equalization was calculated but hey, he's a Sky rider and they're getting the Postal treatment this decade from race control)

[DrSpaceman73]

that was pretty funny.  Run, Froome, Run!!!

feel bad for him though.  I can imagine the outrage from fans in America if something like this happened and interfered with the outcome of a football or basketball game. 

[Cobb Salad]

I don't remember if the same thing happened last year or not, but boy has the coverage of the awards in Paris declined compared to years past.  It would have been nice to see Froome awarded the yellow jersey live as well as some of the other post race activities but you know commercials and pre NASCAR coverage are more important, right?  Maybe they'll show more during tonight's coverage?

[galaxygirl76]

Tom Dumoulin won as first Dutchman ever the Giro d'Italia. He follows in the footsteps of Jan Janssen(who won the Vuelta and the Tour in the '60's and Joop Zoetemelk(who won the Vuelta in '79 and the Tour in '80) as the third Dutch rider to win one of the big three.

[selkie]

Now someone just needs to peel the USA rights for the Giro away from BeIn so you don't have to either pay some sort of double subscription fee or find a wild feed live on You Tube next year to get coverage. 

[selkie]

Le Tour time! 

If Taylor Phinney wasn't going to manage to steal a stage today, I do have a soft spot for Marcel Kittel and his magic hair gel, and was touched by how much the stage win meant to him today.Taylor gets a nice consolation polka-dotted prize, which is pretty amazing considering the long road back after his utterly horrific leg injury. 

[Sharpie66]

Yeah, Taylor's story is really interesting, and I was rooting for him to make it to the end. But, getting caught out with 1.4 km to go was heartbreaking but not really unexpected. Looking forward to today's hills!

[Phebemarie]

That was a brutal crash.  Sagan kicked out of the Tour.  Cavendish probably out with multiple injuries.  

[selkie]

Not sure the punishment fits the alleged crime, especially when you back up and the whole chain of events seem to have been started by erratic movement by Demare, who seems to escape the disciplinary eye because he's a 'proper' Frenchman and all. Seems like the original proposed sanction of relegation to last place for the stage and loss of 80 green jersey points to Sagan was fair. 

[Phebemarie]

The sky-cam angle is probably the one that hurt Sagan the most.  It made it look like the elbow was on purpose.  The street angle wasn't as clear and made it seem more like Cavendish tried to squeeze into a spot that was too narrow.  Regardless, I thought I was seeing someone get their neck broken when the bike went over the fallen rider.  Horrible.  

[Mittengirl]

I thought right away that the elbow seemed to be thrown out on purpose.

Every time I see the riders get that close to the crowd, I flash back to the time a few years ago when that rider get his arm slashed open by somebody waving a cardboard sign.  That was a scary sight.

[Sharpie66]

As a Nairo fan, I am very bummed today. But, Froome is just too good, even without the rest of Team Sky around him. Good for Uran and Barguil--a photo finish on a mountain stage is really incredible. Those crashes were all really scary, especially Richie Porte and Dan Martin. 

[selkie]

There is something kind of funny watching GC guys try to slug it out to the line on a hill stage since they seem to be moving at about 0.6 speed that the sprinters would go. 

Not funny was the wet pavement splat fest that ended up being more dangerous than it should have been. I understand they wanted to mix it up with fewer summit finishes, but the summit finish is safer- too many tired bodies and minds not making good judgement because of a low blood sugar on  wet and technical descents at the end to try to grab a few seconds or places. 

[Crankybroad]

I am so sad about Porte and Thomas! Lost two of my favorites today. I think 12 riders abandoned or were dropped due to the time cutoff today. That's way too many for one stage. 

I'm happy Cannondale is having a great tour. 

I'm tired of Froome and Team Sky, so I'm pretty much overjoyed at anyone else's success. (Although I was thrilled for Geraint Thomas and his win and days in the yellow. He is the only one on Sky I pull for.) An entire tour of Sky in yellow is a bummer for me.

I miss Cavendish and Sagan. They are both exciting to watch. 

I'm a bit sad tomorrow is a rest day! But maybe I can get a few things done since I won't be glued to my tv for four hours!

[Sharpie66]

Cannondale is doing great this year! Did you see that Nate Brown was #9 yesterday?! Very cool.

[Crankybroad]

Yes! I'm thrilled for him and Cannondale! They seem to be enjoying themselves as well which I prefer to see vs. the teams I imagine all being miserable and mad at each other on the bus. I liked the personalities Cannondale brought to the race last year, but this team is performing so much better. I enjoyed Craddock last year but since he had that day where he came so close to being dropped, I really didn't expect to see him back this year. Nate Brown is having a great tour!

[selkie]

Not sure if you need to be on Facebook to see, but Quick Step's Jack Bauer also plays bass. 

 

[Sharpie66]

Surprised to see Froome crack, even if it was st the end! Still gave Aru enough for the yellow jersey. I was rooting for Cummings but wasn't surprised to see him caught with some time to go. That last mini ascent at 20 degrees was brutal.

[Sharpie66]

That was a seriously fun stage to watch! Short (-ish), exciting, and thrills galore. Gorgeous scenery, to boot.

Sad to see Fuglsang abandon, but he must have been in tremendous pain with two fractures. Loved seeing my fave Quintana in second and it was great having a Frenchman win on Bastille Day. Even enjoyed seeing Froome do all those attacks on the descent!! The peleton are going to have to isolate him more than that to gain more time on him. 

I don't expect Aru to keep the yellow without a more supportive team around him. Team Sky is just too strong to let him keep it for much longer.

[Crankybroad]

I would love to hear what's being said on the Sky bus.

Poor poor Jacob Fuglsang.

I'm glad Quintana is doing better. And Uran. Still bummed about Porte. 

These last two days have been incredibly exciting. 

[Sharpie66]

Good stage today! I had to laugh at the full moon on display on the big climb--wacky spectators (also loved the cop shoving one runner out of the way). 

Some great signs on the way. I thought the one thanking the camera people for their hard work and great shots was very thoughtful. And the hourglass made out of hay bales and moving sheep into the bottom half was really clever.