Even if he were doping, and sincerely hope his is not, tactically he rode well, conserved energy when possible, attacked when he could make time, limited his losses when he was behind, descended really well, avoided crashes and also had the best W/kg in the tour.
Jumbo Visma should have shut him down, and tried to break him. Roglic says on his interviews that he was riding his own race, and wasn’t concerned with how others were racing. Perhaps thats just what he says in interviews, but 100% Sky would have done an assessment on the strengths and weaknesses of all the other podium contenders (if any) and ridden accordingly.
With Roglic historically doing a more subdued time trial at the end of grand tours compared to his fresher ability (2017 Tour, 2018 Tour, 2019 Giro, 2020 Tour), they’re going to need to be more aggressive in future if they want to win with team strength.
Well 100m sprints are pretty short, but theres been a crazy amount of doping there…
The tour was physically harder on heavy steel fixed gear bikes and wooden rims back in 1904, and they were making it through glugging bottles of wine and chugging amphetamines and other drugs.
Even riders being disqualified for taking a train…
Also signed Dani Martinez, Laurens De Plus and Tom Pidcock (along with the already announced Adam Yates). Plus have 2 of the favourites for today’s World Champs TT in Ganna and Dennis.
Reasonable to assume they’ll be gunning pretty hard to get that yellow jersey back next year!
He has been riding competitively for more than half his life, here he is winning a GP in Slovenia in 2011. So he has been at this throughout puberty into adulthood. I don’t know how many years it would take to develop, but he has been riding longer than Roglic and if he started when he was 8 or 9 as I read somewhere that means he’s been riding as long as Porte. I have no clue if he is clean or not, but he has been around for a while.
I’m not so sure he did. That was my first thought when I saw he was ~30 seconds behind Dumoulin and WVA. But then you factor in that it was a mountain TT. And that Roglic was in yellow whereas Dumoulin and WVA had been on domestique duties for 3 weeks. I think in that context it’s pretty disappointing. As a previous worlds silver medallist in the TT and the guy who had looked like the best climber in the race up until that point, I think a “good TT” would have had him finish at least on par with Dumoulin and WVA, probably a bit ahead.
He was considered a strong favourite to win the TT, so anything short of winning is a disappointing performance if you frame it that way. Clearly it wasn’t enough to win yellow.
Pogacar was slightly gone under the radar compared to Bernal and the Ineos youngers like Sivakov and Sosa, and Evenepoel.
He also won the Tour de L’Avenir, a strong predictor of future success, the 2019 Tour of California, 2019 Volta ao Algarve, 3rd at the Vuelta with 3 stage wins.
Also he was 2018 Slovenian cyclocross champion, where being good at cyclocross seems to be where most of the new super riders are coming from…
Just a reminder that TD has as many GC wins as Roglic and is also a former TT world champ.
And to go back to 2017 when TD won the TT WC, he beat Poglic into 2nd by just under a minute over a similar distance and both fairly unforgiving courses if memory serves right.
And just watch WVA go in the WC this week (he’ll probably flop now haha).
I’d say Roglic (although he looked to be suffering) rode a pretty good TT.
There’s been quite a bit of talk about Pog as a future GT champion in the last 12 months or so. Think nobody expected him to do it this young, or while on a team that had so little ability to support him. Especially given the dominance of Sky/Ineos over the last decade when it seemed the formula for winning the Tour was bringing a dominant train.
Did also hear an interesting perspective which is that his time loss in the first week may have actually been what enabled him to win! Since without that he could well have been in yellow earlier, and Team UAE didn’t have the firepower to defend yellow and control the peloton.
Sorry replied to the wrong comment, the reply buttons are not so obviously placed!
Was replying to this and how doping is prevalent in sports that aren’t so endurance focused.
Until proven otherwise I will be more than happy with Pogacars win. One thing that I sometimes think though is that maybe the TDF is just to hard. If these pro riders need to consider drugs to win such a tough event, is the event itself beyond what a human should do.
Are they doing to win or all doping just to be able to complete such and extreme event.
Of course, this means next to nothing, but my son is 9 and learned to ride his bike in March (he never really took to balance bikes or training wheels so he was starting from zero). My rides around our neighborhood had me averaging 35w at first, and now I’m averaging in the 80w range. So if we extrapolate 50w over 6 months, I think he’ll be at 400w at 12y/o lol
Seriously though, it would be super interesting to see the growth trajectories in kids, I’m sure it varies as far as some show early growth, others may be late bloomers, etc. It would be super neat if my son were averaging 14mph by spring time, although if he keeps it up my recovery rides are going to turn into endurance rides lol
my humor meter is broken this morning apparently! But just to build on my point, I’m 40 and am in pretty decent shape (4.1 w/kg at the moment, nothing special over threshold or anything), and didn’t start cycling seriously until the age of 33 (late 33/early 34). I had a bike when I was younger, but when my bike got stolen was I was 13 I didn’t get another bike until I was 21 with my own money, but even then it was a crappy MTB that I didn’t ride at all until I was 33. If my son is similar to me, which I’d assume he is in some capacity lol, and would keep up bike riding in a way I didn’t, I do wonder what he could reach and maybe what I could have done had I had the foresight to keep doing bikes.
Turns out that assumption might not be on target according to this article:
“Mitochondrial DNA is of particular interest, because it contains the genes for several enzymes involved in oxygen consumption, and it is inherited only from the mother.”
So I hope you had her VO2max checked before you got serious!
