How about Cav finishing off with a 4th win! Wonder how he’ll do against a more stacked field. Surely DQS will take Bennett to the Tour over Cav, but I wonder if he can’t get a couple of other higher profile wins this year.
Cav is just the tallest short person…4 wins in a week is impressive, no doubt but he isn’t getting a slot in July (and maybe any GT).
But it will no doubt do his head good.
So it looks like La Flèche Wallonne will start without defending champ Marc Hirschi because of a positive covid test in the team (a false positive according to teammate Tadej Pogacar).
Hirschi doesn’t appear to be in good form anyway but what will Pogacars absence mean to the race? My favourites are Roglic and Pidcock, both seems strong. Alaphilippe seems to be missing that little extra right now and Valverde is good I guess but can he match (and/or) exceed Roglic and Pidcock? Who else could we expect to be up there?
This whole thing is interesting, because there were 3 false negatives, but still weren’t allowed to race (according to Pog on Insta). The team has also been vaccinated, although I think Sinovac, which is not the best one.
Alaphilippe pointing his finger at everyone who doubted him. 
Yeah good to see Alaphillipe win. Was a double world-champ win today. Fleche Wallone is such a special race. It´s one of the few with really consistent winners. Alapillipe won it 3 out of the last 4 times. Before that Valverde won it 4 times in a row, and today Anna van der Breggen won it for the 7th (!) time in a row. So impressive.
A fantastic mountain stage in La Vuelta a Colombia, almost 5000m and 140km.
Wooohhooo. Finally Demi Vollering got her big Victory!
Nice win by Pog today…he played it perfectly. Perhaps more importantly, UAE showed strength as a team. That will be a critical element if he is to repeat his win in the Tour.
Kinda wanted to see Allaphillipe get the win…but he has been just that little bit off so far this year (Flèche not withstanding…but it is shorter than Liege)
Carapaz DQ’d for super tuck position. Imagine the schittshow if his move had stuck.
Well it was bound to happen. Gonna be interesting at the Grand Tours. A DQ there would be a lot more consequential. If I can count correctly, there have been only two DQs so far, for the banned positions?! Most riders seem to not have a problem, sticking to the rules.
It was a headwind finish. The last rider often wins a small bunch sprint in a headwind.
It’s staggering to me that seasoned riders don’t adjust for it. Only Alaphilippe and Pogacar were aware of this and executed it correctly.
Many greatly underestimate the power savings. At full finish sprint speed, drafting a single rider can save 500+ watts. Particularly in headwinds. Even very minor headwinds.
In a headwind you want to be EXTRA patient, resist jumping early, just draft each rider as they die a slow death into the wind. Only pulling out approx 50m from the line. Even less into a strong headwind.
If you want to win races, perfecting your sprint timing is as important as any fitness metric yet invented. Yet many, have never practiced it a single time. Even professionals regularly get it wildly wrong.
For grand tours, it is a time penalty, IIRC, not a DQ. I think it is 20 secs?
I don’t think pros are unaware of this, and certainly most or all of them will have plenty of experience in both training and racing of sprinting into a headwind. So when they get it wrong I think it’s simply an example of how hard it is to execute optimally at the end of a long, hard race when your legs and brain are tired. They may simply make a mistake in judging where the wind is coming from or how hard it’s blowing (easy to get it wrong when you’re behind a wheel). Or maybe they misjudge the state of their own legs compared to their competitors. Or maybe they judge everything perfectly, but for that particular rider against that particular field then going early may still offer the best chance of winning even it’s a slim chance. E.g. a rider who doesn’t have much of a kick but can wind up to a high speed and hold it (Kristoff?) might always be better served by going early and hoping for the others to hesitate for a fraction of a second and give him a gap, than leaving it to the last 50m.
Of the 5 who contested yesterday’s finish I would say Valverde was really the only one who made a mistake, and that was finding himself on the front coming into the finish. At that point he didn’t have much choice but to try and lead it out, even if it was always likely to be doomed. And Valverde is one of the most experienced and canny riders in the podium, he would certainly have been fully aware of how bad his position was! I’m not sure Gaudu or Woods ever really had a shot of outsprinting the other 3, it wasn’t a case of them going too early as looking like they simply didn’t have the legs to go at all. Woods probably gave himself the best chance he could by making that big attack to force the final selection, he guaranteed himself a top 5 finish by doing so but was never likely to be able to win a sprint against that company.
I don´t want to be mean, but crashing 10 m before the line must be the most G thing ever.
Did wonder if it was cold hands or if he had problems shifting towards the end … he seemed to be fiddling with his right shifter more than Woods. Should make for a good TT tomorrow though … money still on G for the overall.
Yea might be. It looked like he just slipped off the hood with one hand, while attempting to sprint. They can get quite slippery in the wet 
First Grand Tour of the year about to kick off! Who´s just as excited as me and what are your predictions? Does Nibali have a chance? Is Simon Yates gonna get his redemption? Is Bernal back to his prodigy form and gonna wipe the floor with the field? Or Evenepoel?
Can´t wait lol.