Let’s face it, for as good as the tour was for the first 2.5 weeks, the ending was a major bore!!
Think of how exciting it was to watch Thomas drops Froome off his wheel last year and ride away from him. We didn’t get any drama, everyone knew JA wouldn’t be able to hang and it was only a matter of time.
Booooooorrrrrrriiiiiiiiinnnnnnggggggg
This is like winning the Super Bowl 3-0. Seriously, what a sleeper.
job jobbed
It would have been better if Nabali was caught with 5ks to go our something like that.
And just like that the tour is a real snoregasm again. I did Kawaeh while watching and nothing happened to motivate me like many of the other thrilling stages had. No attacking from JV or BH. At least Yates tried again. He was another great animator this year. Still reeling about Pinot. He deserved better.
I was happy for the stage winner today though and was rooting for him at the end as it looked like he might get caught for a quick second.
19 days of incredible racing in one of the most exciting tours in recent memory and folks are calling it a snoozefest because there wasn’t some dramatic last minute shake up on the last shortened stage?
Tough crowd
Think it was more the sort of anticlimax after 19 days of good racing. The way they designed the stages, and then especially with the landslides and shortened stages, everything that happend over those 19 days became insignificant as one of the best climbers took off up the hill. Well done to Bernal though, hope he keeps it up over the next years.
It’s the TdF. It’s a climbers race. There are going to be a couple of HC finishes in there and they are going to be pretty decisive.
The entire GC contest was packed into the last three mountain stages, and then two of them didn’t happen. The overall winner turned out to be the guy who happened to be up the road when they stopped a stage. Hard not to be disappointed that we didn’t get to see them race it out after three weeks of waiting.
Exactly, we were set up for some great days and got robbed.
Bernal likely wins anyway, but doesn’t have to work hard for it.
This!
This photo of Alaphillipe is incredible: Blood, rain and cheers: Tour de France 2019 – in pictures | Tour de France 2019 | The Guardian
Hope he doesn’t lose his ambitions for the Classics because of his spell in yellow.
I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, but what do y’all think of his (JA) riding style? Not the aggressive nature … that’s all good. But could he possibly be more efficient if he wasn’t swaying side-to-side so much?
Maybe it’s due to the flappy disc wheels.
Or maybe because he’s not a natural born mountain goat.
Or maybe it’s because he was exhausted AF going up that final climb.
Anybody want to take bets ASO tweaking he 2020 route so it has fewer big mountain days, and more mid mountain days to favor a rider like Alaphilippe?
The tour has always been about the big climbs in the alps. Changing it to not have any HC finishes would be pretty sad. Moving them to the start would ruin the tour for a ton of sprinters.
JA was fine in the short climbs, he just couldn’t handle the length of the climbs in the Alps (and I use handle very loosely, he only lost 4 minutes.)
Here is some footage of the mudslides… The camera crew in the foreground is a Norwegian crew if I am not mistaken.
The Girlfriend is watching the tour with me. She’s caught a few stages and is learning. I was telling her the sprinters race for the stage win as its prestigious to win in Paris. She goes “is there a ‘king of the flat road’ jersey, like the King of the mountains?” 
