Simon’s plan wasn’t GC going into this. It was stage hunting and Olympic prep.
Edit: read my above statement before the Tour started and just looked for more out of curiosity. Their team wasn’t going for GC from the start, just stages with those two and Matthews. Maybe it’ll shake out different after a week.
Alaphilippe was so out of position on the circuit after the first time up. Not sure if it was the legs or that he was just not willing to fight for position or what. When MvDP went on the last time up the climb, he was totally boxed in in the peloton and unable to respond even if he wanted to.
LOL…it is 2 stages out of 21. There are no “trends” yet. Sure, some guys have not shown great form and lost a handful of seconds, but there is a big difference between finishing hills measured in seconds and the high mountains where the difference is in minutes.
I wonder if the organizers realize that this sort of parcours is vastly more exciting than a short TT or flat stage to open the Tour?
Ignoring yesterdays mess, I’ll put in my vote for multiple classics stages to start every year.
I didn’t realize MVDP was going for bonus seconds on his first attack. I thought he’d lost his mind. I was convinced he’d blown his chance in yellow. Boy, was I wrong.
What an effort, what a story.
The young man is a breath of fresh air in modern cycling. I say this because it spans virtually all the disciplines. Each discipline of cycling media covers MVDP. None of them quite realizing how incredible his results are, combined.
The crazy bit, he could win Gold in MTB in Japan (That’ll be a tall order against Pidcock) and there’s a real chance he wins the Road World Championship later this year. If he takes the MTB World Championship too, he’d be the only male athlete to take the triple crown in a single year…
Ineos as a team look fine, plenty of numbers on the front for most of the closing kms yesterday. They did their job which was keeping their leaders out of trouble after the chaos of stage 1. They had a bad day 1 with both TGH and Porte losing time, but were far from the only ones and it was more bad luck than anything else.
The question of course is whether either Carapaz or Thomas can compete with Rog and Pog on the big climbing days. But we knew that was a big question before the race started and I’m not sure results on punchy short climbs really does much to answer that question either way. We’ll get a better view of G’s form in the TT.
Don’t think we can say much of G these past two days. The new generation is much better at these punchy climbs so I guess G will find it easier in the high mountains compared to this.
But I don’t think G will be able to outclimb roglic or pogacar by any means. Might be on the podium though if there are no other surprises but Carapaz could be interesting, too bad for his TT.
It is a miracle he won in 2018 (and came 2nd in 2019) with the rate at which he has mishaps in GT’s.
Ineos is out now for the overall….there only hop was to fire their 4 co- leaders up the road in a series of attacks and hope to cause guys to crack. They are down to Carapaz as the only threat at this point.
And with van Baarle and Rowe going back for Thomas, their other guys are left to largely fend for themselves, so sacrifices would need to be made is someone has an issue.
