Thought on Yates comments about his poor tt ride about he is de training sitting in the bunch. True/false poor planning or other.
Link:
“Maybe I had to detrain myself in these eight days [before the Giro] and I’m actually not going good anymore. But we’ll see how we go when we get there [to the mountains].”
It’s been 7 days and it’s not like he has been resting that whole time.
Also nothing stops him from hitting the trainer afterwards for an hour hard session or pulling in the front for more work.
Some people just can’t look in the mirror and say I had a bad day.
just looking at the total time for general classification After stage 7 total time was 29hr:29min:34secs. If you add 30min warm/ cool down per stage plus neural start.
The point about de-training is that you are sitting in the bunch at a low power and not getting in the efforts you need. It is not about hours but intensity.
If you read the Bradley Wiggins bio he talks about dropping out of Grand Tour and races where you would be pootling along, and instead being at home, doing a proper structured and hard training ride. His argument being that it is better to do quality training, than these races where he would not do efforts appropriate to his A races.
Now whether this is what has happened with Simon Yates… that is a different question.
Is this a example of polarised training and why it doesn’t work for everyone (maybe). Long slow efforts on road stages and short intense efforts in the TT.
I understand it might not be the best training but could you get significantly slower at those volumes. Regardless at the effort level. It’s only 1 week.
As talented a rider he is, I do feel that his attitude and public persona isn’t particularly charismatic. Sounds like excuses to me. He’d earn more plaudits by being gracious and admit he doesn’t have the legs.
I doubt that detraining was his problem. Unless his physiology is unique among all the other GC contenders that also sat in for those 8 days.
He was being interviewed. Had to come up with something!
As a fan, I’m a little excited to see Yates lose a gob of time during that stage! It probably means he’s going to be aggressive in one (or some!) of the upcoming mountain stages. There will be mountain stages in the Giro this year, won’t there?
Simon is FUN TO WATCH when he is being aggressive. Meanwhile, Roglic lost his best mountain domestique. Now, Kuss and Tolhoek are capable climbers, to be sure, but not the calibre & experience of DePlus. There is some Yellow Lotto vulnerability…lots of interesting racing to come!
By the way, did you know that Roglic used to be a ski jumper?
" Born in Trbovlje, Roglič is a former ski jumper who competed from 2003 to 2011, and was the Junior World Ski Jumping champion in 2007. He set his personal best at 183 metres (600 feet) at Heini-Klopfer-Skiflugschanze flying hill in Oberstdorf, Germany in 2011. He suffered a crash in front of his home crowd in 2007 at the Letalnica bratov Gorišek ski flying hill in Planica], Slovenia."
Perhaps it’s just me, but I didn’t really see anything wrong with what he was saying and he has a legitimate point.
He tapered hard coming into the Giro
Prologue was hard
He sat in the peloton for a week
When he got to the TT, he had dead legs
If he did one legitimately hard effort in two weeks leading up to the TT, then it completely makes sense why his performance would be this way. Who here hasn’t felt flat after two weeks of easy riding?
Yates isn’t a guy that is going to be allowed by the peloton to get into breakaways, and its a 3 week tour, so his team isn’t going to let him sit on the front or do work, so there isn’t a whole lot he can do. Literally he will get chased back every time and it’s not like he is a bigger guy who can motor along for hours on the flats.
His pre-Giro comments were stupid, but this frankly just seems like a normal straight forward interview.
Or maybe the alternative…
He trained very hard for the Giro after last year, giving him the confidence of saying people should be scared. Aaaand, he overtrained, had his best moments in training and after taper, his legs aren’t there, and he is flat.
Haven’t we all done such things?
He won’t be allowed in a breakaway, and his team prob won’t let him pull. But he can always jump on the trainer for an hour of sweet spot session after stages.