The professional cycling thread

Odds on Pogacar making it a clean sweep of the 3 grand tours this year given his form and the incident the other week taking out some big names? He's already said he'd do the Giro, and if he won both, Im sure he'd have a pop at the Vuelta...

A French speaking friend who I watch Roubaix with most years told me that the day after plenty of French Facebook cycling groups were grumbling about VdP having a motor!

To be fair, Cancellara and Boonen both made it look easy the years they similarly jetted off the front to win solo.

To be fair the same was said about Cancellara back in the day

100% - I remember there being videos of Cancellara

Stevie Williams, first British male winner of the Fleche Wallonne. Brilliant effort!

https://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/stevie-williams...

Pogacar is still human, physiologically there are plenty of riders with similar FTP/kg, where he's a little unusual is that he's good at pretty much everything.

Again that's a factor of people being able to train like a pro with diet, monitors and power pretty much as soon as they've finished their growth spurt.

When riders were first getting into scientific training (and no that's not a euphemism for drugs) with power and monitoring they started applying it to specialisation and as a result we ended up with specialists being unbeatable by generalists in their domain. Gradually I suspect that they are working out that with the exception of the most specialised sprinters the physiology is pretty similar for most efforts and that you don't really loose anything by training for everything.

The second bit of it is that better bikes and wide tyres mean that the skill of riding cobbles is reduced so that again the rider with the best FTP/kg frequently wins.

Finally as the levels and professionalism in the pro peleton equalises all races and race stages are hard, the basic minimum wage domestique has an ftp/kg of about 6w/kg and thus you rarely end up with isolated team leaders. They normally go head to head and the best rider wins. Furthermore with scientific race schedules those best riders will then be pretty consistently good so they end up with incredible win/loss ratios.

I’m watching but I don’t feel like there’s an awful lot of jeopardy in the result. Watching UAE ripping the peloton to pieces yesterday and dropping the likes of Bardet was rather ominous.

ITT on friday, then mountain stage saturday.

pog is on another level

I turned over from Toulouse v Quinns at half time and slotted nicely into the last 10km of stage 2.
Avg 24kph @ 7% incline then Pog hit the burners on 11% incline. Went upto 27kph. BoC tried to stick with him but paid a price losing 1min in the end. G was easily best of the rest but played safe and secure. I’m presuming the game plan there is stay in the game, be best of the rest and pick up any mishap from Pog for the win.
Discounting Pog though, I’d say G is in some fair shape as I think he could have ridden away and “gapped” the rest of the lead group over that last 5km if he pushed. Not bad for the old man!

Downhill at Fort Bill anybody.........Elite wins for 'Super' Bruni & Vali Holl......