Saturday 19: 12:00–12:15 → 17:05–17:45
The second and last mountain stage in the Pyrénées. A flat start, and then a hell of 4 passes in a row with little (false) flat in between, starting with the Tourmalet and including climbing Peyresourde again from the same side (not sure Evenepoel will fancy coming back on this slope!).
Weather shall be significantly cooler than on the previous days, and it should be drizzling.
Beware: the stage starts earlier than usual (still not in the morning, though).
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Watching Arensman in the lead, but I can’t stop focusing on how bad Ineos’s kit looks this year. They need to fire their designer. It looks like their mom hand cut out that total energies logo and did a bad iron on transfer to their shorts.
It is strange that they didn’t connect the back and front stripes.
Jorgenson (Visma), 10th in GC this morning, 9th after Evenepoel’s withdrawal,who never finished better than 8th in a Grand Tour, opting for dropping in order to voluntarily lose time, seems to support my theory of yesterday: there are less and less riders interested in giving their best for the original goal of a Grand Tour, to such extent that it is getting more and more ridiculous.
Remco still complaining about cameras filming him on a bad day. Will he ever learn?
And he abandons, along with Skeljmose! Very dramatic opening to this stage.
Pyrénées are Evenepoel’s kryptonite.
Cras and Evenepoel out, sitting in a car.
Skjelmose out, riding into a traffic sign.
Will Schmidt make it? He was struggling to keep wheels on the flat.
What happened to Cras?
I don’t know but he was unwell yesterday already.
Great stage, what a finish!
It’s going to be quite funny watching the sprinters go for that intermediate but then immediately have to tackle the Tourmalet. I wonder if they’ll try to get up the road in a break before the sprint, so they have a buffer on the first climb and can take it a bit easier.
I suppose so. The way I see it, there should be a large and long breakaway today, so anyway sprinters wishing to score points would need to get into the breakaway (and with the long flat start, they have it comparatively easy).
GG gaps are such that even guys ranked 10th in the general classification (14 minutes behind) might already be allowed to join the breakaway and win the stage. 12th is 20 minutes behind. Even Johannessen, ranked 8th is more than 10 minutes behind the leader (but only 3 minutes behind the podium, though).
I suppose so. The way I see it, there should be a large and long breakaway today, so anyway sprinters wishing to score points would need to get into the breakaway (and with the long flat start, they have it comparatively easy).
Well, we already got the first part wrong 😂
No one managed to break away on the flat. They were a number of attempts, but almost everyone seemed powerless compared to the previous breakaway days.
Well, we already got the first part wrong 😂
Well to be fair to us, Milan did try!
Yes, he tried, but nobody joined him when he was waiting for more riders. Nevertheless, the consequences of no early breakaway were: 1. no gap for the breakaway before the Tourmalet, 2. a different composition of the breakaway, only climbers.
Point #2 should have been an advantage for the breakaway, but there again, everyone in the breakaway seemed a bit powerless, a bit sleepy. Except for L. Martinez, nobody made a great impression in the first climb(s) like it is sometimes the case before failing in the end (and that was the expected fate for Martinez given his previous stages). Arensman played his card later, others just had no card to play (Johannessen tried, though).
Looking at the conditions so far, I think your prediction of a breakaway win has more going for it. UAE might not consider another stage win as worth the risk on these downhill sections, it looks quite dangerous out there.
L. Martinez did a peculiarly bad descent of the Tourmalet, staying too upright on his bike for his own good (and for the good of his trajectories). Hard to say from TV cameras whether the fog played a role in that.
Unless Pogacar and/or his teammates are super tired and need a break, I don’t think they’ll let someone else win this stage. Pogacar wants to win almost every single race he’s in and he easily has the capability to do it on this kind of stage. The sponsors and his team directors will expect it, too.
I don’t think so, but we shall see in a few hours 😀
For the sake of variety, I hope you’re right!
After the stage, I still don’t know who was right and who was wrong 🤷♂️ 😉
I mean, Pogatchar didn’t win but UAE led the peloton and never let the gap get over 4 mn. And they led it fast enough in the last climb. But not so much before that climb, losing downhill what they had gained uphill.
Pogatchar probably could have caught up Arensman (not easily though) but he did not nothing but follow in the last climb.
It looked like the goal was to bring back Johannessen and such (showing than no one in the top-10 was allowed to get away), but not necessarily to win the stage unless it fell naturally into their hand.
Some say that UAE wanted to catch the breakaway along as it contained Visma riders, and that this would have been motivated by the team classification.
Dunno.
