Deschanel2017

It's a good thing for future breakaway candidates that Evenepoel managed to limit the damage and stay on the podium, not giving up on GC 😅

Coquard made it in time! He managed to break one finger of his right hand, while catching a bag before mid-course... No idea how one can hold the bar in climbs, or brake in descent like that...

Lenny Martinez lost the mountain jersey because he didn't contest the uncontested 4^th^ category of the day... (the point was taken by his teammate so that no one else could get it, but the calculation was bad).

Could you rephrase, please? (Sorry, it's just that I don't quite get what you mean.)

After a bit of thinking, I reckon that it is more a case of having a grand maximum of 15 riders interested in GC and trying their best. So someone who isn't a strong rider but gives his best on a good day can relatively easily get in the top-20, sometimes top-15 when several GC riders are unwell and you had a little bit of advance thanks to a breakaway.

The same happened on the first Time Trial. There were like, what... only 20, 25 riders actually giving their best. Many openly declared it was a rest day for them...

It's starting to make me question what the point of a Grand Tour like the Tour of France is becoming, when we have a vast majority, perhaps up to 170 riders (!), which doesn't give a damn about making the best result.

It used to be that at least young riders / first-time participants would try to do their best at GC, but I am not sure that it is very common any more. Even the new guys seem to just do their semi-skilled worker task as assigned by the boss in order to get their big pay check, and no more (they might even get punished if they do more, in a few teams). When I hear more and more often from people who went to see the race on the roadside that "hey, it was cool to see XXX climbing this hard climb in wheelie, he looked fine" about riders who were dropped earlier in the race, I feel that the spirit of GTs has been turned into a joke. Until, say, 25 years ago (random number of years), the last riders really struggled, they certainly weren't going to do wheelies, they were dropped because they were weaker and exhausted. They we got the top-teams trains, with riders specialised into working hard for 20 mn and then relaxing until the finish line; and now it is general.

If it keeps deteriorating this way, some sort of a reform will become necessary. Starting with reducing delays. What does a GT mean, where is the endurance, where is the attrition, when a majority of riders only actively ride 40 km every 3^rd^ day and consider the rest as a... rest?

Beside the top 2 favourites, we've witnessed today many unexpected weaknesses by climbers as soon as the slopes of the first pass began. Many of them somewhat recovered later, but still...

edit: wait, wait, wait: how did Raul Garcia Pierna (🇪🇸 Arkéa) manage to end up in 12^th^ position (before G.Martin🇫🇷, Jorgenson🇺🇸 and various climbers, in a bad day or not)? 👀 This seems to mean that basically only 10 riders from the peloton climbed better than him! On the Tour of Occitanie with a much weaker startlist, he was leading the GC before the first mountain stage but finished that stage after 80 riders and half an hour behind the winner... Perhaps there is a mistake in PCS classification?

Hectic race from the start until the end. Raced like a classic from which you'd have cut the boring first 100 km! Very little actual flat, but a lot of false flats in a hilly landscape, even before they reached the steeper hills of Lauragais (the last 50 km).

Q. Simmons in the shape of his life again, but one more time a bit short in the end. He hasn't spared his efforts since the beginning of the tour: when he's not ahead, he's either trying to get ahead, or working for his team.

Astonishing performance from the winners who started soon after km 0 and resisted non-stop counter attacks all day!

(And disastrous TV direction again. Not sure if you get the same final cut on the international signal, but showing cycling really hurts the French TV director...)

Yep, it's an orgy of points compared to what was distributed so far.

• 5-3-2-1 for 2 each of the 7 2^nd^ category climbs!
• 2-1 for the 3^rd^ category

That's 5x7+2=37 points max. There were so few categorised climbs so far that it was impossible to score that many points along the first 9 stages even if one rider had won all GPMs, and the 'leader' of the ranking only has 8 points...

However, it may highly depends on the individual luck to get or not into the right breakaway.

It escapes me too.

On forums I read, there are always people defending them (there is even one guy asking for more!). The reasoning is particularly shallow, it always boils down to "there has to be stages for sprinters". Myself, I don't call this an argument, I call it a postulate.

This year, I haven't heard the argument that I used to hear: that these stages were 'transition' stages, connecting dots on the map to 'advance' on the global course of the tour without huge bus transfers. It was untrue 3 out of 4 times. Firstly, they often loop around, or go backwards, and do not participate to a logical geographical progression. Secondly, tours are not tours any more, they don't circle around a country or region, they are big spaghetti messes trying to build something out of a reduced list of towns who can pay the required bill, so the notion of progression is rather moot.

If we look at the general map, the stages of today and tomorrow can be seen as transition stages. But that's only because they insisted on going into Brittany for a single stage, and then in the Massif Central for a single stage too; while they spent the first 3 days in the North without progressing by an inch (despite 2 sprinters stages out of those first 3 stages: those were definitely not transition stages). Between Brittany and Massif Central, the landscape is pretty flat; however you could find a few hills and a few valley slopes if you wanted.

Keeping Brittany and Massif Central, they could have done only 1 stage in the North, then the rest of the stages would have been two days earlier (meaning those 2 flat stages would not have happened during week-end), and then added 1 or 2 hilly or medium-altitude mountain stages in the Massif Central before the rest day.

More radically, they could have put the rest day on Friday or Saturday and removed those 2 flat transition stages altogether, restarting a new sequence from the Massif Central, and eventually adding a sprinter stage at the end of this sequence after the Pyrenees, when sprinters teams are cooked and there can be a fight between breakaways and sprinters teams. It would have been OK with UCI rules (first rest day must be later than 5^th^ day) and better balanced than as it is now with 10 days in the first sequence and only 5 in the second!

It make me think of Pacher (FDJ) who pulled the head group before the climb. What was the goal? Did he believe a fast approach would help Grégoire compared to the other guys? Why would it help him?

The actual result is that it enlarged the gap with his leader G. Martin who has crashed... And Grégoire cracked in the climb.

So I imagine, it was simply a case of "Damn, I am in a reduced head group with most favourites, I won't be able to do anything in the climb, so it is my last chance to act". Even if the action makes no sense, he showed he worked. That's my theory for this case 😀

That's possible. Attacking his opponents on the terrain most suitable for them would be another misjudgement of his capacities and the capacities of his opponents, but anyway both our theories imply a misjudgement 😀

Yeah, we usually don't get the sound, so it had a greater impression of reality this time. Pure sound of bikes crashing (and no holler at all). The Jayco guy at the back crashed without being touched by anyone, just thanks to his disc brakes.

I don't understand what Evenepoel expected to do. He had managed to reach the flamme rouge ahead, by pacing the group on his own terms. This was a tipping point with the slope getting easier after that, so I thought he would attack there as this the exact type of effort where he shines usually when others need a bit of rest. But no, he waited for the sprint. Is this another case of him falsely believing he's got a sprint? I thought he would finally have understood he hasn't any.

At the intermediate sprint, Q. Simmons had to wait before the line because he finally noticed that he had significantly dropped all the sprinters whom he was supposed to pull 🤣 He really is in a brilliant form.

Beware: today, the race starts and finishes earlier than on the previous days.