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Cross season is going to kill me. e) also cmon there's still Lombardia. Road season isn't dead yet!!
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# ¿ Feb 13, 2025 05:23 |
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please change thread to the DRUGS tag, mods e) also i can do a basic overview of the road season if anyone wants that, as if any newbies are going to get into road cycling in the year 2020
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I knew Worlds was a tough race but the post-race picture of Alaphillippe was ![]() ![]() poor guy looks like he's just come back from a war
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Smirr posted:I just watched the final 15 km and lmao at the whole thing. There's literally no indication as to which way to go on a roundabout and everyone follows the camera bike, which goes the path of least resistance and pulls out of the race about a minute after that, and everyone's like "WELP" it kicked rear end, watching the riders from the helicopter shot, and suddenly seeing a suspicious number of parked cars on the road until the riders were like "hey wait a minute"
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omloop when
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I don't see them returning to Alp d'Huez for a while after last time
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I think he's too big for it, but I'll be so mad if Simmons decides to do the stereotypical American thing and inadvisably try to become a GC rider.
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I'm really glad the Giro are keeping the "gently caress you, 200km+ mountain stage" ethos of cycling alive, keep getting scared that everything will be 85km stages in Andorra in the future. Can't wait for May. I feel weird being excited about cycling again but apart from the weather-affected last week of the Tour I've enjoyed all of it this year, more than any other year since the first year that Sky Bullshit started. Don't want to give the UCI credit for anything but the team reduction and (probably more relevant) Tramadol ban, and better tests for AICAR seem to have helped, it was striking how the Sky train wasn't really able to get fully established at all this year (they won, but Bernal seems like a legitimate ridiculous talent), and good lord did their previously invincible domestiques suck rear end in and out of the tour. e) I reckon that Tom D with a stupid strong-looking Jumbo/Visma will crush the Giro, though. If he enters. Feels Villeneuve fucked around with this message at 15:07 on Oct 28, 2019 |
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it's probably because the sport is an impossible-to-completely-follow mess of competing rights holders, and also the residual effects of doping, and that it's a weird, notoriously beginner-unfriendly sport, not because "stages too long" (nobody is forcing you to watch the first 100k of the Ronde or the World Championships if you don't want to, you know, and it's only been recently that ASO have insisted on broadcasting every stage flag-to-flag anyway)
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didn't one of the recent Vueltas inexplicably end with like a 8km ITT
Feels Villeneuve fucked around with this message at 21:22 on Oct 28, 2019 |
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also re: the short mountain stages= best thing, can't help but remember that the two best stages of last year's tour, Saint-Etienne and Foix Prat d'Albis were over 180k, the short Tourmalet stage was more or less raced tempo up to the last 500m, and the shortened Val Thorens stage was awful e) poo poo, even the Vuelta this year, the last two mountain stages were both won by really cool long range attacks, and they were 177 and 190k respectively. the two 150k mountain stages in the middle of the race were comparatively dull (Santuario del Acebo was raced so easily that sprinters were still in the peloton leading up to the last climb) Feels Villeneuve fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Oct 28, 2019 |
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That's just a teaser for the weird prose on the RCS graphics where they try to explain which each town the race passes is famous for
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You need roleur stages so a team can't just stack their squad full of fresh climbing superdomestiques, ie Sky For the same reason I don't think keeping everyone fresh is necessarily a good thing, the best climbing stages in the Vuelta this year were 18\20
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The Vuelta route seems bad. I don't mind them trying to attract top sprinters with quite a few flat stages (given the Olympics being more or less a GC rider's competition and how hard the Tour is), but Tourmalet in yet another mini stage, after the really boring one in the Tour? One of the best stages for a long range attack coming right before the Angrilu stage? The longest mountain stage being 175km?
Feels Villeneuve fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Dec 19, 2019 |
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Worlds though...
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Riis is probably a level beyond Armstrong since he apparently* encouraged his riders to dope as a DS at CSC *depending on how reliable you find Tyler Hamilton's autobiography
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he's either the next Merckx or the next VDB
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who cares about grand tours when omloop is a week away
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I will be very angry if I die from the coronavirus or if the Giro gets canceled.
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the fail rear end stage race riders can stay in the UAE forever because it's omloop time ![]()
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it's not real until someone literally gets blown off the road
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Thinking the peloton might have been a little tired after 150k of crosswinds and no break
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Belgium build the wall
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Never mind, cases reported in Wevelgem. We're going to lose all of Classics seasons and the Giro, aren't we
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it's probably fine, the riskiest patients are the elderly and immunocomprimised, so we should just lose Valverde and Thibault Pinot
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speaking of dropped, looks like no Volta a Catalunya, Brugge-De Panne, E3 or Gent-Wevelgem at this point I'd be shocked if the Ronde happened, let alone the Giro.
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on the bright side I think Paris-Nice is like literally the only sporting event running right now
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paddyboat posted:been watching a few old races on the weekend they were supposed to run. it whips rear end that everyone was fine with 42/21 being the lowest gear on a bicycle for like decades
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I don't think it's *that* much slower than nowadays, it's not like running 53/11 on a high end 80s steel/alloy/composite frame is going to be like a cargo bike, the bigger difference is the lack of modern lower-range gearing meaning you don't see the high cadence grinding up walls you see more of nowadays things get significantly faster around the 1991 mark for Some Reason I usually take the "everyone was on some poo poo" view and my hatred for Big Tex is more for him using political influence like a psycho, but the early EPO years where a few teams were ahead of the rest and suddenly Gewiss is the greatest team in the world and Berzin is the next Merckx are legitimately sketchy. I think by '96 or so things were kind of even, though. E) obligatory video of the infamous 1994 La Fleche Wallonne where a rocket fueled Gewiss team rode away from everyone else, featuring a clueless Phil Ligget https://youtu.be/vsgpMoo7fr0 Pitor Urgamov's hemocrit was recorded as jumping from 32 to 61 within a year. Lmao. Feels Villeneuve fucked around with this message at 15:05 on Apr 6, 2020 |
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incidentally i love the late 90s (VDB-era) classics because it's where you get by far the coolest mix of tech in the peloton with some teams still running steel frames, some teams using carbon/carbon lugged stuff, Cannondale alloy frames with giant tubes, and titanium. Also GT supplying a WT team. What a sad story GT was, they should have been as big as Specialized or Trek. ![]() ONCE showing up with the original TCRs was wild (depending on who you ask, the first sloping-tube racing frame) too, it's like they're suddenly using bikes which look ten years more modern than anything around them. I think they even tried running these with 650s for a bit. ![]()
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Some of the latter day Schwinn mountain bikes from when GT briefly owned them, prior to them becoming a department store bike, were really cool too. The top-of-the-line Homegrown line was really well-regarded in particular. Speaking of "before they became department store bikes", someone popped this Mongoose IBOC Team Issue on CL for like $250 and I was so wanting to get it if not for the whole "everyone is quarantined" thing ![]() It's really sad to see these, so many iconic brands back then were swallowed up by the cheapo department store MTB boom, and giant companies buying the brands and sucking all the value out of them. Mongoose, Diamondback, Schwinn, Raleigh, GT. Cannondale just barely avoided the same fate. Feels Villeneuve fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Apr 6, 2020 |
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kinda, they don't really have any connection to the original brands and are in that kind of "budget premium" area, rather than being actual junk bikes. Same thing with Fuji and Masi. They're good, but kind of generic. Speaking of old races, putting on LBL '99 because there's never enough VDB content on Youtube [img-crying-belgian-flag] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yZAJDeeMZA
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paddyboat posted:I watched a bunch of Amstel Gold editions and the highlight was seeing US Postal Star, Floyd Landis do a dumb attack in 2004. The old Amstel finish before the Cauberg one owned because Lance Armstrong lost like a million sprints in a row
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most modern derailleurs are vile looking, tbh
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Someone had a Vitus for sale here and I had to resist because those were considered some of the most noodly frames ever made and I like 2 mash It's one of the best looking bikes ever though smh ![]()
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the issue is that cycling has multiple rights-holders and NBC only deals with the ASO/UCI. You need FloSports to get the RCS (Italian), Flanders Classics, and other races. the multiple rights-holders thing is a big issue that needs to get fixed but IDK if anyone in cycling really cares too hard about promoting the non-TDF races. In a sane world you'd bring back the World Cup and sell that as a single UCI-promoted classics package to broadcasters, but nobody's been able to cooperate on that yet.
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I like Formolo but I hope he gets brutally dropped so I don't have to see that excuse for an Italian Champs jersey
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Schachmann deciding his proper champs jersey can't remain in the group with Formolo any longer
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serious gaylord posted:Retire already Van Avermaet The Tokyo Olympics will get canceled entirely and he'll decide to use the gold highlights for another four years
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# ¿ Feb 13, 2025 05:23 |
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Schachmann is scary good, I think he's a bit slept on for the big classics
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