Too busy to recap yesterday or write much about today. It turns out moving house is hard.
THe longest stage today. Looks breakaway-ish to me but it would be cool to see if anyone tries to put some GC pressure on. Cyclingtips have a good preview here: https://cyclingtips.com/2022/07/preview-what-you-need-to-know-about-stage-5-of-the-2022-tour-de-france-femmes/
Coverage starts at 1300 on Eurosport/GCN/Disco+.
Enjoy!
The gothic cathedral in Saint-Dié-de-Vosges is very interesting and quite humbling. The Germans allegedly dynamited it deliberately during the end of their occupation in WW2 out of spite. When they started rebuilding it, they went via various methods over the years. Some bits were replaced as new but other bits less so. Where sculptures were completely damaged or missing, they simply replaced the item with a block of local stone so you can reflect upon what should be there. They lost lots of the very old stained glass windows and replaced some with post-modern new stained glass windows as they couldn't reproduce the old ones. It's a really interesting way to reconstruct something sympathetically.
It's certainly worth a visit if you're over that way !!
Huge crash. So many riders down. These girls are as hard as nails.
That was horrible to see, especially the girl who was lying motionless on top of the pile of bikes for a hell of a long time. SHe was eventually picked up by other other riders but I'm not sure that was a great idea
Honestly, at this point I'd be sitting the riders and the DS down and asking WTF is going on. This number of crashes is not normal and that's before you get to the total idiot ones like the UAE car and also that bike change yesterday where the rider just dropped her bike in the middle of the trail and the rider behind went straight over it.
Blimey, i don't think i've seen a crash like that on such a simple wide piece of road, it's a right crash-fest so far. They do need to do something about it before someone is seriously hurt.
Is it a large field, or more inexperienced field to make up numbers than you'd get say at the Giro Donne?
And Borghini going the wrong way left things a bit confused at the front!
I think she thought she was a team car..
I think it was terrible that she was able to do that, where was the marshal indicating that riders should go the other way?
ELB’s 9 second time loss has been wiped out, looks like the organisers are at least tacitly admitting that someone should have stopped her riding that way
https://twitter.com/treksegafredo/status/1552731577934761984?s=21&t=Dk9TvNnhmlgFkt2h7LFOmQ
There's a whole host of things to unpick here but this is basic rule knowledge. Even if the rider doesn't know it, the DS should.
DQ for irregular bike change, ELB riding across the front of the bunch to go down the deviation, the regular crashes - this is just chaotic! 😥
Just caught up with the highlights.
THat sprint from Lorena Weibes reminded me of Marcel Kittel in his prime. About a billion watts.
I'm not really enjoying this race as much as I thought.
Missing Ned and David, although the 2 Danni's make a refreshing listen.
The crowds are good.
Is this race a sort of experiment? The gravel course yesterday was brutal.
It's been a bonkers race so far. Lots of attacks and lots of crashes
What caused the huge pile up today? I saw the aftermath but not the crash itself.
Honestly, at this point I’d be sitting the riders and the DS down and asking WTF is going on. This number of crashes is not normal and that’s before you get to the total idiot ones like the UAE car and also that bike change yesterday where the rider just dropped her bike in the middle of the trail and the rider behind went straight over it.
+1
Unfortunately, it's not a good advert for women's racing. I'm speculating, but maybe the pressure to make this succeed is making the riders make some questionable moves.
Q: is this the biggest women's race in terms of number of competitors? If so, I'm wondering whether a relative lack of experience for some of the riders is also a cause of so many crashes and incidents...
I don’t think the race is any crashier than the mens.
https://twitter.com/c_majerus/status/1552703435002335236?s=21&t=ggVsn9tXLMWWL6ocYpuKwg
Clearly the men crash, but there does seem to me to be more in this race & some of those crashes seem to be pretty amateur. In particular arriving at the scene
of a crash at full speed, weaving past other riders and smashing into someone.
Although to be fair you’d have to actually count the number independently to be sure it wasn’t confirmation bias.