TdF Stage 11 – A Very Tight Race [Spoilers]

Reckon he might just give it up for a stage win right now 🙂

Didn’t see on TV but seems he worked too hard too early as he did a few stages back. This time he sat up though – losing a few places? Doesn’t seem to care about us faithful fans who put him in our fantasy teams.

Marion Rousse is a pundit on eurosport (not ours).

Can someone give Sagan some tactical advice? He’s far too visible and does far too much work with 5km still left ‘look at me, see how strong I am, I’m the wolverine hear me roar’.

Meanwhile Dekonkolb turns off his invisibility cloak and appears at the front with 100m to go.

mudshark, it was more a tactical thing with Kwiatkowski sitting there. If he’d have gone after Gallopin then he’d have given Kwiatkowski a free ride to the finish. Gallopin played it perfectly. Sort of like a mini version of this years Paris Roubaix finish.

If Sagan doesn’t take tomorrow there’s got to be a good chance he’ll go home without a stage this year. I wouldn’t have seen that coming.

Yes. Kwaitkowski is now Sagan’s Sagan to Cancellara. Eh?

As an aside, such bullshit from Lemond, saying that somehow bike handling is genetic….

It’s bullshit that you think it isn’t.

Watching the highlights now, this final descent is incredible! Missed this bit live.

Shame that Phil Liggett has told me several times about how they’re using every inch of the tarmac although at least none of them are former mountain bikers…

Epic ride by Talansky and an extremely heartwarming win for Tony..

Bloody brilliant that. 😀

Just seen the highlights. Is there something fundamentally wrong with the Cannondale team tactics?

There have been a number of stages now that have been touted as stages For Sagan but he has constantly been left isolated in the last few km of the stages in a position where when one rider attacks and no one will support Sagan in chasing them down as they expect him to out sprint them.

Or is it simply that Sagan needs a little more nouse?

Burns his team chasing the break ‘cos “it’s a stage for Sagan”, gets left alone at the finish then everyone sits on his wheel. He’s basically ****. Stay in the pack and risk losing to the bigger sprinters or give it a go and have to chase every attack.

Good stage today, weird who you end up cheering for at times. Was screaming for Gallopin at the end, brilliant move!

Feel bad for Talansky, def think he had the form for a top 5. Another one with to much bad luck.

That was an amazing ride by Gallopin, very impressive given that he looked dad and buried whilst wearing yellow.

Do you suppose his girlfriend has given him a special promise if he wins a stage? 😉

Said in the post race interview that he’d actually targeted and ridden the last few k’s of this one before the tour.

Do you suppose his girlfriend has given him a special promise if he wins a stage?

Christ, are we going to get this shit for the whole tour?

I sincerely hope not, I only got 109 points today.

Sagan’s tactics today were spot on IMO. If Cannondale don’t chase the break wins, so they chase. In the finale he had to follow moves else they would have slipped of the front without him, he didn’t force the move, just followed Kwiatkowski.

This left him in the winning move, can’t ask more than that, he gave himself a chance.

But when it was 4 he did all he could do. Sometimes in cycling you have to be willing to lose in order to win. If he’d chased down every break he would have been mugged finally so he was right to ask others to close gaps. It will pay off next time he is in a break when people may be less willing to call his bluff.

If he had a stronger team then maybe he would have been able to sit in and let his team close gaps in the run in but he doesn’t and other teams won’t do the work if he is there.

Cancellara had this issue a few years ago in the classics. He was so strong that everyone would look at him to close every gap, so he refused to chase and now people don’t call his bluff so much. Now he wins sprints from small groups instead of either being forced to chase every attack or go solo from a long way out.

for a pro rider with a fantastic turn of speed he does seem to get dropped in those situations a bit too easily. Maybe he thinks Gallopins gone too early so it’s pointless getting his wheel but I don’t think so My guess is the pace set by Tony Martin on those final climbs just took the sting out of his legs so he was unable to cover the attack as he should have done. He was a little below par in the last 100 meters too.

JCL – have you actually seen the crash where Froome was taken down?
Did you notice that it had nothing to do with bike handling?
Do you also realise that, as his wrist was fractured, he could hardly put any pressure on his bars with one hand, hence the falls the next day. The team had already been prepped that he probably wouldn’t make it through that day.

Apologies for not responding to your post earlier. Only just noticed it.

Which of the four crashes since the Tour started are we talking about not being his fault?

This one at 30 seconds? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CCbQGwf-Oo0

This one at 30 seconds?

He certainly didn’t cause that one (peleton splits round the roundabout?) as he was already in the team car when that happened.
In the entire video you linked to I didn’t see him crash one, I saw the afters but nothing else. I watched the stage live and was surprised nobody caught the crashes. But then again it was fairly wet and hard to see.

JCL you need to up your game…try to find better bait!

Talansky abandons “suffering from crash injuries and “acute sacroiliitis” for his hip say his team”

Talansky was followed to the line by the broom wagon. Good effort from him tho.

It’s bullshit that you think it isn’t.

I think there’s an element of having good genes in terms of being a cyclist but a lot of it is that the bike is an integral part of the family life. Frank and Andy Schlecks dad was a pro and at the age of 12, Andy Schleck was already beating his dad up the Ventoux. Part of that is down to the fact the things that made his dad “suitable” physiologically for riding are in him too but part of it was that he was riding bikes as soon as he could walk and wanting to do what dad did.

I think bike handling is learned by riding, particularly riding with people better than yourself, and if you’re Schleck or Axel Merckx or Tony Gallopin that means your dad, uncles or their mates are pros and are likely to be pretty handy people to learn from.

Liked the ITV4 comment last night about Robbie McEwen and Andrew Talansky having a brief chat about masculinity.

Proper effort from Talansky thereafter. Shame he’s now abandoned, but he’s done it with balls intact.

he’s probably massively dehydrated from all that blubbing.