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****in’ A! Cav did it!
So many riders congratulated him, and he found and put his arm around the breakaway rider - really nice to see. The overhead shot was cool. His team did a good leadout, dropped him in P5, then Cav came up the outside followed by Bouhanni, hung in the wheel of the guy (Phillipsen) who had taken the lead, picked his moment, came around and accelerated with authority to a decisive win. Bouhanni couldn’t come around Cav but looks like he got second. Supposedly his new coach at DQS has been training Cav for pure speed rather than climbing. That makes sense as they didn’t expect to be sending him to any Grand Tours. He didn’t get any altitude training. That’s feels like the year when Cav went to the Tour and the Olympics, had a lot of track training rather than training to get through the Alps. This raises the question of whether he can survive the mountain stages and get to Paris. Some expect him to pull out mid-Tour or to miss the time cut on a climby stage. Anyone looked at the route profiles and have a guess at how many sprint stages there are before the sprinters start struggling with time cuts? |
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4 memorable stages out of 4 stages!
Way to go Cav! It was terrific to see all his rivals congratulate him. |
And tomorrow, the biggest thrill of all . . . a time trial. Yawn - I mean whoop.
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Woman with sign who caused massive Tour de France crash reportedly arrested
BFM television, citing multiple police sources, reported that the woman had been taken in custody in Brittany, the northwest French region where the Tour de France, the world's biggest cycling event, held its first four stages. RTL is reporting that she is facing a fine of 1,500 euros. |
Pogacar kills it, gains time on other GC contendors, who mostly sit bunched up around 1:30 to 1:50 behind him on GC. I wonder if we’ll see their teams joining forces against UAE?
Roglic lost 0:44, Thomas 1:18, those guys are normally good TT’ers but they are riding injured. The bitty climbers lost like 2:00. The opi-omi sign fan also faces prison, but I wouldn’t think that will happen - still, it’s France and this is the Tour de France so . . . suspended sentence, community service, etc maybe? I dunno how the French legal system works. There’s no jury trial. Otherwise, zzzzz it was a TT day. There’s another TT on stage 20 and it’s not a terribly mountainous route, so wouldn’t seem great for the little climbers. |
Pogačar and Van Der Poel are just on another planet these days.
Van Der Poel's first ever real TT and he gets fifth overall. Unreal. |
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I didn’t realize MVP was pretty new to TTs - I think I lose track of how new he is to the road, and how fearsome his untapped potential is.
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Imagine someone winning Yelo, Green and Polka Dot jerseys in the modern era....
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Number 32!
Long wide boulevard. Classic bunch sprint, all the sprint teams lined up and the GC teams backed off after 3 km leaving the field to the sprinters. DQS had its whole team pulling on the left, with two rival sprinters, Bol and Colbrelli, hanging on Cav’s wheel. Cav seems like a bad one to draft, being so small and flicky. Alpecin had their train pulling on the right with MVP’s yellow jersey as their locomotive. MVP pulled off, the sprint kicked off, Alpecin’s remaining train drifted toward the left, DQS met it in the middle of the road. That eliminated almost all the other sprinters who found themselves trapped in the compressed middle mass. Alpecin’s final leadout man pulled his sprinter Phillipsen to the front, Morkov pulled Cav up to Phillipsen, Cav jumped to the right off Morkov to catch Phillipsen’s wheel just as Phillipsen launched and became Cav’s launchpad. Phillipsen was moving faster than Morkov and also the wind was from the left. Cav came around Phillipsen on the right as Bouhanni came from quite a way back to round Phillipsen on the left. Bouhanni had been a ways back on the right so I’m not sure how he got through the clog, that was impressive. The three drag raced, Cav’s lead held and he won by half a bike length, I think Bouhanni got second (?). It was a controlled sprint, everyone got to organize their trains and execute their plan, clean sprinting and pure speed won out. Alpecin should probably switch back to Merlier for the next flat sprint instead of riding for Phillipsen, who Cav beat repeatedly in the Tour of Turkey. Bouhanni is fast but his team doesn’t seem to do a good train or leadout for him, he’s always alone when the final acceleration kicks off. Cav actually mentioned that in his post race interview: he said he didn’t understand if a (French) team brings a sprinter, why the whole team doesn’t ride for him on a nailed-on sprint stage like this? Almost every DQS rider was in Cav’s train, even Alaphillipe who is in GC contention was riding his heart out for the sprint. It looked like the old Highroad train! Chateauroux is where Cav won his first Tour stage in 2008. He remembers every sprint finish there, was talking to the interviewer about how the 2008 finish was further up the road and with a small grade, a subsequent finish was earlier on the road, he has a memory for sprints like a high speed camera. This didn’t feel like a close one. Cav didn’t need his second kick like I thought he might have used in stage 4. He looked pretty dominant. I wonder if he’ll be back at DQS in 2022? Lefevre has bashed Bennett pretty hard and talk is they are parting ways at season end. But Cav will be 37 y/o. Maybe it depends on if he’s reached 34 Tour stages, even if he keeps saying that doesn’t matter to him. No idea what happened on GC but I assume it was basically a recovery day for those guys. |
I was wrong. Bouhanni faded to third, or (photo suggests) he threw his bike too early. The top ten was all sprinters.
Also I can’t seem to keep Alpecin-Fenix and Arkea-Samic straight. |
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Hilly stage tomorrow, yaay!
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