Pro Cycling Discussion 2019

Roady · 4 Apr 2019 at 17:16

Enjoyed this write up/gushing. I was a big De Gendt fan even before Cataluna but that just cemented it as I was getting drawn by some of the classics riders...

physichull · 7 Apr 2019 at 15:05

Bike ride this morning, feet up this afternoon with a Belgian beer and watching the Tour of Flanders! A good day!

physichull · 7 Apr 2019 at 18:30

Disappointing end to the race actually. Well done to Bettiol but such a shame the super field in the chasing group were unwilling to work together to make the finish exciting.

xdcx · 8 Apr 2019 at 09:27

QS with three riders present in the front.... one dude from another team gets away and then stays away.... What a silly anti climax end to what was a superb day of racing. QS are so dominant and unbeatable until they get it wrong. They seem to get it horribly wrong when they do on the rare occasion.

I lost on Terpstra/Naesen for DDV and then lost on Benoot/GvA for RVV. Booooo!

MvdP white shorts - Discuss?

Roady · 8 Apr 2019 at 11:24

#Chri5# said:
Didn't see the race yesterday but some nice stat's from GW

https://twitter.com/VelonCC/status/1112394761023950850

345w and 45km/h average!

Great to see, has been too long since we've seen him win anything big - or be even close! Don't recall seeing him win anything last year in European champs colours? Maybe it has a curse similar to the rainbow bands as Trentin doesn't seem to have much luck/results since he got the jersey. He's in some fine form though!

xdcx said:
QS with three riders present in the front.... one dude from another team gets away and then stays away.... What a silly anti climax end to what was a superb day of racing. QS are so dominant and unbeatable until they get it wrong. They seem to get it horribly wrong when they do on the rare occasion.

I lost on Terpstra/Naesen for DDV and then lost on Benoot/GvA for RVV. Booooo!

MvdP white shorts - Discuss?

Haha yeah QS really so dominant before, but the last couple of weeks they've missed a couple of key moves/worked too hard. Other riders coming into form and maybe they peaked a little too early?

Seeing them drive the pace to catch Saga/Trentin in GW when they missed the move, but burning out Gilbert and Lampaert in the process seemed to be a huge blunder to me.

Oh, VDP gets a free pass on the shorts debate as he's such a beast (what a save & remount!).

https://www.strava.com/activities/2272732700

Bear · 8 Apr 2019 at 13:24

Anyone see MvdP make his noob mistake taking one of his hands off the bars to call his team car when he had a front puncture and went over the handlebars

#Chri5# · 8 Apr 2019 at 15:06

Bear said:
Anyone see MvdP make his noob mistake taking one of his hands off the bars to call his team car when he had a front puncture and went over the handlebars

I saw that and wondered why he didn't stop quicker given he got the bike back under control

Berger · 8 Apr 2019 at 22:52

Broken steerer for MVP so the bars would do nothing. He smashed that road furniture both wheels and broke the steerer if you believe the internet. Makes sense as he wouldn’t have gone up the pavement for no reason?

Not sure what happened with QS. Gilbert sick. Stybar off day.

The three they had left in that bunch were never going to even top 5 in a bunch sprint out of that group. The hard classics guys were stacked, doing heaps of work would just seem them totally gassed and easily beaten. Blame the other teams for having nobody left with their star riders (CCC, Bora).

They got the second best result (behind winning) they could have got. The only way it would have played better in the finale would have been for jungle bob to be in Betiols place.

BJ was out the back of the leaders when the pack split on the last berg and then got back in when they played cat & mouse so he didn’t have the legs.

#Chri5# · 11 Apr 2019 at 14:30

http://inrng.com/2019/04/thursday-shorts-29/

Staying in Sicily, the 2021 Giro d’Italia is due to start in Sicily but where? This week’s Cycling Podcast mentioned off hand a rumour that it could involve a virtual prologue ridden online using Zwift as a platform. It’s not that far-fetched, the grand tours go where the money is and if Zwift wanted to pay millions for it then it could be arranged, and the UCI rules adjusted

I suppose it's harder to stack on the recce' (a la Froome) or if it's wet (2017 TdF)...

BennyC · 11 Apr 2019 at 20:26

Bear said:
Anyone see MvdP make his noob mistake taking one of his hands off the bars to call his team car when he had a front puncture and went over the handlebars

#Chri5# said:
I saw that and wondered why he didn't stop quicker given he got the bike back under control

Berger said:
Broken steerer for MVP so the bars would do nothing. He smashed that road furniture both wheels and broke the steerer if you believe the internet. Makes sense as he wouldn’t have gone up the pavement for no reason?

Pretty sure his front wheel was failing and was what caused him to endo & flip, given he was slowing down and had near enough stopped. Think I recall commentary saying it was delaminating.

GSVBagpuss · 12 Apr 2019 at 07:13

I thought Flanders was a great race - was hard racing for the last 100km and maybe DQS all just went too deep too early. EF Education first played it brilliantly by coming late and with 3 decent riders - I’m guessing Vanmarcke is forever going to be the bridesmaid in these big races

MVDP white shorts - apparently a deliberate choice so the team could spot him more easily against Jungels in the heli shots. That guy is incredible though; rider of the day!

#Chri5# · 16 Apr 2019 at 14:57

Summary for some of the PR rides from Sunday which have been uploaded to Strava

https://road.cc/content/tech-news/259288-paris-roubaix-2019-pros-strava

Roady · 16 Apr 2019 at 15:50

BennyC said:
Pretty sure his front wheel was failing and was what caused him to endo & flip, given he was slowing down and had near enough stopped. Think I recall commentary saying it was delaminating.

Broken steerer, more like utterly smashed! If you look at the 'afterwards' TV footage of him on the floor you can see the stem is in no way orientated the same as the front wheel! Some crazy speed wobble when slowing 1 handed (& 1 footed!) before the flip/faceplant really did look like a wheel failure, but on the floor the wheel looked largely intact. My guess is that mad flexing/wobbling (with no steerer) just orientated the wheel 90 degrees at those low speeds and threw him over.

Incredible recovery, to see him coming back up through the field afterwards was amazing, really humbling in a way to see a guy so dedicated to not only remount after a fall like that, but continue to press on. I've not seen a huge amount of the post race coverage, was he interviewed about it? Anything official afterwards too?

GSVBagpuss said:
I’m guessing Vanmarcke is forever going to be the bridesmaid in these big races

Was great to see him up there (hillarious that Rob Hatch(ES I think?) couldn't identify him for such a long period haha).

Bear · 16 Apr 2019 at 17:42

I thought it was a wonderful story that Evaldas Siskevicius finished 9th after coming last at last years PR, so determined to want to finish the race despite broom wagon telling him to give up, getting a puncture in the last 30km and getting a spare wheel from the team car which was on the back of a lorry as it broken down earlier. Rode to the velodrome which was being locked up but the guy took pity on him and allowed him to complete the lap and complete the race. Such a superb story.

Roady · 17 Apr 2019 at 14:53

Hate to say it, but read back - he's not the first rider with a similar (and far worse) story!

But quite cool that he's one of very few in recent times so there's lots of pictures, videos etc haha

Bear · 21 Apr 2019 at 18:09

What a performance by MvdP, he is an absolute beast

#Chri5# · 21 Apr 2019 at 21:04

Bear said:
What a performance by MvdP, he is an absolute beast

Would love to see his power output over the last couple of KMs!

Roady · 24 Apr 2019 at 11:38

That finish was incredible. That closing speed! To put that speed past Kwait & Alaphilipe in the finish in such a way that neither of them seemed to even bother sprinting?! Wow.

Shame the ES coverage didn't show any of it in the final km's. Gah! :rolleyes:

#Chri5# · 25 Apr 2019 at 12:15

#Chri5# said:
Would love to see his power output over the last couple of KMs!

https://road.cc/content/tech-news/2...l-uploads-his-epic-amstel-gold-victory-strava

He averaged 40.4km/h for the 260km ride, with a monstrous weighted average power of 337 watts for the six and a half hours he was in the saddle. If you delve into the closing stages of the race where Van der Poel was gaining on the leaders, that's where things get even more out-of-this-world. For the last half an hour his power barely dropped below 400 watts, and for the last 20 second segment he averaged an astonishing 1,050 watts - peaking at 1,400 watts.

Impressive, though I bet he'd still get dropped on the local CC reliability rides round here

Roady · 30 Apr 2019 at 12:16

https://www.strava.com/activities/2307958367

The weighted average sounds a bit high when his NP was 278W. None of those numbers are that amazing, you read their quote about the 'last half an hour his power barely dropped below 400 watts'. Looks more like 340W avg to me! Again not that huge numbers for a pro when rolling turns.

The final closing is about right, the impressive part of that finish (to me) would be the solo pull he did leading upto and through the finish. Around 14 minutes at 411W avg - so less than half of the time they claim...?! Typical media exaggerating lol :rolleyes: