There’s no way this makes it all the way to Paris - TdF 2020

No cyclists positive for covid, but Prudhomme is!

Shame there's no strong wind today.

Scenery should be good with the coastline, fortresses and glamour light of La Rochelle and the Iles.

And it was! Nervy race, nice break at the end, but all those crashes beforehand!

Today's stage is like the plantonic ideal of a route I'd like to ride. Undulating terrain with shade trees, broken up by cool villages with nice cafes. None of that 5% for 1 hour climb stuff. Amazing.

All that and a well deserved Hirschi win at last. Dude’s good!

Yeah, if anyone deserved it, it was him. Impressive team work, the Sunweb outlaws are swinging this TdF.

Goddamn and Sunweb again today, WHAT a finish by Andersen. Just a crazy last few kilometers.

That was nuts, tactical genius there. Reminds me of the early years of orica greenedge when they had no yellow jersey contender, no out and out sprinter but a the tactics to grab stages. They had a plan A, B and C.

This has been a great tour, no one is our showing the jersey, no soft breaks. Roll on tonight (today, whatever)

And today’s was a hell of a thing — Jumbo Visma collectively destroying Bernal and then Pogacar sneaking the finish just so. Solid tour indeed. Roll on the final week.

feels like Rog activated a cheat code having Dumoulin as a domestique

Dumoulin looks pretty close to gc form, shame there’s not enough tt in this joint. today was a bit static and postal/sky, but the sorting out was impressive. wtf porte lol. dgmw if he’s stompin out his steadystate high watts thing that’s cool enuf, he’ll be a good ineos worker bee next year.

Jumbo's supremacy notwithstanding, Pogacar stands a real chance to nick this. No give-aways from Roglic at the finish line there, he was defeated fair and square. Rolling on w/ the Jumbo train till the last km will not make them get rid of Pogacar, as evidenced. Time for Jumbo to send some runners in the breakaway imo. Dumoulin getting in great shape now, he can win the TT I feel.

(thought Jumbo's tactics in the final km were poor tbh. Kuss should've gone for the stage w/ 800m to go, but instead Roglic went. He thought he'd put Pogacar on the barbie, but he thought wrong)

wait is it true that some kid with a kickstand is winning this thing

If Pog hadn’t crashed he’d be as much ahead as he is behind and I wonder if jumbo would still be trying the sky train tactic. Pog has a real chance in the TT, especially if he keeps nicking time bonuses here and there, and I hope he has a dig to get mire than that.

What will be telling is if the killer wasps let breaks go on the mountain days, today there’s bonus seconds on the summit just before the finish so a 1,2 at both lines is 10 seconds. Jumbo get to choose though as I don’t think UAE have enough of a team left to bring back a big break if Jumbo want to let one go.

If Pog hadn’t crashed he’d be as much ahead as he is behind

Keep hearing this a lot but Jumbo obviously wouldn't have let him go earlier, if he wasn't 1.40 behind after the echelon slip-up. Agreed on all the other points though.

Ok that overhead w 35km to go of the peloton with the gc teams roughly arrayed in team subgroups adjacent to the lake was absolutely grand. I don’t recall seeing teams so cleanly aligned in a “random” moment.

Ha and 3 clicks later they still doing it . 🤔

How did they not give Carapaz the red dossard?

Scandalous. They announced Juju got it juuust before the most difficult km's of the last climb. Idg why, in a mountain stage, they don't wait till the end to declare the red dossard anyway, but that was too chauvinistic even for them.

Lol ima homer but watching kuss’s desperate chase at +10s of his captain’s group at the end of the gravel onto the paved descent was fun. supertuck, standing, fauxtt— all the trix until CONTACT.

Total sympathy for porte, except for the fact that it’s so lol richie porte to have this. at least he’s not hurt. damn he’s gonna get back in good on him.

Näin tullaan alas Alppen laskuja. Taitoja tarvitaan kaikilla lajin osa-alueilla. Alaphilippe tekee sen poikkeuksellisen hyvin. Hänet tunnetaan toki paljon muistakin ominaisuuksista kun vain alamäkiajajana. (video bongattu @lukascph'in tililtä) https://t.co/nC56EIcK4r

— ammattipyöräily (@ammattipyoraily) September 16, 2020

Whoever is the montage editor for itv has really bringing the krautrock. Neu and La Düsseldorf and plenty of motorik beats.

Nice. What a great break by Andersen! Roll on tomorrow...

Bee sting forces Tour de France rider Lukas Pöstlberger to withdraw with just two days left

Ayayayaya, I really don't want to think about that. He got stung in the mouth!

1. I’m aware of at least one other rider being forced out of the tour by bee sting (Vaughters while at credit agricole i think?), and 2) it won’t help if you get stung in face, but my number one reason to zip up jerseys prior to like 300’+ descents is to avoid hornets going into your jersey and then... about wherever, in stingy stingy mode (for me, more than once, into my bibs).

That sucks for postelberger

Absolute scenes

Damn I wish I could've watched this one live

Pogacar takes the yellow, mountain and white jersey. Unbelievable.

Sounds like he crushed it and roglic too

I faintly remember Fignon/Lemond but this was out of this world. Roglic just crushed.

welp. not close even, a whippin’.

i like to joke about porte, but ~respect~ i’m rather glad for him.

wow just caught up, Pog absolutely killed it today
happy to see Porte take 3rd too, he's had a rough few years at the Tour.

Just wow at it all. I’d half heard a spoiler that Pogacar had ridden the ride of his life but THAT commanding, goddamn. And yeah, cheers for Porte too! And Sam Bennett for that matter.

Gonna be a sad glass for Primoz tomorrow, can't fathom the emotion.

And also, per the thread title -- it'll make it to Paris. If anything the Tour this year has been a quiet triumph in actually being able to pull the darn thing off as COVID still spreads. That's not nothing, and it gives me hope on a variety of fronts going forward, including the Vuelta in a few weeks and of course next year's Tour, etc.

I’m hoping that Andre Greipel going home with ‘a cold’ yesterday isn’t the start of something.

Just about to start watching the TT, couldn’t hold off on reading the reports though.

That was hard to watch. Everything went wrong for roglic.

Heh, Pogacar turns 22 on Monday. Sunday night is going to be total oblivion isn’t it?

This Tour has been brilliant, I’ve absolutely loved it.

Same, it's been pretty great. Quite some complaining here and there about TJV's hegemony, but a) I think during the race it was logical they took the initiative, and b) it's not really hegemony if you lose on the last day! Add Sunweb's outlaws to the mix, and it's been a great tour imo. Perhaps it'd been too long before we saw some real cycling action this year but who cares.

Yeah, a treat these last three weeks and I've been glad of it -- really enjoyed just being able to properly watch a full Tour front to back thanks to working at home, as opposed to half-paying attention to streaming during workdays. I really liked last year's Tour a lot but this one was just as good in its own way. And worlds next week and the Vuelta in four weeks, works for me!

I was quite impressed that there were no covid positive DQs after test 2.

I enjoyed the racing. I think the possibility of an abrupt cancel early along with the bumpy parcours kept breaks on short leashes, but eh, that’s fine.

the only way tjv coulda enforced more discipline was to have roglic put a big hammer strike in somewhere earlier, and with no flat TT and no Kruiswijk, they just couldn’t Sky/Postal hard enough. They were great, but not great enough to put Pog away (if that’s even possible). Eh, I know, utterly conventional wisdom.

Ooh i just see merckx called tjv stupid i srsly cant wait to read

https://cyclingtips.com/2020/09/merckx-jumbo-visma-rode-stupidly-at-the-tour/

That clip of Roglic telling Pogačar, “You’re not dreaming, you’ve won it!” is just amazing

I've just been surveyed by a well known polling company about viewing the Tour de France. One question asked who II had predicted would win the TDF, and there were a ton of usual suspects to choose from, but poor old Egan Bernal wasn't even on the list!

RIP Bernal we hardly knew ye.

Just out of curiosity, who ordered that poll? The broadcaster you viewed the TdF on?

Don’t know, it was on Y**G** and it didn’t say.