Rolling Pro Cycling Thread

very unique scenario; how often does a team have three legitimate GC threats and have them all come to fruition in a single grand tour, let alone three in a year.

Unless I've mis-researched, Kuss was the only rider to complete all three Grand Tours this year (Luis León Sánchez of Astana started them all, but did not finish the Tour) – and all with top-15 finishes (14-12-1)!

my mom/sister just got back from a trip to ecuador and i made a joke about running into richard carapaz (they don't know or care about pro cycling) and my sister was like 'oh yeah he was getting interviewed on tv all the time'

i guess he just got second in the tour of colombia?

anyway two weeks to strade bianche, the best one-day race [Remove Bookmark from this Thread]

Race has such a consistently legit winners list imo

i was just going over it, everyone's a hitter

I'm finally going to achieve a long ambition of mine and head over to Tuscany to cycle some of the strade bianche in a few months' time. Can't wait.

THE NEWSPAPER and disco inferno next weekend, really excited even tho I don't have the jerseys memorised yet so will probably spend half the time trying to figure out who is who. riding some of strade sounds awesome!

ah nbs on the “his best life isht” wooo!

*thinks*

well if the rest of yr life is even better just don’t tell me for a bit. have fun be safe.

Pogacar going nuts on an 80km solo victory yesterday. Today, Paris-Nice!

Phew! Definitely need to do some catching up -- which reminds me: if you're a Max subscriber at all, there's now access for free for a TON of cycling via their BR sports section. Supposedly that'll be a further paid section down the road but for now there's no limit and they'll be showing a slew of things over the next few months, including the Giro. (TdF and Olympics of course still with NBC/Peacock.)

Haven’t got to the mend yet but the women’s race was great. Commentators were giving it all ‘longo-Borghini is the better climber’ right up to the moment Kopecky smoothly pulled away on that last climb.

Never bet against the big flandrian in a race like that.

man if you told me anytime before a week ago skujins for 2nd at SB i woulda said no fucking way. he's fucking flying.

yall
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GH1EJ2SWYAAKJ9-?format=jpg&name=small

first time trial to the moon

Let's have it happen

and only JV ended up in the top ten

Just watched an interview with LeMond where he explained there are hard limits on sustained wattage based on your VO2max, and if the UCI wanted to end doping they could just make VO2max part of your biological passport and then check the sustained wattage. Seems sensible?

to the smaller extent that vo2 max is trainable, and the more slight extent that its expression is influenced by the rider’s mass, i’m always kinda dubious. when dealing with a group of mostly equally-able soooooper outlier aliens, i am not sure how determinative it can be. can one say hey a rider with an 84ml/kg/min can never match w/gm a rider at 95 wrt w/kg? v v fair.

but i don’t know how much the vo2 max can be argued to be a definitive permanent defin stmt. it has a ceiling for everyone, but it does move. with ppl built to cheat, when will you know you’ve got the correct ceiling measurement? also not all races are determined by that energy system. better races (imo) are determined not only by your w/kg at threshhold, but v v often by your super-threshold power layed down in just such a situation to make a gap and get away enough to stay away with other better performers, or if you can hold that superthreshhold power long enough to win with it (these “w’” efforts are ot usually long, they can last 8-10 mins, not much more). And in a long day, lots of difference comes out of how your body can recover during long hard days. Or how good your teammates are at hiding you until it’s time to make those super efforts, of either kind (roughly called aerobic and anaerobic). whether you’re eating enough. whether, even if youre eating, youre digesting it. whether youre digesting. even whether youre drinking. whether you are naturally just low and fast in position. there’s a shitton of smaller variables that cumulatively make big differences.

i mean there are things that stand out as flags. relatively sudden big improvements obv. ppl going from excellence at anaerobic super performance to being aerobic w/kg supermen (like armstrong bw 97 and 99– and there were many of these in the late 90s obv). or low enders who suddenly just became gods, like froome.

my main takeaway for lemond—as talented and as sorta regular decent person as I think he is— is that his vo2max numbers were like all-time great for any sport, like 95ml/kg/min. scandi xc level shit (who btw were also like patients zero for aerobic doping technique—but i’m implying that for lemond at all).

so maybe everything looks like a nail to lemond, named vo2max. but i dunno, srsly all those riders move so much more oxygen that normies like me, and i just watch and clap.

Lemond I like mostly but he also seems pretty obv very emotionally immature. Not fragile, he’s tough and v resilient,but perhaps best termed “whiny.” actually the first time i met him in the early 90s (i don’t know him obv), i turned around so he could sign the back of my team jersey in sharpie. then he was nice enough to talk to me a couple mins. near to the end he made a joke like “well, i’m just a retired wash-out now, they should just put us down, like horses.” it was said humorously and was appropriate and funny, but i walked away thinking “he really does seem a little shook.”

NOT IMPLYING lol

it was not a jersey of his team, it was a long sleeve of my team, i was out riding and stopped at a shop and there he was. I wish i’d kept that jersey in good shape— but i rode and warshed it to rags. ☹️