Vive la Revolutions: Tour de France 2018

what a great finish! bardet, i just love him. heart of a lion, i loved seeing him attack again & again. Kruijswijk too - that took incredible, unbelievable gas.

and this sucks - more video evidence to indicate it was spectator & not moto as first thought

BREAKING - Broken vertebrae confirmed, Nibali won't start tomorrow (Italian journalist Andrea de Luca on FB) #TDF2018

— La Flamme Rouge (@laflammerouge16) July 19, 2018

I am a giant softie and this made me well up slightly. https://chpt3.com/blogs/journal/well-done-mark

first time Greipel ever left the Tour. will he ever return? I am not so sure.

I just realized Bradley Wiggins was 32 when he won his only Tour. This could be Gerraint's only Tour. It's certainly starting to look like it.

bit distracting, but comments like this re booing fans are topical and fair imo: http://forum.cyclingnews.com/viewtopic.php?p=2291903&sid=90f04b549ef9013153e8291412a76eb0#p2291903

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/jul/24/tour-de-france-protestors-peloton-farmers

French police accidentally pepper spray the peloton.

cool stage. i felt sick and terrified at gilbert going over that wall, and was so so happy to see him reappear in reasonable shape, then stoked as fuck to see him remount.

but...controp: you CANNOT blow your rad break/positioning tactic like that and get a fatmantis prix de la combativité. can't do it. nope nope.

Yeah that was a shocking moment when he went over, Christ. I figured he had to be okay simply because I hadn't seen any explosion of comments on my feed or elsewhere earlier before I saw the replay.

Alaphillipe had a blast for sure but pity about Yates.

Alaphillipe is easy to enjoy. Larfing at the gifs of his resemblance to begbie tho

JA rules

irl lols

I feel for the riders in the Tour today as when I was a police officer I once pepper sprayed my own testicles when I fell off a gate whilst attending a rural incident and my gas canister exploded into my groin.#TDF2018

— Matt Stephens (@RealStephens) July 24, 2018

crushing hard on Alaphillippe, that was a brilliant performance

heartbroken for Yatesy, so close! and Gilbert pulling for the rest of a way with a broken knee - eat your heart out John Wayne

Gilbert’s leg after the race 🤢

🤕 The most aggressive legs!
Les jambes du plus combatif du jour @PhilippeGilbert 💪#PrixAntargaz #TDF2018 pic.twitter.com/voJCdF1zHN

— Le Tour de France (@LeTour) July 24, 2018

strategic wfh day today

photo of gilbert's knee on instagram was horrible : /

photos of Luis Leon Sanchez's heavily stapled arm 2 weeks after crash :(
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DioWb_pWAAAReB1.jpg

yiiiiiikes D:

This actually got interesting but we need to see dumoulin.

glad Quintana pulled somethin off.

Unless Thomas goes all Adam Yates-y (which he won't) he's ON this thing.

still definitely some crash risk/jour sans risk in play

SIMON I MEANT SIMON :P

gendarme knocked froome off his bike on his way back down the mountain
https://www.instagram.com/p/BlqYeNHBDAX/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=6jyuxi3n3ijy

lmao

Maybe somebody should tell @GroupamaFDJ and @ArnaudDemare that there is GPS tracking in @LeTour. Chapeau to lose just 9min on a 17 km climb on @NairoQuinCo #notthefirsttime pic.twitter.com/OZPfHvRawa

— Andre Greipel (@AndreGreipel) July 25, 2018

alaphilippe has been the one bright light of this tour
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Di-ZT2LWsAI0ePi.jpg

Greipel’s tweet, it’s gone now but presumably Marc Madiot’s bottle was extra sticky today.

i read somewhere Madiot encouraged spectators to push Demare. Oh well.

this long distance dedication goes out to andre greipel hai miss u man

i don't think i've ever been more absorbed by watching a lol-ly finale effort than the one by the EF trio. what does davis say to his kid on that?

Sagan on NBC “I hit really hard my ass muscle” 😂

Name a tour after that phrase.

"After I flew through the forest and I hit a big rock with my ass."

in sagan versh rock paper scissors, assmuscle shatters rock. that big rock is just gravel and dust now.

he asstographed that rock

Interesting in the Tourmalet. Bardet up the road in a handy group, now in virtual 3rd place ahead of Froome. Still a long way to go, though.

It’s all going off. Thomas without team mates for the first time and 11km still to climb.

I work with a *Dutch guy who is so desperate to talk about the Tour de France he'd heard about this one other guy in the organization who is into cycling and looked out his phone number and phoned him up - he was out! I try my best but can't contribute much beyond hoping Froome loses.

(*he's from Maastricht too, so doubly excited about Dumoulin).

i like how kruiswijk (sp?) and roglic and lottojumbo are doing what they doing. with the long descent, all of this is very not obvious for the result to me, tbh.

wow i guessed correct on spelling!

aww that's a sweet story 'Father Ted'.

i feel sad for Quintana, he didn't crash yesterday...

real nice result imo. in the post-epo, kenacort, salbutamol, whatever-6'2"-skeletons-use era, it's weird to see a gc performer look so damn muscular. that's more like the 00s, or the classics. great complete rider afaict.

watching kruiswijk and zakarin descend together, trying to stay in touch with the lead group was um, something that should not be encouraged, tho kruiswijk is far better than z. 2016 giro stage 19, was terrifying (zakarin) and heartbreaking (k) and watching today, all i could think was "was that giro ALSO stage 19?" Yup.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iKeiSk45P8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XhMkbcWpHc

^ I remember Kruiswijk crashing into a wall of ice, but I'd forgotten about Zakarin

xps
Close, but it’s spelled “Kruijswijk”.

o how i love the lingo: "I took a tree to the face" (Phinney)

The cycling podcast has a nice valedictory episode on Silvan Chavanel, who passed 365 days in the saddle on the tour on stage 8. He wants to come back in retirement as a moto pilot.

Andy Schleck is one of the VIP drivers this year!

https://www.bicycling.com/racing/a22564124/what-its-like-to-ride-a-race-motorcycle-in-the-tour-de-france/

One of my friends who does a lot of event photo support on his moto showed this to me.

Vive le Thomas.

Not attacking the leaders on the last stage is dumb. They should race every day or just end the race today. People complain about the radios and meter watchers ruining the Tour, but it’s tradition of not attacking on the last day is ok? It’s idiocy. Race everyday.

That's kind of a naive view, but the "inside baseball" reality is two-fold:

1) grand tour GC contenders are (physiologically) the kind of rider who excels at climbing up long, steep gradients (ie, not flatlanders). The type of rider who can attack on the flat final ride into Paris + along the Champs + successfully hold off the pack are a completely breed/build (see the spring classics).

2) the teams that are seeking a victory on the final stage (which is by pure definition an absolute sprinter's stage), can easily control any breakaway attempts as there are extremely long straightaways and virtually no places to get out of sight. Those teams are trying to secure a stage victory as directed by their team Director, it's not an ego-driven stage like you'll see in the Alps/Pyrenees.

"kind of rider who excels at climbing up long, steep gradients"

ha, no. they (esp sky) are taking giant 185cm+ track watt machines, then skeletoning them so they can ride mostly steady state up long climbs (i do think froome is interesting in his ability to really burst, but he never lets off, he holds that crazy wattage to his finish). i do think this style of guy WERE more tt-rouleur flatlanders, but if you skin them out, it's just watts/kg.

the "classic" gc climbers- dudes who were super scrawny and light who got change pace and rip it on super steeps are gone from gc. Contador was basically this style. pantani too.

you saw this movement to straight power starting with wattage cottage indurain, but the model post-EPO is different. instead of adding pure watts with mega doses of EPO, they add little with microdosing, but get extreme w/kg by slashing fattie trackies (who are still legit great talents in watts) down to what you see, wind em up, let em go.

there is a reason the top 4 are now ALL tt guys, the model is complete.

look i know this looks like infowars bs, but looking across the field at riding and body styles, this is the best overall fit. i've really given up caring too hard about meds and measure "legitness" more on style points.

i want a thread "2018- 'Legitness' is the new 'authenticity'."

sorry, your point that "guy who excels climbing up long steeps" is exactly right, tho. but traditionally those guys were born out of a class of "climbers," and that's not the roots of the current lot. i've not scrutinized dumoulin's palmares, but he def styles more as having been a tt wattage factory than a climber kid.

An acquaintance of mine (retired domestic pro) got dropped on a 15 minute climb at the Tour of California and Froome was with him in the grupetto. Froome was perhaps 4-5kg more than he weighs now but still, this may or may have been after his miracle recovery from whatever plagued him earlier in his career that coincided with his ascent to GC contender.

TdF is considerably the "easiest" of the Grand Tours, which is why you'll see more of the 70kg guys contending.