Pro Tour/ Euro/Whatever road thread

http://cycleto.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=973

i still think this is the best anglophone rider out there for race assessment.

im interested in hearing who's better tho.

Not pro, but pretty shitty:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/tayside_and_central/8054215.stm

i love chris horner

http://www.livestrong.com/lance-armstrong/video/lance-and-levi-talk-to-dave-zabriskie/bef12e89-651a-48fb-875a-ebbfe0b03389/rms/

juan pelota has better sense of humor about it than i figgered

di luca trying to break away from menchov here on the vesuvius climb is pretty entertaining!

Menchov looked pretty chuffed at the end there.

I normally find Cadel Evans to be the Prince of Boredom in the mountains, just defensively grinding his way up at a steady pace, following wheels and limiting his losses, but he was fantastically aggressive and attacking in the last two stages of the Dauphine Libere (trying to shake off soon-to-be-banned Valverde).

Yeah he's looking good hey.

happy moncoutie got that stage, always liked him.

http://i44.tinypic.com/j5gy01.jpg

everyone is expecting moncoutie to be nailed real soon

do ur sources say millar is back on the sauce because garmin needs a gc rider?

has VDV not recovered?

ive a hard time believing he'll be ready in time, but maybe. dude sounded like a train wreck.

columbia high road is srsly unstoppable this year

serious bullshit right here:

http://blog.oregonlive.com/horner/2009/06/astanas_chris_horner_explains.html

mmm. i like horner, he's a PRO. he does as ordered and spends 100% as asked. if contador wanted the strongest team with a guy who follows management's orders, he'd demand horner. i think horner's take is right--and contador doesn't trust bruyneel. with paulinho, ac will have a guy who'll follow his own commands. and if ac jumps teams, he'll take his flunky too, anyway.

cant help but believe that if youre serious about winning gc, you take a team to back one guy 100% to win gc, no concessions.

I've started this:
Tour de France 2009
As it's the one race a year that people who don't look at this board might actually want to post about.

i'd venture to say anyone that cares about the tour, except ned, already reads and posts here!

why was dekker doping in december? is that like the auto doping layaway plan? if he were to bag blood in january, how long would it keep, doc gbx?

that's a good question, actually. i'm sure google could answer this, but: if he's banking blood, it's usually because the banked blood has a higher hematocrit (more RBCs), right? like from training at altitude or a course of EPO or something, yeah?

so basically the question is how well do RBCs age? their oxygen binding ability will degrade with time, as the hemoglobin denatures, which may be retarded by refrigeration (blood banks work, after all), but i dunno about 8 months. and freezing ~shouldn't~ work because the cells would lyse, i'm guessing. flash freezing, maybe?

basically i have no idea

getting caught aside, i can't believe these guys are ok with putting blood that's been frozen for so long back into their bodies \(O_O)/

it's just blood

yuh true. do these dodge doctors typically have "commercial" (or whatev) grade storage for these guys' blood tho?

I'm guessing that if you are providing an illicit service to professional athletes with money or sponsor's money to spend then yes you have institutional grade storage available.

yeah and i think it was Kohl amongst others who was putting up his own cash for a centrifuge

from what ive heard, the coaches will ask their riders to buy their own spinners so they can monitor easily. no facility needed for that.

serious bullshit right here:

http://blog.oregonlive.com/horner/2009/06/astanas_chris_horner_explains.html

― cutty, Friday, June 26, 2009 12:12 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

mmm. i like horner, he's a PRO. he does as ordered and spends 100% as asked. if contador wanted the strongest team with a guy who follows management's orders, he'd demand horner. i think horner's take is right--and contador doesn't trust bruyneel. with paulinho, ac will have a guy who'll follow his own commands. and if ac jumps teams, he'll take his flunky too, anyway.

cant help but believe that if youre serious about winning gc, you take a team to back one guy 100% to win gc, no concessions.

― iro with the brown bag (Hunt3r), Friday, June 26, 2009 9:31 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

can't believe that horner was dropped for a dude that probably won't finish the tour (scroll way down):

http://www.letour.fr/2009/TDF/LIVE/us/400/classement/index.html

Watching Cancellara do his TT run at the worlds and he is in a completely different league from everyone else 38s in front at the first split.

Wiggins looks done, I think he just had cancellara and Larsson come past in quick sucession.

Although that still puts him in a fight for third with Tony Martin. the fact that cancellara is a minute ahead of a guy who is a minute ahead of everyone else is staggering.

And that's it for Wiggins, bonked.

OK, not him the bike, damn the lack of commentary on the universal feed.

u watching this on eurosport ed?

On Universal Sports in the US. I expect you can get the whole phil ligget experience on eurosport.

Cancellara is amazing, he beats the guy who beta the rest of the field by a minute thirty by a whole other minute thirty. In a race that they consider it necessary to time down to 1/100th second. This guy is absolutely amazing. Looked so composed and in the groove. Roll on sunday.

Prolly on drugs :(

I am counting on his swissness to make that not true.

Famous for their scrupulous morals, the Swiss.

"He is on another planet," said Zirbel of the winner. "Second place would be a win in any other generation. That's how you have got to view it. We were all scraping for second and third."

Cycling Moves to Phase Out Use of Two-Way Radios

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Article Tools Sponsored By
By JULIET MACUR
Published: September 24, 2009

The International Cycling Union voted this week to phase out the use of two-way radios in all categories of road racing, a move that will most likely cause controversy at the top level of the sport.

Riders in the junior and under-23 categories are already barred from using the radios, but the cycling union’s management committee said in a statement Wednesday night that the use of radios at other levels “distorts the nature of cycle sport.”

Riders competed radio-free until about the mid-1990s, when they became commonplace among professional squads. Before then, riders would speak to their race director face to face during the competition, pulling beside the team car to receive directions. These days, most top-level competitors rely on the radios for race strategy.

If last summer’s Tour de France is any indication of how riders and teams will react to the ban, its implementation will not be easy. Officials tried to ban the radios on two racing days. Their motivation was to make the stages more interesting, as riders would be forced to think on their own rather than rely on cues from race directors talking to them via a headset.

The ban lasted only one day, on which some riders appeared to be pedaling slowly on purpose. By the second day, it was rescinded.

Johan Bruyneel, team director for Astana, which was Lance Armstrong’s team, led a resistance to the radio ban. He drew up a petition, and most of the teams signed it.

Those team directors and riders said that the ban was too dangerous and that the Tour was not the place to try something new. They said the safety of the riders could be in jeopardy if they were unaware of a crash ahead and not given enough notice of it.

“You could also have two days without a helmet. How about that?” Jens Voigt, a German rider on the Saxo Bank team, said during the Tour. “Or two days where we cut the cables from the brakes.”

The cycling union’s ban did not call for a specific timeframe during which the radios would be phased out.

could race organisers run a neutral radio service to alert riders of crashes?

wiggo's bane:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdrBXuwID2o

Wiggins, however, says that to improve in 2010 he has to move elsewhere.

Despite improving immensely during his spell with Garmin, he used a rather unflattering football analogy to summarize his thoughts on the issue.

"It's a bit like trying to win the Champions League and to win the Champions League you go to Manchester United and I'm probably playing at Wigan at the moment.

"I'll probably have to make that step to do it," Wiggins told the BBC.

haha, class, dude. good luck with that tdf.

http://www.velonews.com/article/98562/wiggins-looking-skyward

damn they pulled that story down fast!! someone musta hated it. now its back to smoochyville.

what a ride by zirbel; cancellara is a fkn beast. he has a horse's legs

road race is on. nasty crash already, looks like one of the austrians has busted his collarbone.

cadel!!!

Well done to the moody Aussie. It's nice to see him finally win something. I thought he was unlucky not to win the Dauphine this year, and pretty unlucky in the Vuelta as well.

World Champion Cadel Evans just doesn't sound right but whatevs.