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This 'Tour' is in fact a sort of Brittany โ Lake Geneva straight line in 9 stages.
22 teams of 7 riders are engaged, including all top riders I believe.
Stage 1 (Saturday 26: 17:25โ17:40 โ 19:25โ19:40)
The timing is made so that the women race starts right after the penultimate stage of the (men) Tour de France finishes.
At the Intermediate Sprint, only 1.5 rider seemed interested in the points.
I am not sure because I really don't know them well, but wasn't it a little bit the same for GC, with several riders, whom one may have expected to put up a fight, having a bit of a Roglitch attitude? Do many riders submit to the favourite(s) and already give up on GC before the first stage is finished?
Stage 3 (Monday 28: 13:50โ13:55 โ 17:30โ17:55)
The first of two flat stages for ~~sprinters~~ Wiebes in a row.
100% expected outcome of a sprint stage:
๐
Stage 4 (Tuesday 29: 14:35โ14:45 โ 17:35โ17:55)
The second of the Wiebes stages.
Oh surprise! there was a sprint and Wiebes won for the 38^th^ time in two years. ๐
Several but not too many hard crashes, I believe.
Stage 5 (Wednesday 30: 13:20โ13:35 โ 17:30โ18:00)
This stage should be for punchers rather than sprinters, but Wiebes has already won harder classics than this. It may depend on her team's capacity to control attacks.
Wiebes was quickly dropped in the little climb 20 km from the line, and neither Kopecky nor herself made a big effort to try to come back.
It was a much more interesting and pleasant final part than the previous stages (even the first two). Successive splits left a group of 7 for victory, and Le Court wins and takes the yellow jersey, even though her recklessly stopping 10 metres from the line almost caused Vollering to cross the line before her.
After the easy half of the Tour, we have already lost 19 riders. That's almost the equivalent of 3 full teams.
Stage 6 (Thursday 31: 14:00โ14:25 โ 17:30โ17:55)
A short-ish stage with some mountain passes in the Massif Central (the Forez mounts, I believe). There are several climbs, none of them is too steep, but the main one is very long.
Perhaps GC favourites will attack (like they did in the punchy final part of stage #5); perhaps it will simply be a game of attrition before the following harder stages, as the two major climbs are a little bit far from the finish line today.
Perhaps GC favourites will attack (like they did in the punchy final part of stage #5); perhaps it will simply be a game of attrition before the following harder stages, as the two major climbs are a little bit far from the finish line today.
It looked more like option B.
I am not quite sure what FDJ (Vollering's team) attempted to do in the final two climbs. They were pulling the 'peloton' (about 15 riders only), but weren't reducing the gap with the breakaway (the lone Squiban) and weren't dropping anyone. And Vollering didn't get any time bonus, neither at the last climb not at the finish, while Le Court took all she could (it probably won't matter after real mountain begins, but still...)
Stage 7 (Friday 1: 13:30โ13:40 โ 17:30โ17:55)
This stage brings the riders into the Alps (Chartreuse), after about 100 flat kilometres. The finish line is at the bottom at a long descent. Will downhill abilities matter more than climbing ones? Riders who struggle in descents had better get a head start in the main climb.
Same winner as yesterday, Squiban (๐ซ๐ท UAE), this time from a breakaway.
Again, the FDJ team was pretty lethargic, not trying to catch up with the breakaway, not trying to finish the riders who had been dropped in the last climb, except for a mile or so before and after the pass.
Le Court had temporarily lost her yellow jersey, but she managed to catch up in the second half of the descent, and didn't lose a second in the end.
Obviously, her team and herself see Vollering way above the others in the future stages. Well... this kind of overconfidence has already bitten her in the past, I think. She is still the favourite, but who knows what can happen when you chose to place yourself at the mercy of a bad day, an incident, a pee break?
I also didn't understand that Le Net, FDJ teammate of Chabbey who wears the mountain jersey, didn't contest the points to Squiban on the first two climbs despite being in the same breakaway. Chabbey wasn't going to lose the jersey on this stage, given the poor points scale (the second climb was particularly under-categorised), but still... Now that I think of it, Squiban wasn't lucky with pints the day before either: on top the second climb she passed in first position, they had put a time bonus sprint in place of a mountain sprint! That's why she ends up with so few points, in spite of having ridden 5 out of 6 climbs in first position since we arrived in the (pre-)Alps.
Stage 8 (penultimate) (Saturday 2: 13:45โ14:00 โ 17:15โ17:45)
This summit finish will probably be decisive.
At the other end of the stage, starting directly with a 13 km climb will probably thin the ranks of the peloton even if no strong pace is put there.
I didn't understand Squiban's (๐ซ๐ท UAE) attitude at all. She didn't dispute the mountain points to Chabbey (๐จ๐ญ FDJ) and just went for the second place on each of the 2 climbs the breakaway passed ahead. The only reason I can imagine is Chabbey offered her money, because I can't figure out any sportive reason, and I also fail to see what Chabbey could have exchanged in the sport domain.
For the final win... Let's sum it up by saying that the favourite Vollering (๐ณ๐ฑ FDJ) massively failed one more time. She was beaten hard by Gigante (๐ฆ๐บ AG) and above all Ferrand-Prevost (๐ซ๐ท Visma). She could have been beaten by Niewadoma (๐ต๐ฑ Canyon) as well, if the latter had got another rider's help like Vollering behind her got (and the first two riders got too before her).
With only one stage remaining, the biggest team with the biggest favourite, FDJ, has zero stage victory and won't win the Tour unless Ferrand-Prevot has an accident and Gigante is a bit dropped; even the podium was compromised 1 mile from the line. That's the result of the "all for Vollering, all for stage #8" plan.
Stage 9 (last one) (Sunday 3: 15:20โ15:25 โ 18:45โ19:15)
A stage where teammates can play an important role, as the main pass is in the middle of the stage, and riders who will be dropped uphill or downhill in this pass or the smaller next one will need teammates to catch up on the false-flat sections. And of course teammates of riders ahead will be used to pull hard the front groups so that dropped riders cannot come back.
With over 2โฒ30 gap over the second, Ferrand-Prevost will be hard to beat, but the rest of the podium and top-10 is not so clearly decided yet.
A stage where teammates can play an important role, as the main pass is in the middle of the stage, and riders who will be dropped uphill or downhill in this pass or the smaller next one will need teammates to catch up on the false-flat sections. And of course teammates of riders ahead will be used to pull hard the front groups so that dropped riders cannot come back.
LOL, it happened right at the start, no need to wait for the big climbs, it happened before anything was climbed. Thanks to the TV direction, we didn't see or understand how it happened, but both Ferrand-prevot and Gigante were dropped, so there was a pursuit that consumed all Visma domestiques (1st chase group), all AG domestiques (2nd than 1st chase group), and several FDJ domestiques (peloton). It also annihilated the SD-Works breakaway.
Kerbaol was dropped in a crash in the first curve of the main climb. She never managed to come back.
Gigante was dropped as soon as the very first hairpin bend of the descent that followed. Heck, they weren't even coming fast in the curve, it has just started going downhill for 75 yards and she was already 10 yards behind at the exit of the curve! Insanely bad. She wasn't as strong as yesterday in climbs, so she hadn't managed to get some time margin before the descent.
Then the whole rest was Labous laboriously pulling a group of 5, with some help from the Polish riders who were interested in dropping Gigante for good. There was nothing Gigante could do, there was no one else being dropped (and very few riders ahead), and the groups behind were very far, so she rode alone for over 50 km, progressively losing time.
Vollering was as likeable and bright as always, asking her opponents for a relay 3 seconds after attacking them and failing; attacking in the worst possible locations for her; pointlessly sprinting for mountain points; accelerations that only drops her own cooked teammate Labous who needs to come back to pull gain (after riding for her leader in climbs and flat for 100 km in two days); and so on. Got beaten in the end by Ferrand-Prevot in the last part of the non-categorised climb a few miles from the finish.
Congratulations to French cycling for winning a Tour ๐
Actually, she's not extremely well regarded. I don't mean among the masses or the officials, but among cycling followers. Her profile (isolation, training methods) has always looked rather suspicious, so the whole picture is so-so. A J. Labous, for example, has a better image among this specific public (but she will probably never win anything).
Well, that's a shame, and I hope it's unfounded suspicions of course. It's hard to gauge where we're at in the doping cycle of the sport, but it's been a wild 5 years after corona.
Well, in a general manner, I have a hard time believing that there is something really hardcore going on for the last few years and nobody is ever caught red-handed (except a few Portuguese and a couple of South-Americans doing it the old way). Beside anti-doping controls which can come late compared to the use of a new product: not a 'oops' moment in the background of one of the millions of videos and photographs published nowadays; not a disgruntled or gossipy employee among the ton of people who now work with/around riders, not a vengeful WAG publishing information; not a random police or customs car control. Nothing. So we've got a whole bunch of people involved (much bigger than in past times) which are not on average the cleverest in the world, and yet none of them ever makes a mistake... hmmwell...
Beside a few top amateurs to which not a single team wants to give a pro contract because the professional milieu has little doubts about them doing something very wrong, I reckon the whole rest must be microdosing, and at present I don't see much difference with several practices which are officially allowed and yet already beyond any definition of normality in my opinion.
Stage 2 (Sunday 27: 12:10โ12:30 โ 15:05โ15:20)
Going backwards in Brittany.
The stage takes place before the (men) Tour de France last stage.
Still amazed at how many female riders can crash in seemingly unremarkable situations. It had gotten better in last year's edition, but we seem to be back to the number of crashes of the year before. No massive crash though, more individual / little groups this year.