Based on their bike handling skills one would think EF is a bunch of Triathletes.

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All I Wanted Was A Pepsi, Just One Pepsi

Team Zoot, Team Zoot Mid-Atlantic

Could be. It appeared to me though that there was water on the descent and Tony Martin went down first. He certainly isn't the greatest handler, but no rookie.

This is beautiful. :)

That shouldn't be pink. That is real.

"Brakes are a means of expressing fear"

I forget where I heard that

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"What's your claim?" - Ben Gravy
"Your best work is the work you're excited about" - Rick Rubin

FIFY

To be fair, Jumbo has collectively crashed about 27 times so far too.

Class win by Old Man Valverde. The four favs all looked evenly matched today. Good to see Kuss bring the pain.

Freakin' Valverde...….

Aru has bounced back from the arterial surgery, nice ride.

Nice seeing Phil Gil out there, dude is poetry on a bike....

Kuss is coming into his own.

Pogacar is a new favorite. Crazy kid. Valverde is almost twice his age.

And Tejay. Oh well.

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"Human existence is based upon two pillars: Compassion and knowledge. Compassion without knowledge is ineffective; Knowledge without compassion is inhuman." Victor Weisskopf.

Class act Valverde 👍👌

Pogacar is going to be a badass. On the right team he might be someone who can take on Bernal.

If UAE willing to spend a little more, he might be on the right team. They reportedly just signed Richeze. Would they rethink there goals? G. Bennett under contract until 2021. Throw $$ at him (or someone similar)?

Well let's keep it in pink. Some of us triathletes are way better bike handlers than roadies....exhibit A











...and the guy who caused all the crashing going down to gap....well that guy has the Kona age group bike record now in his second life as a triathlete

I guess that is a point well taken Dev. I still can't believe Lance kept it up right and survived getting around what was arguably one of the nastiest crashes I've ever watched

Hey, I guess I don't like broad brush labels in general....is Vino a roadie or a triathlete...is Lance a triathlete or roadie is Lucy Charles another crappie triathlete who can't swim for shit? My main point, let's just judge each individual on their abilities. Remember Karin Thurig's performances at UCI cycling world's and some of you may not recall world duathlon Champion Matt Brick finishing top 20 at UCI TT world's....and what a bad triathlete (relatively) Chann McCrae was even though he was US Pro road champion in cycling.

Yeah the Beloki crash was ugly when that tubular melted off the rim. I think Lance lost a bit of his bike handling skills after his retirement. Remember his 2010 Tour de France when he crashed three times. The old Lance never crashed. He was always at the right place at the right time....or maybe he was always at the right place at the right time because he was doped up to the gills so he had the top end engine to always be out of trouble. In any case, for sure, some athletes just crash more than others. Its either bad luck or back handling or bad positioning.

If I recall correctly you are a high caliber swimmer, so go through this exercise:

1. Pure runners almost never say athletes from another sport "can't run"
2. Pure swimmers never put down athletes from other sports about their inability to swim
3. XC skiers never do that either....they want more poeple to become skiers
4. Speedskaters never talk about how other athletes can't skate
5. Triathletes never put down roadies for their inability to swim and run.

Its only roadies who somehow feel compelled to put down triathletes about their bike handling. Some of it is well earned, however, there is actually a more pertinent point. Cycling is actually a pretty easy sport to pick up. You take anyone with a massive engine from another sport and they will quickly surpass a cyclist with an inferior engine (especially if they are in a high watts to kilo category....Michael Woods or Lance are prime examples). So cyclists feel threatened that they can and often are easily surpassed by big engine athletes from other sports who "just jump in and become awesome"....Roglic is the latest example coming from ski jumping.

Unlike other sports where you have to spend your entire youth getting technically sound, cycling does not require this. So the defence mechanism of inferior engine cyclists (not saying you), is a generic put down of athletes from other sports saying, "they can't handle a bike". Its really a valid insecurity thing. In other sports, the good athletes have no insecurity. You can't just hop into the pool and become good in the 400IM or hop on the ice and get your 5000m speedskate time down to 6 minute. But Eric Heiden could hop on the bike and become a US national champion at cycling not that long after sweeping the gold medals in speed skating in Lake Placid. Its just technically not that complex a sport, so "bike handing put down" is all the roadies on athletes from other sports, because a big engine in cycling pretty well trumps everything. The other sports, a big engine only gets you so far....you have to be able to do the sport.

You get almost NO one from cycling that can leave that sport and become world class in another sport. It almost never works that way. Lots of examples the other way around.

Agreed on all counts. I was mostly just enjoying the joke, but again I agree with you. :)

I have ran competitively, biked competitively, tris competitively, skied at a very high level and speed skated competitively. In all these sports the best of the best have been very friendly in trying to help an outsider (at least initially until I became more insider than most insiders), get better. The last one is swimming and I am getting better at my 400IM and 200 fly. Its only in cycling where I have seen this standoffiish behaviour towards athletes trying to get into the sport and getting good. The funniest part is when I beat a roadie friend up Alpe d'Huez (around 12 years after you would no longer call me a roadie) and then he said, "yeah, but wait till the decent". I arrived in Bourg d'Oisans 5 minutes ahead of him and was twiddling my thumbs while he came down with smoking rims that were almost on fire. Mine were cool to touch by hand.

Cycling is a tough sport in terms of pain and suffering....but technically....its only got "bike handling" as a technical differentiator when big engine athletes come from other sports but its a lot easier to become a decent bike handler than a swimmer or skier or skater. Running...at some point, you're either born to run or you're not. No amount of running can help someone who is not born to run. Short achilles fat calf long torso athletes are dead before they even try the sport. They can only get so far even if their engine is huge.

I would agree that in all of these sports the best help each other get better. That said, in all sports I've also heard light hearted jokes about rookie mistakes in a manner that is not brought upon by malice. I will say cycling is very unique though. Especially here, I've seen some purely shite stereotypes about Columbians who can't descend, cyclists from the States with no etiquette, etc. That is in poor form. I THINK the jokes about triathletes not being able to handle a bike are in good fun, but maybe it isn't that way by all.

I digress and back on track.

Today's stage was fantastic. The old man does it again. Jumbo looked great and Roglic looked like he was just marking everyone the whole day and conserving energy. Quintana looks like his old self. Very dynamic and fun.

The stereotype exists because on average triathletes do have worse bike handling skills, and more importantly pack handling skills, for their level of fitness. This is pretty much inevitable given that in achieving that fitness they would have spent less time on a bike (cross training benefits from running and swimming), less time on a road bike and less time in group rides than the average roadie with similar fitness. Of course there are exceptions in both directions, I'm talking averages here, since that's what tends to lie behind stereotypes and perceptions of a whole cohort of people. Your anecdote about descending Alpe d'Huez is funny (though your friend sounds like a bit of an asshole) but no more relevant than my story about a triathlete I saw on a training ride a couple of months ago who went off the road on a completely innocuous bend with no other vehicles or bikes nearby on a windless day and blamed his rear disc.

If everybody was out riding solo like swimmers and runners do then it wouldn't be a thing. Or it would be the cycling equivalent of the "strange denizens of the pool" thread. The reason it's a thing is that when strong riders with poor handling and pack skills show up to group rides and races they cause carnage for everybody else. As you say, those strong newbies could be from a bunch of other sports, but the biggest cohort tends to be triathletes, and triathletes are often also relatively easy to identify. From their kit, their IM tattoo, their bringing a TT bike on a group ride, or from just talking to them. There isn't a stereotype for ex ski jumpers in cycling because most of us have never met one.

Now sorry for continuing to take the thread completely off topic! Back on topic - quite a punchy climb 30km from the finish and the finish looks slightly uphill as well. Maybe a day for somebody like De Gendt rather than an out and out sprinter?

CX World Championships today too, could be a high screen time day.

So much for EF talking a big game with calibrating and going for stages, huge break today, pretty much every team without a big GC rider was in it, all of the small spanish Conti teams were in it, damn even Dimension Data managed to get a rider in....

great win by Pauline Ferrand-Prevot coming back from double iliac artery surgery; tough day
for Kate Courtney but fight back for 5th

hoping Aru continues to improve as he also is coming back from iliac artery surgery

Yeah, PFP looked awesome. Bummer for Kate but she has a lot of years ahead of her. #8 for Schurter— that’s just mind-boggling.

Skill level of all of em at that level is just crazy.

yeah Nino with #8 is just hard to comprehend: not quite same level but like KFC and her ? 15? US Nationals

Even the moto drivers getting in on the crashing today. Scary to see the live video go sideways and hear the moto sliding out. Hope the driver and cameraman are OK.