If there was a single speed Grand Tour, De Gendt wins by landslide.

lol. I love Thomas de Tank.

Great course, makes me miss TT bike.

Ok, it passed.

Roglic is a fucking animal. I would love to know his w/kg and w/CdA. Clearly slippery as all get out. Clearly has the watts. Clearly can handle his bike. Just amazing all around.

How can you not miss something that makes you faster!? ;)

Posted in another thread, but I snagged a Premier Tactical and had some very smart aerodynamicists (is that a word?) adjust my position from my old P5. For me this bike allowed me to get well under .2 CdA due to its design and allowing a more aggressive position. I love TT bikes! All UCI legal too.

And I think echappist already called me out in the watts/speed thread, but I do have clothing on haha. Lucky for you all its a speedo after my morning swim session and you don't have to see all that.

---

PS. Shout out to Marcag. The Notio validated my positional changes while testing laps within .04 to my actual CdA confirmed at Boardmann and the track. Great tool.

Cool.

So if you were a .20 on the track it measured .24 ? .004 I would be happy, .04 not so much

If we go with the .01 CDA is 10watts, is 1sec/km, given he beat Lopez by 120seconds on 40km (3s/km) it will be pretty easy to guess when I see Lopez's file

But I am going to go with he rode at 380watts with a 0.185 CDA

You caught my typo. .004 was the difference. Amazing if you ask me. Down to .190. Now to find the 30 watts I am still missing from Epstein-Barr.

I'd love to see real data, but my guess is Thomas de Tank isn't .185. Higher CdA and higher power I think. You might know better than me obviously.

Curious what you think Roglic was doing watt and CdA wise...

come to think of it, I bigger faux-pas is that unfinished bottle of whey protein shake :p

Jest aside, what sized Premier Tactical do you ride, and do you know what the head tube length is?

My TT bike is a Scott Plasma 3, the team replica one with the shark tooth stem. It's long and low, but a bit too low. So low that I think I'm running more than 10 cm of spacers between the bar and the pads. Also so low, that there isn't enough clearance for normal brake housing routing (had to drill a hole through the bottom of the stem to feed a TriRig, as the heat tube is barely 9 cm, IIRC.

In a photoshoot, the bike looks great. But I was never able to maneuver the bike well, as I can't get much steering input into the low bars when my arms are that stretched out in the bullhorns. It makes me think that a bike with a higher front end may not be such a bad thing, so that at least I could weigh the front end a bit easier. Only unfortunate thing is that other TT bikes also tend to go to the long-and-low extreme, with the bullhorns located a tad too far...

Then again, none of this might matter. I haven't been able to ride the TT bike in almost two years, due to a knee injury, and I'm not sure if I will ever be able to recover to the level of pain free riding for me to try out different positions.

Roglic is a beast. Valverde, Pogacar and Lopez were within range of each other, while Quintana just sucks at ITTs. Can't see him having a shot at this point unless he can somehow break both Roglic and Lopez. Movistar's crazy strategy suddenly makes more sense.

My gestalt impressions on Quintana’s TT position: wide knees, wide elbows, forearms pointing slightly down, back not particularly flat/low and head not particularly low. Probably a lot of improvements could be made.

His biggest ITT improvement would be ditching TT bike altogether and being the Sagan of climber's jersey competition.

You could say that of a lot of “GC” contenders.

For sure. How many stage wins & polka dot jerseys could Bardet own by now?

Bardet would be a better Richard Virenque and would be the darling of French cycling, if he focused on those 2 things and not his hopeless GC dream.

Sort of.

Not to harp on this, and I understand the tactics. But seeing as how today ended up exactly as expected...why not just let Soler go Sunday? He is currently the future of your team. What did they really gain? That time was marignal in the overall picturel. I (as a fan) would have rather seen him get the stage win then see Nairo barely in red for a cup of coffee.

And for the extra kick in the rear...after it all goes down Nairo and Carapaz officially say Adios.

https://www.espn.com/...-leads-cannabis-raid

this made me laugh

someone's paying attention :)

If he wanted to really be like Virenque* there are other things he'd have to do.

LOL

Am I the only total sap here that shed a sentimental tear over a journeyman rider on a Basque team taking a stage in home mountains?

(And Euskadi's team spokesman claims they're very close to a sponsorship deal that would keep them racing in 2020)

The Pro Conti teams have acquitted themselves well this Vuelta. That Euskadi dude is never going to have to buy txakoli again. Great win for him and the team.