2025 bike racing thread *SPOILERS*

Triathlon Forum Road Cycling
903

AK is figuring in the early efforts. As is Mads. Maybe just openers for him. :slight_smile:

904

Maybe not wishful thinking after all

905

W

T

F

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906

HELL YES!!

:us::muscle::muscle:

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907

W T F did we just see…

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908

Awesome for Powless

909

Gotta get this guy a nickname.
HUGE.

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910

Powless nailed it and Wout just does not have it

911

EF did a great job of sitting on the group behind.

912

Have to watch again, but did Wout start earlier then he had to? It is clear he doesn’t have it. On the overhead, Nielsen just kept climbing the ladder right past him.

913

Hilarious own goal from Lisa Bike. Devastating for Wout. His head must be a mess right now.

914

Amazing initial tactics by Jumbo followed by a Stannard level roll at the line! Back to back American wins?! Unheard of.

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915

Powless absolutely delighted!

Almost seems worse than Quickstep/Stannard situation. At least QS tried to drop Stannard in the finale.

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916

So don’t you now need to ride for Matteo Sunday?

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917

Yes

918

It was worse than the DQS situation. That was an epic fail. I actually feel bad for Wout’s mental health. That has to be a awful.

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919

I haven’t watched it yet, but on paper sure looks like the classic QuickStep Omloop fail!

920

In terms of effort, Stannard had to do a lot more, being subject to numerous attacks.

As a corollary of the above, in terms of tactics, Visma was woeful, just giving an armchair ride to Powless. I watched the coverage sithout commentary and just had a sense this might not go well for Visma.

This will undoubted change how people view 2 v 1 and 3 v1 situations, although the latter is such a rarity.

Also, on a personal level, completely forgot to submit my picks. Oh well.

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921

I overslept and only caught the last 5km. My first thought was “Why aren’t they trying to drop Powless?” Second thought was that since they weren’t trying to drop him, it meant they were all in for Wout. Which is an enormous tactical error as it tells Powless that all he needs to do is watch Wout.

They should’ve been regularly firing one rider up the road while the other two sat on Powless. A few km of being worked over like that and either somebody rides away or you’ve blunted Powless’ sprint.

I guess JV means Junior Varsity!

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922

Everybody wanted Wout to win this and Lisa committed to that. If Matteo and Tiesj take turns at the front in the final few km, sure Powless gets an armchair ride, but so does Wout. In a sprint of Powless vs Wout, I think you’re pretty confident Wout wins that spring 9/10 times. Wout says he cramped, so maybe hard to gauge whether he was really outsprinted. Lisa took the win for granted and put all their eggs in one basket - they underestimated Powless when they should have said “it doesn’t matter which one of us wins this” and been attacking Powless relentlessly over the last few kms.
Tough day for Lisa, amazing win for Powless, absolutely legendary. Hopefully Wout can just move on (and Lisa is stocking up on bananas for Sunday).

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