So while on the trainer I was listening to Spencer and Johan on Wedu going on about Paris Roubaix tomorrow (13 April 2025),
I loved how Spencer referred to the potential of a sprint finish being in “Ganna’s office”.
In any case one of the topics was Visma’s handlebar activated tire inflation/deflation to soften tires up for cobbles and inflate them up for pavement and that Van Aert and team will be on this. It is technically generally available, but it seems other teams are not using this.
Van Der Poel’s sickness before Flanders came up as a topic (and his crash) so will be interesting to see if he’s back to 100% for tomorrow.
Trek and Mads Pederson came up as having the strongest squad. Spencer mentioned that only a few of the races in the last decade have ended in solo wins, the rest being sprints in the velodrome.
Some rain overnight, but looks like a dry with cross tailwind for the riders tomorrow which should inherently favour riders who are not 65 kilos like Tadej, so if he wins, he’s taking on the big quads on their turf in unfavourable conditions:
@rrheisler I tried to pick road cycling forum and it seems that’s joined up with triathlon forum now, but there are different ones for swim and run. Feel free to move it appropriately
I wonder if the spring altitude camp is hurting his top end though. It’s the same as runners at altitude camps. You can’t apply as much mechanical force in training at altitude. Inherently altitude training should help with endurance, but that pop/high end force can be limited. In theory you arrive at the finish burning less matches due to higher aerobic capacity on the one hand, on the other hand day in day out training intensity can be impaired (at least it is impaired somewhat for first 7-14 days at altitude, so you lose that)
He certainly isn’t where anyone thought he would be. It was kind of easy to dismiss it early as big training blocks or whatever, but clearly, something is lacking in his engine room. The high altitude is interesting–I hope he figures it out.
