From the cyclingnews stream:
“Chicchi is riding his road bike with a set of clip-on aero bars afixed to his handlebars. He’s also running his regular wheels, no discs here.”
So the guy is a sprinter and just hoping to survive today. So… how fast do you think he will do it.
Go Chicchi go!!
I like it when the pros kick it old school, it makes me feel not so poor and inadequate with my clip on’s sans disc
I think a lot of the Liquigas guys will be on their road bikes for the TT, it was that way for the prologue, too…“theyre only using this race for training”
either way, I hope he goes fast so I wont feel like I need to get a TT bike anytime soon
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That’s why I am cheering for him too!! At that level, the aero disavandtage will be huge, and of course he’s not a tt specialist, but still… Makes me at least feel better about my road bike/clip-on combo.
Of course, he won’t have the satisfaction I often get when I pass dudes (posers) on their $$$ tt bikes and aero gear…
There’s nothing particularly radical or admirable about this choice. His performance does not matter today except to survive the day and be able to race tomorrow.
You can bet your bottom dollar that if he were tapped for a top performance, the DS would have him on his TT bike.
Indeed, probably the only reason they’re going to the trouble of aero bars is that if he didn’t at least use those he’d be in danger of pushing the time cutoff.
he probably won’t give it a 100% 
as a sprinter he’ll save his legs for the final stages and simply try to stay within the time limit
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it seems like more trouble to put clip ons on his road bike
than just get on the tt bike and go
maybe it is immensely painful for him to ride or something
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Anybody know why Armstrong gets to start after DZ? The start is reverse order, so the final three should be DZ, Rogers, and Levi. The only reason I could think of for the change is Horner and Lance are 4th and 5th and might “work together”
Is there a rule teammates can’t race back-to-back???
Is there a rule teammates can’t race back-to-back???
don’t know if thats the rule but they are allowed to prevent this if they can
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A few years ago Boterro (sp?) did a TDF TT on his road bike and finished second. He didn’t even have clip-ons. The aero wiz kids thought this was because he had a shaved head and rode head down almost the whole TT.
It’s probably an economic decision too. They didn’t even bring TT bikes for anyone except Basso and maybe Nibali. You know those guys aren’t going for GC or a stage win, so why spend all that money shipping over 12 or so extra bikes for the only time you’ll be in North America this year?
that makes more sense
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it seems like more trouble to put clip ons on his road bike
than just get on the tt bike and go
maybe it is immensely painful for him to ride or something
More likely they didn’t want to pay to ship his TT bike from Italy when they had no plans for him trying to ride a fast TT in the first place.
What, $300 round trip so that he could ride it for a total of around 40-45 minutes (prologue and Solvang)?
I think we could see more of that as the year goes on. Last year at Georgia and this year at Qatar were mandated by the rules, but don’t be surprised when American based teams racing in Europe (or vice versa) choose to leave their TT bikes at home except for the specialists and GC contenders. Obviously grand tours are still performance first, frugality second.
Or something interesting to see would be if any teams opt to build up stock bikes provided from shops when racing across the pond. I thought Liquigas might take that route since probably over 20 shops in California have Slice frames that could still be resold as demos or something like that, and very very few pros are riding custom bikes anymore. Maybe it’s a contractual sponsor display thing though, and they’ve gotta have those blue/green paint jobs.
For “training” races this is not unusual (just not worth lugging a second bike over). Watching the riders in Solvang, it’s easy to tell who was going for time, and who was just putting in their time. Some of the guys practically rolled off the start ramp the way you’d start up after a stop sign, while others practically sprinted to the first corner.