🇮🇹 #ILombardia A day in the attack for Tiesj and Wilco in Il Lombardia! 🍂 Tadej Pogacar won the race and wrote sports history once again. We can only say chapeau about that. 👏🏼
ANALYSIS: Visma's quiet monument performances exacerbate a disappointing 2024
CyclingFriday, 18 October 2024 at 20:00
From being the best team in 2023, winning the 3 grand tours with a spectacular dominance, to completing 2024 in a much more disappointing way. Team Visma | Lease a Bike's season has been very tough from start to finish, as analysed by our Spanish sister channel, Ciclismoaldia.
The Dutch based team has been far from the all-conquering force that stood out from all its rivals last year. In addition to not having won any Grand Tour this 2024 campaign, Visma has recorded a very surprising and disappointing record in the 5 monuments of the season: Milano-Sanremo, the Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and finally, Il Lombardia.
Among all the World Tour teams, the only one without a Top 10 in any of the monuments was Team Visma | Lease a Bike. All the other World Tour category squads managed to put at least one rider in the top 10 at one of the five races.
Visma's best result this year in a monument was Tiesj Benoot's 12th placed finish at Liege-Bastogne-Liege. At Il Lombardia though, they didn't even manage to sneak a single name into the top 20 of the race dominated by main rivals UAE Team Emirates and Tadej Pogacar. Those are tough stats for one of the giants of the UCI World Tour. Below, we show you Visma's best results in each of the five monuments of 2024.
Visma's highest placed finisher at each monument in 2024
Milano-Sanremo.
- Best Visma rider: Olav Kooij - 14th
- Winner of the race: Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck)
Tour of Flanders.
- Visma's best rider: Tiesj Benoot - 15th
- Winner of the race: Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck)
Paris-Roubaix.
- Visma's best rider: Tim van Dijke - 16th
- Winner of the race: Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck)
Liège-Bastogne-Liège.
- Visma's best rider: Tiesj Benoot - 12th
- Winner of the race: Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates)
Il Lombardia.
- Visma's best rider: Wilco Kelderman - 21st
- Winner of the race: Tadej Pogacar (UAE Team Emirates)
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- Exactly who, Joey, is "they"? Flimsy, illogical conspiracy theories aside, it is in no one's interest (financial or otherwise) to "drive away small local events." Major cultural and macroeconomic factors are reducing ridership, but there is no "they" in this context.verve82520-12-2024
- And our virtual platforms allow us to "ride" famous place that we can't get to in person, which is a pretty fabulous aspect of this weird weird sport.RidesHills19-12-2024
- Which off-season are you referring to? The one after he won the Tour of California? The one after he won 3 stages and was on the podium of the Vuelta? The one after TJV screwed up, never put him away, and lost the Tour on the time trial? We've seen the guy hit the wall, lose energy, nearly fail, and lose races ("I'm dead") more than once. He's got a visible threshold and his fueling regimen is a clear weak spot. You'll need more detail to make this more than under defined insinuations .RidesHills19-12-2024
- Interesting analysis. And yet, I'm in the US, and at a recent wedding reception as a group of us older folks had to stand at a certain place to keep track of a thing, we got to talking, and every single one of us had a favorite rider, a favorite circuit of races, a moment when we fell in love with the sport, and a joy in the complexities of it all. None of us knew about the other's fandom until that moment. It's wonderful that these are my brothers-in-law, and we now know to talk about this when the spouses aren't listening. Point being: there are fans all over, and for US folks, the loss of GCN+ has been huge. As so often, it's the media bottleneck that matters more than anything else. Look at F1 in the US before Netflix, as an example.RidesHills19-12-2024
- On the one hand, what he says is trivial. Of course it's genetics. It always is, in any sport. That's just obvious. Look at Mondo Duplantis, whose sprinting speed is key to his pole vaulting, for example - he's just plain faster than other vaulters and good at the rest of the event as well. In cycling, even when you take the most genetically weird group of people and give them amazing training, some will be better than others, as well. Distributions are distributions and there are outliers and that's just that. Pogacar's body is built for this kind of thing, it seems, with him only recently having had to pick up skills that others have used all along. I'm still inclined to believe that these folks are using entirely legal means to arrive at their shockingly good performance, given how more senior riders kinda complain about (or at least comment on) the regimens and control over the nutrition and exercise and all that. And in every population, there are edge cases of truly exceptional behavior.RidesHills19-12-2024
- And it’s likely going to get worse. They are going all-out to drive away small local events which are where a lot of new riders come from. They want fee income and Olympic medals. That’s all.JoeyB19-12-2024
- Oh Lordspock12319-12-2024
- Interesting suggestion, fo you think testing Tadej’s (or Bolts’ or so many others’) parents would have given us a preview of his potential then or what criteria do you have to pick parents with?Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- Even amateur teams suffer this sort. But this is also largely due to the precarious sponsorship, in very few sports do you find kit with so many sponsors having to be integrated and changing so regularly.Mistermaumau19-12-2024
- I think it’s pretty obvious what was responsible for destroying interest that used to be there.Mistermaumau19-12-2024