Sa had her work cut out this year 😂 Grand Tour chop ✅ #Giro ready 👀
Geraint Thomas looking forward to battle with Tadej Pogacar: "He is one of the strongest riders ever and it will be a great challenge"
CyclingThursday, 02 May 2024 at 14:00
INEOS Grenadiers come to the Giro d'Italia stacked; with a lineup including great climbers, a lot of experience and a very well rounded team led by Geraint Thomas who looks to make good use out of all these resources to counter the expected dominance of Tadej Pogacar.
“I don't think I'll start out beaten, otherwise I wouldn't be here. There's a lot of pressure, it's a different race compared to last year because we have a big favorite in Tadej Pogacar and we'll do everything we can to counter it," Thomas said in a press conference ahead of the race. "He is one of the strongest riders ever and it will be a great challenge, but the Giro is always full of dangers, there are also factors such as luck and bad luck."
Thomas is familiar with bad luck, but in both 2022 and 2023 he found his very best form at the Tour de France and Giro d'Italia respectively and finished on the podium of both. Despite being in his late 30's, his performance hasn't gone down one bit, and he followed a program such as the 2023 one ahead of the Giro which he hopes to see him reach peak form once again. Besides that, he believes the route is good for him.
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"I like this route because there are so many timed kilometers," he tells. "Every Grand Tour is difficult, although maybe the climbs come at the beginning as in this case, and perhaps having these climbs at the beginning will take away a bit of the chaos that was there when the first weeks of the grand tours were full of flat stages . But in the end I don't think it will make much difference because in the Giro it's always about going fast at the end."
Thymen Arensman and Tobias Foss will be among the ones backing him in the mountains; whilst he can also count of brilliant rouleurs and classics specialists Filippo Ganna, Magnus Sheffield and Jhonatan Narváez to try and surprise or at least not be in loss against Pogacar in the more explosive days - including the gravel stage, a very dangerous day for the overall classification contenders.
“It was a start to the season in which I didn't race a lot. But I could see how there is a good atmosphere in the team, there are young and promising guys like Magnus Sheffield who is here next to me. This year I almost felt stronger in training but every year is different and the results always change," he concludes.
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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