This dreamy photo of Evenepoel, Pogacar and Vingegaard on the gravel yesterday by @therussellellis is a thing of beauty 🚴♂️🌤️🚴♂️☁️🚴♂️😍 #TDF2024 cyclingimages.co.uk/6xz7933ip41gi1…
"I get along pretty well with Remco and I am really enjoying racing with him" - Could Tadej Pogacar and Evenepoel form Tour de France alliance in the high mountains?
CyclingFriday, 12 July 2024 at 10:36
The 2024 Tour de France is heating up and we look set for an almighty fight for the Maillot Jaune between current leader Tadej Pogacar, reigning champion Jonas Vingegaard and Tour debutant Remco Evenepoel.
Notably absent from that list now is Primoz Roglic after the Red Bull - BORA - hansgrohe leader crashed late on stage 12, losing more than two minutes as a result and dropping to 6th in the GC, now 4:42 down on the Maillot Jaune wearing Pogacar. “It was a stressful final already. I heard the big crash when it happened, with 12 kilometres to go, but it’s only at the finish that somebody told me that Primoz had gone down. It is really devastating," Pogacar reflects in his post-stage interview. "He was in very good shape already, and I could feel he was getting better and better with every stage. I’m pretty sure he would have been fighting for the GC in the next few days. It’s very sad that a crash has affected him. I hope that he is well, that he recovers quickly, and that he can fight back into contention."
As far as Pogacar himself goes however, the feelings were again good on stage 12 he insists, despite the leg sapping day on stage 11. "I expected my legs to be more tired today," he admits. "It was a very fast, up and down stage. Actually, I prefer this pace to Tuesday’s super easy rhythm. At this pace, the legs keep turning and it feels better for me. The final kilometres were pretty hot, though. As for tomorrow, it’s another sprint stage that might get complicated because of the wind. It will probably end up being a stressful day out, like many others in this Tour de France."
Whilst many consider Vingegaard the main challenger to Pogacar's Maillot Jaune at the 2024 Tour de France, it is Evenepoel who remains in 2nd overall. "I get along pretty well with Remco, and I am really enjoying properly racing with him for the first time," Pogacar says, not completely ruling out forming an alliance with the Belgian. "I don’t know if we will help each other in the mountain stages… I don’t even think about that. We just need good legs for those stages."
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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