"It was 150 kilometers total" - Johan Bruyneel on modern Grand Tours' tiny time-trial distances in comparison to 30 years ago

Cycling
Saturday, 18 January 2025 at 15:00
tadejpogacar

The trend of time-trials growing smaller and smaller in Grand Tours is continuous and reflects a massive change from Grand Tour racing in modern cycling when comparing to a few decades ago. Johan Bruyneel experienced the old way of designing them, both as a rider and DS, and has shared his opinion on the diminishing distances of the efforts in the discipline.

"Now the total of the three Grand Tours, the time-trial kilometers, is what in the 80's and 90's was the time-trial kilometers of one Tours," he said in 'The Move' podcast. "I did my first Tour in 1990 and I remember we had the team time-trial of 30 something kilometers, and then we had a time-trial of 70 something kilometers and another of 60 something kilometers. It was 150 kilometers total time-trial, it's a tendency".

These kinds of efforts led to the winning ways of some of the Tour's most notable figures such as Miguel Indurain and Lance Armstrong, specialists in the discipline, but as the mountain stages began to make less differences over the years, the time-trials became more and more decisive. Over the 2010's, a clear pattern change began, with the Grand Tours slowly designing smaller time-trials which wouldn't kill off the chances of several riders. The dominance of Team Sky, Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome at the Tour was also a key factor, at the time with there being efforts to make the routes more accommodating to smaller gaps and closer racing.

Nowadays however, the pattern has changed again, now with most world-class climbers also being world-class time-trialists. The likes of Tadej Pogacar, Jonas Vingegaard, Remco Evenepoel and Primoz Roglic, arguably the four top Grand Tour specialists currently, are all top time-trialists as well. There is a big gap to most other GC riders, but amongst themselves the differences are minute.

"Less time-trial kilometers, I don't think it changes much, the best GC riders are also the best time-trialists and amongst themselves they don't lose that much time," Bruyneel argues. "Last Tour de France we saw the difference in the first flat time-trial between Jonas and Tadej as 15 seconds".

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2 Comments
Veganpotter 19 January 2025 at 21:35+ 586

I think the UCI should require at least one +50km TT and a TTT for every Grand Tour. A circuit race stage should also be required.

Ride1974 20 January 2025 at 17:26+ 258

It's easy for me to say something from the couch, but TTs are often the most entertaining. I would like to see them a bit longer. But I'm also very aware of the pain the riders go through.

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