This dreamy photo of Evenepoel, Pogacar and Vingegaard on the gravel yesterday by @therussellellis is a thing of beauty 🚴♂️🌤️🚴♂️☁️🚴♂️😍 #TDF2024 cyclingimages.co.uk/6xz7933ip41gi1…
Marc Madiot excited over Tadej Pogacar and Jonas Vingegaard's Tour victorry battle: "What we need is for Vingegaard to come closer"
CyclingSaturday, 13 July 2024 at 12:52
The Tour de France has been absolutely on fire over the past few days and it promises to continue as the race enters the Pyrenees this weekend. Now in the high mountains with long and repeated difficult efforts, Jonas Vingegaard could take the spotlight what has happened in previous years repeats itself... And Groupama-FDJ's Marc Madiot is enjoying the spectacle that the duo are delivering.
"I like what I see. What we need is for Vingegaard to come closer tomorrow, just to annoy everyone. For him to take back I don't know... 20-30 seconds, just to get the atmosphere going," Madiot said in words to Cyclism'Actu. The veteran French manager talked about his team's race, so far underwhelming, applauding the fighting spirit and team's tenacity but lamenting the lack of freedom from the peloton to allow breakaways to fight for stage wins - thus far, only stages 2 and 9 had winners from the breakaway of the day, those being rival teams' Kévin Vauquelin and Anthony Turgis.
Groupama will keep trying and most likely try to support David Gaudu's ambitions in this weekend, after the initial team leader showed great legs on the gravel stage, attacking and finishing ahead of the peloton on that day. Madiot leaves a warning however as well regarding the growing number of Covid-19 cases in the peloton, which will have every GC team on their toes as they try to avoid what could turn out to be a disastrous situation.
"There is Covid which is apparently hanging around. It will cause some teams to tighten their buttocks, even with us because it must not come into the house, it quickly becomes dangerous," he adds. "Apparently, there were guys who were changing either in the car (he is referring to Tom Pidcock and Geraint Thomas at the start of stage 12, ed.), or on the bus, it is not a good sign".
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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