🎬 The Tour Tapes | Ep.4 | A Job well done at the 2024 Tour de France second week💛🏆💛🏆 Enjoy a look behind the scenes at the #TDF2024 life and relive these incredible days in the Pyrenees. 🔗 Watch the full video: youtu.be/93Ut9BfCmMI?si… #UAETeamEmirates #WeAreUAE
Tadej Pogacar "is well on his way to doing the Giro-Tour double" - French legend Richard Virenque on Tour de France spectacle
CyclingTuesday, 16 July 2024 at 13:15
Richard Virenque was the face of French cycling for many years in the 90's and one of the Tour de France's figures having won the KOM jersey countless times. The mountains were his terrain, and the former pro analyzes what has been nothing short of a spectacular Tour where Tadej Pogacar is in his eyes close to achieving something historic.
"The race is keeping its promises, even if we lost one of the 4 'fantastics' with Primoz Roglic," Virenque said in an interview with Cyclism'Actu. "Like every year, he is affected by bad luck, maybe also because he is not skillful enough on a bike. Jonas Vingegaard is impressive, after three months without competition, he is in contact with the untouchable Tadej Pogacar. Vingegaard must feel better and better, he attacked him on the 15th stage. For the moment, Pogacar has the upper hand on the Tour, but he is not safe from a reversal of the situation in the last days. And Remco Evenepoel, hats off, for his first Tour, he is on the podium and he won the time trial, it's great".
The Top 3 of the Tour at the moment are all showing their very best level in the second week of the race, but truly all three have been at their best since the start of the race with terrific performances ever since the Madona di San Luca on stage 2. "Pogacar's advantage is that Vingegaard is coming back from an injury. The more things go on, the more things will reverse. He took advantage of this advantage to gain 3 minutes. Now, he has to manage this end of the Tour well," Virenque argues, although the Slovenian has unexpectedly made a huge difference over both stages in the Pyrenees, specially thriving on Plateau de Beille after Visma executed their plan.
"He is having an exceptional year and is well on his way to doing the Giro-Tour double. For the moment, everything is good for him, but we are never safe. He is hungry for victory, since he was pushed aside by Vingegaard over the last two years. He is the person who blocked his path and Pogacar is very wound up. But he knows very well that the threat is always present, 3 minutes is not yet a safety net," Virenque, now 54, adds.
It is incredible what has happened this Sunday with a full-gas mountain stage from start to finish which then led to climbing numbers never before seen in the sport from both Pogacar and Vingegaard. A rivalry for the ages... "Records are made to be broken. The equipment, the way of recovering, the diet... everything is evolving. It's 2024, we are moving towards a super strong evolution of the rider and the optimization of the athlete," Virenque argued.
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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