Category: Tour de France
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Rafal Majka wins your average mountain stage
This is the way a mountain stage is supposed to go. A bunch of decent riders who are miles behind on the general classification head off up the road. The best climber among them attacks and wins. The favourites roll in a bit later with no major kerfuffle. Just as it was twice last year,…
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Chris Froome is the fastest climber – how’s his endurance?
And how’s his ability to stay on the bike? Because those are surely the only things that can prevent him from winning this year’s Tour de France. Never mind stopping for a pee, Froome could take a crap (even a challenging, low fibre crap) and still conceivably retain the yellow jersey. If he falls, or…
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Vincenzo Nibali loses a little more time ahead of The Big Mountain Sort-Out
The team time trial was an intriguing prospect, but it didn’t amount to an awful lot in the end. BMC won it and it increasingly seems like their leader – the American, Tejay Van Garderen – has become the fifth member of the big four. My maths is less-than-excellent, but there are only two ways…
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Alexis Vuillermoz forces people to learn his vowels
Alexis Vuillermoz is the kind of cyclist I’m happy to see finishing sixth in La Fleche Wallonne. This is because I don’t have to write about the guy who comes sixth and therefore don’t have to try and wrap my brain around the typically vague, meandering French vowel sound that results from ‘uiller’ in the…
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Mark Cavendish’s aerodynamic sprinting position
Mark Cavendish’s aerodynamic position always makes me think of a child doing an impression of a cyclist sprinting. I don’t know why. I think it just looks a bit try-hard. It seems more silly when he loses. You think: “Why were you being all aero? You didn’t even win.” But it is of course a…
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How many wins before a rider’s not considered second-best?
Greipel wins! Take that pedals! At one point Andre Greipel was the second-best sprinter at HTC-Columbia after Mark Cavendish. Then, for a long time, he was the second-best sprinter in the world after Mark Cavendish. More recently, he’s slipped a notch and has only been the second-best German sprinter after Marcel Kittel. But suddenly, in…
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Give Tony Martin an inch and he’ll cycle away from you very quickly indeed
Tony Martin, on his own, can almost beat the entire peloton over a distance of 175km. When he decided to have a go with 3.3km to go on stage four, the front group didn’t stand a chance. They’d maybe have stood half a chance if they’d chased him down instantly, but Geraint Thomas was on…
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Who’s the fastest climber in the peloton?
If the long mountain passes later in the race will test climbing efficiency and the sustainable uphill speeds of the top riders, the Mur de Huy asks a rather simpler question. ‘How quickly can you cycle uphill?’ it says. ‘Go on. Give it everything. Let’s see how fast you can go.’ Chris Froome did indeed…
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Andre Greipel rides like the wind – which on this stage meant in brutal, destructive fashion
Greipel wins! Take that pedals! At the finish, Mark Cavendish’s Etixx-Quick Step team made a bollocks of it. Starting his effort early, Cavendish seemed to be sprinting for an age with a great line of riders just chilling out behind him, biding their time. Other than Greipel, Peter Sagan and Fabian Cancellara also went past…