Tag: Sprinters

  • Marcel Kittel proves himself the best sprinter at the 2013 Tour de France

    The points competition is geared towards the sprinters, but it isn’t the sprint competition. If it were, Marcel Kittel would have been the one with the green beard, not Peter Sagan. Kittel won four stages in all, including the biggest sprint of all on the Champs Élysées, breaking Mark Cavendish’s winning run there. I’m a…

  • Is Marcel Kittel faster than Mark Cavendish?

    When it comes to bunch sprints in the Tour de France, the default result is a Mark Cavendish win. Sometimes he can be outmanoeuvred, sometimes his lead-out train goes awry, but if things go smoothly, it’s generally accepted that there’s little anyone can do. On stage 12, Marcel Kittel overtook him. That’s weird It is…

  • The apparent inevitability of a Mark Cavendish win – chapter one billion

    It was less than a day ago that I tried to get us all to appreciate the near-inevitability of a Mark Cavendish sprint win by pointing out that it had been less than a week since I’d tried to get us all to appreciate the near-inevitability of a Mark Cavendish sprint win. I then correctly…

  • Mark Cavendish imposes order

    Approaching a sprint finish, the peloton is a ruddy great mess. It’s a teeming beast where lines of riders intertwine, break, attach, merge and occasionally make a gravel rash offering to the gods of the road. Who’s leading? Watch TV coverage and it can be hard to pick out the main contenders. They’re the ones…

  • John Degenkolb’s moustache wins stage five of the Giro

    With no changes in the general classification, by far the biggest news on stage five was that John Degenkolb’s moustache conquered steep climbs and crashes to sprint to victory. Here is a photograph of John Degenkolb’s moustache (seen here with a man called John Degenkolb attached to it). Sprinters are more muscly than other riders…

  • Andre Greipel’s legs

    I was massively disappointed that Anthony Delaplace didn’t get into the break today, but I was less disappointed that Mark Cavendish was beaten by everyone’s favourite wide-mouthed Germanic meat sack in the sprint. You need only take one look at Andre Greipel’s legs to know that it’s right that he win races. When someone has…

  • How powerful is Andre Greipel?

    Andre Greipel’s angry mashing got him over the line first today. I’m glad I’m not a pedal. He was lucky in that he didn’t have to beat Mark Cavendish who was mangled in a pile-up about 2.7km from the finish. He beat everyone else though. Like any Greipel win, it was a triumph of leg…

  • Mark Cavendish bollocks Kenny Van Hummel while sprinting

    One of stage three’s highlights was seeing Mark Cavendish bollock Kenny Van Hummel during and immediately after the intermediate sprint. Van Hummel had done a bit of a manoeuvre and Cavendish felt it necessary to tell him how he felt about this. For maximum emasculation, he did this while basically just drifting past Van Hummel,…

  • Three reasons why Mark Cavendish is inhuman

    1. The ability to maintain a high speed Not the speed of the sprint, the speed of the run-in. The peloton was doing 45mph over the last few miles of Stage 2 of this year’s Tour and riders were disappearing out the back because they couldn’t maintain that flat speed even when drafting someone else.…

  • Andre Greipel – Tour de France rider to know and love

    Andre Greipel’s nickname is ‘Gorilla’. I sort of get this. I presume it’s a reference to his round-armed sprinting style and his gargantuan physique. You don’t think a cyclist could have a gorilla body? Take a look at Greipel’s legs of ham. He also resembles a basking shark with his wide mouth sucking up all…