Tag: Vincenzo Nibali
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Alejandro Valverde is still in the Giro d’Italia
Alejandro doesn’t always sprint for fourth place. Sometimes there aren’t three riders ahead of him and he has to settle for sprinting for the win. That’s what happened at the end of a short but gruelling stage 16. The attacks started early and continued throughout. Without wishing to walk you through who attacked when, the…
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Steven Kruijswijk fastest uphill – handy when you’re already first and there are only mountains to come
Well that was a bit weird. Alexander Foliforov of the Gazprom-Rusvelo team won the cronoscalata. In cycling, weird is usually bad, but let’s not jump the gun. Foliforov, essentially an unknown, does have a certain amount of pedigree. In 2014, he came fourth in the Tour de l’Avenir, a Tour de France for under-23s which…
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Vincenzo Nibali has a Monument
Not a statue, not a commemorative building of some description, but a win in the Tour of Lombardy (Il Lombardia), one of cycling’s five Monuments. It’s a big deal. When people measure a cyclist’s worth, they often look to the diversity of wins. It’s one of the reasons why Eddy Merckx is out on his…
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Vincenzo Nibali – part man, part sidecar
The most interesting aspect of stage two for me was big Tom Dumoulin finishing second. It would be good to see a time triallist competing for Grand Tours again. It would bring a new dimension to the racing. I doubt it’ll happen this year, but consider this some sort of foreshadowing of things to come.…
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Nairo Quintana in the third week
After Chris Froome hurried his way to what appeared an impregnable lead after stage 10, I wrote that Grand Tours aren’t just about who’s fastest, they’re also about how tired you get and I pointed to how Nairo Quintana had been stronger than Froome by the end of the 2013 Tour. So it has proven…
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Peter Sagan finishes second to… Ruben Plaza?
No, me neither. Ruben Plaza won a stage of the Vuelta a Espana a decade ago and he’s been Spanish national champion a couple of times, but I’d have had him down for break fodder; one of those faceless riders who makes up the numbers and ultimately gets dropped. He didn’t though. He waved goodbye…
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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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How did Vincenzo Nibali win the 2014 Tour de France?
Last year, I looked at where Chris Froome gained time on his rivals in a bid to explain how he came to win the Tour. That’s not really so necessary this year because the result was so much more clear-cut. Vincenzo Nibali gained time on pretty much everyone, pretty much every chance he got. These…
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Marcel Kittel’s back off holiday
Because that’s where he’s been, right? On the eighth of July, he’d won three out of four stages and then, on the 27th of July, he won a fourth. In between those times, he disappeared. I can only conclude that he had a fortnight in the Bahamas. What an oddly protracted sporting event the Tour…