Sky's Grand Tour Domestiques
Robert Millar's words:
"It's as if the domestiques, even the delux ones, that were going to be on the front all day towing Froome along have lost the ability to race for themselves and are stuck at one speed unable to go with an acceleration or make the difference. Nieve and Kiryenka don't seem to have all the zip trained out of them just yet but they chose the wrong days to try their luck."
Is that a lazy generalisation or accurate? It does certainly seem as though their Grand Tour riders struggle with winning stages even though on paper they are good enough too. They were absolutely nowhere in the ardennes classics and the guy who looked most likely to win a stage for them in the Giro, Deignan, has only been with them for this season.
You could argue that if you are winning a GT every season then who cares about winning races/stages. That's a fair enough argument but can we say Sky's training methods are blunting the riders' attacking abilities?
"It's as if the domestiques, even the delux ones, that were going to be on the front all day towing Froome along have lost the ability to race for themselves and are stuck at one speed unable to go with an acceleration or make the difference. Nieve and Kiryenka don't seem to have all the zip trained out of them just yet but they chose the wrong days to try their luck."
Is that a lazy generalisation or accurate? It does certainly seem as though their Grand Tour riders struggle with winning stages even though on paper they are good enough too. They were absolutely nowhere in the ardennes classics and the guy who looked most likely to win a stage for them in the Giro, Deignan, has only been with them for this season.
You could argue that if you are winning a GT every season then who cares about winning races/stages. That's a fair enough argument but can we say Sky's training methods are blunting the riders' attacking abilities?
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Comments
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They don't have natural winners in the squad. But the problem here is Bob is making it sound like it's fairly simple to win a TdF stage if you're talented. Bob was talented. He did 11 TdF's. He won 3 stages.
Nieve was ill too.
But there's probably a bit of truth in it - They're paid to do a certain job and train for it.Fckin' Quintana … that creep can roll, man.0 -
As Iain says - they seem to be paid to put out X number of watts for a certain amount of time and so that is what they train to do. Understandably, this is likely to take a bit of their sprint ability out (see EBH)
Not sure about Sky attacking on the wrong days - after they stopped riding for Porte there were four successful breakaways and Sky were prominent in three of them. Majka won two of those stages from the break and expecting anyone to go outclimb him is asking a bit much. Mick Rogers won the other stage where Sky were in the break - Kiriyenka finishing in the small group at 3 seconds. The remaining stage was where Navardauskas won - Sky's plan that day was to ride for Eisel although Bernie was finding it tough during the stage and so they dropped that idea.
Maybe Sky could have used Thomas a bit better - if he had been allowed to lose time then he might have had a decent chance of succeeding in a breakaway. However, early in the race he was riding for others (they couldnt have known that Froome was going to crash though) and then he was too high up in GC until he faded towards the end. Riders like Kadri, Rogers and Gallopin all won stages and the abilities that got them the wins are similar to what Thomas can do - the Navardauskas is also similar.
Deignan did look good in the Giro but Cataldo was closest to the stage win - getting overtaken by Battaglin in the dying metres of stage 14. Worth remembering that Nieve won a stage of the Dauphine after Froome's fall.0
