Gent - Wevelgem *spoilers*
Comments
-
Blazing Saddles wrote:Terpstra perhaps not everyone's glass of Duvel..............or maybe that should read anyone's.
Yes not the first time I've heard that.0 -
inseine wrote:Rick Chasey wrote:Milton50 wrote:Maybe this is the best victory in my career.
High praise indeed for an Italian who has won a Giro stage.
Stage win < any classic.
Yeah, even just talking the GTs there are 60 stages a year on offer. On the other hand I suppose alp d'huez beats Paris-Tours
*paging Iain to the thread. Iainf to the thread please“New York has the haircuts, London has the trousers, but Belfast has the reason!0 -
frenchfighter wrote:
0 -
Rick Chasey wrote:Milton50 wrote:Maybe this is the best victory in my career.
High praise indeed for an Italian who has won a Giro stage.
Stage win < any classic.
Obviously the case for proper classics. You'd take Scheldeprijs over a win on Alpe d'Huez?0 -
TailWindHome wrote:
*paging Iain to the thread. Iainf to the thread please
It really needs an update
Fckin' Quintana … that creep can roll, man.0 -
iainf72 wrote:TailWindHome wrote:
*paging Iain to the thread. Iainf to the thread please
It really needs an update
So, no more posts, it was just a chipper...0 -
GW is the OC.
Original Chipper.Fckin' Quintana … that creep can roll, man.0 -
Above The Cows wrote:Pross wrote:Thwaites had a good ride. I was surprised that Stannard and Rowe missed out on the front groups, I would have thought those conditions really suited them. Which team rode on the front to cause the initial splits or was it purely the weather and anyone not near the front got caught out?
You have to laugh at Lefevre - Cav crashes twice, the first one is apparently due to someone else catching his back wheel whilst the second is someone taking his front wheel. Surely only one of those can be the other riders fault?
As people were literally getting blown off their bikes yesterday I think that luck as much as anything determined the outcome for the majority of the field yesterday.
And yet those at the front were generally the same group that have been at the pointy end all season. Same as the in form riders seem to avoid crashes and mechanicals somehow.0 -
Rick Chasey wrote:Blazing Saddles wrote:Terpstra perhaps not everyone's glass of Duvel..............or maybe that should read anyone's.
Yes not the first time I've heard that.
Super popular with the boys over here.We're in danger of confusing passion with incompetence
- @ddraver0 -
I think it's easy to fall victim to confirmation bias here and only remember the examples where that statement happens to be true. Just to pick some counter-examples from this race alone:Pross wrote:Above The Cows wrote:As people were literally getting blown off their bikes yesterday I think that luck as much as anything determined the outcome for the majority of the field yesterday.
And yet those at the front were generally the same group that have been at the pointy end all season. Same as the in form riders seem to avoid crashes and mechanicals somehow.- Stybar: in superb form but punctured and missed the selection because Vandenbergh started attacking at the same time.
- Degenkolb: great form, punctured and never got back on.
- Cav: in decent form but had at least one mechanical and I think a crash too fairly early on and abandoned long before the end.
- Paolini: crashed at least once, possibly twice.
- Thomas: obviously crashed too.
0 -
ddraver wrote:Rick Chasey wrote:Blazing Saddles wrote:Terpstra perhaps not everyone's glass of Duvel..............or maybe that should read anyone's.
Yes not the first time I've heard that.
Super popular with the boys over here.
Not much liked in the peloton apparently.0 -
No Paolini:
Chavanel on Ultegra:
Contador is the Greatest0 -
I am still enthusing about this one a couple of days on.
It was a brilliant example of the conditions and riders making the race. I think we will be talking about this one for years to come.0 -
Poor old man:
Contador is the Greatest0 -
Turbo Durbo also ended up in the watery ditch:
And Quintana was in the car!
Bauer, giving thanks for his soft landing:
Photos:
http://cyclingtips.com.au/2015/03/photo ... -wevelgem/Contador is the Greatest0 -
They gave him a tiny mention down near the bottomfrenchfighter wrote:No Paolini:0 -
Good race, but the middle portion of it dragged on a bit until Roelandts got free.0
-
adr82 wrote:
I think it's easy to fall victim to confirmation bias here and only remember the examples where that statement happens to be true. Just to pick some counter-examples from this race alone:Pross wrote:Above The Cows wrote:As people were literally getting blown off their bikes yesterday I think that luck as much as anything determined the outcome for the majority of the field yesterday.
And yet those at the front were generally the same group that have been at the pointy end all season. Same as the in form riders seem to avoid crashes and mechanicals somehow.- Stybar: in superb form but punctured and missed the selection because Vandenbergh started attacking at the same time.
- Degenkolb: great form, punctured and never got back on.
- Cav: in decent form but had at least one mechanical and I think a crash too fairly early on and abandoned long before the end.
- Paolini: crashed at least once, possibly twice.
- Thomas: obviously crashed too.
I should have said 'avoid or overcome'.
With the exception of Cav I believe that all of the above will still in contention in the final hour despite the punctures and crashes (and in two cases they made the top 3). That's the point I was making - Geraint had some bad luck but his form enabled him to rejoin and come third, Paolini crashed and found himself in the second group yet managed to get himself across the gap on his own and go on to win. I think Terpstra may also have had a problem but crossed the gap.
I'm didn't mean to suggest form riders don't get problems but I am suggesting that when they do they tend to overcome them and therefore that the result is determined by more than luck otherwise the front of the race wouldn't see the same faces. Sure, there's an element of luck in whether or not you get injured in a crash as we've seen with Boonen and Cancellara but excepting that the best riders generally overcome their misfortunes better than lesser riders.I just think that if the result was determined by luck for the majority of the field as ATC said then we would have had a more random leading group.0 -
-
I understand what you're saying, I just don't think there's some sort of general rule you can apply that says the "best" riders are more likely to overcome (or avoid) problems, simply because the type of problem is typically much more important than the rider. Some problems you simply don't come back from, no matter who you are, if it happens at the wrong time (eg Degenkolb's puncture). If a rider is on form and capable of riding at the front, that obviously has its benefits, but it also doesn't guarantee anything. They're just as likely to suffer a mechanical or other random incident there as anywhere else.Pross wrote:I should have said 'avoid or overcome'.
With the exception of Cav I believe that all of the above will still in contention in the final hour despite the punctures and crashes (and in two cases they made the top 3). That's the point I was making - Geraint had some bad luck but his form enabled him to rejoin and come third, Paolini crashed and found himself in the second group yet managed to get himself across the gap on his own and go on to win. I think Terpstra may also have had a problem but crossed the gap.
I'm didn't mean to suggest form riders don't get problems but I am suggesting that when they do they tend to overcome them and therefore that the result is determined by more than luck otherwise the front of the race wouldn't see the same faces. Sure, there's an element of luck in whether or not you get injured in a crash as we've seen with Boonen and Cancellara but excepting that the best riders generally overcome their misfortunes better than lesser riders.I just think that if the result was determined by luck for the majority of the field as ATC said then we would have had a more random leading group.
Not to pick on Stybar, but he's a good example again: he was on a great ride in P-R 2013 before hitting a spectator. It didn't even knock him off his bike, yet that was his chance of winning gone, he couldn't get back to Canc and Sep after that gap had been made. More recently he was going well in MSR before getting taken out by Gilbert on the Poggio descent (not that he would have won though!). Or look at Valverde, he had some sort of minor crash or mechanical on stage 3 in Catalunya and it quite possibly wound up costing him the GC despite excellent form throughout the whole event. Sep put in an attack on the Paterberg in E3 and broke a cleat somehow, costing him his chances for the day because it took a while before he could get a new shoe. I'm sure there are many other examples, those were just the ones I could think of right now.
What I'm trying to say is you can't just look at who actually winds up finishing towards the front of a race and say "This proves riders on form can overcome mechanicals", because that group is by definition only going to include the riders who did overcome them.0 -
frenchfighter wrote:Poor old man:
Doesn this rahter suggest he was chasing on but couldnt fight against 2 pelotons in full attack mode?!?We're in danger of confusing passion with incompetence
- @ddraver0 -
This is the race that keeps giving... we will be chatting about this one for years to come now.0
-
So, are we saying that Wiggins crashed rather than he just decided he couldn't be bothered and took an early bath as had been previously suggested?0
-
may have been mentioned before but...deep sections?? really?? on a day like that - can't help but think that a lot of riders made a bad situation worse0
-
Here we go chaps:
Wiggo has only ONE target this year. P-R
His racing at the moment is: a) training for P-R. b) paying back a few favours as a domestique
It wasn't worth risking an injury or infection in a race which he's not there to win or place in.
Would you have gone out in Sunday's weather let alone race?
THE END0
