Froome: unlucky or clumsy?
Comments
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You can't accuse Sagan of being anything other than a technically brilliant bike handler.
He proves it time and again when positioning himself for a bunch sprint.
The twistier the sprint the more Sagan comes into it0 -
However, I don't rate him so highly for presence in the bunch; he's not got a patch on Stybar shouldering Vanmarcke on the cobbles. Regardless, he doesn't seem to crash much (if at all) more than other GC contenders.
I should also mention this seems like a common problem for most lighter GC contenders, not just Froome. Lacking presence means they lose positions and get pushed around a bit more, giving rise to the potential for crashes. My favourite example of this is Contador bouncing off Vladimir Karpets in the 2011 TdF.
As for Sagan, I'd put it like this; you have two scales from 1-10, technical ability and bravery. You want the two to match or be weighted in favour of ability. A weighting towards bravery increases the likelihood of a crash. Sagan is like a 9.5 on ability and a 10 on bravery. It's descending D&D!I'm on Twitter! Follow @olake92 for updates on my racing, my team's performance and some generic tweets.0 -
Sagan has the reputation, but is a poor descender in my opinion. He's brave, but typically very reckless carrying too much speed into the bends and constantly is adjusting for overcooking the corners, the typical Sagan descent involves a lot of rear wheel movement and misjudgement, followed by crazy acceleration to bring it back. I suppose he must be a good rider to adjust to that and keep getting away with it, but he always seems a huge pile up waiting to happen. Cancellara is the complete opposite, like Valverde smooth and taking a very good line.
This is very interesting. I saw a good point made by David McLean that most pros are good descenders because they are brave. Rain washes that bravery away and you see who is actually technically good at cornering. This struck me as very pertinent even from my limited experience of high level riding.
Sagan seems to be a bit of both; technically very good and very brave, but perhaps his bravery causes him to overstretch his ability, or the ability of his bike to handle what he wants it to do! I've heard (can't remember where) some pros complaining about his recklessness.
Funnily, Cancellara always strikes me as technically good but lacking something else. See his reactions to wet descents and wet cobbles. I lost a lot of respect for him after those stupid 'go-slows' and complaining about that TdF cobble stage.
Froome seems to be technically a good bike handler. He can follow a line down a mountain pretty well and his crashes are usually when going well within himself, he just seems to switch off, I guess. However, I don't rate him so highly for presence in the bunch; he's not got a patch on Stybar shouldering Vanmarcke on the cobbles. Regardless, he doesn't seem to crash much (if at all) more than other GC contenders.
Not sure I buy Dougz post there. RR and I were watching some of the headcam runs from the DH Worlds last weekend. To the uninitiated it just looks like they re falling with style rather than riding a bike down a hill. However, if you were to watch their training runs back to back you'd see that they re actually hitting the mm-same lines every time. Sagan is the same, it's not that out of control and a lucky mm away from a crash, it's that he is capable of pushing right to the edge of what is possible but not going past it into a crashWe're in danger of confusing passion with incompetence
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^I would like to point out that downhillers are mentalists
Insane stuff
*doffs cap to the Athertons et al*0
