76th Critérium du Dauphiné 2024. ***Spoilers***

Very strong 11 man break has a fairly stable 3 minutes with nearly half the race done

Current KoM standings with one climb left (cat 1, 10 pts to winner):

Fortunato: 40

Soler: 38

Roglic: 30

So Fortunato (2'15" behind the peloton) will be hoping Roglic doesn't win and the Soler gets caught and dropped

Ciccone goes from the bottom, but Bora aren't keen on letting him go - Vlasov didn't quite close him but has increased speed to keep him close

Good race this. Can’t see them getting a big enough gap on Roglic but at least they are trying. Gee is really impressing me but I think he’s on the limit here and could blow.

The last couple of km is pretty flat, but they're still going out

49 seconds at the line with Jorgensen second, Rodrigues first.

Roglic just holds onto the GC

Great finale! THat was a lot of fun. Hoped Jorgensen would take the GC there, but pleased Rodriguez took the stage with the work that they'd done (and the flak they've taken for trying stuff)

French race commentators are blaming disk brakes for the uptick in crashes - too much power for too little rubber. I dunno, some people are never happy.

That doesn't even make sense as disc brakes are absurdly easy to feather in all weathers

Maybe if the improved performance means riders are coming hotter into corners and braking later

I do think this is just the perils of racing on roads. I think there is a sort of peak-ice-like behaviour of certain roads in certain conditions - mixture of just enough water and just enough petrol/oil to lift it to the surface and lubricate it all, but just not enough to wash it off.

We could demand race organisers scrub and wash the road beforehand, but even then, there is usually so much car traffic ahead of a race I don't think it will necessarily solve it, and it's not immediately obvious when a road is more or less slippery.

Yeah I mean, what do you do? Often roads are re-laid in order to make them safer.

I mean, I went down on my own on a very innocuous corner - not going fast at all and it just whoop went from underneath me - broken shoulder. I think there was the thinniest of smears of oil that you'd never see. I've taken that corner 100s of times before, faster and slower.

I don't think there's anything you can do to mitigate that kind of stuff.

DS telling riders to move up as much as possible - that has been going on for as long as I have been watching cycling in 1998?

I think it was just aquaplaning. It looked like one side of the road was wetter than the other, and it was on the wetter side where most riders came down. To me the road didn't look recently re-surfaced and I'd only say braking was involved (as those behind would have done having seen riders in front of them fall) in that it made falling more likely, same if a rider slightly turned his front wheel to avoid a fallen rider. A two-wheeled vehicle almost inevitably crashes when aquaplaning.

The fashion for wider tyres and lower tyre pressures will mean aquaplaning occurs at lower speeds than in the past with the-then more common narrower tyres and higher pressures. Narrower tyres are less susceptible to aquaplaning because the weight is spread over a smaller contact area; the speed at which aquaplaning occurs is related to tyre pressure, lower tyre pressures mean it occurs at lower speeds. Little tread on racing tyres won't help either.

What I thought most interesting was that the first couple of dozen riders went through that stretch without problem, it was the riders farther back who went down. It made me wonder if the depth of water was originally too little for aquaplaning, however the tyres of the first riders effectively displaced the water slightly, creating left and right of where a front rider went through patches of sufficient depth to induce aquaplaning.