Tripleshot Cycling

After this morning's time trials at the TdF, Contador is 39 seconds ahead of Schleck with only the ride down the Champs Elysee remaining. This casts that 40+ second gain when Schleck's chain problem happened in a different light. (Ryder moved up to 7th place)

So does this change anyone's opinion about Contador not waiting?

Is Contador the winner but not the champion?

In my humble opinion Contador needed to win by more than that gap to erase any questions and he did not.

Yeah, I agree it would have been more satisfying had he got just a few more seconds. His 2010 win will have a historical earmark. Having said that, I still think he was fully within his rights to take stage 14 as he did.

Great fun, though. I don't have much perspective on other tours, but I can see how without the tight margin we've seen between AC and AS, it could be a lot more boring to follow, day by day.

I WAS a firm believer that race team radios are a reality of the modern age of bike racing, and the race is better for it. However, upon reflecting of all this argument about "should he (Contador) have waited", I can't stop but think that bike racing has turned into a sport of Generals commanding their troops, and that the ethics of 'waiting' for a competitor has largely arisen from the unprecedented real-time feed of knowledge of the race to the riders, and the orchestration occurring from within the gadget filled Skoda.

Should Contador wait for a competitor having a mechanical if he knows nothing of it? I'd rather see the bike riders race with their own tactics on the road. We'd probably see more successful breakaways, instead of these deflating within-one-k-to-go-GPS-algorithmically-determined-with-a-statistical-confidence-of-4-sigma effort from the peloton to catch the break for yet another Cavendish sprint victory.

Sans Radios you launch an assault on the mountain, you have no eyes or ears in the back of your head to see the 'mechanical' or other pandemonium transpiring down the mountain. Let the riders RACE sans directuer sportif blabbing in their ears as they command the race they watch on the HD coverage on Versus form the confort of team cars.

I say hats off to Contador for pretending for a moment that race radios don't exist and he raced old-school, with very limited knowledge.... that he race 'pure'.

As a spectator of the grand tours I think watching a race without team radios would be like watching a game show on TV where the answer is presented to the viewer and you watch at the edge of your seat hoping the contestant gets the answer. The fact that riders know as much as we know as spectators if not more, has soured the interest. The unexpected, the glory, just doesn't happen anymore.

When you get a mechanical like Schleck's in the midst of an attack in the midst of a mountain climb when the riders are already strewn across the mountain, who waits, where do they wait, how much do they wait, how slow do they go, do they stop? Does a virtual bar go across the road where Schleck is standing? Impossible. If Cancellara hadn't neutralized stage 2 entirely, Schleck wouldn't have had a chance at all. You can't say that they shouldn't have attacked Schleck when he had his mechanical, because it was Schleck's attack they were trying to cover. Hesjedal said it best. It went semi-viral on Twitter and it seemed to calm everybody down: "if you draw your sword and drop it, you die."

sylvan wrote:When you get a mechanical like Schleck's in the midst of an attack in the midst of a mountain climb when the riders are already strewn across the mountain, who waits, where do they wait, how much do they wait, how slow do they go, do they stop? Does a virtual bar go across the road where Schleck is standing? Impossible. If Cancellara hadn't neutralized stage 2 entirely, Schleck wouldn't have had a chance at all. You can't say that they shouldn't have attacked Schleck when he had his mechanical, because it was Schleck's attack they were trying to cover. Hesjedal said it best. It went semi-viral on Twitter and it seemed to calm everybody down: "if you draw your sword and drop it, you die."

Thanks for posting that. That is a good way to put it. Yet another reason to cheer for Ryder. I think that's another way of saying, he blew the shift, the bike didn't break.

On another theme, anyone else wondering about Schleck being able to almost match Contador in a TT? Is this the same Contador that won a TT in last year's tour over TT specialists and this year is what, 35th in the TT? And none of the top ten gc are in the top 10 of the TT?

And none of the top ten gc are in the top 10 of the TT?

note only that, Brad Wiggins is the only man in the top 50 GC to be in the top ten of the TT

Lister Farrar wrote:anyone else wondering about Schleck being able to almost match Contador in a TT? Is this the same Contador that won a TT in last year's tour over TT specialists and this year is what, 35th in the TT? And none of the top ten gc are in the top 10 of the TT?

That was partly/largely down to the wind. It was horrendous later in the day. Menchov's ride was massive and he'd have been 3rd or 4th for sure in the earlier conditions. Wiggo had an excellent ride in the worsening wind. Contador and Schleck were probably borderline top-10 to top-15 performances equalizing for the conditions. Condator was definitely vulnerable this year, for the first time since he started winning GT's. He was hinting today that he won't ride the Vuelta this year, and might skip the tour next year in favour of another Giro/Vuelta double.