After after Giro/tt talk... TT in or out?

I think that maybe the order of events could get tweaked and have the last time trial before the last mountain stage and that would allow the race to be decided on the slopes in a do or die effort. That’s one idea anyway, but I can’t see abandoning the time trial because it is a vital element in deciding who the best overall bike rider is.

unfortunately you have to select Contador, because he can climb with the best and and best the climber when it comes to time trialing.

But I can’t get past the whole OP deal with him.

The same with Basso.

Next year ought to be an interesting Giro if AC defends and Basso comes back from suspension.

A real battle of the OP alumni!

The problem isn’t the time trials, it’s the riders. Stage races are about complete riders. Climbers that can’t time trial aren’t complete riders. I don’t think the answer is getting rid of time trials or shortening them. The answer is that the climbers that struggle in the time trial, like Ricco, need to get their time trialling in order. Not everyone is going to be great at them, but everyone can improve. I’m biased because I like riding by myself and I like riding until I’m cross-eyed. Time trials are important, like them or not. They are equalizers and they keep the racing from being the first little guy to the top wins every time. That would be boring.

There would be more fireworks but the gaps wouldn’t be bigger, they might even be smaller. The punchy climbers generally don’t open big enough gaps over short distances to make a big difference (Ricco for example) but climbers that climb at a hard steady pace on long climbs can open HUGE gaps. So if you want to see climbs make a big difference, I would think you would want long climbing stages with climbs that aren’t super steep but that are somewhere in the middle and really long. Riders like Ricco probably wouldn’t be able to hang so well on climbs like these but riders like Bert could open huge gaps on these kinds of climbs. Maybe that’s why a lot of guys that do well in the Giro don’t do so well in the Tour.

I’m probably missing the point of this whole thread, but it seems clear to me that if you just pluck out the TTs or ignore the climbs from the results of a grand tour, and then try to use that as a indicator of the relative value of each discipline, you run into a big issue… you are no longer talking about the race that the riders actually rode. You are creating a different race, which everyone would have raced differently. Remove the TTs and a guy like Contador, who is an excellent climber, will have less need to save his matches for a TT and he will just climb harder. Shorten the climbs and he can relax and then shell someone like Ricco in the TT.