Tour de France 2012 Route Leak Screenshots

Now that, I’m all for.

Teammates are already enough of the equation, without making a rider’s GC ambitions hinge on whether Nicki Sørensen or Miguel Minguez can hold on in a time trial.

Fine, but we shouldn’t have to wait two weeks for anything to do with the battle for the GC. It’s the same as how the Giro didn’t bother putting anything after about stage 11 to make the sprinters hang around, so they didn’t. The Giro was too focused on the mountains and the GC men, so that when the GC was cleared up early there was no side battle; the Tour shoehorned the entire GC battle into one week to make room for the other battles.

The stages of the 2011 Tour weren’t the problem for me. The ridiculously lopsided pacing was.

Just a shame we had to wait until stage 18 for them to realise that they might have left it too late.

I thought the spread of stages at the Tour was absolutely fine, but having no GC-settling stage until stage 12 meant that everybody was protecting their interests until then, resulting in a nervous and crash-prone péloton because woe betide the guy in 29th place overall loses his chance of getting into the top 15. I would have liked some kind of early GC shakeup. I would have had an ITT instead of the TTT (Definitely) and made the Super-Besse stage use the harder 2008 approach for one thing.

With regards to the Giro, that was just too much mountain focus. Either they needed to turn Nevegal into a 55km flat ITT or they needed to drop one of the unnecessary overkill MTFs like Macugnaga. Obviously, the Giro put some potentially very exciting and interesting stages in week 1 but for obvious reasons, racing took a back seat at that point, and I have no qualms with how they treated the tragedy so no problems on that point.

With regards to the Vuelta, I’m sure that pretty much any of you given a few minutes with a map could draw up some more GC-relevant stages in the north of the country than they provided. Also, in the early leaks of the route the flat procession in Madrid was replaced by a 20km ITT. I prefer this, as though the Champs-Elysées sprint may be sacrosanct, the pan-flat sprint through the capital to finish is played out (especially in races like Austria where it completely hamstrings the race route) and reeks of copying the Tour. And it makes the Vuelta look weak in comparison (you can make the convincing argument that it IS weak in comparison, of course, but they should be trying to mask that).

Gilbert is a great rider. The best in the world by a street at what he does, if not the best in the world bar none. But what he does in one day races has no bearing on whether he should be in the top 10 of a GT after two weeks, considering he hadn’t even picked up any major time in a breakaway.

At the start of the penultimate weekend, we’d had one mountain stage (which was raced very conservatively), the Aubisque stage which is sort of a mountain stage I guess, and the rest of it was a TTT, and nothing but sprints and a few of the kind of stages Gilbert was made for.

Great riding by him to be there, but on any other GT parcours of the last ten years, no way would he have been there. He can’t climb or ITT well enough for that.

to elaborate:

There is nothing wrong with including sprint stages, and there is nothing wrong with including the kind of stages Gilbert excels at. Some of those stages were quite good in fact. But that he was still in the top ten after two weeks shows just how lopsided the parcours was, because it meant that no truly challenging GC stage AT ALL had taken place – as Gilbert can neither climb nor ITT well enough to be any GC threat realistically.

Gilbert’s riding in the first two weeks of the Tour saved it from being an utter processional farce, and for that he should be commended. But the route was “two weeks of jockeying for ten-fifteen seconds, then a week of mountains one after the other”. Normally I’d be all about a week of mountain stages. But it was like the first two weeks were deliberately rendered irrelevant, but for the demolition derby aspects of it, because they crammed absolutely everything into the final week, and because of how chaotic they’d made the final week, they just kind of ambled around for two weeks on a wing and a prayer that Gilbert could somehow make it worth watching, since the green jersey was the only jersey actually being fought for (as in for the victory, not just the right to wear it) in weeks 1 and 2. Mileage naturally varies on how interesting he made it.