Watching the peloton - Professional Road Racing thread 2026

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Great ride by Carapaz! His one-two punch at ~3 km out sealed the win.

Sure hope Tadej and Isaac don't catch the bug going around UAE. Are they obligated to stay in the same hotel as their teammates?

Quite a dilemna facing UAE now. If Isaac gets sick, how much help will Tadej really have on the 2 big mountain stages coming next? If Isaac has to empty his tank helping Tadej, he could well lose his final podium and white jersey in the process.
 
Carapaz is known for late stage attacks in big races, so I was not surprised when he threw his double attack down for the win. This is great for Carapaz and EF.

Teams can stay wherever they want to, but there is no real need to change hotels, just isolate them in their own room. Most riders have roommates.

Del Toro did not look good after today's stage. For whatever reason, he looked uncomfortable and withdrawn. I think he knows that it's down to him now to protect Tadej, over two of the toughest stages in the race. Maybe he is feeling something coming on. Who knows. I still think a healthy Tadej, without a healthy, complete Visma team to test him, has this race in the bag. Lance did not understand why ASO put these last four stages together at the end. He thought that it was boring. He must have forgotten that the one guy that could challenge Tadej is no longer in the race. A healthy Jonas could have made this race epic.

The ride of the day was Mads absolutely burying Phillipsen on the stage. Think about it. You have a sprinter who is a decent climber make the lead group, stay with them for 125+km, and then take the intermediate sprint. Unbelieveable. Only 32 points separates them, so this is not over yet.
 
stompandgo said:
The ride of the day was Mads absolutely burying Phillipsen on the stage. Think about it. You have a sprinter who is a decent climber make the lead group, stay with them for 125+km, and then take the intermediate sprint. Unbelieveable. Only 32 points separates them, so this is not over yet.
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If they gave a gold jersey for most entertaining, Mads would have been wearing it since Stage 2.
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He announced that he'll be retiring after this year's Danish national championship, which he rode with similar gusto last year. He'll be sorely missed.
 
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Jeremy McCreary said:
If they gave a gold jersey for most entertaining, Mads would have been wearing it since Stage 2.


He announced that he'll be retiring after this year's Danish national championship, which he rode with similar gusto last year. He'll be sorely missed.
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I love it when top athletes decide to retire on top.
 
Well, Tadej did it again! Good to see Yates back from his illness to help halfway up Alpe D'Huez. Again, very impressive rides by Carapaz and Pedersen.

Tadej's always a class act, but I wish he'd at least pretend to look tired after stages like this.

Hurts to even look at tomorrow's profile.
 
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BlackHand said:
Tough break for Sepp Kuss, but it could have been much much worse.
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Guessing he was blinded coming out of the tunnel on the 1st crash. On the 2nd, he lost grip before hitting the wall — maybe something on the road, maybe just too hot into the curve?

In any case, kudos for the way he rode the top of that wall, stopping maybe a meter short of the end of the safety net. Never saw him touch the net, but if he'd hit the wall a few meters later at a different angle...
 
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I worked a race all day and finally caught up with the queen stage. Carapaz, so impressive. He is a beast in the mountains. Great finish to your career. Sepp, damn. It was the story of Visma all Tour. You had it in the bag. Awful. Remco. You have worked so hard to be a climber and man, did it pay off. This is the best I have seen you ride in a stage race. Seixas. You probably should not have been there, but what a fight you put up. Learn, and progress. Del Toro, it's awesome that your team leader backed you up, but when it counted, without Tadej, you would have lost minutes. Do you still think Jonas is a wheelsucker now?

I can't believe it's over, and how it went down. The top step may have been predetermined, but everything else was up for grabs. Such a polarizing edition of the greatest bike race ever created.
 
Catching up. Weather here so lovely been in the sea most of the time but caught yesterday's last hour and snatches during the week. Stomp you've summed it up very well and I'm happy to eat humble pie about Remco, I was sure he'd crack in the last week but he deserves his second place. Had Lipo & Johannes still been racing it would have obviously been tighter but he would still have had a shout. Losing 4kgs and extended altitude training paid off. Incidentally on INRG was just reading that it's 1982 and Van Impe since we had a Belgian on the TDF podium. Such a come down from the 70s when with Merckx and a host of Belgian stars they were everywhere.

Pog was unstoppable. Seixas at 19 finishing 4th is remarkable and also glad he didn't kill himself in process. He can really build on this. Let's see what team snatches him now. Plenty of interesting stories in the rest of the top ten, Pedersen is a beast and Chapeau to Carapaz absolutely delighted for his double and polka dot what a race he's run.

Today could be MVDP on the cobbles or Pog with a last hurrah.

Only downsides was that awful heat wave and the dark clouds of the 2am drug testing. Reports saying doping authorities convinced something was going on. Guessing we'll hear more of this over next few months if something is off.
 
I did not watch the entire replay, so I missed the incredible effort by Mads. He gets dropped on the Col de Fer, chases back to the main group, attacks the main group and escapes, catches the break, then wins the sprint for the points. I mean, that's crazy. It makes me believe that the days of the pure sprinters like Cav and Jasper may be ending. Is Mads the new Grand Tour sprinter prototype? Will we see multiple Mads guys out there marking and challenging each other on mountain days in order to get to the sprint points first, or to battle it out at the line after a summit? If so, I love it. Bring it on.

Of course, I had to watch the Move afterwards. Lance is either such an idiot, or he plays one on tv.

Lance: I don't care about the Men's Elite World Championship. I am going to watch two races only, the U23 time trial and road race for Ben Wiggins.
George: You're not going to watch Enzo?

Dumbass.
 
The next Grand Tour, the Vuelta de Espana, starts in 4 weeks (8/22 with US streaming by Peacock). Sad to see this one come to an end today, but it'll be nice to realign my sleep pattern with my own (Pacific) time zone for a while.
 
Jeremy McCreary said:
OMG! I've only been following pro racing in earnest for 3+ years now. Does it get much better than that finish? Than that Grand Tour?
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I have not watched the final stage, but I've seen the reporting. They typical Stage 21 is some riders going out on the break, the yellow sipping champagne while cruising along the dead flat countryside, the break getting caught and dispatched by the sprint teams, and the final 3-4 circuits along the Champs ridden like an American criterium, flat out, riders getting shelled every half lap. Yesterday, they took out the flat boring part, and added a short cobbled climb, which meant the riders, like all race long, would go at the gun flat out and race until the end. That's a good model for the future.

The best Grand Tour ever? If you're a Pogi fan, you probably think so. Not for me. There was no challenge for the yellow. That's the whole point of the race. It could be argued that if Jonas had stayed in the race, that a serious challenge may have come in the final stages in the Alps. We will never know. Remco has improved his climbing greatly, but he still cannot catch Jonas. Seixas is a question mark, but shows incredible promise. The rest of the top ten can win on any day, but the GC, it's tough.

I thought that the course design this year was magnificent. If sprinters are morphing into riders like Mads, then there is no need for more pan flat stages, which are boring until the end. I am intrigued about this possibility. Another thing that has changed is the rise of young riders, not just Seixas. Spencer Martin pointed out that over the past few decades of the Tour, the average age of the peloton has been 29, and so has the average age of the top ten finishers. In the past few years, the average age of the peloton has stayed at 29, but the top ten finishers average age has dropped to 25. If this is a trend, then bike racing could be going the way of women's gymnastics, where young athletes dominate and competitors in their late 20's are team fillers. Time will tell.

It was also enjoyable for me to see so many American riders play key roles on their teams. Participation in road racing in America is way, way down from the peaks of the 1980's-1990's. So many races have gone away. American riders that want to succeed at this level have to sacrifice their lives to spend months overseas. How sustainable is this? Now that the salaries have caught up with reality at the UWT level, maybe some of that will trickle downhill. We shall see.
 
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