Tour '25

I'm starting to think that Visma is playing 3D chess with TP. They sent Yates up the road and he ends up getting the stage. UAE was nowhere to be found. Healey is a better climber than anyone here has admitted to. He will be a threat in yellow, but he won't have a lot of support at altitude. He will need a lot of help to keep it. That creates another dilemma for TP. It was nice to see Remco attack at the end, although it didn't mean much. Jorgensen didn't crush himself yet moved up to 5th, creating yet another angle to the matrix. Sepp was there and then he wasn't. Either he's not ready or Visma sat him down.

Wednesday or Thursday are when Visma may show their cards. They have to isolate TP on a significant climb and have Yates, Mateo, or Sepp beat him up with ruthless attacks, then spring Jonas. They don't have to get him in yellow, but they must significantly reduce TP's lead. They need to get in his head. TP is great when he's in control. Not so much when he's not. Jonas has proven that he can chase TP down and beat him on long climbs.
 
Jeremy McCreary said:
NBC takes its cycling coverage seriously, and they do a good job.
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By and large I agree, they do a pretty good job. But as someone in a household that has closed captioning on all the time I have to complain how poorly its implemented. Live captioning is no longer as delayed as in years past, but in this day and age there's really no excuse not to have trained the algorithm on every rider and team director name.

They've clearly added names to the dictionary, because it does get names right..sometimes. But come on, Jonas Bingo Card? Tidy Packages?
 
stompandgo said:
I'm starting to think that Visma is playing 3D chess with TP. They sent Yates up the road and he ends up getting the stage. UAE was nowhere to be found. Healey is a better climber than anyone here has admitted to. He will be a threat in yellow, but he won't have a lot of support at altitude. He will need a lot of help to keep it. That creates another dilemma for TP. It was nice to see Remco attack at the end, although it didn't mean much. Jorgensen didn't crush himself yet moved up to 5th, creating yet another angle to the matrix. Sepp was there and then he wasn't. Either he's not ready or Visma sat him down.

Wednesday or Thursday are when Visma may show their cards. They have to isolate TP on a significant climb and have Yates, Mateo, or Sepp beat him up with ruthless attacks, then spring Jonas. They don't have to get him in yellow, but they must significantly reduce TP's lead. They need to get in his head. TP is great when he's in control. Not so much when he's not. Jonas has proven that he can chase TP down and beat him on long climbs.
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Great analysis. Pog & Jonas would each pay dearly to see inside each other's head right now. The only crack so far was Jonas's TT, which was pan flat, but a crack is a crack. Going to be fascinating. Healy is unknown on the high peaks. I was amazed he passed O'Connor on that last climb after all that pulling, O'Connor is a great climber but blows hot and cold and this year so far hasn't shown his best. Healy has stamina and can climb - short climbs at least - and has a pretty good TT. I'd say Healy would be aiming for 3rd place and why not. Remco, Roglic, Kevin V and the other pretenders do at least look vulnerable. But can he do the long 20km climbs? Unlikely but will be fun to see and with yellow on his back a rider can grow or collapse under pressure.
 
Turned out Eurosport was bought by Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) I think in 2022. There is a Player service that belongs to TVN, which in turn belongs to WBD. A monthly access to Eurosport is some five dollar a month. I may pay for a month tomorrow.
 
BlackHand said:
By and large I agree, they do a pretty good job. But as someone in a household that has closed captioning on all the time I have to complain how poorly its implemented. Live captioning is no longer as delayed as in years past, but in this day and age there's really no excuse not to have trained the algorithm on every rider and team director name.

They've clearly added names to the dictionary, because it does get names right..sometimes. But come on, Jonas Bingo Card? Tidy Packages?
Click to expand...
We also have closed captions on all the time. It seems like they are using a combination of live captioning and AI. No one caption stenographer can caption for 6 straight hours, even with commercial breaks. They may be supplementing it with AI. The live caption stenographers get names right by preloading a subset of the names that they expect to come up ahead of time. I'd be surprised if they have more than a dozen preloaded. Captioning works phonetically, not by spelling, so to insert names that aren't preloaded, they have to "spell" them phonetically, and pronunciation of names isn't consistent by the announcers, so you'll get inconsistencies.

AI captioning like OtterAI works by creating a language model modeled on English. Names aren't part of English so it has to try and spell them phonetically. Sometimes it works, a lot of times it doesn't. I don't know if AI captioning can be preloaded with names like a stenographer can. It appears not.

What bugs me is when they overlay the captions over important graphics like race radio communications. A good caption producer would flash <<race radio conversation>> up then remove it to reveal the conversation.
 
Rás Cnoic said:
Great analysis. Pog & Jonas would each pay dearly to see inside each other's head right now. The only crack so far was Jonas's TT, which was pan flat, but a crack is a crack. Going to be fascinating. Healy is unknown on the high peaks. I was amazed he passed O'Connor on that last climb after all that pulling, O'Connor is a great climber but blows hot and cold and this year so far hasn't shown his best. Healy has stamina and can climb - short climbs at least - and has a pretty good TT. I'd say Healy would be aiming for 3rd place and why not. Remco, Roglic, Kevin V and the other pretenders do at least look vulnerable. But can he do the long 20km climbs? Unlikely but will be fun to see and with yellow on his back a rider can grow or collapse under pressure.
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They mentioned that Healey has been training at altitude for the tour. That has benefits at any altitude.

Jonas' poor ITT was accompanied by a great ITT by TP. Even Remco has an off day. Jonas did get gapped by TP earlier in the race. Let's see how that holds up.
 
Stefan Mikes said:
Turned out Eurosport was bought by Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) I think in 2022. There is a Player service that belongs to TVN, which in turn belongs to WBD. A monthly access to Eurosport is some five dollar a month. I may pay for a month tomorrow.
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Yes and they turned off Eurosport in UK so prices would leap from £6.99 per month (Eurosport) to £30.99 per month (TNT aka Warners/Discovery) with exactly the same feed, commentators everything just a new logo and huge monthly increase in price. Ironic as they promised 'added value for cycling', total bullshit. Cycling gains none of that extra subs, it all goes to Discovery/BT. A US company who is deep in crisis, in this post cable world they are losing the streaming wars against Amazon, Netflix and Apple and with Warners about to go their separate way. Nobody wants to watch their archive of old reality shows. At least Warners has 100 years of decent films. They've been making a cash grab in televised sports to save themselves with partners BT (British Telecom) another greedy company who used be public owned (the national telephone company basically pre digital) but who was made private under Thatcher. Years ago the Tory Government gave them £100 million for rural broadband, 3 months later to everyone's surprise BT got into the TV sports game by out bidding Sky, spending, you guessed it - £100 million for UK Football Premiership TV rights. Funnily enough rural broadband seemed to take an age to be implemented after that (don't know if it was connected but 4G is rubbish still in rural areas compared to other countries). This latest match up is all about pure greed. Neither care anything about cycling or sport, just monthly subs. Rant over.

Actually rant not over just remembered something! The Paris Olympics - watching in the UK and over in Ireland I was puzzled by why it was difficult to find some of the more smaller niche sports to watch that I'd watched in earlier Olympics. Then found out that a US company had bought ALL TV rights to every sports and was making national broadcasters like BBC and RTE around the globe buy each sport one by one from THEM rather then an overall package as previously from Olympics themselves. With limited budget this forced national broadcasters to prioritise key sports popular in their country, ie ones they had a shot at the medal table. This left no money for niche sports. You could of course pay through the nose to that company to watch them all, though reviews said they were badly curated with no commentary and hard to navigate. Anyway the holders of the rights - yes, Discovery/TNT. I was so furious - the joy of Olympics is seeing all these tiny sports and incredible athletes once every four years.

Also - If you watch Downhill MTB - Discovery, snatched off Red Bull last year, going from free to same £30.99 per month and pissing off mountain bikers.
Rugby in UK - now also TNT - they have the club leagues & rumours to be attempting to buy Six Nations outbidding BBC and ITV from next year, so going from free to air (Terrestrial) to £30.99 That will cause a lot of anger if it is pushed through, its a sacred ritual from Feb to April each Winter/Spring.

Finally rant over, going to go lie down.
 
Watching Stage 10 highlights after a glorious full night's sleep. At 10.9 km to go...

Quinn just dropped, the guys still lined up behind Healy all have agony on their faces, Healy's just grinding away up the hill out front looking pretty calm, and the commentators are just blubbering in admiration, especially Bob Roll. Great watching!

Healy seems a very likeable fellow. Add his underdog status and his achievements in this Tour, and I think we have a new darling of the cycling press.
 
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Two pertinent facts learned yesterday:

1. So far, this is the 2nd fastest TdF in history.

2. None of the current riders have ever endured a TdF with 10 stages before the 1st rest day.

CORRECTION: Sorry, misheard No. 1. From Wikipedia, "Stage 9 was the second-fastest in Tour history at 50.013 km/h (31.077 mph), owing to the tailwind and the chase for the Alpecin–Deceuninck breakaway."
 
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Jeremy McCreary said:
Quinn just dropped, the guys still lined up behind Healy all have agony on their faces, Healy's just grinding away up the hill out front looking pretty calm, and the commentators are just blubbering in admiration, especially Bob Roll. Great watching!
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Quinn was in the break basically at the start, and pulled all day. I don't know if he ran out of gas or was told to return to the field. The guy's a hammer.
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Slept in till 70 km to go. OMG, what a race! Absolutely thrill a minute. Can't wait to see the lead up on replay.

What we have here is a failure to prognosticate, and I'm loving it. I know the commentators and pundits have to say how they think things will go. But to steal another famous Hollywood line, in this Tour at least,

Prediction is futile. You will be humiliated.
 
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So tomorrow is the first of the Pyrenees. 180km, vert 3794m in 3 monster climbs at end of stage. Bad timing for Pog & that crash. He'll be sore. Jonas looks hungry. Ben H just needs to stick to his own pace and hope that he's with the small group of hopefuls; Remco, Jorgenson, Kevin V, and a few others by the finish line. He has a buffer of around 2 mins on that group, but can lose that in a single KM up there, be a miracle if he could hang on to their coat tails and still be in play by day's end. Let's see, it will be explosive in many places, some hopefuls will be exposed, blow up, left for dead, new heros might emerge! Certainly seems much more interesting in this kind of chaos than the days of the 'Sky train" where Froome and co would just set that high tempo and ride everyone off with zero attacks. There is a real excitement growing, after that first long week this feels a great edition of the Tour, long may the chaos continue.
 
Screenshot 2025-07-16 at 18.07.28.jpg
 
Rás Cnoic said:
Just a pity he's deep down the MAGA spiral. Loves himself a bit o'Trump.
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Look I don't want to do him a disservice, he's an exciting punchy rider who lights up a stage. He got suspended by Trek in 2020 for a racist tweet at a journo who dissed Trump - apparently. Quinn denied it was racist (some symbol he used) and later on Trek took him back into the fold. So who knows. And I guess in normal times politics shouldn't come into racing.
 
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