Watching the peloton - Professional Road Racing thread 2026

[Rás Cnoic]

By all accounts, we're now deep into "past performance is no guarantee of future results" territory with Mas and Movistar. The sudden and dramatic improvements are hard to fathom.

According to Roll and CVV, Dan Lloyd, and many other credible sources, nothing in their recent histories would have predicted the very impressive way that Mas and team have risen to the opportunity opened by Pogi's Stage 9 crash.

As for Mas, we're talking not just a good day, but a very good 12 days in a row. Where did that come from??

As for the team, CVV has called Movistar's tactics in recent years "laughable" several times, and he's not alone in that opinion. That's largely a "corporate culture" thing, and corporate cultures aren't known for changing overnight. Yet now Movistar seems to be doing everything right.

Really, how can all this be happening at once??

I don't rate the GCN gang too much to be honest. It's fairly simple - With Pog out and Mas riding very well, he immediately became favourite. He'd already out climbed the other favourites and was the only one able to keep up/catch Pog the previous day. A fantastic sign how well he was going.

Plus it's Movistar's home race! The chance of red from the position Mas found himself in (driving seat) made the team quickly and simply move into defence of Mas.

It helped the number of mountains ahead, where he excels, and that the team knows these roads inside out. Also they may in the last number of years have been disfunctional but they've been GC hunters for 46 years since 1980- 1980!!

It also helped that I'm convinced Bora don't know their arse from their elbow. They are so disfunctional. Because of Roglic's bad crash in training for Vuelta they wrote him off and expected Pog to run riot. Instead of a team of climbers supporting their 4 time winner, they instead put one day specialists, TT specialists, Sprinters and only 2 young untested climbers to help Roglic in the mountains, a really stupid decision. Follows on from their shambles at the Tour with Remco fighting Lipowitz (destroying his confidence) and the team splitting into 2 camps. Here on an early stage, Roglic was astonished that some of his team were pushing ahead and ignored him when he told them not to. And he was so angry he went public about it in the post race interview. Something really not good at the heart of Boro.

Felix Gall tried his best but to me Decathlon looked a bit mentally knackered after the tour and the big Seixas show.

And what can you say about Carapaz! He really lit up the race and EE really tried their best to support him. There with him every day, attack after attack. What a great team and individual performance. He looked bitter at the end today, like Max and Gall and Roglic he knew how rare an opportunity this was without Pog. All these riders have to face Grand Tours with the Pog or Jonas factor, its defined their careers.

The big surprise was Mas himself and it's like when he put on that Red jersey it made something click in his head. I've watched him for years, he was the young hope in The Least Expected Day and was always in the the elite group going over the high mountains, just seemed to lack that killer instinct to win, in those split second decisions that you clearly see Carapaz, Roglic or Pog making. Maybe being 31 and never gotten this close, and maybe never will again, made him grab it with both hands. And then he became a leader; decisive, sharp and pretty deadly. And then the team around him was electrified.

Look at Landa today, 36, never won a Grand Tour but came agonisingly close at least 4 times. Or Dunbar yesterday 30, but as a teenager everyone earmarked him for a potential Tour De France winner - it just never happened. Life is hard. The sport is hard, Big wins so rare. Usain Bolt faces 7 other sprinters on the start line. Riders face 180 rivals over 21 days. To get any win is incredible.

I think Jeremy you've been spoiled by the Pog years making it all look so easy. This tour, best of the year, shows how it usually is, fought to the last stage with all to play for and riders in top 2 or 3 or 5 so close, one misstep and the chance can go, and maybe never come back again.