2022 Tour de France thread

Mental impression of knoath’s accent…changing…

Pog’s butt is gonna hurt tomorrow

So after today’s stage, is Van Aert a future GC chance? If so, does he leave JV? Also given that JV is the undisputed leader of JV, perhaps for years to come, does Roglic leave to go to another team while he still has an outside chance of winning? Will Bernal come back? Lots of questions…

The tour used to have a lot more time trialing, so I think if they add back the team time trial and have 3 ITTs like they did in the 90s and 2000s a guy like Wout would have a much better chance. Then again he’s still at least an hour down on the GC and that’s a lot of time to make up even if he had giant margins like Indurain did.

As far as “do-everything” phenom goes, I think Pogacar would be closer since he can win classics, TTs, and is even good on cobbled roads unlike many of the pure climbers. This year’s tour he’s in the top 4 for each of the main jerseys, 2nd for the green, and 4th for polka, which is still insane even though he lost yellow.

I’ve finally caught up on this and allowed myself to finish reading this thread. I said last year that Wout Van Aert has what it takes to contend for the yellow jersey. Don’t forget that he won a high mountain stage last year (or was it the year before?), and if Jonas Vingegaard had been working for him instead of the other way around, Wout would have been King of the Mountains this year.

He can climb, he can time trial, he can sprint… yes, he can win the Tour de France if he had a team working for him to do so.

He’s an hour down because he’s been sacrificing himself for Vingegaard. If he was racing for GC he wouldn’t be doing that.

The commentators were speculating that Ineos should take Cavendish back and switch from being a GC team to bring a sprint team and that is certainly an interesting idea. But if they want to stay a GC team maybe they should be thinking about Wout Van Aert. He could win the yellow jersey for them. But if Egan Bernal comes back from his injuries then they may well stand pat.

I’m expecting the 2023/2024 or one the upcoming tours to be one of the best ever. If the following people were to try for the GC:

Tadej Pogacar
Jonas Vingegaard
Remco Evenopoel
Egan Bernal
Richard Carapaz
Jai Hindley
Enric Mas
Wout Van Aert

…it would be super competitive. Could stack it up further by bringing Joao Almeida and Ayuso too…

Not familiar with a couple of those names… assuming they are up & coming?

When is Wout Van Aert’s contract up with Jumbo-Visma? I’m not sure they’ll let him ride for GC.

More importantly, even though I 100% believe he could, I’m not totally certain that he wants to. We shall see. I’ll be a fan of his regardless of his GC aspirations.

I see you gave up on Roglic. Poor bastard.

I looked up Roglic’s record because they didn’t really talk about him much at the Tour this year. He won Paris-Nice and the Criterium du Dauphine and won an individual stage and the team time trial at the Vuelta wearing red after his stage win, but didn’t finish. Seems like he might still be a contender, but what happened to him at the Vuelta?

It’s a bit like what happened to Caleb Ewan last year (in one of his several crashes). He was so tired after going so hard up the hill, that he misjudged getting into the slipstream of another rider, hit their wheel (handlebars in this case) and went down. Roglic pulled out the next day.

He was within striking distance of Remco, although it would have been still a long shot to win.

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I take it he was out of red when the crash happened then. That’s too bad. I hate seeing the crashes.

Speaking of crashes, I thought it was interesting that Christian Vande Velde and Chris Horner both blamed UCI for the horrific crash of Fabio Jakobson and Dylan Groenewegen in the Tour of Poland. Groenewegen served, what, a 9 month suspension for his role in the crash? But they thought that UCI allows too much side to side movement and that all sprinters, including Jakobson, do it.

Thoughts? My default is to defer to their opinions, but I’m curious if others agree.

I love watching sports, but Tua’s concussion had me thinking that I hate how much risk is involved in simply entertaining us. And there’s SO much risk in cycling.