Mountain Bru

If you have a Garmin, the Garmin route planner is definitely a better choice cos it makes it so much easier to sync stuff to your device. No idea how this works on other devices

@J Wakefield Great ride from Majka yesterday. Was it always the plan for him to do a ambitious 70km solo attack? Also, does Majka still have functioning kidneys after neading a fresh bidon every 2 minutes for 70km?

I'd guess 1:30 minimum for Mas, and more for Lopez. I mean Mas lost 18s on stage 1 in 7km. Final TT is 34km, so basically 5 times longer, so if things scaled completely linearly, he'd loose 1:30s. Roglic has this in the bag as long as he doesn't randomly crash or completely blow up on stage 17 or 18

I reckon he learnt that move in the Movistar playbook. If I was the IWG DS, I'd have been pissed. Would have been so bad if Eiking got dropped and lost red while Meintjies meme attacked to maybe get a top 10 at best. But having said that, I get the feeling the IWG DS writes down the tactics for the day with a wax crayon in his colouring in book every morning while drinking tea out of a sippy cup

Naa there was nothing to gain today. He's basically sitting in the lead marking attacks, and the only thing that hinted at looking marginally threatening was Mas marking Yates' first attack, which Rogla was immediately all over (marking Mas, not Yates). The stage's profile looks intense, but if you try think about how you can actually win time and look at the gradients, the descents and the valleys, it becomes clear it's not gonna happen. Biggest climb is still with 40km to go, so a huuuge attack there from Roglic would leave him needing to do a 40km solo break, (or bridge to Kruijswijk?), but Ineos, Movistar, IWG, BV all had multiple domestiques and would all chase him with their full team, so would have been a big waste of energy. Last climb was 8km @ 4%, but only with 1 short steeper section. It would have taken a massive effort to maybe win 10s seen as no one is gonna crack on that, so really not worth it. Yates only got away cos nobody could be bothered to chase a guy that's 4 minutes down and at best is gonna win 20s.

Good to see IWG on the front and not just leaving TJV to control. Don't think this last climb is going to result in much. I don't think the climb is long enough to drop anyone serious abut GC, and with a downhill finish, I don't think there's much incentive in going over the top with a 5s gap

I really hope you manage to reverse the deal. But if all else fails, at least you're not R25k out of pocket. Carbon repairs aren't as complicated and expensive as you might think, and if it's done properly you won't even see the repair.

Had a very similar idea yesterday:

I fully agree. But I'm sure I'm not the only person that would prefer to not deal with such a person under most circumstances. It's not at all malicious against the individual though, just that "statistically" it's more likely to be a scammer. Same as not wanting to deal with people with no posts or sub1000 posts on the forums. It's not because you think everyone without posts is dodgey, it's because the risk of things going bad is lower with someone that's active on the forums.

Shucks, you've seen straight through my elaborate plan to block all of the jealous 2 bottle haters ..... ????????????????

Same reason you don't write a list of spammers on a piece of paper and check it every time you get an email. You mark them as spam, and let the smart people at Google keep their nonsense out of your inbox. 100%. Being able to immediately see stuff like if someone started and account and immediately posted an ad, or if someone has multiple 1 star reviews would be really useful. Also if you have a bad experience with someone screwing you around (like not pitching up for a meeting, or @Nico van Loggerenberg's favorite - tells you that you can buy something and hen sells it to someone else), you can't leave them a bad review, but you probably don't want to do business with them in future. Having a way to flag that guy would be really useful.

So after reading a few threads, particularly the ones which call upon the power of the pitchfork brigade, I thought it would be useful to have a list of people that I'd choose to never buy from or sell anything to. Like not even necessarily in a malicious way, but in a "I don't want issues in my life" kind of way, and some people seem to create more issues than others. I remember once having a friend that literally every time we went to a restaurant, he'd find something to complain about to the waiters and could never let anything go. So eventually I just stopped going out to eat with him cos I got tired of his crap, but we were still friends. Kind of like that. There are some characters floating around that I'd rather not eat with... I know that there's a rating system which helps us know when someone is dodgey once they've made a sale, but those reviews should only be of transactions that have actually taken place between hubbers, and there shouldn't be any 1 star ratings because I don't like what someone said in a forum post or someone gives off a "I like to complain" vibe. So instead of trying to maintain a list myself, I figured being able to flag people somehow on the platform would be super useful. Maybe not even see their ads, or not have my ads visible to them, but at the least being able to see when I open an ad or get a message from someone that this dude is on my "no touchy list". Would anyone else be interested in a feature like this, and what would it take to get the admins to implement such a feature? (I know from other threads that petitions for features we want isn't effective though )

100% agree. Once my membership ends, I doubt if I'll renew it, and without the ability to see the leaderboards, especially your own efforts, I don't think I see much value in strava. I assume you also can't see your power curve or fitness and freshness curves? Intervals.icu does that for free though, and is probably a better training tool than strava though.

Yup. Pretty sure that's a crack

I don't understand. I have a strava membership though, so I have no idea what it looks like without a membership. There's a few things I love about strava : - The "my results" view on a segment to see how you're improving or where your fitness is. - A record of all my activities that isn't tied to a watch platform like garmin or suunto or whatever. This might be really useful one day in the future - Being able to link it with hubtiger and know when to service my bike/fork/drivetrain for different bikes without thinking at all.

I can see how the trident strategy should work in principle, and in all honesty, it's probably the only way you can beat Pogacar or Roglic, but I feel like I've never actually seen it work. It seems to always be a mess when there isn't 1 leader on a team. (The reason I say it's your only chance to beat the Slovenians is the same reason it was the best chance to beat Froome. When you have a guy that can "comfortably" hold the wheels all the way up a climb, and then put a massive kick in on the last km or minute, he's always gonna be hard to beat. If Ineos has 1 leader, say Bernal, and made a mountain train on the front with Narvaes, Yates & Carapaz (or Kwiato/Thomas/Porte/Martinez/Castro in the TDF), they would be able to rip it up the climbs, but it's super unlikely they'd be able to ride Roglic or Pogacar off their wheels, and in the last km, the Slovenians just have a stronger kick than Bernal and would take 10 - 20s off him. So the best chance of winning is to not make a train, make UAE/TJV pace, and then have multiple attacks from multiple leaders that are close on GC to force Rog or Pog to close attack after attack while the other leaders sit on. Eventually they'll crack and someone will get away and win some time)

Funniest things about this thread is that the OP (who has since disappeared ) wanted to rant about how bad Castelli is, and instead has done some great marketing for them and probably won them some more business with all of the positive reviews and feedback that people have posted.

Another great plugin is StravaSauce. (I think it's a chrome plugin, so I'm not sure if you get it for other browsers)

Are these people going on a multi-day hiking expedition? Why does everyone have a rucksack on?

Thats good strava-ing ????

That climb had gradients of 24% on it ???? Not sure if you caught Lanterne Rouge's recap, but he has Kuss' power data overlayed for the last climb. Absolutely mental to think he was left behind by Roglic and Mas while doing some serious watts.

I'm in a conversion process.... Quite enjoy the "80km of jeep track in lycra nonsense" at the moment... (As in XC races)

I realize being a roadie also makes you appreciate having the route on your edge unit far more than on a MTB, and I guess I've really gotten used to it. On the road, It can literally make the race safer if you know we're 500m from a sharp left turn, so I should expect the bunch to start braking soon. Or from a non-safety point of view, to know that it's only 300m to the top of climb, so even if I'm suffering, it's really worthwhile to dig deep to stay in a bunch rather than getting dropped. On a MTB it's more of a luxury I guess, but still really useful at times.

Also really exciting to see Mas and Lopez working well together as a team, not just for this race, but for future races too. Movistar will be a real force to be reckoned with if those 2 can consistently work well together and Bala is in the mix too. I know it's fun to tease Movistar for having terrible tactics and attacking each other and getting up to all sorts of shenanigans, but it's a far more entertaining race to watch when they're performing well as a team and are a serious contender for the win. It's funny to watch Valverde chase down Landa after Nairoman makes a random attack, but I think it makes the spectacle of the race itself far worse

It's such a pity that the Vuelta isn't more popular and isn't as well covered as the TDF. I only watched the last 10 or 15km today, but it was seriously far more exciting than so many of the stages in the tour. I mean 11 stages down, and Roglic is looking really dominant, but it's still all to play for.... One bad day from Rogla and Mas or Haig could easily take this.