Irvin85

Tough one, I still do not think Jonas is at 100%, if he was he would have continued on the climb when he caught Pogi and gapped him, instead he rode onto his wheel and sat there for a while. He might be riding it a bit smarter and saving some energy, knowing that he would not gain a lot on the stage anyways. Exciting weekend ahead with some big mountains to climb

I did that on Saturday, nearly died. Average heartrate of 178bpm.

Point of view is from what Jonas and his team expect. Not my personal opinion, they expected him to lose around 2 minutes in the first week but believe he will be able to claw back the time in the third week where the climbs is more suited to his strengths.

I might be completely wrong, but from past races Remco does not have it in him yet to stick to the top climbers in the High Mountains. A realistic 5th place would be great for him, anything better is a major Win.

I have yet to see Pogi ride defensively, his attacking nature will not allow this to happen. He will only ride defensively if he has reached or is close to his limit. He will continue to attack and try and get a proper lead before the final 3 stages. Jonas has really been impressive so far considering his poor lead up to the race. If he gets stronger during the race I expect the 3rd week to be fireworks.

My guess is that Jonas will ship some time on Poggi, while Roglic will have a similar time to Poggi and Remco to win the stage. Remco is not the world champ for no reason. I expect Wout to do well as well.

Tell Sir Wiggins to buy his new home with the Glory of winning the Tour.

What was the Top speed of Cavendish in the sprint yesterday?

Did my First Ride on IndieVelo on tuesday, what can I say, I am really impressed. The setup was easy and no connection issues using Ant+. The physics feels much better than Zwift in my opinion, I could feel a remarkable difference when drafting behind another rider, something that I never experienced with Zwift. The graphics is great, on par with Zwift. MyWhoosh is too hardware heavy as I cannot run it on either of my laptops and the graphics is horrible running from my Iphone, Not even the less detailed version works on any of the laptops. I also did not experience any drop in connection like with Zwift. In order for Zwift to work properly on Ant+ or Bluetooth I had to switch the Treadmill off and unplug it. Meaning that My wife(a Runner) and I could never train next to each other as Zwift would never work and my indoor trainer even when using Ant+ would bomb out. So Indievelo for the win.

Brilliant sprint from Cav. I really did not think he still had that kind of Top speed, his experience showed jumping from one wheel to the next to ensure he is following the correct lead out. It was pure class. Some Humble pie being served today. I hope he can repeat that, even if it is just for my Fantasy team.

Apparently the bike is faster with the empty bottles on it than without it.

Thanks for this, I have now downloaded it and will give it a go.

Has he not been "Knighted" - A Knight in a dumbster - Sounds like a title of a bad movie.. Too soon?

Bliksem. 13Million pounds is a lot of money to spend. I feel for the him.

Thanks, I will stick to the information I obtained from a person that lived the first 20 years under the Soviet unions control and had direct contact to the sort of behavior.

Peaking a week too early? I so hoped that the top 4 will go to the Tour with the perfect preparations and that after 3 weeks the strongest will stand on top of the podium, without any illness or crashes effecting the race.

The Russians has been doing it for decades. in the old days they raised the woman's natural testosterone levels by getting them pregnant shortly before the Olympics. In some eastern European countries the kids only why "out" is by excelling in a sport. I had a wrestling coach from Romania who was won a Silver medal at the 1968 Olympics. and the things they had did from a young age to achieve greatness and how their parents pushed them is hair raising. If a youngster has been micro-doping it is possible to be "undetected" and have a significant higher baseline to work from. "Shew" - I guess you know more about this kind of stuff being involved in Pro- cycling.

Where do you see that?

You could use your phone and cast it onto your apple TV?

I have cancelled my Zwift subscription, Mywhoosh will take over from zwift, the only issue that I do have is that it requires quite a proper laptop/pc to run the full version. The have however launched a "mini" version and even that does not want to work on my laptop because of the graphics card. I am running it from my phone but that is not ideal. MyWhoosh has a agreement with the UCI to be the official virtual race platform, so I do believe it will take off once they have it ironed out the massive hardware requirement that it currently needs.

I wonder if the Biological passport actually works. I am not exactly sure when they start tracking and excatly how it works, so please correct me if I am wrong. From my knowledge of it is that it tracks anomalies from the established levels of an athlete, so if you doped before they started tracking you, lets say from 13years and your levels was high from the start but they could not detect any of the drugs in your system, then you basically will never raise a flag if you continued to dope and your levels remained the same. I honestly think that is what is currently happening and why we are seeing so much younger guys on the podiums of the Grand tours. In the past guys only reached their prime for the 3 week races at the age of 28 onwards.

This year will be interesting, I cannot think that any human is able to recover that fast from a punctured lung and spending 11 days in hospital to riding the tour, never mind being competitive. I honestly think the peloton is as dirty as it was in 1999, they are just getting so much better at masking it.

All that "jiffy bag" medicine finally starting to go to his head.

Chris Froome not going VROOOM at le Tour https://www.cyclingnews.com/news/chris-froome-misses-israel-premier-tech-tour-de-france-selection-gee-and-williams-to-star/

It will be interesting to see what kind of shape he is in. The tour starts with a extremely difficult stage that could already have a big GC impact, so he won't be able to ease back into racing at all. It could all be over for him by the first stage. That being said, they have Jorgensson and Kuss that could potentially fight for a podium spot. I hope we see Jonas well recovered and race ready, he won the tour by 7min so if he is only at 95% he will still be very competitive. Nothing will be better than seeing the top 4 in a dog fight for the yellow. Will Carapaz be the dark horse?