Brussels sprouts a new winner? Tour de France 2019

[delicatemoth]

Ala should keep 5th, I think?

[ursus arctos]

Nice gesture from Thomas on the line

[longeared]

And that result means Bardet wins the spotty jersey

[ursus arctos]

Bravo Nibs!

[longeared]

Yes Nibs!

[ursus arctos]

So, we will get fifteen minutes of racing

[longeared]

Alaphilippe's going to end up finishing outside the GC top ten.

[ursus arctos]

We are starting to see why the construction in les Trois Vallées is considered a disaster by many.

[ursus arctos]

The Tour is making manifest how important it was for Roglic to lose De Plus in the first week of the Giro

[delicatemoth]

BUGGER.

[longeared]

Oh, Julian, oh, Romain.

[delicatemoth]

The graphic is showing the gap to what I have to refer to as the 'Porte group'. I'd understand if he were French. Where did the idea that Porte is a potential Grand Tour contender come from, and why does it persist?

[ursus arctos]

Leclerc looks to have given away tens of thousands of replicas from the caravan

[delicatemoth]

I do like this year's polka dot jersey.

[longeared]

Memo to Jumbo-Visma; trying to out-Ineos INEOS never works.

[longeared]

It's better than the flamenco style theme music they use for the Vuelta.

[Benjm]

The accordion styled theme ought to be far more irritating than it is, although I don't envy young M. de Galles having it as an earworm.

[Ray de Galles]

Ah no, hearing it now the music bed for the competition is far more Balearic.

[Ray de Galles]

What tells me that I'm ready for the race to finish is that I'm increasingly finding the incidental music that plays under ITV4's competition announcement to be a moving and profound masterpiece.

If that's the same vaguely Kraftwerk-lite tune they use as bumper music in and out of the adverts then it's affected my son too.

He's only had to hear it when he's watched some highlights with me and when I had it on all day Thursday as I, ahem, worked from home but by that evening at the cricket he said he couldn't get it out of his head.

[delicatemoth]

Bernal looks really cute in his shades.

[Benjm]

What tells me that I'm ready for the race to finish is that I'm increasingly finding the incidental music that plays under ITV4's competition announcement to be a moving and profound masterpiece.

[longeared]

Yeah, agree, it was the least worst option available and ASO had to make a decision quickly. The alternatives were to keep racing which would have been dangerous, stick the riders in cars and restart at the foot of the climb to Tignes which wouldn't have been possible with the landslide (and would have taken ages) or cancel the stage entirely and have no results in any classification. They may well have done that had the weather hit before they started the Iseran.

Also, it's outdoor sport. Weather intervenes occasionally and prevents the event proceeding to a natural conclusion. Cricket says hello.

Anyway, seems they are going to start today, no publicity caravan, no helicopters (hopefully they can get the plane up for telly pictures) and I've seen a line that ASO are setting up a timing point 10k from the finish in case they are prevented from going further.

[Ray de Galles]

Good points, though I think it all proves the point that there will be something of a shadow over Bernal's win.

It's a little like England winning the Cricket World Cup via scoring the most boundaries. You're almost retconning a victor, though perhaps necessarily so.

[ursus arctos]

Very much agreed

[delicatemoth]

It was either that or nullify the whole stage, which I think would have been a bigger distortion - Alaphilippe still in the lead after we saw him dropped and Bernal ride off like that. If they'd chosen that and then today's stage had been cancelled (as seems to have almost happened) we'd have seen the GC drop in Ala's lap thanks to the cancellation of the last two big mountain stages. I think that would have been a victory with a bigger shadow, so for me the organisers made the least bad choice.