Great Tour, but the fact that it happened at all was important and they did really well to get it complete as they did. Before they started I thought there was a genuine chance they'd end up with about fifty finishers and someone like van Avermaet might end up really high on GC purely through managing to stay in the race. ASO (and the French government) have shown the sport can be staged in a pandemic and we haven't had cases spreading through the peloton. The rest of the season will happen, the Worlds are at the end of this week, the Giro will happen (there seems to have been racing in Italy without issues pretty much continually since the restart), most of the Classics look safe. Only the Vuelta and Roubaix look a bit questionable presently, and I think the world will keep turning if the Vuelta got canned.
One of the takeaways from this race is the use of the train in the mountains. It's not usually the most riveting or subtle of tactics, but both Jumbo and Bahrain have shown there's considerably more to it than just "stick a load of riders on the front and ride at high tempo"
Pogacar was on debut aged 21, lost time in the crosswinds, saw both his main mountain domestiques go home before halfway .... and still won the race. Just think about that for a moment. He's more of an all round rider than Bernal, who is basically a pure climber. You can Bernal-proof a route by sticking a huge flat time trial in it. I'm not really sure what you could do as an anti-Pogacar measure. There's plenty of things that could go wrong with his career (fills out as he gets older, struggles with the pattern of a more conventional season, wilts under the extra pressure, scrutiny and expectation, gets injured, enjoys the trappings of success too much) but equally he could dominate this race for years to come. Not many riders win multiple Tours these days but he likely will and it's not beyond the boundaries of possibility that he'll win every edition of the race for the next decade.
Originally posted by Mumpo
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Pogacar was on debut aged 21, lost time in the crosswinds, saw both his main mountain domestiques go home before halfway .... and still won the race. Just think about that for a moment. He's more of an all round rider than Bernal, who is basically a pure climber. You can Bernal-proof a route by sticking a huge flat time trial in it. I'm not really sure what you could do as an anti-Pogacar measure. There's plenty of things that could go wrong with his career (fills out as he gets older, struggles with the pattern of a more conventional season, wilts under the extra pressure, scrutiny and expectation, gets injured, enjoys the trappings of success too much) but equally he could dominate this race for years to come. Not many riders win multiple Tours these days but he likely will and it's not beyond the boundaries of possibility that he'll win every edition of the race for the next decade.
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