Vuelta a España & Tour of Britain 2017

[Kevin S]

Post-Tour just means pre-Vuelta.

Sky have announced Froome is going for the double, and this was why he wasn't in top form in the Dauphiné and the first half of the Tour.

Movistar will not put Nairo in for a third GT this year so the race will be without a defending champion. Of course Valverde will be in no position to race either so it will be an experimental team, and their long list of 12 has been released this week. It includes Marc Soler, who has been hyped up by, er, me, and is described in the Spanish sports press as being the new Big Mig.

[Kevin S]

New Pro-Continental team Aqua Blue Sport, who are based in Ireland, have got one of the wildcards.

There's a summary of the route here:
http://www.cyclist.co.uk/news/vuelta...u-need-to-know

[Antepli Ejderha]

Is La Vuelta starting earlier this year?

Only going to be highlights on ITV so it's back to Eurosport for most of us.

[ursus arctos]

A few days earlier than in recent years, yes.

Likely because the Worlds are earlier, being in Norway.

[Antepli Ejderha]

That would explain it. Norway is also bidding to host the Grande Depart of the 2022 Tour.

[Kevin S]

ToB is not for a fair while yet, but here's a preview of the route. It mentions last year's winner was Steve Cummings, who currently holds the Tour of Britain, the British road race title and the British time trial title.

http://www.cyclingweekly.com/news/ra...y-stage-162382

Good to see less emphasis on London. The capital has its own race, the London-Surrey classic (a legacy race from the 2012 Olympics), which is the first British men's race to be moved up to World Tour status. That's this coming Sunday, by the way. So the ToB can and should cast its net wider around Britain.

[longeared]

Mick Bennett said on ITV during the TdF that they couldn't use London as there are only a finite amount of times it can be used for a bike race, and the Women's Tour had taken priority this year.

[Kevin S]

http://www.cyclist.co.uk/news/3208/s...b-with-28-ramp

Oof!

[ursus arctos]

[Kevin S]

The champion may not be defending the Vuelta, but the 2015 winner is going to have another crack at Froome this year.

[longeared]

Provisional start list for the Vuelta is out. The big headline is that Lotto - Soudal haven't selected Adam Hansen, which will be the first Grand Tour he's missed since the 2011 Tour de France. That ends his sequence of starting and finishing 18 consecutive Grand Tours, which is a record that will surely never be beaten.

Plenty of GC riders there, a mix of riders who did the Tour (Froome, Aru, Bardet, Barguil, Contador, S Yates, Meintjes) and those who did the Giro and bypassed July (Nibali, Zakarin, A Yates, Jungels, Pozzovivo)

Sprinters look thin on the ground, already down to the likes of Trentin, Degenkolb and Blythe. Might be some opportunities for some rather soft stage wins here.

[Kevin S]

Well, this is something:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BXfHbrNFo3t/

[ursus arctos]

Adam Hansen is back in the Vuelta!

Rafa Valls Ferri broke his hip in training, and Lotto Soudal have named Hansen as his replacement.

[Kevin S]

2017 OVO Energy Tour of Britain teams:

An Post Chain Reaction (Ireland)
Bardiani CSF (Italy)
BIKE Channel Canyon (Great Britain)
BMC Racing Team (USA)
Cannondale Drapac Pro Cycling (USA)
CCC Sprandi Polkowice (Poland)
Cylance Pro Cycling (USA)
Great Britain national team (Great Britain)
JLT Condor (Great Britain)
Lotto Soudal (Belgium)
Madison Genesis (Great Britain)
Movistar Team (Spain)
ONE Pro Cycling (Great Britain)
Orica Scott (Australia)
Quick-Step Floors (Belgium)
Team Dimension Data (South Africa)
Team Katusha Alpecin (Germany)
Team Lotto NL – Jumbo (Netherlands)
Team Sky (Great Britain)
Wanty Groupe Gobert (Belgium)

[Kevin S]

So a good selection of World Tour teams there. If I could handpick them I'd rather have Sunweb than Katusha, but otherwise these are teams who have either really gone for the race in the past or have notable British riders in their squads. The big finish in Wales, and an omission from Sky's Vuelta squad, do seem to suggest that Geraint Thomas might be targeting this. If so, then that's frankly excellent news for the race.

As to the sub-WT foreign teams, always good to see An Post coming (whose sponsorship will change next year I believe). Then there are three pretty big names from the PCT in Bardiani (I hope we recall Edoardo Zardini's assault on the Tumble in 2014?), Wanty-Groupe who rode the Tour de France last month, and Giro d'Italia semi-regulars CCC Sprandi Polkowice. I haven't really come across Cylance before, and they are a CT team rather than PCT. Kyle Murphy was their most successful rider in the recent Tour of Utah, so let's hope he comes over.

Looking at the domestic CT teams, there was space only for four and JLT, BIKE channel, ONE and Madison Genesis were the stand out teams in the Spring Cup this year - consisting of four one day races - which I think is the basis on which they qualified. This means no place for Raleigh, Metaltek and, surprisingly, WIGGINS. Team WIGGINS have obviously timed their peak wrong, as they are third in the second series of domestic races this year. I haven't yet seen the composition of Team GB, though, which may include young talents from these three teams. JLT have been the best of the bunch, though, with James Gullen winning the overall in the An Post Rás, and Alex Frame taking several 2.2 classified stage wins.

[Kevin S]

And a Vuelta lineup:

Bora-Hansgrohe for the Vuelta a España:
Cesare Benedetti (Ita),
Emanuel Buchmann (Ger),
Michael Kolar (Svk),
Patrick Konrad (Aut),
Rafal Majka (Pol),
Christoph Pfingsten (Ger),
Pawel Poljanski (Pol),
Andreas Schillinger (Ger),
Michael Schwarzmann (Ger).

Majka and Buchmann get to have another go at a GT this year. The big news is the continued absence of Leopold König. "After his long-lasting knee irritation, Leo feels better now. He had his first race in San Sebastian, but we think he is not ready yet for a three-week tour, the intensity for his knee could be too high. To not take any risk for his long-term perspectives he won't race the Vuelta," explained team doctor Jan-Niklas Droste.

[Kevin S]

The omission of Team WIGGINS also follows their absence from the Tour de Yorkshire in April, so it's not been a good year for them at all. Of course, that race has nothing to do with British Cycling; in fact you'll do well to get them to acknowledge that it exists at all. Five British CT teams were invited to that, with Raleigh joining the four above and WIGGINS missing out.

Anyway, I meant to say that British Cycling has arranged all the one day races for these teams (and the others - there are 13 such teams in total) into two series. Weirdly, they call the spring one the Spring Cup but the summer one is called the Grand Prix series rather than, say, the Summer Cup. And the Spring Cup has two races called a Grand Prix in it, which is the same number as in the Grand Prix series.

They have all sorts of weird and wonderful ways of awarding points to individuals and teams for these races. The races break down like this:

Spring Cup:
• East Cleveland Klondike Grand Prix, which goes from Guisborough on the northern edge of the North York moors, out to the sea at Saltburn and back again a few times.
• Tour of the Wolds, i.e. the Lincolnshire Wolds
• Chorley Grand Prix, a Lancashire loop
• Lincoln Grand Prix, through the city, out, round, and back again several times

Grand Prix Series:
• Tour of the Reservoir, which is Derwent reservoir, in the north Pennines
• Stockton Grand Prix, in Teesside
• Ryedale Grand Prix, in North Yorkshire around the Howardian Hills (this was last weekend)
• Leicester Castle Classic, 20 laps around the city from the castle to the football stadium (this coming weekend)

All very strangely arranged. For the women, however, they have a single series which runs from April to August, and has nine races in it.
https://www.britishcycling.org.uk/wo...chedule-0?c=EN
Which seems far more sensible. And surely it would be better to base ToB qualification on a whole year's performance rather than half of it?

[longeared]

There's a quote from a Team WIGGINS manager in this week's Cycling Weekly that they didn't expect to qualify for the Tour of Britain once they'd not been invited to the Tour de Yorkshire. They then go on to somewhat defensively say that they are more concerned with developing young riders anyway.

Can see the logic in basing qualification on half the year, namely that teams know whether they've qualified early on rather than everyone riding themselves into the ground deep into the season - they've got time to prepare and try to hit form rather than the team turning up exhausted. Same reason the Tour de France announces its wildcards early in the season rather than in June like it used to.

[Kevin S]

Ah, yes, that makes sense. I've got the qualification slightly wrong, too. It was 13 races rather than just the Spring Cup:

*Over the course of 13-events between April’s East Klondike GP (HSBC UK Spring Cup Series) and the weekend’s Ryedale GP (HSBC UK Grand Prix Series), and including the four UCI events to be held in the UK, the six British registered UCI Continental teams scored points based upon their first rider to finish each race, on a 6-5-4-3-2-1 basis, with teams permitted to drop one score from the UCI events to allow for non-participation. Teams also scored points using the same ratio for their overall position at the end of The Tour Series in May. The top four teams through this process then qualified for the OVO Energy Tour of Britain.

So I think this means they included TdY points in their calculations, which is presumably how the WIGGINS manager knew they wouldn't have enough points, as their five main rivals all raced in it. The four UCI events are Rutland - Melton Cicle Classic, Tour de Yorkshire, Beaumont Trophy and Velothon Wales. At least, I presume that's the ones they mean. The London-Surrey classic is also UCI but it's a World Tour race and none of the CT teams featured. Saying 13 events rather than four also means they must have included the Circuit Series races as well as the road races above.

I think there's still room for improvement in how they manage this process, and it could improve the profile of the domestic road races and circuit races. (I'd happily watch them on ITV4, for example.)

[Kevin S]

Incidentally, rather than the gold of the IG sponsored era:


or the yellow when it was Aviva, then Eisberg:


the change of sponsor to OVO Energy will almost certainly mean the leader of the Tour of Britain will be in a green jersey, as was the case for Katarzyna Niewiadoma when she wore the Women's Tour leaders jersey all the way.

[longeared]

Not seen anything to officially confirm that, but assume it'll be the case to satisfy the sponsors, and the header of their Twitter page features a rider in a green jersey. That'll in no way confuse the casual fan, will it?

[delicatemoth]

Oh my word, an afternoon of excellence, to be followed by three weeks of bike paradise, awaits. Ladies Tour of Norway stage 3 starts in a quarter of hour here, but not for North Americans without a VPN, I'm afraid. It's 140.4 km and it looks kind of flat with little lumps I think but the numbers are too small for me to read. Jolien D'Hoore is 2 seconds ahead of Marianne Vos after winning yesterday's sprint finish. The winner of the combativity prize gets 10kg of salmon, hopefully heaved inelegantly into their arms on the podium. Still easier to deal with than Eisel's reward for winning the KOM last year, which was half a tonne of salmon. Mr C would love Norway.

[delicatemoth]

And then, and then, this mouthwatering Vuelta gets underway with a cheeky little TTT, one of my favourite things in cycling. And this one is short enough that it will hopefully avoid the sole downside of TTTs; the tendency for Sky and BMC to gain loads of time. I think Quickstep will win it. The route for the race overall looks brilliant, I think there's a stage that finishes with 400m at 21%.

1. Vincenzo Nibali
2. Chris Froome
3. Alberto Contador
4. David De La Cruz
5. Esteban Chaves

Outside chances - Rafal Majka, Wilco Kelderman, Marc Soler

Nibali will be fresher than Froome and I think this route suits him. Froome has for some reason been riding money crits like it's the 1960s. Contador is a slightly sentimental pick but he will obviously be going berserk.

That ITT deep in the race is going to seriously fuck up anyone who can't TT, EXCEPT a really really good climber like Chaves might be able to make a lot of it back on the numerous uberclimbs IF he is on form. And he's lovely, so I hope he does. De La Cruz and Soler will both have known well in advance that they're gonna get this shot, and have both looked quietly impressive this season. Majka and Kelderman didn't get Tour-exhausted, and both look solid for top 10 finishes. I don't think Zakarin has the climbing skill to trouble the top 5, and I'm not convinced he'll finish the race. Fraile will presumably be highly motivated to take a third KOM in a row. I haven't really looked at the sprinters but my friend reckons Degenkolb. I'd like that, he deserves some joy.

[delicatemoth]

NORWAY - With 5km to go, the entire peloton has been brought back together by a closed level crossing. There was a small break a few seconds out in front but not anymore. They're waiting for the lights to go green. Emma Johansson is a very good commentator.

The peloton is going to start together, tough buns for the break.

[longeared]

BMC win the opening Vuelta stage and Rohan Dennis takes the race lead. Good result for Aqua Blue Sport too, finished 13th and beat several World Tour teams.

Think Froome is most likely to win the thing overall what with that whacking great time trial in the final week, but hope DM is right with the Nibali prediction. Would be smashing to see Contador win the thing in his last race but he's not shown anything in the last couple of years that suggests he could still win Grand Tours.