Wednesday 9: 13:10 → 17:45
French Caen-Caen
The first individual Time Trial. Basically all flat, it is rather long compared to many others nowadays.
Rankings:
1- Van der Poel🇳🇱 & Pogatchar🇸🇮
3- Vingegaard🇩🇰 at 8″
4- Jorgenson🇺🇸 at 19″
5- Vauquelin🇫🇷 at 26″
6- Mas🇪🇸 at 48″
7- Onley🇬🇧 & Almeida at 55″
9- Evenepoel🇧🇪 at 58″
10- Skjelmose🇩🇰 at 1′02″
Yes, it’s natural to have bad days, not natural to be in tip-top shape 8 months of the year and win in all terrains.
Pogatchar doesn’t take part in many days of racing, though (neither does Vingegaard). Despite riding 2 Grand Tours last year, he ended up with less than 60 race days. This year he only rode the equivalent of 3 weeks before starting the Tour of France. Even Roglitch who is very often injured, thus needs to abandon races and requires recovery time, rides a bit more than Pogatchar.
Pogacar was 28 seconds slower than Vingegaard in a time trial half this distance last month, but go off. It wouldn’t be the Tour without one-eyed fans arbitrarily deciding which rider is doping based on whether they were happy with the day’s results.
You’re right that I should probably not bring it up here, but my opinion is not based on today’s results - it’s based on everything I’ve seen the past 5 years from Pog and 35 years of watching cycling.
I don’t really know how anyone can watch cycling for that long and think only the very best rider is doping. There’s absolutely no way Team Visma is clean if Pogacar is not.
Not what I said, but the performances of UAE in general and Pog in particular are more suspicious than e.g. the performances of INEOS or AG2R. Right? Especially when you consider that UAE almost never ride smart, they’re just all stronger than everyone else.
That said, I will keep my opinions to myself in race threads.
UAE Team Emirates has a massive budget and has recruited some of the best riders in the world to support the best rider in the world, Pogacar. So yeah, of course they’re are stronger than most other teams. INEOS has declined massively over the last decade (maybe you should be questioning what they’ve been doing) and until very recently AG2R had nowhere near the budget of the big teams. At every point throughout history there have been big teams and small teams, that’s how the sport works. Comparing the biggest team to a couple of middling ones and saying “look how much better they are, they must be cheaters!” is a nonsensical argument.
In any case, the original point you seemed to be making was that Vingegaard, the second best GC rider in the world, is clean but the guy he has beaten in multiple stages and stage races, Pogacar, is a doper. Like I said, I don’t understand how you can come to that conclusion. It just sounds like emotional reasoning because Pogacar’s dominance reminds you of Armstrong. You’ve been following the sport long enough to remember that Armstrong was far from the only doper of his generation, and his team was far from the only one circumventing the rules.