Nicely done by Dewulf, an absolute beast so far. Doesn’t look like we’re in great shape for the GC for now, but lots to play for with the TT coming up. Hoping Viennet and Perez have enough in reserve to do well on the day, as Willwohl hasn’t really fired on the sprints either.
I guess it went aproximately as you could have expected here for us.
Ioannidis clearly had an off day, but the others were around where to expect, maybe even a couple of spots higher for Christapopoulos.
Farantakis did what he could to see if a GC top 50 was possible, but that ultra long ITT really makes this an all TT races. A bit sad of you ask me, as it’s always fun to see the best sprinters fight for a 10-25th GC place.
Time to pick up and do better than stage 2, if we are to come away from this race with anything really useful.
SotD wrote:
Farantakis did what he could to see if a GC top 50 was possible, but that ultra long ITT really makes this an all TT races. A bit sad of you ask me, as it’s always fun to see the best sprinters fight for a 10-25th GC place.
I basically agree - but iirc the length of the ITT was increased because in past years, we sometimes had the case that the group of sprinters got a gap over the rest of the pack in at least one of the flat stages (look at the 2023 results, which I think triggered the change). So the longer ITT basically ensures that it really is a TTers race.
This might not be necessary this year, given that we have many more TTers races now with the AI making sure there are almost no gaps in stages that aren't mountainous. But once we can somehow fix this (if possible at all), I think it's still good to have a longer TT stage to ensure this race goes to the TTers.
True Fabianski, but even in 2023 it was still a TT’er race. The best sprinters survived and got good results, but there was only 4 sprinters in the top 30, so I Think increasing the TT by 20km to make sure that never happens again seems a fair bit unessesary tbh
You don’t really see any races where sprinters with a good TT stat is fancied. It’s either a High PRL or nothing.
It’s fine by me to wait until making such changes after Farantakis is no longer relevant, but it seems like a race that would be relevant, at it would mix a different group than normal. Some of the less strong sprinters actually could be interesting there due to a decent TT stat.
Good result for Bjerg, just going to be a tense few days to see if it will be seventh or eighth given the time. Two seconds faster and we wouldn't have this problem
