HardyWeinberg

+1

cthenn

LOL, tour over. Richie "Lapdog" Porte is the second best rider, and it's plainly obvious he's well below Nibali. Thus, the racing is finished. A forgettable tour to be sure, except for Stage 5, which was probably one of the best I've ever seen. Only thing left is just to watch Nibali slowly and predictably stretch out his lead over the next two weeks.

Jakedatc

except there will probably be another 8 different stage winners of varying disciplines.. sprint.. attack.. mtn finish. GC is only part of the race. He could also crash on his face on a rest day cruise tomorrow.

Zinger

Go TJ !

And try not to crash anymore every chance you get.

gpsblake

NBCSN might be giving out a lot of free commercial time by the time this one is over. Maybe they can take over the Vuelta coverage from Universal, which might be stacking up to be one heck of a race.

DiabloScott

Exacto. The GC is the biggest prize but is actually one of the less interesting competitions. If Nibali looks unbeatable overall, we'll have better competition for stages.

dbf73

Some of the individual stage wins like Boom, Kadri and Martin, while perhaps not epic were mightily impressive

dstrong 

While GC winner might be wrapped up, there are 10 riders within 2 minutes of each other for the rest of the podium.

lsberrios1 

That's kinda like watching Netherlands and Brazil battle it out for third during the world cup. Not even the Netherlandeese celebrated the win.

Caretaker

Plenty of Dutch in the stadium celebrating from what I could see.

If Talansky makes the podium it should be celebrated by U.S. fans.

roadwarrior

If you are watching this like you'd watch a football game (in other words, no real clue what's going on but yelling all the time, anyway) it's not too interesting.

personally, I am find this pretty fascinating watching the tactics being employed given the hand a lot of the DS's have been dealt in the last week.

Keith99

Personally I think top riders of the past would go crazy riding today. NOT that riders today are better, but that there are more of them, far to many more of them in the Peloton. The result is until the final couple of climbs there is no way a top rider can escape. There are just too many riders to chase him down.

It makes for boring racing.

Keith99

Yea, just like the 71 Tour was over when Ocana was 10 minutes up after stage 8.

Oh wait!

Zinger

Talansky is almost 15 minutes off Nibali after his two crashes. Amazingly though BMC's Tejay van Garderen is just under 4 minutes down, in 7th in the GC, and riding well despite crashes himself in this year's TDF.

patrickgm60

Spartacus is out, focusing on September's WCs. While not a GC threat, he sure can shake things up.

Fabian Cancellara quits Tour de France to focus on Worlds ? and Hour Record? | road.cc

Leinster

I think the problem in recent years has been the opposite; there have been too few genuine GC contenders, and the favourite has usually had his Sky/Disco/Astana/Telekom train on the front of the race keeping up a high enough pace that prevents attacks from other riders, and just setting up their leader to attack the 2 or 3 remaining contenders on the final climb. So Lance never had to beat Beloki, or Virenque or Sastre, he just had to wait until Levi or Hamilton or Heras had shelled all those guys out and he was left one-on-one with Ullrich or Pantani.

By contrast, in 1990 Lemond had to face off against Delgado and Indurain, Mottet, Breukink, Bugno etc with a lot less support, all while trying to trim Chiappucci's big lead. Or in 2011 when Evans had to claw back Voeckler's lead while also competing with the Schlecks, Sanchez, Basso et al.

Astana are doing well so far, but I can't see them having the firepower to control the whole race to Paris. They've a bunch of riders within 5 minutes of Nibali, none of whom can be taken lightly (well, maybe Gallopin...) and the attacks will come.

Rich Gibson 

It wasn't so much the victory, the Dutch just enjoy their beer. They do that a lot, they're famous for their spots on the mountain climb switchbacks. (Hint..look for lots f orange colors.)

Rich

SpeshulEd 

Seems kind of pointless to take the Vuelta from Universal, since Universal is NBC.

gpsblake

Yes, but NBCSN is available on almost every cable and satellite company in the USA while Universal isn't.

However, with the Vuelta starting the same time as the Pro Cycling Challenge, which looks like will void of big names, not going to happen.

Keith99

And let us not forget Rodriguez is out of contention for Yellow but looking for Polka Dot. If he is up the road any early attack on a true mountain stage by a contender takes on an entirely different light. What otherwise would be a minimal concern situation becomes an alarm bells everywhere situation. And Rodirguez isn't the only one contending. A similar situation for a couple riders who are his competition. That means if a Rodrigues/Porte attack gets pulled back you can bet there will be a second attack se soon as they are back together.

njlonghorn

Exacto +1. I have always enjoyed the fact that the TdF is composed of 20ish separate races. Better yet, each race has sub-races (Intermediate Sprints, Mountains) to keep things interesting from start to finish. If they did away with the GC competition altogether, I would still find the Tour compelling.