redlude97

I'm curious why you think its a bad fructose source? Fructose is fructose, and glucose is glucose. Sucrose easily breaks down to glucose and fructose. Maltodextrin easily breaks down into glucose. Gatorade powder is cheap and easy to get.

Ygduf

neive

hack

looked so broken when Thomas came galloping by

revchuck 

I was hoping he could hold it to the line. At least he's in good company - thinking of Mara Abbott in the '16 Olympics and Tony Martin in the Vuelta three or four years back.

topflightpro

Yesterday's stage totally convinced me that Sky is racing 100 percent clean.

mattm

Ygduf

I was watching the playback on a feed that had the gaps in meters. He was like 150m ahead with 1k (1000m) left. I ran to grab something from the kitchen and when I got back Gerrant was finishing so I moved it back trying to see the Nieve win. Was very confused.

What a brutal end to an otherwise fantastic ride for him.

TheKillerPenguin

That was some take no prisoners gentry class "I own a tea plantation in Raj India" ****.

Hermes

Stage 12...Now that was some climbing. Match sprint cat and mouse tactics on Alpe d'Huez among 4 skinny bike racers for the last kilo for the stage win - priceless.

Also, I noticed that many racers on Team Sky and other teams are wearing Breathe Right strips. Mechanical doping or a nose fairing?

ancker

Sarcasm?

Sky are very reminiscent of US Postal. But USP never had 5 guys on the front....all day long....
I'm not necessarily saying they're all doping, but damn, it's pretty impressive that their entire team can climb better than every other teams' GC favorites.
Having a huge budget helps, but when 21 year old Egal is on the front up Alpe D'Huez for like 10km and absolutely murdering all but a few top contenders, you have to wonder what's different. It's not fluffier pillows or a better diet.

Regarding Sagan. I really hope he's clean. It's difficult to know for sure.
He wins a ton, but loses a lot more. He's sitting on other leaders forever and switches back and forth based on which one looks better. More often that not he's 2-5th.

topflightpro

Yes, I was being sarcastic.

I did see a post today that Thomas climbed Alpe D'Huez in 41 min., where as the times during the peak doping era were 37-39 min. I guess that does lead some credence to the argument that he is clean, but as you said, it's kind of amazing that they have 5 guys who can out climb most of the GC competitors.

TheKillerPenguin

Money is a PED, and Sky has a ton of it.

ancker

They spent a lot of time looking at each other before the attack. I suspect that added a couple minutes to their time.
Landa was a long ways back and managed to climb back up to them while they were lolly-gagging, then got dropped like a brick again once they all attacked.

Hermes

I think team performance will be a "we'll see" moment. The last week is the toughest and during that time period when past teams infused their own blood to improve performance. And it was really hot on the climbs that is going to take a toll.

My wife and I were watching the race and I asked her how many Mount Soledad repeats we would need just to ride stage 12 let alone race it.

And is not the story about the elimination of the sprinters? Talk about being rigged, Sagan has to finish and he gets the green jersey. And he gets any other sprint finishes including the last day in Paris. Why did the race organizers make the Alpes so hard without dramatically increasing the cutoff times? It strikes me that it really hurt the teams with sprinters and will affect their ability to raise sponsorship money. Let's see if we get the apology from the organizers of oh we did not realize it would be so hard for sprinters. Yeah right.

jsk

They actually did, for the two hard stages. The short stage 11 in particular had a higher than usual percentage cut off, but still a few of the riders missed the time. It wasn't really that many, though. Most of the sprinters didn't even try, they just abandoned fairly early during stage 12.

Hermes

The cutoff time increase was too small to be material.

mollusk

Weird to see Phil Gaimon in a TDF commercial. I know him and he knows me. Great guy.

Hermes

Voodoo76

In a way it probably leads to a less equal playing field than when doping was the norm.

The next few days will be interesting. I think it's Sky that needs to be aggressive. I'll bet Dumoulin would be happy taking his chances making up 1'50" in the TT. Sky are going to have to play Thomas against Froom to get one of them more time on Dumoulin before the TT. If they continue to just TTT the climbs it's too easy to cover both.

spectastic

highlights from today's tdf stage

Ttoc6

What odds do you think I could get from a bookie on Alaphillipe winning a GT in the next 5 year?

gsteinb

How many iterations of the same saga do people need to go through before we accept doping will always be the norm? Are they on the high-test EPO? Probably not, thus the slower times. But there's always been folks circumnavigating the rules. We pretend they've cleaned up the sport, and then act shocked when some new revelation surfaces that it's not the case.

TMonk

I dunno if I'm reading into it to much, but Thomas just seems like he has a guilty conscious to me... He hasn't had a solid smile in many (any?) of the podium and yellow jersey pics, and in the press conference I watched last night it just seemed like something was bothering him

Hermes

redlude97

he's mostly in yellow because of crashes on the first stage. thats gotta at least be on his mind.