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Thread: Tour de France 2020

  1. #11
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    Quote Originally Posted by Stagger View Post
    Yep.

    But sticky sheets mean something different in Yorkshire.
    Yes. I bet those Pontefract cakes get everywhere!
    Visibility good except in Hill Fog

  2. #12
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    Yates now leads

  3. #13
    I'm cheap
    What is a good online channel to watch the highlights?

    edit: ok, I found cyclingnews.com, it's only few min short, better than nothing you can't expect much if you don't to pay. As much as I love cycling no way I'm going to pay to watch a bunch of cheaters (maybe not all, but probably most) riding bycicles, I still have too much bitterness after Armstrong cheated us all while the organizers deliberately turned two blind eyes.

  4. #14
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    ITV4 highlights 7 till 8pm

  5. #15
    Marco,
    it could well be that cycling has changed. I do't know. But if it has, I have not seen anything to indicate so. And in your post you are not pointing to any indications of it.
    The 1999 Tour, the one after the Festina scandal, was nicknamed "the Tour of redemption". Go figure.
    And once the Brits started to win, I was appalled by the mood in Britain "sure cycling must now be clean, the evidence of it is that the Brits, undoubtedly clean, used to be beaten and now start to win". This is only nationalism. Go Brexit!

  6. #16
    Quote Originally Posted by Marco View Post
    a bunch sprint at a summit finish; the days of 'superhuman' exploits have gone, and now they're trying to nick a few seconds here and there.
    Bunch sprint finish were always there.
    Are you maybe saying that the spread among the first riders now being smaller than years ago should indicate the sport is now clean? I don't find this argument convincing: those behind Armstrong 20yr ago doped as much as he, so we can't say the gap was big because "he" doped.
    They cheated us and I'm unhappy and I feel very bitter.

  7. #17
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    Not a major summit and the race always gets lit up in the latter stages. I do think this year is one of the weakest years in terms of contenders. A long way from the heady days of Contador vs Schleck vs Nibali vs Evans vs everyone else etc
    Trying to plod up hills every day slightly faster than the day before

  8. #18
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    It’s thirty years next year since Abdoujaparov won his first green jersey
    Poacher turned game-keeper

  9. #19
    Master Witton Park's Avatar
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    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/cycling/...failed-produce

    I saw this article a week or so back. I was going to comment but resisted and comments seem to have been disabled for the article anyway.

    Only one black rider in this years TdF and a general lack of BAME cyclists in the pro ranks which the writer sees as a failure of the sport.
    That might be.
    But the point I would have made was that when I started watching the TdF on C4 in the 80s, I only had Robert Miller and Sean Yates to support if I wanted to follow home riders (some of you experts might be able to name a few more, but they were thin on the ground for a country with lots of clubs. In fact Ireland used to often have more than GB in the pro peloton.

    Despite our clubs and our infrastructure, we couldn't produce top class international cyclists.

    It seemed to change with Obree and Boardman. All of a sudden young cyclists had some role models to aspire to.

    Cycling News have a GB all time list and half of the top 20 are still racing which says something.

    So how are African cyclists going to develop to the top level? They need infrastructure first and then they need role models.
    Probably Froome is the best example of a cyclist who's development was in Africa, but he's not a typical case for sure.

    The number of cyclists in the Far East is staggering, but do they see it as a way of getting from A to B or a competitive sport?
    Why no Vietnamese in the pro peloton?

    As well as infrastructure, culture is key.

    There seem to be sports in westernised nations that appeal to BAME people. Here in the UK we have plenty playing football, rugby, athletics, boxing.... but rarely equestrianism, cycling, swimming.

    Maybe time will change that.

    I never linked drugs policy changes in cycling to the rise of the GB cyclist. I saw it as having some early role models to aspire to and investment in development of the Olympic squad via lottery, which produced results that propelled GB to a top tier cycling nation on track and road.
    Last edited by Witton Park; 04-09-2020 at 06:58 AM.
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  10. #20
    Master Travs's Avatar
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    I know a guy from another (non-sporting) forum who could be classed as a lesser rider... he is of good standard, looking to get a contract with a professional team. He freely admits (under his pseudonym) that at that level "everybody is at it".... they consider doping as worth the risk at that level in order to grasp that chance at a pro contract... and in fact he says that it is so rife at that level, that you have to do it, just to keep up with the pack.

    I don't know the guy personally, so it may not be quite true... but i've got no reason to doubt it either.

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