sounds very AI generated
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Sport
Worlds - elite men’s Road Race: where to watch?
(41 posts)-
Posted 7 months ago #
-
Hmm. I'll try and sound a bit more human than normal then to counteract it :P
I have a question, as someone who's not even a little into cycling as a sport and is only vaguely aware of it being shown a few times on the telly - are these races team games or not? Because I've seen & heard talk of teams, team tactics, and names of "positions" in brief snips of discussion I've noticed, which suggests a team sport to me, but then a few weeks back on twitter I noticed a few of the cycling fans getting *really* animated about a "controversy" which, to an outsider, was pretty confusing(the thing about the lead rider's teammates racing against him rather than supporting him).
Lots of talk of how it's "entitlement" of the lead guy to think that just because he's been given that position his "better" teammates shouldn't just ignore their assigned roles and smoke him etc, which from the perspective of someone who's only experience of team games is more traditional ones just seems bizarre, like me deciding back in the day "pfff, our scrum half is garbage, I, Number 8 am a much better player, eff that guy I do what I want" and disrupting the whole strategy over my ego. So which is it, a team sport or a proper race? And if the latter, why are the "superior" racers allowed to bring along a team of side-guys to help them at all, surely it should be just a straight-up individual competition?
Posted 7 months ago # -
"pfff, our scrum half is garbage, I, Number 8 am a much better player, eff that guy I do what I want"
This approach has sometimes been highly successful, to be fair: https://youtu.be/Jp8f6OiwNtM?t=65
Posted 7 months ago # -
@Yodhrin, I assume you are talking about the Vuelta Espania rather than the Worlds and I'll agree it's very confusing until you know what's going on. (After which it is just regular levels of confusing.)
The riders are all riding for themselves despite being part of a team and will usually have one rider who is best placed to win (the team leader). The rest of the team will then put their personal ego's aside and support that leader to try and ensure the team wins. However you will sometimes have larger egos who clash (eg Wiggins/Froome) and not fully support each other.
It's not uncommon for a team to start a grand tour with 2 co-leaders and see who ends up getting a lead on the road.
The Vuelta was unusual in that 3 strong riders from 1 team ended up in the first three places. Initially the team decided to let the riders race on the road but forgot that it didn't really work. As soon as one of them broke away from the group the other two couldn't close the gap as they would be bringing members of an opposing team with them (It's much easier to keep up with another rider than go alone). This meant that what was said to be letting the three team members have a race to see who was strongest would have ended up coming down to luck more than strength. However in the end the larger ego failed to get enough lead to beat his own team mate and the worthiest rider won.
Hopefully I've cleared the muddy water somewhere, although it's probably still dirty.
Usually in a
Posted 7 months ago # -
@Frenchy I mean sure, but 99 times out of a hundred it just screws things up for everyone. You make the argument you could do X job better before the game, once you're on the field you play for the team not yourself even if you don't agree with the decision that was made.
@acsimpson I'm a bit confused still - your explanation of how things are supposed to work was great thank you, but with regards to the specific situation; the guy who broke away was the one who was *supposed* to break away, or was he the one who was supposed to be backing one of the others? Because that was where my thinking seemed to diverge from a lot of what I was seeing on twitter, to my mind the guy who decides "assigned roles? eff that I'M the badass here" and screws his teammates is the one with the ego, not the guy who expects everyone to stick to the plan.
Posted 7 months ago # -
With La Vuelta I reckon Jumbo Visma allowed Kuss his break rather than telling him to calm the jam on the radio calculating they could reel him in later, e.g. in the time trial. But he seems to have improved in the time trial.
Then when the three Jumbo riders could have attacked each other more the pressure was exerted from King Kelly and others about not attacking the leader which worked in his favour. It was then clear that the team would split post race . And roglic moved on but now with the super merger with Lotto Soudal we are back to the multiple leaders again.
Posted 7 months ago # -
Visma Soudal merger is off apparently
Posted 7 months ago # -
On a wider level than just the Vuelta (which was indeed particularly confusing) tactics depend on what the team is hoping to achieve, too.
If the team has someone who is "going for GC" that means that they are looking for a good place in the overall General Classification, i.e. the shortest cumulative time over the whole stage race. The other riders in the team are responsible for looking after that rider (or riders, as acsimpson says). These riders are known as "domestiques". Sepp Kuss is/was a "superdomestique" which really just means that he is particularly good at his job (which is less stressful than being the overall team leader, among other things).
(A bad analogy would be a football tournament where the winning team is the one with the person who has scored the most goals on it. That would produce rather different tactics to the way football is actually played!)
Other teams may have a rider who is strong in bunch sprints, so again they will look after that rider but their tactics are very different.
Then there are teams who either don't have a GC rider at all, or their GC rider is not having a good race (for example, Ineos at the Vuelta where Geraint Thomas did not have a good race). These teams encourage their riders to go for stage wins i.e. to win on an individual day, rather than the whole race.
Hope that helps to make it a little bit less confusing!
Posted 7 months ago # -
(To add: a "good place on GC" might also depend on team and rider - for some it might be a top 10 finish, while others are there to try and win.
This is further complicated by the fact that there is also a GC competition for riders under 23.)
Posted 7 months ago # -
I'm not sure but Jumbo presumably entered the Vuelta with vingegaard and Roglic as co-leaders. However with Kuss they also had a third very strong rider. He was riding his third Grand Tour of the year which is something many of the strongest riders will never do.
When a breakaway goes ahead of the peloton then most teams will try and get at least one rider in it. That allows them to have some element of control in the race as without a rider in it they will have to work harder to chase the breakaway down, especially if they are the only team who want to stop the breakaway winning.
On stage 6 Kuss managed to get into a much larger than normal breakawy of 40ish riders. Some teams were caught napping including Quickstep which meant that as it became clear the breakaway were not going to be caught Evenepoel had to work very hard to minimise the time loss to Kuss (as by this time they had realised he was a genuine threat in the overall GC). However by the end of the stage Kuss had been elevated from a domestique to having a genuine chance at the GC.
From that point the three leaders weren't actively trying to harm each other in such a way that they would loose time to the field, but they were also not sacrificing themselves for the good of each other. There was still a lot of racing left and all it would have taken is for Kuss to have a bad day (Like Evenepoel had) for one of the other Jumbo riders to get back to the top.
Posted 7 months ago # -
“
Now, in his immensely readable and revealing new book he also explains that road cycling is a business where the suffering rider leaves his chances for glory “in the shaky hands of teams that are both state-of-the-art and shambolic”.
“
Posted 7 months ago #
Reply
You must log in to post.
posts
