2019 Vuelta; spoilers!

[NATURAL ANKLING]

Hi,
Mountain top Finish tomorrow is twice as long as today.
So plenty of action if today is anything to go by.
Quintana has slipped to over five minutes.

[Cyril Haearn]

The riders seem to turn the pedals in unison, how many rpm might that be? Do some pedal faster or slower? Whatabout up- or downhill?

[Brucey]

cadences do vary from rider to rider, but generally speaking the optimum cadence goes up slightly as you work harder. So if you are riding at maximal aerobic effort that would be a fairly high cadence and at lower efforts the cadence is liable to be lower but less important also.

There are other factors; most riders seem to have a slower cadence (in relation to their effort) when climbing but a few seem to be happy to climb at as high a cadence as they would use in a time trial.

cheers

[Brucey]

crayzee race, with more crayzee Movistar tactics...! Long periods of this race were run off at well over 60kph; I wondered why they were pedalling so quickly, it was because they had run out of gears...

The one thing that wasn't a big surprise was that Gilbert won the stage; with that pedigree and that number of team mates in the break, he'd have been eating supper in the DQT naughty corner if he hadn't, pretty much.

But that Quintana made such big gains on GC in a flat stage and that Valverde rode like he did.... well anything can happen in this race....Did Valverde rip his group up and thus make their rivals work harder/go slower overall, or was he motivated by is own GC ambitions? We'll never know....

..but anyway Quintana is back in the mix, lying second on GC. All it needs is for Quintana (or Valverde....) to have a good day on the climbs and Roglic to have a bad one and this race could still go to a Movistar rider.

cheers

[Norman H]

The wind played havoc with today's stage. Nairo Quintana was the big winner displacing Valverde for second place in the G C. The pace was crazy, Philippe Gilbert took the stage win and in the post race interview said he was spinning a 54x11 gear at 110rpm on the flat.

Primoz Roglic missed the break but was lucky to limit his losses, due in part to some questionable Movistar team tactics.

[Brucey]

in the words of a Steely Dan song; "Guadalajara won't do (now)".

They meant Guadalajara in Mexico, not the Guadalajara in Spain, today's stage finish, but the song is apparently about betrayal and drugs. Maybe it is has got more to do with cycling than one might expect...

cheers

[NATURAL ANKLING]

Hi,
I am not sure tomorrow will see Quintana lose time again.
Today might of been calculated, but as Millar remarked to Imlach not just the Vuelta but anywhere!

[mattheus]

Wow - what a stage!

I'm not sure that the Valverde-led tactics can be blamed for Quintana not gaining more time; we'll never know if Astana were going to ride hard anyway.

(What Quintana *can* blame is his own measly contribution. I know it would only have helped marginally - he's not built for dragging a group on the flat - but if every second counts, why did he just sit on wheels all day? Unless of course the highlights editor was mean to him! )

Sideshow:
Can Sam Bennett now win the Green Jersey?? If so, Bora-ShowerTaps will pull off an amazing triple.
(It's a shame that the Brits* in the lead group didn't work together, they could have given Quickstep a run for their money. Well, perhaps not Knoxie ...
*In the British Isles sense?)

[Brucey]

….What Quintana *can* blame is his own measly contribution. I know it would only have helped marginally - he's not built for dragging a group on the flat - but if every second counts, why did he just sit on wheels all day? Unless of course the highlights editor was mean to him!

on the highlights we saw him taking turns at the front, mainly up the hills (such as they were). You must have missed that. I'm surprised he came through at all; he had team mates with him and their job is to ride for him. Generally speaking you don't win stage races by poking your nose in the breeze needlessly, especially not on the flat stages if you are a climber...

cheers

[NATURAL ANKLING]

Hi,
Today will be interesting.
I think Quintana's had his day peaking on 2016, up to yesterday which was a fluke.
But as this tour has shown up till now anything can happen .
When I started watching itv4 I naturally assumed that quintana was five minutes adrift...... all the way up to near the finish as I flipped through the boring stuff, what do I know

[mjr]

But that Quintana made such big gains on GC in a flat stage and that Valverde rode like he did.... well anything can happen in this race....Did Valverde rip his group up and thus make their rivals work harder/go slower overall, or was he motivated by is own GC ambitions? We'll never know....

We may never know what Movistar's tactcs were but we can strongly suspect that they only ride for Valverde. Since he won the 2009 Vuelta, I think the only Grand Tours won by Movistar riders have been when he's been absent (2014 and 2019 Giro) or cracked totally on a climb despite teammate support (2016 Vuelta, losing 10 minutes after cracking 10km from the Aubisque summit). I think he's a very good one-day racer who was probably enabled to win a grand tour by still doping between the fall of Dr Fuentes and the final court ruling, but he won't accept that he can't win another and so now disrupts any grand tour squad he's in and gets away with it because team boss Unzué loves him blindly.

It's going to be very interesting if Nairo Quintana speaks out after he moves to the second division Arkea-Samsic team. Presumably Unzué has been telling him something to keep him at Movistar (and thereby keep getting good money from Movistar South America) for seven seasons.

[Richard Fairhurst]

I'm just going to leave my quote from a fortnight ago here...

True enough... yesterday Quintana was all set to take the red jersey until he was attacked by... Valverde. It happens every time and it never gets less funny.

[mattheus]

….What Quintana *can* blame is his own measly contribution. I know it would only have helped marginally - he's not built for dragging a group on the flat - but if every second counts, why did he just sit on wheels all day? Unless of course the highlights editor was mean to him!

on the highlights we saw him taking turns at the front, mainly up the hills (such as they were). You must have missed that. I'm surprised he came through at all; he had team mates with him and their job is to ride for him. Generally speaking you don't win stage races by poking your nose in the breeze needlessly, especially not on the flat stages if you are a climber...

cheers

Fair point, but then like most rules, there are exceptions; it's rare to be in a break, on the flat, that is making a difference to GC. It makes sense to me to burn some matches in that situation.
(It's not like his teammates saved him some energy to do something in the final sprint. What was he saving all this energy *for* ?)

[Brucey]

(It's not like his teammates saved him some energy to do something in the final sprint. What was he saving all this energy *for* ?)

the next day. Each stage is a battle but the war is at least as much one of attrition as anything else.

cheers

[Brucey]

Remi Cavagna took an excellent win today meaning that DQT have four stage wins overall.

However the stage may be remembered for a crash at speed, 66km from the finish, which took out all but one TJV rider, and in Tony Martin's case, it was bad enough for him to abandon. Marco Mercato also abandoned. Following the crash, Miguel Angel Lopez (4th) and Roglic (1st) were a couple of minutes down but most of the Movistar team was at the front of the race, putting the hammer down.

Roglic effectively (and not for the first time in this race) got pulled out of the poop by the Astana team, and I think the commissaires turned a blind eye to them and others drafting team cars as they chased back on. After ten or twelve km Movistar sat up. It is unclear whether they thought it wouldn't work, or that even if it did work for them, it would be a hollow victory.

There are two schools of thought here; one is that 'racing is racing' and the other is that if you win like that, you may as well have cheated.

Lopez was scathing at the finish; 'Valverde showed no respect' he said, "the world champion shouldn't make these idiotic moves", he continued. Pretty strong words; Valverde may not have instigated the move but there is little doubt that he could have stopped it at any time if he had wanted to. [Arrieta, Movistar's sporting director, claimed that they had ridden hard there because that was their plan all along. I dunno whether to buy that line or not, but let's put it this way, I wouldn't buy a used car off that bloke...]

Quite a few riders from other teams knew who to talk to, once the race came back together; you could see various riders having words with Valverde and he seemed to be giving them the 'I didn't do it' line. Roglic looked as if he said nothing; he survived the day but quite how he'll feel tomorrow is anyone's guess.

cheers