this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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This 'Tour' is in fact a sort of Brittany โ Lake Geneva straight line in 9 stages.
22 teams of 7 riders are engaged, including all top riders I believe.
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Stage 9 (last one) (Sunday 3: 15:20โ15:25 โ 18:45โ19:15)
A stage where teammates can play an important role, as the main pass is in the middle of the stage, and riders who will be dropped uphill or downhill in this pass or the smaller next one will need teammates to catch up on the false-flat sections. And of course teammates of riders ahead will be used to pull hard the front groups so that dropped riders cannot come back.
With over 2โฒ30 gap over the second, Ferrand-Prevost will be hard to beat, but the rest of the podium and top-10 is not so clearly decided yet.
LOL, it happened right at the start, no need to wait for the big climbs, it happened before anything was climbed. Thanks to the TV direction, we didn't see or understand how it happened, but both Ferrand-prevot and Gigante were dropped, so there was a pursuit that consumed all Visma domestiques (1st chase group), all AG domestiques (2nd than 1st chase group), and several FDJ domestiques (peloton). It also annihilated the SD-Works breakaway.
Kerbaol was dropped in a crash in the first curve of the main climb. She never managed to come back.
Gigante was dropped as soon as the very first hairpin bend of the descent that followed. Heck, they weren't even coming fast in the curve, it has just started going downhill for 75 yards and she was already 10 yards behind at the exit of the curve! Insanely bad. She wasn't as strong as yesterday in climbs, so she hadn't managed to get some time margin before the descent.
Then the whole rest was Labous laboriously pulling a group of 5, with some help from the Polish riders who were interested in dropping Gigante for good. There was nothing Gigante could do, there was no one else being dropped (and very few riders ahead), and the groups behind were very far, so she rode alone for over 50 km, progressively losing time.
Vollering was as likeable and bright as always, asking her opponents for a relay 3 seconds after attacking them and failing; attacking in the worst possible locations for her; pointlessly sprinting for mountain points; accelerations that only drops her own cooked teammate Labous who needs to come back to pull gain (after riding for her leader in climbs and flat for 100 km in two days); and so on. Got beaten in the end by Ferrand-Prevot in the last part of the non-categorised climb a few miles from the finish.
Congratulations to French cycling for winning a Tour ๐
Actually, she's not extremely well regarded. I don't mean among the masses or the officials, but among cycling followers. Her profile (isolation, training methods) has always looked rather suspicious, so the whole picture is so-so. A J. Labous, for example, has a better image among this specific public (but she will probably never win anything).
Well, that's a shame, and I hope it's unfounded suspicions of course. It's hard to gauge where we're at in the doping cycle of the sport, but it's been a wild 5 years after corona.
Well, in a general manner, I have a hard time believing that there is something really hardcore going on for the last few years and nobody is ever caught red-handed (except a few Portuguese and a couple of South-Americans doing it the old way). Beside anti-doping controls which can come late compared to the use of a new product: not a 'oops' moment in the background of one of the millions of videos and photographs published nowadays; not a disgruntled or gossipy employee among the ton of people who now work with/around riders, not a vengeful WAG publishing information; not a random police or customs car control. Nothing. So we've got a whole bunch of people involved (much bigger than in past times) which are not on average the cleverest in the world, and yet none of them ever makes a mistake... hmmwell...
Beside a few top amateurs to which not a single team wants to give a pro contract because the professional milieu has little doubts about them doing something very wrong, I reckon the whole rest must be microdosing, and at present I don't see much difference with several practices which are officially allowed and yet already beyond any definition of normality in my opinion.