2019 Tour de France
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never thought i'd see the day that a kiwi is shredding the peleton to bits on the tourmalet!!! that was a thing of beauty to watch.
i can't help but think about all the riders that got shelled way before he even hit the front.. dude needs a serious pay rise!
sheesh Alaphilippe has to crack at some point. you can't just smash the shit out of the tour from day 1 and not expect it to come back and bite you in the arse at some point..
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@scribe said in 2019 Tour de France:
I’ll eat my hat if Alaphilippe survives the high mountains. They don’t have the team to support him and I think Mas is a better bet for Quickstep overall, for a podium place.
I know he won the KOM jersey last year but that’s completely different from riding GC.
I read somewhere that Alaphilippe has treated the race to date as a series of one day races.
nom nom nom what sauce are you going to have with that hat??
but yeh SURELY at some stage he's just going to fall to pieces.. 3rd week by the looks. be lots of questions if he doesn't...
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@WillieTheWaiter yep lots of questions if he wins. A guy who won 3 of the biggest spring classics holding form and going on to smash everyone in a 3 week grand tour?
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Alaphillippe now the big favourites with the bookmakers. Thomas odds have soared today.
https://www.oddschecker.com/cycling/tour-de-france/winner
Kruijwijk is my pick to win it now. Both he and his team looked very strong today.
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The clibs have suited Alaphillipe more than they have suited Skineos - for one thing yesterday was a shorter than usual stage and Tourmalet rewards those climbeurs who are puncheurs if they can hang on at the end. Jumbo-Visma have a nasty 1-2 punch with De Plus (who did a lot of the really hard grunt work that sapped Thomas, Porte and Quintana early on) then Bennett who is seriously creating a very solid career - watching Kruiswijk ask him to accelerate the pace three different times - that was freaking special.
You don't win KOM on the TDF these days without having some serious climbing chops in the second and third week - so Alaphillippe who is in better form than most of the peloton is scary asf right now to all the others, But it was good to see Frenchmen winning on the Tourmalet again.
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That was great watching today - seeing all of those big guns dropping off and George powered up the climb! Certainly the most super of the super-domestiques today!
Be interesting to see whether Thomas and Ineos just had a bad day and can come storming back tonight, or whether he's properly cracking. Was very surprising to see those Ineos support riders fall away without them really having had to do a great deal of work all tour.