Marlen Reuser and Remco Evenepoel are main candidates for ITT (Elite) but with Tadej out there’s now an oportunity to some other riders. Not many, because 270 km with that EG it’s a hard WC.
Let’s enjoy all week long!
(edit: IDK how to set post’s language to english, please excuse me)
The only new inhabitants they can get there are virtual ones 😄
I checked the lap times, and can you imagine that the last 3 laps (≈ 40km) were raced slower by leaders than on the U23 race?! (and their fastest circuit laps were when Armirail🇫🇷 was pulling as a domestique!)
Those guys exhausted themselves before that, when Van der Poel🇳🇱 was ahead, I’d say. Especially Del Toro🇲🇽 and Seixas🇫🇷, who both started experiencing troubles at the same point, and started ingesting anything they could find in panic mode.
Also contributed to the low final speed the fact that their pace was switching ON-OFF-ON-OFF-… all the time in the last laps.
It was so much fun seeing van der Poel and the others (including Charmig) exhaust everyone from so far out, but without the part where Pogacar wins and makes it boring.
As for the cramping, I think Del Toro and Seixas are just a little young, haven’t done many classics style races against top opponents. And of course, 270 km races are very different from 220 km races. You can see how some riders - like Pedersen, van der Poel, McNulty - don’t decline as fast as other people do when the race is so long.
Btw, someone needs to tell Seixas not to be so hard on himself, he’s almost ready to jump from a building after not winning the WC at age 20. France rode a good race, Amirail was impressive, and Seixas will get stronger for the next 5-6 years at least. Chill out.
The problem changes when you know that Seixas already decides of most things. His team and national director seem to be confined to a role of advising councils. The mystery is how this happens, how they allow a 19 yo to dictate their choices and strategies. Is there active blackmailing from the Seixas family (“if you don’t comply, he’ll be in UAE next year”), or is it self-inflicted?
He decided to go on the Tour of France against the advise of his team. He decided of his teammates. Even in this WC he decided of most of the team. (Like Zidane insisted of having his club pal Dugarry back then).
So, that’s why he takes responsibility to this extent. Because he decided of many things (and asked to decide of many things); he wasn’t just a (final) cog in a machine decided by others.
Now there are people who wouldn’t charge themselves so hard even after being having decided even more and fucking up harder, but that’s not his mentality indeed.
France strategy was no good, considering the team that had been built: no co-leader or even leader number 2, just single leader. No good domestique except for Armirail, whom they decided to wear out way before we even came 100 km from the line… No puncher who could risk casting a shadow over Seixas. Just small climbers, most of them out of shape.
Strategy-wise, they applied a stereotyped plan. Armirail to forbid other from attacking, and then the little climbers would attack in order to… in order to what? In a single-leader team, you fuck yourself if you do that, and that’s exactly what happened. Icing on the cake if you don’t have the manpower to regain control; and you don’t have it because of both the team composition and the fact that you already used most of the manpower you had to do whatever.
After Armirail stopped, there was nobody in the team to pursue his effort (due to the absolute lack any other rouleur in the team), so they went with part B of the plan way too early. France themselves created the mess that would kill them. Paret-Peintre, Jegat played their little 2 minutes act to start messing things up and disappeared. Baudin initiated (or simply took an active part to?) the movement that would ultimately become the Van der Poel breakaway…
Then you have tactics. There was zero tactical adaptation, neither about the A & B parts of the plan, nor within the mess which happened later.
That part when there were still a few teammates and they were chasing at the front the peloton, Jesus… You had Labrosse (I reckon?) dying pulling the peloton, and… there wasn’t a single French anywhere in the line behind him! Nope. The 4 riders including Seixas were aside, in the wind a bit behind, using 1 other rider to make their own line… Result: out of Seixas’ 4 teammates, they lost 2, thus 50%, in this short action. Instead of using only Labrosse (?).
Before or after that, what the heck was this ridiculous solo counter-attack attempt by Prodhomme at some point? A vast overestimating of his own shape and a misjudgement of the situation (was he hoping to compete with Van der Poel and the likes later, ahem?)
Seixas remained focused on sticking to Del Toro. That was the only tactic he applied. The original orientation can be understood because he had done too much on the Montreal GP and the Mexican had finally beaten him. But not seeing what was going on, not seeing that he was soon going to be solo with more than 100 km to go… And sticking to racing 100% the opposite way of 2 weeks ago… He never followed an attack or counter-attack by all the outsiders who were breaking away.
Then when leaders were isolated, many times there were several occasions to join the head after Del Toro had made a big effort to start reducing the gaps; but he never relayed nor counter-attacked to jump to the head of the race, in order to re-establish a calmer situation.
All Del Toro actions, gaps over the following riders were aborted this way. On a profile like that, you cannot only count on gaps created in the short climbs. It is a berg classic. A berg classic without the mutant. A mutant-free berg classic, a ‘classical classic’, therefore the gaps have to be created for real by keeping on pushing very hard at and after the top of the climbs, after you have only created a tiny gap in the climb. That’s what the Seixas/Del Toro did perfectly on the Montreal GP: they considerably grew the gap on the false flat and descent of the University plateau area. Because Del Toro immediately relayed Seixas when he joined him on the top 2 weeks ago, which Seixas always refused to do this Sunday. On this profile and in this racing situation, efforts need to be extended longer than what the short climbs naturally allow, or they are worthless.
In fact, the whole strategical and tactical mistake may well come from my previous paragraph: France wrongly decided it was a race for climbers. There was a slight possibility to turn it into a climbers race, and it was part of their goal, but they completely failed at making it so (wrong team composition, wrong timings, wrong moves).
That and the fixation with Del Toro.
The synthesis of the strategical mistakes + Seixas charging himself can be highlighted by his declaration before the race, when he said there was no other objective for him than the victory.
That means a wrong analysis was made (by himself, by his entourage or by the head of the French team, I don’t know who started, but in the end everyone involved held that analysis), that consisted of considering everything would be as on Montreal GP and there would be no new opponents and no new configuration. This analysis saw the WC race unfolding exactly the same way as the GP, with the same and only opponent, except that in the end that opponent would be more tired and Seixas would not fail at sprinting.
They didn’t plan for teams being different, for a few extra riders coming, for a few riders being worse and a few being better. They didn’t plan for different races configurations and situations.
They only had one very basic plan, against one single opponent, and ignored all the rest of the field and all the rest of options.
Highlights for me:
Lowlights: