Season really starts tomorrow with Strade Bianche. One of the most entertaining race of the year raced partially on dirt roads

Weather has been terrible this week and the race should look like that :



Riders to watch this year :

Sagan, Van Avermaet and Naesen should be the first 3 riders to watch in the cobble classics



Then it will be time for the Ardennes battle

Alaphilippe seems ready to contest the supremacy of Valverde this year, even though Valverde is still the fav. New course in Liege-Bastogne-Liege this year, with 8km of flat after the last climb. Race should be way more interesting



Will Tom Dumoulin take another casual **** in the fields before winning the Giro ?



Will this very sick man be able to do another miracle this season and win his 5th Tour de France ?



Or maybe he will be suspended by that time, and then it will be a very open battle between Porte, Landa, Quintana, Bardet, Aru, Nibali.

Bonus point this year on the tour with a cobble stage. Last time Nibali won the Tour there and Froome went home with a broken hand.



Then all season long, we will have some madmen that will do absolutely nothing but riding a bicycle in a peloton for hours, before going HAM in the last 300m

Money on this guy Fernando Gaviria, most promising sprinter in the world. Otherwise Kittel seems terrible in his new team. Groeneweggen, Ewan are the next 2 right now in terms of pure speed. Then there's a dozen of really fast guys that can win depending on the type of finish. The sprint is entering its all time prime right now, no more boring big trains, 1 or 2 leadout and a finisher just like track cycling



LET US WATCH PEOPLE SUFFERING FOR HOURS WHILE SITTING IN OUR COUCH !!!

https://cyclingtips.com/2018/03/wigg...costeroid-use/

Wow just watched MSR. Nibali's pointless annual attacks on the Cipressa/Poggio finally paid off! Guy is seriously underrated.

Milan San Remo was awesome. I did not expect that attack to stick. Even at the very end, I thought he started celebrating too early.

Also, here's Cavendish's crash (go to 35 seconds)



EDIT: This thumbnail is so lol. He hasn't been with Quickstep since 2015.

"only" a broken rib.

Cav has had really bad luck this year. In Abu Dhabi, the car that starts the race suddenly braked, causing Cav to crash:

Cavendisg must be high on Tramadol when he races. Like Contador he fall every races because of lack of attention

Lol Valverde attacks on the taaienberg today at Dwars Door, finishes in the 2nd group with GVA and Terpstra. Hints that he might ride Flanders on Sunday. Can't imagine how much the cycling purists would hate it if he won there.

Happy COBBLE Day



Paris Roubaix today, we should have some rain as a bonus

Hope someone find a way to counter Quickstep, it's a bit boring when they have 1 rider in front and 3 sucking wheels in the favourite group

Sagan being Sagan. Clever attack with 55km to go, not sure why and how it worked???

After 4 straight Valverde's wins, There's a new Lord Commander on the Wall

Today was a truly epic day in the Giro. Hell, the whole Giro has been pretty epic.

Highlight video:



Recap:

* Simon Yates has always been good. But had never been a real contender.
* Tom Dumoulin, defending champ, was looking to defend.
* Chris Froome was going for the cycling version of the Tiger Slam, by winning three consecutive grand tours.
* Stage 6, Simon Yates takes the pink jersey in the first real test of the race. Dumoulin is 16 seconds back. Froome is way back in 8th, at 1'10"
* Stage 9, Yates wins the stage and puts time into the contenders. Now 32" ahead of Dumoulin. Froome cracks and is in 11th place. 2'27" back. People are seriously wondering if Froome should abandon to concentrate on Le Tour.
* Stage 11, Yates is really doing it. Now 47" ahead of Dumoulin. Froome is way back in 12th: 3'20" back.
* After two sprint stages, stage 14 is back in the mountains. Froome shows he's back in form by winning a stage. But Yates nearly keeps up with him, only finishing 6" back. Now, Dumoulin is 1'24" back.
* Stage 15 is another Yates victory. People are really thinking he's got this. Dumoulin is still in second at 2'11" back. Froome is in 7th at 4'52".
* Stage 16 is the ITT and, as expected, Yates lost a bunch of time. But he's still in pink. Dumoulin is in second, 56" back. Pozzovivo is 3rd: 3'11". Froome is 4th: 3'50"
* Stage 17 is a sprint.
* Stage 18 is won by a breakaway. But the important part is that Dumoulin, Pozzovivo, and Froome finish together, but Yates is finally dropped, losing 18 seconds. Are the cracks showing in Yates.

* Stage 19 was today. And the answer is yes, Yates finally cracks. 86 km to go, on the biggest climb, Yates gets dropped: https://streamable.com/2oa5g
* By 80 km to go, Sky finally runs out of riders. At 3:45 of this video: https://streamable.com/2oa5g, Froome makes a break. By this time, Yates was already 2'45" back.
* This is a long ass mountain. Peak is at 74 km to go. By this time, Froome is 41
ahead of Dumoulin. Yates is 9'45" back.
* Froome is one of the best descenders, so keeps putting more time on his chasers.
* By the time the next climb starts, Froome is 1'53" up on Dumoulin. Yates is 18 minutes back.
* By the middle of the next climb, the feed doesn't even show how far back Yates is.

At the end, Froome wins today's stage by 3'00. Dumoulin finished 5th, 3'23" back. Yates finishes in 79th place: 38'51" back.

In the GC standings, Froome is first. Dumoulin is second: 40" back. Pinot is 3rd: 4'17". Yates is in 18th place: 35'42" back.

Here was the profile of today's stage:



Here's tomorrow's stage, the last mountain stage of the race:

Landis into Morzine was a way better ride imo

Also: wtf was the time cut

In theory, the time cut should have been 40'37". Meaning Yates was within the cut. However, when large groups of riders don't make the cut, the UCI doesn't enforce that rule. 57 riders didn't beat 40'37"

Spoilers as of 32 km to go today's stage:

Results are in

Yates didn't even try today. 45'32" back. He went from wearing the pink jersey for over two weeks, to 22nd place, 75'11" in back of Froome, in the space of 2 days.

Ruh Roh Froome

Spoke too soon - http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/uci-...-chris-froome/

Complete joke. Cycling is ****ed up well beyond repair. If you have enough money you can make anything go away in this sport. It's a shame because it really is a beautiful sport, but the rampant corruption has ruined it.

At least the cobbled classics are still great. Grand tour cycling is a big farce these days.

The theory I'm seeing put forth by Sky is that urine tests aren't the most accurate indicator of how much Salbutamol he put in his system. Since he was dehydrated, the proportion of Salbutamolin his urine would be higher than normal, but not necessarily indicative that he took more than the legal limit.

Also, it's still unknown whether Froome will be at the TdF. UCI cleared Froome. But UCI doesn't run the TdF. ASO does, and they tried to ban Froome yesterday.

Latest I've seen is that ASO is dropping the case against Froome. I guess this means he will be competing in the TdF.

While there is obviously a lot of pushing of boundaries going on, particularly revolving around TUEs, this whole case seems like it was way overblown. As far as I can tell the case revolves around a single test where Froome was ~20% over the limit in a period where he had ~20 other clean tests, for a substance that has been shown in research to have high variation in urine concentrations when the same amount of the drug has been ingested.

It's the sort of thing that probably happens many times every year, except this time it was improperly leaked and is about a multiple grand tour winner and therefore is a huge story. Taken in a vacuum the only thing that seems actually suspicious about this specific case is the timing of the case being concluded.

Froome was on twice the legal amount. Coincidentally, the day before the positive test, Froome lost time to all of his competitors, but on the following day, where the positive test was taken, he suddenly had no problems following them. What a strange coincidence that he just happens to have twice the legal amount in his urine on the same day that he magically was a lot better than the day before!

Sky and Froome's explanations are absolutely hilarious. First they said he had a bad asthma attack which made him take an extra high amount, even though the amount in his urine was wayyy too high for that to make sense. Then Froome was simply dehydrated, even though Sky have previously talked about how they have many people on the route with water bottles to make Froome is properly hydrated.

WADA's reasonings for not punishing Froome are completely absurd. It looks a lot like something we've seen before with UCI protecting Armstrong from doping punishment.

I guess Ulissi and Petacchi will be suing UCI now, considering they got banned for the same thing Froome did, except they actually had much less of it in their blood than Froome did.

A good take on the situation:

The overall point made I pretty much agree with, I just think that this specific case is only such a huge deal because it involves Froome and that the actual details of the case are actually not particularly damning. For starters Salbutamol has been shown to have no actual benefits to muscle strength, sprint or endurance performance when inhaled - it only has a significant effect with high, systemic dosages - and even then shown no benefit for endurance performance (link to research if you're interested). If you're claiming that the increased level on one specific day was strongly related to the performance on that day then the science doesn't seem to back that up. The one point counter to this is that as a treatment for asthma it obviously would have a short-term benefit but this is what the drug is allowed to be used for, and research indicates there is no benefit beyond reaching the baseline of a normal healthy (i.e. no asthma) athlete - and in fact this is why there is no need for a TUE for regular use.

The fact that a urine test is pretty much unfit for purpose for analysing levels of Salbutamol (among other things) makes the case a lot weaker as well, but this undeniably a factor in the perceived lack of credibility of anti-doping agencies.

I don't doubt that there is plenty of bending of the rules going on and that some of the rules around specified substances and TUEs are being being abused, but this specific case seems to be having all of these issues heaped onto it since it was leaked during the investigation and involves Froome, when in reality this specific case seems very minor. I have much bigger issues with Wiggins' use of Triamcinolone and other dodgy uses of TUEs, albeit they technically break no rules.