Thread title correct after all. Only other guy to win three jerseys was merkcx

Always assume Roglic was a better TT rider than Pogacar. Didn't know Pogacar actually beat Roglic in the Slovenia TT this year

Makes it look even worse, Roglic was quite clearly stronger than Pog in the Col de la Loze and that was only 3 days ago

Unreal time trial.

My favorite rider is Carapaz but that was epic.

That was incredible. Gutted for Roglic, but Pogacar deserved it. Mostly on his own all tour and was the most aggressive/exciting GC rider.

Really happy for Porte too.

Can't believe Pogacar put 2 minutes into Roglic and won the ITT by over a minute, what the actual ****.

His dogs are named landis and pantani

What sort of course was the Slovenian tt this year for Pogacar to put 9 seconds on Roglic over 15km I think it was?

If it was fairly flat I think we can safely say that we ought to have known Roglic was more in trouble than what everyone was letting on as Pogacar just seemed like a more accomplished climber in this tour as he didn't have the support of a near full strength climbing squad as Jumbo did.

I'm at a loss for words, utterly unreal ending to the Tour.
What a phenomenon Pogacar is, winning the Tour at 21 while not having a lot of help from your team, and just destroying everyone in the ITT. My god. Like half of that distance was fairly steep climbing Iirc, so to some extent similar to this one. I've also read that it was supposedly very wet and Roglic rode relatively conservatively.

Pogacar's ride today was out of this world, but I certainly also think Roglic seemed finished. He did not look good on his bike, he couldn't find the rhythm, he was constantly standing up and pedaling which isn't his usual style when he's riding fast. He just looked empty, like he was running on fumes. So this looks like another case of Roglic perhaps peaking a little too soon, it seems to me like he goes from being the best in the first week of the GT to struggling towards the end. It happened in 2018 when he dropped out of the Podium on the ITT on the 20th stage, losing more than a minute to Froome and Dumoulin, it happened in last year's Giro and now it has happened again.
Maybe it's not even that he peaks too soon, but rather that he just wears himself down and isn't as durable/quick to recuperate as other top GC guys. It sounds a little weird to say about someone who is less than 1 minute away from the win, but unless he was sick or had other issues, it should just not be possible for the Roglic we've seen the past 3 weeks to lose by nearly 2 minutes and get beaten by 4 riders, he was closer to Landa than to Pogacar.

Either way Pogacar was just on another level today and even a Roglic in very good shape would likely not have beaten him, this has to have been one of the most emphatic wins I have ever seen. It's great to see that it was the GC rider who took the most initiative to attack who gets rewarded for their fun way of racing, Pogacar has made many fans this Tour and I am one of them.


Also great INEOS "duo" stage win Wednesday and damn Søren Kragh Andersen you absolute machine, you look like a crossover of Cancellara and Vinokourov out there stealing another stage from the sprinters, what an absolute legend.


And I'm also happy for Porte, what a great way for him to end in his final Tour. So many years of things not going his way but he's finally had a great Tour where he had a chance to really show how good he is.

betfair exchange was something like 93% roglic and 7% pogacar pre race.

is this a case of the 7% getting there or the market being dumb and not realizing how strong pogacar was and how relatively weak his team was for stage races?

i trust markets, but my feeling is that it has to be the latter considering roglic could have gotten 2nd and still lost the maillot jaune

I think the most reasonable explanation I can think of is just that Pogacar was unimaginably strong. He just had the legs of his lifetime, and him being that much stronger than Roglic is not something that has been the case the whole time only Roglic's team made it seem even.
Roglic was the favorite to the stage, and Pogacar was like 3rd so it's not like it was difficult at all to see Pogacar beating Roglic today. But him beating Roglic, who has looked as strong as Pogacar most days, even a little stronger on the Loze stage, by a full minute was pretty much unthinkable barring a crash or something else before the stage started today imo.

Pogacar not having helpers on the mountain finishes is not really a major issue. They hardly provide any shielding from the wind when you're climbing steep mountains anyways, and you don't need them as much as the leader does, because the leading team must defend the jersey. If Pogacar had had to reel everybody in every time someone attacked in the mountains it would have taken a lot of energy, but he didn't, he could just follow Roglic's wheel and attack when he wanted. Of course it's an advantage for Roglic that he can set the pace, but if you have good enough legs to not get dropped not having teammates is not going to make any real difference to whether you can keep up or not on those climbs, unless you're constantly closing the gaps yourself. You need a team to defend the yellow jersey much more than you need one to take it I'd say.
So in no way should/did the fact Roglic had a much better team suggest that Pogacar would be so much better today, it just so happened that it was the case today for reasons nobody could have realistically predicted imo.


Edit: also Pogacar was a bit of a joker today. He's ridden like 5 ITTs as a pro cyclist in total, and he's improved it a lot over the last year, so it's hard to say just how good is he at them. Like, is he going to win every mountain TT he'll participate in for the next 10 years or was this more a case of him peaking at exactly the right time while the competition struggled? It's hard to say.

This. I dismissed this 9s stat all the way through as not really significant .. i just thought that over some shortish course they were more or less even. Very wrong, obviously.

I'm still in shock, tbh.

I said last night I had no idea what to expect in the tt and I spent a decent amount of time today, before the top ten set off, trying to explain to mrstchaz how the KoM works in order to explain why Pogacar might want to change bike at the bottom of the climb in order to ensure KoM even if it meant that he might drop from 2nd to 3rd overall, and that that might well be a quandry as to which option to take.

loltchaz.

Ok. So we can wonder about Roglic, but he could have beaten the rest of the field today by 20s and still have lost the yellow jersey. In retrospect everyone is right: his teams' strength should have been used to build a bigger lead and he should have gone with Pogacar on the day the latter grabbed back that 40s or w/e. And, yeah, Vigg is right that Pogacar didn't have to chase breaks in the mountains, but that's not really an excuse for Jumbo Visma.

What an incredible, unbelieveable performance by Pogacar.

Doesn't feel as much like Roglic lost as it does that Pogacar won. To blow away the entire field by that much time is amazing. Porte and Dumoulin had great rides and Roglic was right there, he just wasn't up to Pogacar's standard.

An epic Tour.

Here you mean "is" rather than "is not", right?

That's the only way I can make this comment parse. Not being a nit, just trying to make sure I understand your point(s).

Agreed. Maybe Roglic could have been at the Porte/Dumoulin standard today in the tt - he wasn't that far off in reality - but that just wouldn't have been anywhere close.

Interesting to hear Pogacar saying (post-game) - and of course one doesn't know if it is true - that he didn't have any time checks/differences once he got to the bottom of the climb sa the crowds were too large and louc for him to hear the team in his earpiece.

It was a market with very little information, imo.

Obviously the odds were drastically out of kilter, but however the market got to its odds one shouldn't had confidence in them.

I was trying to say that imo they have looked equally strong until yesterday, and that this is not simply down to Roglic having so much help from his team.

Granted, Roglic could not have held onto the jersey without his team, but in several mano a mano scenarios, they looked equally strong in the mountains, and Roglic having the better team is not what made him able to keep up with (and in one instance beat) Pogacar in the mountains after all his helpers had let go.

wow the next day, still cannot remember such a memorable (and hilarious) time trial as the one yesterday.

no going to hammer on it again, but of course Pogacar is thermonuclear, being trained by ex-dopers and blood transfusion specialists. All indicators -according to doping experts and journalists- point to a blood transfusion yesterday similar to what the Kazakhs did in 2007 when they clowned the TdF ITT (and got caught due to a blood bag mix up). Let’s see which names come out from the Aderlass Operation debacle. Roglic probably didn’t dare since he had the TdF won- Jumbo is still thermonuclear nonetheless, why are the Rabobank staff still allowed around cyclists is beyond me.

We should have some fantastic battles between Pogacar/Bernal/Remco in the next few years. This reverse of fortune also gives some hope regarding the possibilities of riders winning the Tour without an armada, this is good.

Expect more mountain ITTs on the last Saturday of the Tour in the next year. This was the dream scenario for the organisers- what a drama!

Very happy for Richie, he deserves to stand on a podium in Paris after all the missluck in previous TdFs.

The Giro and Vuelta have such different profiles this year.

Vuelta is designed for climbers (most of the stages end at the summit, including the first one!)
Giro is relatively flat compared to recent years, with 3 ITT and a looooot of stages for sprinters.

Let’s see who does which- it is not possible to ride both since they overlap.

I also have huge problem with the culture we have of letting the staff that was obviously around doping but never explicitly caught off the hook

Cedric Vasseur who used to ride for US Postal with Lance during the Tour has been a pundit on national tv and now is the GM of Cofidis

.... it was 7 seconds! it was an incredible change

I mean compared to Porte

I understand how you feel about that, but if guilt-by-association is the standard is there anyone who would be clean enough to be allowed around the sport?

agree totally...Pogacar can win this way more than Roglic lost it...Pogacar was a man possessed.

the peloton is gonna be **** scared of him from here on

Indeed, some associations feel stronger than others though