Sagan disqualified from Tour

[Palatine]

Bad decision IMHO. Cav used his head first and Sagan reacted. I've seen Cav do this before and crash.

 

[BlueHen]

Bad decision IMHO. Cav used his head first and Sagan reacted. I've seen Cav do this before and crash.

I agree. Cav tried to make a move and there wasn't enough room. The decision surprised me, even the TV announcers didn't think Sagan did anything wrong.

 

[junglehusky]

So I used to follow @digger_forum on twitter a while ago, he's kind of an extremist anti-anybody-even-tangentially-associated-with-doping which was fun when Armstrong had his fall and the Skybots were supposedly clean. When someone has a big attack in the mountains you know a bunch of tweeps will analyze the power to weight ratios and compare it to the dirty days of Lance and Basso and Ulrich. I stopped following after he was saying the reduced suspension deal that Zabriskie and those guys took for testifying against Armstrong, Bruyneel etc was too lenient.

Anyway I looked at his feed to see what he was saying about this year's close finish, with like 5 guys close to Froome on yellow,no signs of suspicious power output... and he was whining about the alpine stages being boring with not enough attacking. LOL... what do you want, a clean race with short attacks and a tight leaderboard or big unbelievable attacks? Pick one.

Anyway, I was hoping for Bardet to threaten somehow on the TT but he needed to have the yellow before today plus a minute or two, he was never going to beat Froome starting from behind. But a dramatic TT to hang on to third by a second. (And nice setup in Marseille with the starting and finishing line inside a stadium).

Very happy to see my team, Slipstream-Chipotle-Garmin-Transitions-Sharp-Cannondale-Drapac surprise everyone and put Rigo Uran on the podium in 2nd place. Smallest budget in the World Tour. Pretty amazing. And they signed a new sponsor to at least secure a couple more years, but it sounds like they're still hunting for a title sponsor to increase the budget to to the level of the other teams, if not Sky.

 

[Fishy]

I don't know what to think about this year's Tour.

Basically, Froome gained a little bit of time in the time trials and then used his team to defend for three weeks. He gained 1:16 against Uran in the two time trials and lost about 20 seconds to him otherwise.

I like Froome - he's a street fighter on a bike, but this was definitely a victory for a large budget over a small budget.

Great news on the Vuelta today...Froome, Bardet, Aru, Uran, Contador, Nibali and Zakarin are all expected to race. That will be epic.

 

[Kolumbo]

I just saw this thread and watched the entire tour. I don't like Cav at all and the tour giving Sagan the boot was just plain wrong. The commentators were great on this topic. I agree with Fishy, I respect Froome, great cyclist and always very professional. I don't like Team Sky. I don't think Froome was the best cyclist but he had the best team. The tour is the tour but it also made me wonder just how important is a podium finish when the 4th place rider misses the podium by 1 second, and there seemed to be no challenge on the final stage. I wanted it to go to Bardet, but just wondering.

Kittel was a beast until he abandoned and Greipel seems to have lost his edge. It would have been great to see Matthews and Sagan battle for intermediate sprint points.