re: LE TOUR v.110: All Things Tour de France 2023-That's a Wrap! Results in Post 2

2003 TDF Postal comes across together, shattering the prior best time, puts Victor Hugo Pena into yellow.

15:10 if link doesn't go directly to the time
TTT Postal

2003 Stage 15 is the famous Luz Ardiden stage where Lance's bars got caught by someone's little baggy, upended him, and Lance not only got back to the front but won the stage.

This was back when guys would ditch helmets on the climb. Wish they still did that. These are grown men. If they don't want to wear a helmet, that's their choice. Also, it was funny watching them toss helmets into the crowd or onto the ground or looking for the team car to get up there so they could hand it off, getting angry when the car wasn't there. I think I remember one of them just tossing it into the race director's car one year.

While we're talking old school, Durianrider, years ago, put up this video Best Lance Armstrong Documentary You've Never Seen and it's really good. I've watched it several times over the years. Video opens with Lance on a training ride, I think scouting / riding an upcoming TDF route. Johan comes up and says up ahead he will stop, they have tea for him etc. Lance says, 'What if I keep going?'. He didn't understand the entire road was blocked by snow / landslide or something. Dude was possessed back then.

I've had friends that have done PEDs and I always wonder if guys like Lance are obsessed with their craft or if the PEDs transform their mindset. My friends have told me that when they are on PEDs they feel better and want to train constantly.

Lance is on a beautiful red, white, and blue Trek. I miss those days - US Postal, red white & blue, US Cycling, some national pride. If I was a billionaire I'd fund a team. No sponsors, just American cyclists going for jerseys. When the doping scandal hit and Lance got sued, he showed in court that he generated tons of revenue for USPS and the sponsorship was worth hundreds of millions in equivalent ad revenue spending and so forth. I don't want to be political here, but I would really like to see more of our country enjoy cycling, burn calories, lose weight etc, and I think bringing back US Postal would be a good use of tax dollars to help in that purpose. The average weight of a US female is now the same as the average weight of a US male from back around 1970 or so (around 165lbs). Average weight of men is now just below 200lbs. We really need to fix this.

I remember those old Postal days. Bike shops were doing insane amounts of business. So many people were buying bikes, riding bikes...myself included.

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Matteo abandoned

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Damn. Wish the best for the kid. He’s a great rider.

It’s odd to me to see bike changes in the middle of TTs. This TT course is interesting.

The climb in the Giro was nutty. Only in Italy.

This is just a 7 minute puncher. Borderline on whether to bike change or not, but probably worth it with how heavy modern TT bikes are. Should favor Pogi I would think.

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Borderline on whether to bike change or not, but probably worth it with how heavy modern TT bikes are. Should favor Pogi I would think.

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I just read how theoretically it could be a gain of 5 secs. 15 seconds to change bike, then climb up 20 seconds faster with the lighter bike.

Not a second to waste on the bike change though

I’d imagine Jonas will copy whatever Pog does

I feel like it’s a real dick move to stand in the road during a TT.

Holy hell these guys are ridiculous

Jonas putting 50 seconds into a complete freak of nature like Wout Van Aert in 10 minutes either means he's going out way too hard or he's about to ride the best time trial in tour history.

Pog and Vinge are unreal. I bet their blood has the consistency of toothpaste

Dang looks like this tour could be over in the next 15 minutes if this keeps up.