Men's Road Cycling UCI World Tour 2022 (Tour de France)

[heywoodu 16,059]

1 minute ago, Grassmarket said:

Once again the “send a man up the road to help later” theory is completely useless. Ineos sent van Baarle up the road early. The group with Thomas reaches him.  Van Baarle falls away after 20 metres, contributes absolutely nothing, not so much as a bottle. 

Van Aert has shown that strategy is quite good though, if the rider is strong enough and the timing is done well.

[heywoodu 16,059]

McNulty drops Thomas  

[Quaker2001 268]

This is going to be fun.  Tadej has his helper.  Vingegaard has no one.  And Thomas has cracked, so that's probably the end of his day

[Grassmarket 4,082]

2 minutes ago, heywoodu said:

Van Aert has shown that strategy is quite good though, if the rider is strong enough and the timing is done well.

Sure, if you have the best rider in the World on your team, I can see how that would be handy. 

[heywoodu 16,059]

2 minutes ago, Quaker2001 said:

This is going to be fun.  Tadej has his helper.  Vingegaard has no one.  And Thomas has cracked, so that's probably the end of his day

Thomas can't rest though, he still has the 3rd place to defend (which shouldn't be much of a problem, but still)  

[heywoodu 16,059]

3 minutes ago, Grassmarket said:

Sure, if you have the best rider in the World on your team, I can see how that would be handy. 

Right, but it's been proven a useful tactic quite often throughout the years  

[Quaker2001 268]

And here we go!  Pogacar attacks and Vingegaard follows him down the mountain.

 

Nevermind.. probably a smart idea to allow McNulty to catch back up, so they're back together on the descent

[Grassmarket 4,082]

1 minute ago, heywoodu said:

Right, but it's been proven a useful tactic quite often throughout the years  

The only thing I can think of is that it gives you the right to have a car up at the head of the race, which can be handy. But the idea that the guy from the break is going to give your team leader 5km on the final climb…..don’t remember that ever happening recently.

[heywoodu 16,059]

And down goes another record from the EPO days  

 

 

[heywoodu 16,059]

2 minutes ago, Grassmarket said:

The only thing I can think of is that it gives you the right to have a car up at the head of the race, which can be handy. But the idea that the guy from the break is going to give your team leader 5km on the final climb…..don’t remember that ever happening recently.

A common way to use it is as sort of a 'springboard', so to speak. Guy up front lets himself be dropped, team leader acttacks and catches up with his teammate, who can then push for a few minutes to give his team leader a good gap. This isn't a very rare tactic, although it's hard to perform it very well.