heywoodu

Pogacar on a solo, roughly 35 guys in the chasing group including basically all of the main favourites.

Meintjes in the group of dropped riders in order to stay invisible.

And DNF.

Since there wasn't enough going on yet, an old new war is heating up.

Yeah, as soon as the dates and route were known, I don't think anyone expected to actually have every climb in the race It's the Giro, that's how it goes.

Whoopsie.

Right, Lutsenko's DNS is due to a positive test. No, not that one, just the COVID-19 test.

There you go, Grosu in the attack.

During the neutralized part 20 extra euros were matched on Lutsenko, huray!

DNS for Natnael Berhane because of visa problems. Which is rather sad by itself, but even more so now: he raced just last week...in France, and now such a short bit away he can't even start.

Grosu can suddenly do everything lately, who knows I missed it, but apparently Meintjes placed an attack in I believe the Tirreno earlier this month

And there we go

Meanwhile the first competitions in months have been held, but the Chilean races obviously only had Chilean athletes this year, so they're not that interesting sadly.

Aaaaand we're live Go Nibali (and The Luts, if nothing else)

To be fair, it does seem like most countries are testing a whole lot more (and not only testing pretty sick people anymore), which obviously leads to way more cases.

That's an anticlimactic 24 hour race

Quite some first 7 hours. Third-placed Lamborghini broke down and is out, later the leading Mercedes crashed and is out....and less than an hour ago, the other leading Mercedes crashed as well, out as well. Two of the three leading Audi's had a spin, but stayed on the road, and now there's a red flag due to too heavy rain, which is most likely going to turn the 24 hour race into a 16 hour race, since it's probably not going to be lifted until early daylight

It's not the default thing in men's cycling as it often is in women's cycling Plus in men's cycling there are 100+ riders who can realistically win good races with strong fields, in women's cycling there are maybe 20. I know that has it's reasons, lack of opportunities and so on, but there aren't going to be a whole lot more opportunities when simply a whole lot less people are interested. It works both ways: yes, to make it bigger there needs to be some more support, but to get more support, there needs to be some more interesting racing. A ton of people follow the Tour de France, at least casually if not by watching most stages. Nobody I know watches more than a handful of women's races even if they're shown on TV or live stream. The opportunity to watch is there, but a lot of cycling fans just don't find it interesting enough.

The problem is, you need to have at least some interesting things to offer before getting advertising, television, funding and so on. Women's cycling sometimes does, which is why it's on TV (or live streams) relatively often nowadays, but of course main channels are not going to pour more and more money into something that offers their viewers two hours of basically nothing of any interest.

Luckily there's plenty of other stuff to see Women's races aren't often great, but they are generally a lot better than this

Oh damn, lucky Longo Borghini wasn't sprinting like this in a peloton sprint. Both lucky for everyone close and for herself (cause she'd have lost a medal, which wouldn't be surprising to happen now anyway).

I've seen boring races and I've seen boring races, but holy moly this was a boring race.

Wonderful TV images by the way, as the commentators here put it: "These images are so good, it's unitalian/non-Italian." And as it turns out, the images are done by the guy who did the Tour de France images for 20 years

Van Vleuten going for both silver and the award for ugliest style of the race.

Late attack by Van der Breggen....Van Vleuten did it 65km earlier