Hello you beautiful cycling fans and welcome back to another A1 show…
Hello you beautiful cycling fans and welcome back to another A1 show of Welta Special. This time we're talking about stage 12, one of my favourite riders in the bunch won today, he's been around for a long long time, a season journeyman I suppose. When you say journeyman you kind of think about someone who's washed up and no talent so I don't know if we could describe him as a journeyman because he still won the stars of the sport, Philip Gilbert, I'm going to unpack a pretty epic state. Like we've been really lucky that we've had on the transition stages, really exciting racing out of the breakaway. And today was no exception. One of the more exciting ones similar to yesterday's stage, with drama all the way to the finish line. So let's jump right in. Before we do, let's have a chat about missing piece. Missing piece are our show sponsor for the Vuelta and they have been amazing. I've got my chopping boards, I wonder if I get them like two days ago, loving them. Still haven't brought myself to actually chop anything on them yet because they're like walks of art. Like these things what they're only, they're probably super torto... I couldn't believe when I went onto their website they checked their price and they're like, 30 euro, a phenomenon, what a nice gift. It's the gift I've just started buying up for an anticipation of being unorganized at Christmas, starting to buy up some shop boards and the reason being that it just, there's a really nice personal touch to them and when you gift them it kind of feels like you care, even if you don't. So there you go. For all the lads out there who are normally going for the gift vouchers, get the chopping board, get the chopping board with your wife or partners home town engraved into it and that will show a real touch of class. There you go, and all the girls listening, you aren't as lazy with your presents, so you can just do what you do. You do what you do because those presents are a lot more thoughtful than ours. Anyway let's talk so stage 12, took two hours for the breakaway to go today. That was some rough racing. Yumbo Wismer, we talked about them, their transition into this role as sort of the new team's guy. I'm going to touch on the Tommy D stuff as well, Tommy Dummelan, because there's been a lot going on with the Swoon Web director, but even in advance of Tom Dummelan's arrival as Yumbo Wismer, they are taking up this sort of head of the Peloton role quite well, and they weren't happy with the composition of the break for a good chunks of the early part of the race and it took two hours of pretty frantic racing for the break to go. The final climb was an absolute wall of the yoke today. That's where most of the big racing went. Well let's talk about Tom Dumelan for a second. So Tom Dumelan is a roiving ass, Yum Bovizma in the off season. So he's There's been a bit of back and forth in the press between Doomlan and Sunweb owners and they basically have commented, you know, it was a money thing, it was a payment from Doomlan to Sunweb and they said it's a mutually beneficial deal for everyone and it's difficult to see how Sunweb are spinning this is a positive, you know, they have some big sponsors on the Samsung, they've servello, obviously Sunweb and they've spun a line to those sponsors that they're going to contest for grand tours with like outside team in the else team's going. Doomland has been the most consistent GC rotor for years so now without him the proposition looks very different but they tried to make the analogy of you know Oix didn't stop producing players just because you all have Croyf left the thing the whole concept and the academy kept rolling forward and that's the same for Sunweb but they're like if they're gonna home develop talent. It's going to be a long time waiting for a Sunweb rider to win a grand tour. They need to get in and active in the transfer market. Like you would wonder with Sunweb losing Dumelan. Why they didn't make an approach for Dan Mart. It seems like their wages would have been comparable. He's a GC guy on the move. There's not many of them. We've make a land again on the move. Why did they not make a move for him? We carapazers on the move, I know we went to any else, but it seems like this rumblin Dumelana turned out, I didn't know this, Dumelana turned out, it actually turned the car around as he was driving to the team training camp for the pre Tour de France training camp and just you turned the car and went home and that was basically the nail that broke the nails breaker, camel's back, or is that straw as the breaker, camel's back, who knows.
Let's talk about this last climb on today's stage
Let's talk about this last climb on today's stage. The Altodil Arios, it was a cat tree climb, well it's been harping on Altruv-Welta about a cat tree climb in the Vuelta, it's not a ramp, it was a cat tree climb, it took about 10 minutes to go up and it was like a wall. Like the really active roiders on it earlier are my least favourite roider in the bunch. Valerio Conte, he looks like a moaning little bastard. Gilbert was obviously super wrong in the early part but more just following Aaron Burrow looked good as well and but then we had Gilbert in the second half of the climb. He said in the fourth half of the climb in his post stage, post stage interview that he was 29-28 in the early part of it so that Chelsea house D but was like if Gilbert needed a 29-28 going up but you know I'd need a I'd need a chairlift going up and then he said when he was attacking he was moving between the 23 and 21 so that shows you how steep it was when Gilbert went looked it was now going with him the two tried to make an effort to go with him where Bartcello and Aron Bordeaux both had a bit of local knowledge as well under the sentiment combined quite well and they kept that kind of drama still with eight seconds to go or went 1.4 kilometers to go he had it only an eight second gap but Gilbert was talking afterwards he didn't have a lead motorbike for whatever reason so he was he was struggling to know where the coroner is, how much they were bending around because you know when you have a lead motorbike you judge your breaking off the motorbikes breaking. If the motorbikes are hard on the brakes you know it's wrapping back around if he's only federing them. You know you can kind of rail that corner a bit more and you know if you remember he did have that bad crash in the tour last year and he even referenced that afterwards. So he said he remembers his crash in the tour and that sort of thing stays in your head so he didn't want to take too many risks going down there. He also with the win, he said he couldn't hear the team radio so he didn't know what gap he had. He said he looked back a couple of times and couldn't see it but they were back to eight seconds. I actually thought they had them at one point but a funny game starts happening at a certain point and I'd submit that it's around 2k to go and a two up like that where you're kind of boat riders are kind of thinking okay we could catch them now but we may not and a second's better than toward and this little like we spoke about when when collaborations change from collaborative to combative and or you know cooperative to competitive and that's what started going on and at around 1.5 to go and yet the impetus went out of the chase interestingly what was going on there was a motorbike did anyone see this or was I seeing things there was a motorbike parked on the corner at 400 meters to go as she'll bear with coming around the corner. I remember we had a crash a number of years ago me and the farmer on our Shamp Damian shore were sprinting, we weren't sprinting for the win, I think we were sprinting for Tour de Fort in a race here in Ireland, visiting the classic. We turned a blind corner at about 250 meters to go and he let out the sprint through the corner and he just head down and I looked up and I put the boy sideways and he sprinted straight into the back of a park motorbike which was parked at about 150 to go. So, yeah, I've seen this happen before and it can be so, so down to see broke his collar bones as far as I know in that crash. Horrendous, like, I don't know what was going on with that motorbike with 1.5 to go. But anyway, Gilbert, he held it home. Aaron Buru, who's a pretty fast finisher in Gilbert, would have been worried about him with Second and Barcello was toward. Back in the bunch, we seen Yumbovism at the Great Job. George Bennus and Sept Coos, very, very, very strong. They set a tempo that not many people felt comfortable following. I said it was 15 left in the bunch. Ward Priestage was that Lopez was planning on attacking. He did attack. It was pretty soft. Roglitz responded quite easily with that. And what I found was interesting on the second half of the climb was Salaire from movie star. It started to kind of ride in a solid tempo. This was at a stage when Roglic was isolated.
Celera rode all the way in on the front at a pretty hard tempo
And Celera rode all the way in on the front at a pretty hard tempo. A tempo hard enough to deter attacks. It kind of got me thinking, like, why did they not start hopping? Well, I know why, because to the stage coming up tomorrow is, it's pretty epic. They have, what's the decline called? Lost my Jugos is on tomorrow and that's an epic climb and that's gonna be one of the key climbs in this year's Vuelta. So just a lot of nerves there and people don't want to waste energy but I would have still taught the movie star guys with having the numbers having the Valverde and Quintana, you know you send Valverde out Ruggleschas, you know he needs the chase and it's wasting a bit of rug, it's just energy for tomorrow as well. So I would like to see a bit more of that. I'm loving the kind of two stages in one stage at the moment, especially when the break is getting a good gap. Like we've had at the last couple of days where we've had the break getting the big gap and then the GC fight, the GC fight behind. Let's make it for a really, really exciting TV, especially because the fight for the stage is becoming so close at the moment. And before I crack on, I just want to give a mention to ClickFunnels. ClickFunnels are another show sponsor of ours who have actually extended beyond the Vuelta. So thank you for that. They're happy that you guys are clicking. So thanks very much for checking that out. I know a bunch of you guys have been messaging me and saying you've been checking it out and you're loving the ClickFunnels software. Definitely check it out if you haven't and you're trying to do a little side hustle business. You want to build your own website, you don't want to get stuck or held hostage by a developer, paying huge, you know, recording monthly fees for running WordPress updates and hiding behind vague tech terminology that you can't understand. You know, we've all been there, so ClickFunnels is a software that gives you back the freedom. It's super easy. Like, I'm not techy. I drag and drop and build a page for a set of training camp, about two, three minutes, templates they're all in their brilliant brilliant software I encourage you to check it out and like missing piece the link for click funnels is down in the show notes on the description and they've hooked our audience up with a 14 day free trial legends Philip Gilbert he's given us all hope Philip Gilbert and Valver they are just shown that age really does not matter in cycling that you know I've lots coming into our coaching stable and they're kind of worried that they've you know they're sort of approaching forties and they're kind of worried that you know there's a ceiling on what they can achieve and you look at Valverde and Gilbert and I think Gilbert is 37 but he's just on the new tree your contract you know these guys are phenomenally strong they're at the top of their game and you know they only look to be getting better and I would contend that Gilbert is the favor for the worlds in Yorkshire. So yeah, it's an interesting one with sports science and I suppose I'm really looking forward, I love the Vuelta Daily Podcast but I am looking forward to getting back to our regular format and getting a deep dive into some topics because I think age is one I'd love to get into and you know exactly what mechanisms are slowing down my age and how we can use sports science to reverse those. I've had some super interesting meetings as well in the last week, I've won meeting last week. And it's funny because I actually, I think with anyone coaching, I just got so lucky at the very start. You know, cycling wasn't cool or sexy when I started out and then Team Sky happened and kind of it became the new golf and then, you know, a lot of people came across to cycling and then and the numbers just exploded. Bike parts started to be built, it's not just in Ireland, but around the world. And a bike to works game here, it's like a tax incentive for buying bikes. And it just, we became more health aware. And I think the new phase of that, I'm so happy that it looks like we're gonna be at the forefront of that as well, but these little hacks and tricks that you can implement around longevity. Because, you know, we're starting to see that there's more to life than just success and previous definitions of success. are purely predicated on monetary success, how big is my house and how big is my car. But honestly, one of the biggest failures in life is success with ill fulfillment. Because if you don't succeed in something, if you try and launch a business and it doesn't work, you normally learn a bunch of lessons.
If you succeed in something you launch in the business and it does…
But if you succeed in something you launch in the business and it does work and you're still not happy, that's a dangerous place to be in. So yeah, I'd say that if you don't get fulfillment and you do get success, it's quite an unhappy place to be and it's one of the most unfortunate things in life. So fulfillment, we're gonna break it down in some of the upcoming podcasts, but like without your health, happiness, longevity, there's such core pillars to fulfillment. And then obviously we can get into our subcategories like giving and a sense of communal achievement and helping other people out help and give someone else a leg up but all these things are so powerful. We're happiness and it breaks back down. I've been saying I've been harping on anyone who's been listening to the podcast for months about this that it's cycling and it needs to be a 360 view and the best thing I'd own was stepping away from the sport because it gave me some context and coming back into the sport I can see that it's also interlinked unless we're happy you're not gonna perform even happiness linking into stress hormones and the links between stress hormones and poor sleep and excess body fat and it's also interrelated. So for coaches and coaching companies to just say do these sessions and that's going to make you a better bike rider without looking at other aspects of your life. It's very narrow and short sighted. So I'm happy that we're spearheading that and I honestly am really looking forward to just jumping back into that content because of some super cool stuff coming up. But I'm going to stay focused and I'm going to stay strong on the Vuelta because were over halfway there and I am super excited about tomorrow's stage. Roglich, always the entertainer in the pokes race, press conferences, he said, yeah, the guys were super strong on the climb, no problems for us today, keep the focus. Yeah, I do like him because I'm viewing his comments as somewhat ironic now. I know a lot of the press don't like him. They were in the Basque Country obviously today and as Gilbert remarked, it's the center of world cycling, so it was so special for him. For him he said, every day he goes out training, he thinks about two things, he thinks about the worlds and the classics and that's what get him out the door. He also what was interesting and it's something that comes with experience, I mean at the front the boy graces on big days, he said he'd be very careful about pacing and effort on a climb went extreme atmosphere like that because he can't hear yourself breathing, you can't hear your heart rate. The normal prompts and cues that we get from our body, you can't actually hear them with the wall of noise and sounds. So he said, you really need to make sure you don't go too deep. That was very interesting I thought. He's a very likable guy, he's a very charismatic guy and I'd love the same way in worlds. It was a great stage, it was a very enjoyable stage but it's going to pay in comparison to tomorrow. Tomorrow we're staged, we're at 166km, seven categories climbs and we're finishing up Las Speciale or Horves category for the French out there. Las Magigos, it's epic, it's a wall and it's going to be one of the places that we see GC decided this year. So hopefully Fatherdé, Quintana, Lopez, Poggakar, these guys can mount a entertaining challenge to Roger's stronghold on the race so far. Guys, thank you for listening. I'm also going to pop a link to our training camp in the show notes down below. Do check that out and get signed up because I'm gonna knock that off soon. Like it's not a I'm not trying to bring 50 guys out to Spain. It's gonna be a small training camp and I I think we're gonna do a price bumping up in, it's at 650 at the moment, which is insane value. For six days, it was paying with all your meals, covers, support cars, airport transfers. It's insane value, so we are gonna bump that price, I think, in the next, probably week or so, but I'll keep you posted on that. So if you are thinking about it, get booking now before the price bump. Okay guys, thanks for listening and enjoy your ride you haven't changed yet already this evening and I will be back to you tomorrow, Friday for another one of the classic stages. Ciao, see you later.