Welcome, roadmen, it's stage 12 at the Tour de France and Tour Time…
Welcome, roadmen, it's stage 12 at the Tour de France and Tour Time is a charm for SON Webb's Marc Hershey. Let's cue that intro. The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness and our longevity? That is the question on this podcast, give you the answers. My name is Anthony Welch and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Welcome Roadman, it's stage 12 of this hortifrence. You're very welcome back. We went today from Chavanet to Saron and it was a lumpy-ish stage, a bit too lumpy for the super fastman, But today's stage was dominated by an unapologetically say I cheered this man home, Mark Hershey from Sunweb. He's had a heartbreak on a couple of occasions. Called the EC was the first stage and he was when he sprung onto my attention. I had no idea who the young lad was and then we had that dramatic 90k solo break where he was caught by the GC contenders last week. And now finally, third time lucky, he's only gone and rolled a big one. He's won a stage of the Tour de France. Before I jump in and unpack this stage because there's loads of controversy again today. It seems like every stage of the Tour de France is just bringing us crazy controversy. But before I do that, just a reminder to head on over to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore Walsh. Patreon is how we fund this podcast. Patreon is what let's go forward. It's what pays for all the costs associated with editing, hosting, distribution, everything it goes along with it. My goal is to get this podcast that break even as soon as possible and your generous donations fund the podcast. So I really do appreciate them. So if you're getting value out of it, you're learning something, you're getting a little bit of entertainment or encourage you to head on over there, you can buy me a beer, you can buy me a coffee, and you can say, you know what, Anthony, I'm getting a little bit of value from these nuggets of information that you're dropping on me daily. My goal is just to help you guys understand the tour and what's going on a little better and to aggregate a lot of news that's happening like one of the stories today now it's Wiggins this is the culture we're living in isn't it where it's lazy cheap journalism and headline readers and I'm not gonna know you know what it's podcast land I will name them you know Sticky Butler ran it to 42 ran it a bunch of other publications here in Ireland, ran a lazy headline about Wiggins claiming that Bennett was Irish, with literally no context. If they had taken a second, went to Bradley Wiggins Instagram or watched a full clip they would have seen that it was clearly a joke. It was clearly Wiggins, Wainte and Sean Kelly, our very close friends. It was clearly a joke between the two of them. There was a reference on his Instagram to just, it was a heavy way, boxing champion, claiming that Katie Taylor was English a couple of weeks ago on Katie Taylor's title for it and there was just generally a bit of banter around it and how English people always claim ownership of Irish people and the two lads were banter and lazy journalism ran with it, parceled it into a story when it was never a story, and gave it airtime and gave it oxygen. And you know what, that's the last oxygen I'm going to give it, because Wiggins is a good lad, Bennett's a good lad, everyone knows Bennett's Irish. Where's Shamrock on his helmet? We all know he's Irish, let's move on to a good story. The fallout from the Sagan Woutfernart sprint. There's an angle of this sprint, post the sprint, and if there was any doubt that there's a love loss between Woutfanaart and Peter Sagann. It can clearly be saying Woutfanaart given Sagann the finger. So it's clear that these two aren't buddies. It's clear that there's a little bit of animosity there. And you know what, they don't have to be buddies, but at the end of the day, I think Sagann, I think he has to accept.
Seems like he has accepted it because there's not a mechanism for for…
It seems like he has accepted it because there's not a mechanism for for a pale on this stuff beyond what's already played out, but we're in a new era. And if I started watching cycling in the 90s and you're looking at guys like Chippalini, like Jamolodine, Abdu, Jaffra, and these guys, they were aggressive sprinters and there was a lot of cotton, Robbie McEwan, there was a lot of contact with these guys. And that's sort of all of my generation one of watching sprinting. Calvin is just my second generation of sprinting. The contact in the fourth generation is sprinted. It was tolerated and maybe even encouraged. Second generation calvinishes. It's rolled a dice. If you make contact, you risk punishment. We're in the new era now. We're in the post-Yacobson era where tragically we had that horrible crash with Dylan Grown-A-Wagan and Jakobson, which if you haven't seen it or heard about it, it resulted in Jakobson having some pretty horrific injuries. He lost all his teeth apart from one. a horrific amount of stitches in his head, his paralloyed vocal cords, a very severe concussion and the kids still recovering from it. And like I hope speedy recovery to Jakobson on the off chance that he's listening to the podcast. So with that in mind, there's no contact is going to be tolerated in sprints from now on. Now I don't believe that the Dylan Groenewig and Crash did contact or the deviation from the line was as dangerous as the saga and Wilt Van Eart, The consequences are worse, but we need to move away from something where we're punishing based on consequences and move to punishing based on conduct. And Saigon's conduct was worse than Grunewegen's conduct, so I'm happy that he got relegated to last place in the bunch. Well, work fun on Earth came out and he said, you know, sprinting is dangerous enough without that. And can you imagine you're sprinting at 65k an hour against the barriers, holding your lion completely straight and then some lap allows into you from behind. You're not expecting it and Woutfaneart don't great to hold it open. Probably the best boy can during the world and if it wasn't Woutfaneart being touched like that maybe we're looking at another ground away and Jakobson Krasch again. Who knows? The Green Jersey tactics played out very interesting today. If anyone got a chance to watch early on the stage, I didn't get a chance to to watch the entire stage today. I like, it was the longest stage of the race, so who does. But I got to watch when the break was getting formed to start and then I watched the last 90 minutes or so. The break formation of the start is always interesting to watch. Well, they averaged 51.4 kilometers an hour for the forest aeroplane racing today. If you're in an amateur recreational rider, you're not double to speed, you're right around that. Like wrap your head around that for a second, you're running around like a decent training spin, you could average 25k an hour. They're double that, they're average and crazy stuff. But the Green Jersey Intermediate Sprint, it shows you how close this is. Because Bennus not only contested the Intermediate Sprint, but he had his lead out man, Markov, who's fast in his own right. He had to be fast to be a lead out man. He had Markov contest the Intermediate Sprint. So both them took points from Saigon in the Intermediate, but not only that, he had a teammate, Casper Asgrin, up the road just ahead of the Intermediate Sprint. So he took points, so three quick step-roaters scored before Saigon scored. Genius stuff from Patrick LeFavor. But it just shows you how doggy doggy doggy because the energy they're willing to consume and the energy they're willing to expand to get a couple of points for the Green Jersey. And again, that was showcased in the end with Saigon. He sprinted for 12th in the bunch sprint to get two points. Crazy stuff. We're going to go right down through war in the screen in Jersey battle. Today's breakaway, it was a big one and we had Alephaleep Bennett-Sallar, Schachman-Roland Roach, Harada.
We had Mark Hershey, we had Soren Kray Anderson
We had Mark Hershey, we had Soren Kray Anderson. A bunch of guys not cooperating well. Mark Hershey's talk advantage of this and we had a lesson for anyone listening to the podcast who is wondering about tactics and what you can learn. I always say you need to be watching what the guys are doing, not what the commentators are saying. If you get a chance to go back and watch the last 10-15 kilometres of the race, watch the Sun Web riders behind and look at the role of teammates. You have Hershey up the road, maybe you have two teammates behind Soren Anderson and Nicholas Roach behind. So they're doing two things. Number one, they're an anchor on any attacks that are getting out. So you see Roland is attacking, Alifelip is attacking. They're not attacking whether some web rider in the wheel. And what that does, it mentally just destroys the person attacking it, ruins their momentum because you have Hershey up front fully committed. And now you have an Alifelip chasing but with Nicholas Roach as an anchor. So when you have that anchor, you're not committing as fully because you know if you get to the lion, the other guy is going to be fresh and he's going to pop you. it destroys you and undermines the entire attack. So that's the role of a teammate as an anchor. The second role of the teammate you'll see in this is the role to disrupt. The chase was a little bit disjointed but at times they got organized and they got what be familiar to any club cyclist. The two pace lines gone. One pace line on up on the left and coming back on the right. But you'll see the Sunweb guys roll up in the line and they get to the front and there's no urgency. They just roll through on the front. They don't push the brakes and brake check people behind. That's dangerous and it's bad etiquette. But they just slowly amble through or don't amble through at all and make the guy in the wheel behind them come around them to start it again and it just wrecks the momentum of everything. Now you'll only get away with that a couple of times and you might get a bottle whacked off your head. But if you do it subtly enough times, they were doing it on the scents and rolling through on corners And when Hershey's out from railing corners, Roach is coming behind and he's taking the corner very, very gingerly. It was brilliant to watch and a lot of the credit for Hershey's win today goes to Sarnanderson and Nicholas Roach. Congrats boys, it was a great team effort and it was brilliant to see and a fine example to anyone watching from club cyclists all the way up to elite racers on how you can... It doesn't always have to be the strongest rider, Union, Yulia and Alephaly probably the strongest rider in the group, but the collective can be the individual when it's well oiled and somewhere by the way, they lose some of their biggest stars, they lose Tom Dumeland, they lose Bling Matches and they pull out a team performance with Solidarity like that today, it was absolutely commendable. Another thing to watch in the stages is watch the domestiques because each of them will have assigned a job and often when that job is complete you'll watch them and they'll just sit up out of the bunch and they'll roll in. That's not because they can't keep up with the bunch anymore, but their job is done for the day, and I've seen this sort of 10-15 kilometers ago. It was interesting to watch as well. But today was dominated by Marc Hershey. I was absolutely delighted for the lad. He was a guy who just popped into my consciousness on the call the Eze. I thought it was Nicholas Roch going but Alaphaleep's attack on stage 1. But it was Marc Hershey. And since then he's been a roiter that you can't get away from in this Tour de France. He was the under 23 world champion two years ago. He is still 22 years old. Think about that for a second.
What were you doing when you were 22 years old
Like what were you doing when you were 22 years old? I was in UCD. I was commuting out by bike playing a bit of football on the side. I hadn't even started cycling at 22 years old. This lad is winning stages at Tour de France. It's insane. He's only a professional cyclist for the last 18 months. Like his Royce has been meteoric and we're going to see a lot more of them and it was great to see Switzerland's country with a proud cycling history and Fabian Cancellara won the greatest of all time. Spartacus was 2012 the last time Cancellara won a stage in sort of France and that was the last Swiss winner. So I'm delighted to see her she put the heartbreaker appearing in these and they called it easy behind them and he pulled off this great win today. We had a man coming in second today Pierre Roland if anyone is a cycling history fan you'll know Pierre Roland is a French man and he's won on Alp DeWez and there's not many of them. So that was a great to see Pierre Roland back at the point the end of a race. And then just to show that teamwork makes the dream work, we'd saw an Anderson coming in toward play. So first and second, first and toward for Sunweb in today's stage. Massive stuff lads, amazing. Tomorrow, tomorrow we are on like, you need to be planning your day around that. Oh, my Google calendar out and I'm arranging meetings around tomorrow's stage. It's one at all stages where you need to catch this. We're staged toward Dan. It's in the massive central. It's 191.5 kilometers. It's from Chateau, Guwan, to Poix. I'm working on a somewhat finish on Poix-Mourey. There is two first category climbs. There's two second category climbs, and there's three toward category climbs. Tomorrow, my prediction is the GC explodes. On the podcast, we'll tell you our Hamilton do-to-day. my podium I called. I have that great sound that I love it. It's strong opinions hell loosely. I've changed from Roglich to Bernal. As I don't want Bernal to win, I prefer to see Roglich win. I was anyone here to story about Roglich. It's been doing the round, so you might have heard of it, but for those who haven't, Roglich, when he was getting started, he rang the local professional team and he's like, hey, I'm coming from ski jump and I want to make it as a professional cyclist. Can I join your team the local country team? They're like no you're too old and Teams full the only way you can join is if you cover all your costs cost your bike cost all your kit and your travel and he's like Okay, and what's that? It's five thousand euro and he's like, okay. I'll call you back He goes off and he gets a job in a local supermarket packing bags and stacking shelves until he saves the five thousand Then he calls them back and says hey, I've got the five thousand still you still have to spot. I want to take it That's the attitude and the mentality that you need for winning. And I see it time and time again with clients who have achieved massive things in business. It's fine in solutions and not problems. Fine in solutions and not problems is a common thread among winners in every aspect of life, not just sport. Great, great, great story and a great, great will to win. And I think that's why I'm up for Roglage. But I still think Bernal is going to win tomorrow's stage. He's my bet for tomorrow. bed for tomorrow and I'm predicting big big gaps in the GC tomorrow. You're gonna take today's GC and you're gonna turn it up upside down and that's tomorrow's GC. I had a team manager and that was a famous sign it is. Don't miss tomorrow it's gonna be epic and you know what you know what I'm gonna be back again tomorrow to unpack all the drama. Rolment thanks for listening and ride safe out there.