Roadman, it's the final day in the Alps for this year's Tour de France, it's stage 18. Let's give it a 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, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh, and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Robemen, welcome back to the Robeman podcast. It is stage number 18 of the Tour de France 2020 and it's our final day in the Alps and it was definitely a test and day for the boys of the peloton. Stage 18, just let that sink in for a second, 18, like 18 days ago and include rest days. So we've had two rest days, 20 days ago, we're doing 20 days ago. It's a long time and these These boys have just been riding their bikes around France. They are in every sense of the world, it's one of the most impressive physical displays that we see every year. The contravalence circus around France. I absolutely love it. Today, in Eos, they banish the demons of Bernal, pack in the Tour de France and they put on a lovely display. And honestly, one of the best finishes I've seen to a race in a long time. It was a goosebumps moment with Carapaz and Kiekovsky coming across the road, arm in arm, hand in hand with time to celebrate down the finishing straight. It was class TV. Before I jump in and unpack all the goings on in the Tour de France, let me remind you to head on over to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore Walsh. Patreon is the way that you can pay me for this podcast. It's the way that you ensure this podcast has a future. It's a way to support small creators instead of pumping money into GCN, Amazon, Netflix for small creators to have a voice. And it reminds me of during the COVID lockdown, I bought a lot of vouchers for local restaurants. Because if you don't support small industry, it's going to disappear. Starbucks wasn't going to disappear, but my local coffee shop, there was a chance it was going to disappear. It's the same with all small podcasts. There's a chance they disappear and the way we ensure they don't, it's true mechanisms like Patreon. So thank you to everyone who has subscribed on Patreon so far, it makes such a difference and it means I get to bring you this stage 18 podcast. So if you take one second and head over there now, you can blame me to proggs with beer once a month and it keeps this show on the road. Today's stage, if you wanted to know how hard today's stage was, you just had to look at Pierre Rowland, French Reuter, crossing the loin. As we say in Ireland, the absolute hack of him. He was on sideways. He looked like he'd slept rough for a week. The lad looked absolutely broken. Today's stage started off with, as we've become accustomed, the intermediates print hotly contested because we have this Saigon, Benus, I don't know how could we We choke Trentain into the mix. Again, familiar enough, Benetuk the stage. If you took the stage, we wish. I don't think he will ever be here in the words Alpointe stage and Benetuk it in the same sense. It's Benetuk the intermediate sprint and he's extended his lead to 52 points. Tomorrow, it's fucking all in tomorrow for Sam. Stage 19, I identified this a long, long time ago. And stage 19 is a pivotal one. It's a sprinter stage. Sam needs to avoid catastrophe. You need to be within one or two places to Sagin. If he extends his lead tomorrow, it don't endost it. Sam, we're all rooting for you. We're all rooting for you. It's nice to see Sagin. He's one of seven times. I do like Sagin. I think he's been great for his sport. He's almost transcended the sport. Even if you're to look on Sagin's Instagram, you get a flavor to just how big the guy is. He's 1.7 million Instagram followers, brand deals all over the place, one of the highest the highest paid athlete in cycling. He's a huge name and he's not going away because he comes second in the Tour de France sprints contest. He will be here for a long time to come, one of our great ambassadors for the sport. But come on Bennett in my completely biased fashion. Last year I loved watching as almost as much as the stage after the stage on Euro sport.
So Carapaz has inherited the lead in that at the moment. I had a couple of questions in about the climbing style of Carapaz and when it's suitable to to get in the saddle versus out of the saddle. Because you'll notice the carapace is a roider who doesn't like to sit in the saddle very much. And I think the basic, there's a couple of reasons why you would shift in and out of the saddle. One, your ass gets a little bit sore on the saddle. It's reason one. So it's nice to get out and give yourself a break. You're engaging different muscles. If you think about the muscles you need while seated versus the muscles you need while standing, they're different muscles. So it can be good to give one muscle group a break and shift the load when you're out to saddle onto more quadriceps, stuff like that. It gives your back a break, your neck muscles a break, but it's also possible to get more torque down on the bike. So if you're going up in a specially steep section, it's useful. So that's why we see sprinters sprinting out of the saddle because it maximizes torque. Likewise on steep sections of climbs, we see people getting out of the saddle because it maximizes torque. Back in the main palaton which I know you're all eager to hear because that's where the real drama is in almost every stage, it's the GC battle and we had a little bit of a GC, yeah there wasn't much, a bit of a storm and a key teacup to hype GC stuff, we had Mica Landa sticking the team on the front of the race, we were praising Landa yesterday for trying something with his team, it didn't pay off and he got himself dropped but he He tried it again and today a slight change of tactics he stuck two men in the breakaway. And it's a really good idea on these hard outpoint stages, especially into the toward weak to put Reuters into the breakaway. The theory behind this is if you're in the bunch, you're Reuters and someone like Yumbovisma sets a temple, your domestics are getting dropped so they are zero use to you. But if you put them ahead of the race, Yumbovisma are set in a temple, they're born out their own Reuters, your Reuters have a head start on the climb, so they're coming back. So, land that attack, but Walt Pels and he had two Reuters up the road that he could pick up to try and extend that gap. Unfortunately for him, it didn't extend because we've seen Wout van Art, who we've talked about so much during this climb, or during this Tour de France, we had him climbing again and climbing. Like, every day I talk about Wout, but I should call it the Woucho. He dropped Adam Yates and he dropped Rigoberto Iran with the pace he set, which was unbelievable. We had the controversial inclusion on the top of the last climb today, called the Madeline with the controversial inclusion of a gravel road. It was the basis because it's just like the fairness of it. You stick it into the last Alpoint stage. Someone has had a great ride, they've prepared all season, show it difficult COVID lockdown. They've got through two and a half weeks at a tour de France avoiding crashes, minding themselves, climbing well, descending well. Then you're sticking a gravel road. It's highly likely someone's going to puncture. So it's like what do we get out of this? It looked kind of cool on TV, but Richie Porte did puncture and I think for anyone who's a fan of fairness you were glad to see Richie Porte getting back in. And it's just a dangerous on the gravel. It's easy if you've ever ridden gravel, especially on a road bike, it's loose and it's easy to slide out going around the corner. And that's why we see in Roglage taking her up and actually riding away from the entire group on the gravel road. Like a group that included only really big hit her GC guys like Einrich Mass, Landa, Lopez, the Podgecar and of course, Sepp Coos. But we see in Roglage taking her up on the gravel just to stay safe because the chances of crash are huge. And unfortunately Richie Port punctured and he did have to bust his balls to chase to get back in. Richie Port was kind of lucky that the group he got dropped with, the group he dropped out of on the road, he was picked up by a group from, that included Walt, Walt, Walt, Walt of Art and included Tom Dumelan.