Is there such a thing as the course of the Rainbow Jersey
Is there such a thing as the course of the Rainbow Jersey? That's what I'm gonna talk about today. 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 and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Anthony Walsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Roadman, welcome back, Roadman. It's Monday. It's another Roadman Cycling Podcast. I hope everybody got out and about and enjoy your riding over the weekend, wherever you may be. Roadman, it's been a big weekend. We're in an action-packed period of cycling. Let's call us bed to bed every weekend, it's a big weekend at the moment. We've did Euro and of will to run in at the same time at the moment. Well, just about to start tomorrow Tuesday. We're going to have the 0 on the Vuelta overlapping each other for the first time in history. And this weekend, we had the big one. If you're a classics fan, Ron Vomvlanderin, Tour of Flanders. I'm going to get into all that, including poor Alif Leib and the course of the Rainbow Jersey. Before I do, I would ask you to dig deep folks to podcast We're gaining attraction, watermelon to spreading but revenue isn't going the right direction for us. So please keep on heading on over to Patreon. We want to hit that initial break even point and that's the point where we can just braid a little bit of a soil relief and say you know what the podcast it's here for good it's sustainable but until that point please please please and encourage you to head on over to patreon patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore watch by me the price of a point of beer once a month and in return you're going to get access to the secret podcast. And the secret podcast is where I answer all your burning questions. It's an Ask Me Anything podcast where I give away my deepest secrets, where I give away my best tips on how to go faster on the bike. So roadmen, let's get into this. Actually, before I get into the action, there was an interest in musical chairs of bike sponsors going on today. Yumbo Visma, move of boy sponsor, we're kind of used to seeing them on the Bianchi, it's become kind of iconic now with Primo's Roglish, but they're in and they're seven years association with Bianchi and they're moving across to Cervelo, which I'm actually riding myself at the moment. I get a lot of questions on what boy can ride at the moment and yeah, I'm riding a Cervelo or f0iv at the moment, I'm not a sponsor by Cervelo, I bought that boy with my own cash because I love Cervelo or f0iv. So yeah, it's pretty cool to see Yumbo Visme heading across to Cervelo, but as they went across there, that left Sunweb in a bit of a hole, so Sunweb. Now, I don't know what order this happened then, but I would imagine with Team Yumbo Visme being the biggest team in the world at the moment, that Cervelo jumped ship and went across to Yumbo Visme, which left a hole for Sunweb, which were riding Cervelo without sponsor now some web have Scott and then that left me jilton Scott without a sponsor so they now have Bianchi very confused and I know so we're just gonna leave it there but three of the biggest teams have three different boy sponsors and this year or to tell you as I mentioned is on at the moment as well and we have well well made up from quick step a 22 year old it's we talked about this trend over and over the young kids they're just so so good 22 years old We'd pull gotcha up when the Tour de France. Now we potentially have all made it at 22 years old in his forced-ever Grand Tour on the rest day today. He said I don't believe it I actually won't believe it until I start the final TT in that pink skin suit Then I might believe it but until then everything is possible quite down to earth Especially for a lad now who's been 14 days in the Maglia Rosa and he was never even meant to lead the team in the Giro of course the He was totally talented, Evan Paul was meant to lead him, but then he literally, not figuratively, literally went off the side of a cliff earlier on this season and he's recovering I think from a broken pelvis, but I've seen some shots of him back on the indoor trainer, which is awesome for the sport.
Speedy, speedy, get well wishes to Evan Paul
So speedy, speedy, get well wishes to Evan Paul. But yeah, we have Almeida, a new starter to sport, it's born again and we've Wilcox Heldermen at about, who feels like a vet at this stage, I think he's 28 or 29 and he's 15 seconds back and his teammate Jay Hindley's at 2 minutes 56 back. It looks like it's going to be between the illustrator, the only ones in striking distance. Two Sunweb is going to give a real headache to the quick step boys but we are heading into what's been dubbed Shark Week for an Enchinso, Enchinso Nibali, this week erasing that was basically made for Nibali. His nickname of course being the Shark Amesasina. But the brutal hard last week, it might be scuppered because the weather looks atrocious, they're talking about racing up the Stelvio, I've literally seen videos of people skiing on the Stelvio in the last few days. So we'll see how all that works. And of course we have the Vuelta coming up which is starting tomorrow. I'm going to do, I didn't want to do a disservice to the Vuelta and it's a really interesting race but Chris from coming back to the start line. So instead of me giving it a course three once over and two or three bullet points, I actually decided to dedicate a whole show to a Vuelta preview tomorrow. I feel like if you have a preview and it's set up and you know who the main characters are, you're more likely to enjoy the three weeks of racing. Whereas if we don't do that preview show myself and Cleo that I won't do the research to find out who's in form, what teams are going, what rotors are going and you're left then watching the race a little bit like you don't even go into the cinema late and you don't really know what's going on and especially if you've arranged to meet your girlfriend or something at the cinema and then you're trying to kind of whisper to her going what happened and then she's explaining to you what happened but as she's explaining you're missing more stuff I feel like that's a little bit what's happened to me in the jiro this year if I'm hand up I didn't do that full on jiro preview show because it's on the same time as the classics and I unapologetically loved the classics and they held my focus so especially off the back of the Tour de France, it was a little bit grand tour deux didn't do the Jiro preview show and consequently I haven't watched it and enjoyed it as much the stages I have watched like T.O. Gegenhert won yesterday it was a little lost to me as to obviously I know what's going on but you're just not as immersed in it it doesn't matter as much so I am going to do that for the preview show tomorrow so look out for that one folks Ah, the Rainbow Jersey, the course of the Rainbow Jersey, doesn't exist. I don't know, but what I do know is he's had two, the housewives favour us. We've dubbed them here on the podcast. He's had two really unfortunate things before, since winning the Rainbow Jersey. Of course, Amstel, he threw the hands up and then he got pipped on the line by Roglich. And now, Toref Landers. 46k in, 40k in around, the race was getting super, super selective and then it got very, very selective and like it does the cream rolls to the top and we had the two stars of our sport, the three stars of our sport, Wout Van der Poel and Alifeliep coming to the front and the tree man break, cooperating well, putting distance into the rest of the chasers, for the life of me it looked like that one was stuck and it was going to go to the line. some drama coming into the finish because we still had a lot of climbs to negotiate, a lot of steep cobbles and we had this interesting dynamic building which I was super excited about because you know Alaphalee's gone attack because he's not as fast as the other two in the finish. So you know he's gone attack and then with the rivalry we've seen between World of Anert and Vanderpaul, who's going to close him down when he attacks because there was no love loss between these two guys in the press during the week.
Were they going to sink up and shake some straight away and I just…
So were they going to sink up and shake some straight away and I just felt it was set up for such a brilliant finale. But then of course if anyone's seen the highlights or if you haven't know what's or if you don't know what's going on at this stage you had your head under the rock. You hit him out a boy. I'll have to leave him out a boy again. He hit it pretty hard and it was disturbing to watch how fast he hit him. I don't know. It's the culture we're in. We need to apportion blame. Someone wants to apportion blame but I don't think there's any blame to go around anywhere here. So we had Wealt Van Ert on the front, Vanderpaul on his whale and we've a la Fleep in Tord Whale. Vanderpaul, sorry, Wealt Van Ert does what every professional boy crouder and amateur boy crouder around the world has been known for a long time. He roids riding behind the motorbike until the last minute to get every bit of draft that he can. He doesn't flick out, he just doesn't swear if he still navigates around the bike. Now Vanderpaul isn't paying as close as attention and his vision is obscured so he has to pretty much swerve around the parked motorbike and then I think he's flicking on his garment or his Wahoo computer and he's not looking at all. So when Vanderpaul swerves, he doesn't see the swerve coming at all, he rides pretty much whack bang into the back of the motorbike and he's broke his hand in two places, he was writhing in pain, it was a horrible sight to see. Look, Patrick Lefebvre, the outspoken quickstep director Sportif, he's come out and said that he finds that it's a motorbike's fault, he said, Reuters will always look for the shortest route and the motor should have been on the outside, he had no business there, Julian will never get a chance as a world champion again. Now to put that into context the Ron von Blandren or the Ron does they call us the Tour of Flanders, as we refer to it, it's the biggest race in Belgium to win Tour of Flanders. Quick step for the Belgian team and to win the Tour of Flanders there, it's bigger than the World Champion chips, it's bigger than the Tour of France stage win, it's probably bigger than winning the overall in Tour of France. If you want to be considered a great roiter, especially a great classics roiter, you have to win the Tour of Flanders. It's under-blowed it. I think it might even be a national holiday in Belgium. It's huge. So it means a lot to the favor to lose that race. But I don't know if necessarily blaming the poor motorcycle marshal is going to help there. So the motorcycle marshal actually came back out today in Belgium media and gave his side of events. So he said the brake weight built up about a 20 second lead, Shimano neutral service motor bike to take a position behind the brake. we let ourselves drop back the TV motorcycle did that on the left side and we chose the right. Should we have also chosen the other side of the road? Well anyone who says such a thing has never ridden a bike race and that I think leveled our patricle favor. I didn't do anything unusual such things happened 100 times in a race and this is just an unfortunate incident. Afterwards I remember seeing Alafleep had been talking into his microphone and I could no longer avoid him. I feel sorry for Alifleap, his injuries are bad, but also because he had a chance to win the Tour of Flanders and this has hit me really hard. It's affected me very deeply. I feel guilty even though I couldn't have done anything about it. I feel that's fair. I feel that's honest. I don't think he could have done anything about it and I think to blame the motorbike marshall is difficult. What we need to do if we want to see, it's back in the headlines again because we didn't talk about motos in races for a long time and now we've this high profile one with a la fleep and we have vidiviani in the jiro last week getting hit with a motorbike.
If we want to avoid this specifically the a la fleep crash yesterday…
If we want to avoid this specifically the a la fleep crash yesterday you need to outlaw a rider gets instant disqualification if you try and fall into the draft of a motorbike because it's been done on a professional and amateur level riders have taken any advantage they can so if you deviate like in triathlon if someone passes the intrayathlon you have a draft exclusion box you can't move back into their draft we need to to enforce a draft exclusion box around motorcycles if we want to avoid this happening, because it's not a case of this being some crazy freak accident. Motorcycles need to pass the race for safety, for marshals, for TV coverage. And yeah, with the current mindset and rules with Reuters trying to glean any advantage they can, we're gonna see a repeat of this. Hopefully it's infrequent, but when it does happen, it's always pretty gnirly, pretty bad. It was a crazy looking crash. He must have got 10 feet near with his bike. Nuts looking. What we were treated to in the end was a spectacle with probably the two best boy-grudders in the world. Walt Van Ert and Vanderpaul coming head to head, took it to the lion and it took a photo to separate these two. Matthew Vanderpaul is dad role, Sean Kelly back in 1996 and now he is one to Tora Flanders as well. It was a great win and I was happy to say because Woutz had so much success across the season. Also, are we seeing the bird of a crazy rivalry? Like a cancel-air, a boon and a remarks to Flammock? Who knows? I would say to jump to that conclusion and say this is the bird of an amazing rivalry is probably to overlook the world champion, Alifelie, because he was there in that break and both for misfortune. We could be talking about him as the Tour de Flanders. Winner, also Peter Sagan is after Shiro D'Italia. He is one of the best, if not the best, classics rider in the world. So it's difficult to jump to that conclusion, but nonetheless, I hope Alifleap has a speedy recovery and let's hope it's just a couple of mishaps and it's not in fact the course of the Rainbow Jersey. Folks, thank you for listening to another Rellman podcast. A bunch of people messaging in, asking me questions on terror choices coming into the winter. So I've updated and add all those into our Rellman resources, regular listeners to the podcast, we'll know all about that. Rellman resources, it's just the place I go for stuff to do research and I love. stick it in there so you don't have to go and research and go through all the trial and error pain. They're not product endorsements, they're not sponsors but they are all there just sort of congregated in one spot for your convenience. Roadmen I'll be back tomorrow for a Vuelta a España preview. Look after yourselves. Hey everybody it's Anthony again. Really quick I want to invite you to join arguably the best thing I've ever put out inside the roadman community. It's a challenge. It's a challenge called a 14-day Kickstarter challenge. So regardless of where your fitness is at right now, this is going to be the catalyst for making you faster and making you leaner. I've created this challenge to take the guesswork out of everything. It's 14 days of training plans, regardless of what your level is. There's a master's beginner advanced, there's meal plans shopping list and even a video course holding your hand and talking you true at all. So what I recommend you do right now is just stop everything, press pause on this audio and go to roadmancycling.com forward slash 14 day or check out the link in the bio that roadmancycling.com slash 14 day.