TdF Stage 2

I am feeling a little smug as
I am feeling a little smug as i picked Velits as my highroad guy . . . whoopy doo

Wig_Billy wrote:
As long as

Wig_Billy wrote:

As long as the dropped riders finish within the time limit they DO get points for the final position of the team.

You’re right, I’m completely mis-remembering what happened in the Giro TTT.

Apparently Frank Schleck swallowed a bee, having once done this with a wasp I also retract my previous statement about him. Chapeau to him to stick on the back of a fast train after that.

Still Bernie Eisel didn’t really deserve any points did he…

Going off the letour website
Going off the letour website it seems Dave Zabriskie dropped one second on Hushovd so the top 3 should have read: (1) 5 Garmin Riders. (2) Dave Zabrisike @ 1 sec. (3) 7 BMC riders @ 4sec.

Julian Dean would be another good example, broke himself over the first 8 km or so for the good of the team, without that effort he could most likely of stayed with them when they finished in 4th place. Compare and contrast to a plausible scenario for tomorrow: Bernie Eisel, anxious to make amends after spending the night being chased by Cav with a fondue fork, does his normal sterling effort hammering along at the front of the peloton and pulling off in the last few km to finish a couple of minutes down. The HTC train does its work well and Cav wins. Eisel gets 5 points for Cav’s win.

I don’t actually have any of the mentioned riders, I just think it’s an interesting point worthy of disscusion.

I’m not convinced that it’s
I’m not convinced that it’s right not to award points to riders who are dropped in every case. For example Garmin used a couple of riders to drive on the pace really hard early on then having them drop off after 10 km where the fresher riders could take over, moreover, what about Zabriskie who died at the end with less than 100 m left. I don’t know what time he got but I’d guess it was quicker than the Omega-Pharma team time. Obviously this was part of their strategy and without killing these riders they would probably have had a slower time overall.

OTOH Eisel clearly did nothing for HTC and by binning it most likely cost them the win, it’s almost a certainty that someone as strong as him would have saved them 6 seconds over 25 km.

Then what about Spartacus? He came bloody close to winning a TTT by himself. For sure he should get all Frank Schleck’s points as Schleck did the square root of f all.

Ok so that last paragraph was a bit tongue in cheek but it’s definitely true that some teams owe their finish position to riders who weren’t in the first group over the line.

I had it as Thor
I had it as Thor