David is back. Thought I was going to have to keep carrying this thread all on my own
Why is nobody talking about my team? I’m going to give Yony a run for his money
+1 Drew’s comment
Mike, I agree, the real battle is definitely at the bottom of the ranking!!
We have a bunch of the same riders (Cadel, Quintana, Viviani, Dani Martin!), so it’ll come down to some of the other guys to make the difference.
Also, I’m just using the classics and Giro as training blocks, and will come into form for the Tour. That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking to it.
1.) That was one of my favourite stages in a Grand Tour in a long time
2.) Battaglin is amazing and arguably my best pick
3.) Nick Roche is embarrassing and arguably my worst pick
4.) Hesjedal - I approve of the effort
5.) This GC battle is going to be unreal. Awesome to see Uran have weakness
It’s going to be so tight.
Phil’s team of Uran, Wilco, Quintana, Pozz, and Aru is looking poised for a good performance once GC points are dolled out at the end of this.
Plus, even one of his nobody picks Zoidl had a decent ride today
Additionally, finish time for today’s stage, only four and a half hours.
Time and again it seems we find that mountain stages are way more exciting when the distance is cut down and the riders feel they can actually go for it.
wrong ulissi remains our best pick
IMO Ulissi was an easy and obvious.
Battaglin was a diamond in the 4 pointer rough
amazing
fabio aru turning out to be a hell of a pick for phil, launching him ahead of dennis and I
My team is almost as decimated as OGE.
Getting dropped harder than Svein on the Zoncolan
My precious lead is eroding!
In other news, it looks like Ryder might top 10, which is cool.
Pete, this is not a place to discuss the reality of the giro, this is a place only to discuss fantasy implications of reality
I sure hope I make the time cutoff today
phil pretty much crushing it and despite all the shuffling, i managed to stick to 4th overall
I love watermelon Philippe T 1 4204
Mattel and Mars Bar Chocobots Coach P 2 4198
The Clucking Bells AGallai 3 4002
Team Fructose is Poison p/b GOMAD DavidF 4 3627
Sandwich Isles Militia Dominique 5 3492
Those Italian Podium Girls... Dennis 6 3406
v. good team nnova 7 3302
MasterYaodas AndrewY 8 3058
^^^ Everyone else is here ^^^ Mike 9 2791
Who knows? (I don`t) Yony 10 2618
Pretty in Pink Vincent Paul Lavallee 11 1931Damn you Quintana living up to expectations!
Here’s some visualizations of the race so far. The first figure is the difference in overall points, normalized for total points, across each stage
Here’s the average daily rank of each directeur. Errorbars were constructed using 1 standard deviation from the mean.
This clearly shows that no luck is involved.