Contador Archives - Irish Peloton

May 27, 2017

Closest Grand Tour Ever

Two stages to go of the 2017 Giro d’Italia and Nairo Quintana, Tom Dumoulin and Vincenzo Nibali are separated by just 43 seconds. But not only that, look down the general classification a bit further and there is also a mere 90 seconds separating Quintana and Domenico Pozzovivo back in sixth place, with Thibault Pinot and Ilnur Zakarin in between in fourth and fifth. This is remarkably close after over 85 hours of racing.

Is this the closest Grand Tour of all time?

Well, of the last 30 years, it certainly is. Any further back than that and data is hard to come by. You’re in the realm of trawling through newspaper archives for each edition of each race. And given the short window that this stat is in anyway relevant – if anyone else feels like doing that to themselves, go for it. You’ve got a few hours left before the G.C. in this Giro looks completely different.

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February 17, 2017

Froome’s Emergence from the Shadows

Chris Froome used to be bad at cycling. He joined the Barloworld team in 2008 and from then until the 2011 Vuelta he managed only one victory, in the Giro del Capo in South Africa.

‘Bad’ is all relative of course. He was good enough to be a professional cyclist and he was also good enough to be signed by Team Sky. But the story goes that before that 2011 Vuelta the team were done with him. They wouldn’t be renewing his contract because he wasn’t worth paying anymore.

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June 22, 2016

The Tour Preparation Puzzle

Nobody knows. You don’t know. I don’t know. Christian Prudhomme doesn’t know. Chris Froome doesn’t know. Even David Brailsford doesn’t know.

Nobody knows who is going to win the 2016 Tour de France.

My day job is in sports betting. Even if you have solid mathematical models taking all of the previous 102 editions of the Tour into account you’d still be nowhere near knowing who will win. If you had the results of every cycling race ever, the performance data from every training ride of every rider, analytics on tactical performances of every team and the biological passport data from every rider in the race, you still wouldn’t know.

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July 30, 2015

Top Five in the Tour de France

Much was made before this year’s Tour de France of the salivating showdown we had in prospect between the ‘Fab Four’ of Vincenzo Nibali, Chris Froome, Alberto Contador and Nairo Quintana. The four are all Grand Tour winners and had never all competed in a race together until this past July. We weren’t really treated to a four-way showdown due to Contador and Nibali struggling in the opening couple of weeks and it looked like Froome had the race sewn up after the first summit finish until Quintana finally made a race of it in the final Alpine stages.

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October 7, 2014

The Million Dollar Nonsense

“If Quintana, Froome, Nibali and Contador all agree to ride all three Grand Tours, I’ll get Tinkoff Bank to put up €1 million. They can have €250,000 each as an extra incentive. I think it’s a good idea”

The words of Oleg Tinkov speaking recently to Cycling News as he once more offers to throw money at the sport of cycling for his own amusement.

Trying to win all three Grand Tours in the same year is seemingly impossible, but Tinkov seems to think that every rider has their price. With that notion, he might be right, €250,000 is a lot of money. Perhaps not worth as much to these multi-million euro contracted riders than to you or I, but a lot of money nonetheless.

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November 1, 2012

Roche, the UCI and the media scrum

It’s been almost three weeks since USADA released their reasoned decision in their case against Lance Armstrong which included an avalanche of evidence into the doping practices on the Texan’s various teams. With the lack of top level racing in the days since then, it’s unsurprising that much of the cycling news emerging has included the reactions of people within the sport, not least the cyclists themselves.

It is a quirk of the entire Armstrong case that many of the main characters are Irish. Consequently, the mainstream Irish media can seek comment from several of their own when a big story breaks – the unrelenting journalists David Walsh and Paul Kimmage, the president of the UCI Pat McQuaid, the whistleblower Emma O’Reilly, the prominent cycling journalist Shane Stokes. All of whom have appeared on Irish TV or radio over the past number of weeks.

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