Today had to be the worst case of group 2 syndrome ever. I refuse to believe that those guys couldn’t take back time on Pog cramping and alone on the flat. Carapaz catching back up shows you how little effort they were putting in. Fair play to Pog for taking the opportunity but it’s maddening to see it essentially gifted to him by a bunch of guys content to podium/top 10.
Yeah.
Yesterday, on Paris-Tours, the case showed a few similarities but was a bit different, in that the favourites did not appear to have understood that it was a race for tough guys, which means said tough guys must at some point take the matter in their own hands (as in a spring Belgian race) and not wait for their drained and unique surviving domestique to do the job in their place.