Tour of Dubai

[thom]

Taylor Phinney has the fastest time from Steve Cummings at the moment.
The excitement is unbearable but luckily there are loads of pictures of big buildings to calm me down.

 

[rich p]

Taylor Phinney has the fastest time from Steve Cummings at the moment.
The excitement is unbearable but luckily there are loads of pictures of big buildings to calm me down.

And nice fountains!
I spotted a shot of a cyclist just now too

 

[Flying_Monkey]

Dowsett was surprisingly off-form today - I know sprinters always do better than normal in these short tests, but normally you wouldn't have expected Cav to be ahead of him, especially as Cav is by all accounts still carrying a little extra winter weight.

 

[The Couch]

And nice fountains!
I spotted a shot of a cyclist just now too

Saw a piece of it yesterday evening on Eurosport... indeed I don't know what those cameramen were told to do, but you did get the feeling they were just shooting a sightseeing of Dubai and when they noticed there was a bike race going on, they thought that showing some of that might be a great addition to the sightseeing bit

 

[The Couch]

Impressive run by Phinney though, he had quite some margin on everyone.... could the wind perhaps have been in another direction when he did the course?
(Also pretty nice from Lasse Norman Hansen... a new name, but it seems he's really cut out for this)

 

[thom]

Saw a piece of it yesterday evening on Eurosport... indeed I don't know what those cameramen were told to do, but you did get the feeling they were just shooting a sightseeing of Dubai and when they noticed there was a bike race going on, they thought that showing some of that might be a great addition to the sightseeing bit

The commentators eventually apologised for that claiming the tall buildings interfered with the signal transmission.

 

[rich p]

The commentators eventually apologised for that claiming the tall buildings interfered with the signal transmission.

Shouldn't be a problem out of town, when the tallest building is a kerb

 

[The Couch]

Shouldn't be a problem out of town, when the tallest building is a kerb

You mean the 1 stage where they did an effort to go out of Dubai?

 

[raindog]

link here, if anyone's interested
http://www.coolsport.tv/kiwi26.html

 

[Flying_Monkey]

Kittel wins. Cav's lead-out train never really came together and he was not in contention. OPQS have work to do if they want to compete with Kittel and Sagan this season.

 

[The Couch]

Interesting because at the start of the stage, Cav was saying that OPQS have now got the best lead-out train, having invested heavily.

They might have (who am I to argue)... but the fact remains that the "trains" of Lotto-Belisol and Shimano have been together for a couple of years now and have way more experience together. Adjusting to each other will take time (and might take more than a season even)

 

[Crackle]

OPQS seemed to disintegrate at the end which is what was happening last year. Still early I guess.

 

[thom]

Yeah - work to do for OPQS but still something of a phoney war. I mean, we haven't yet started the mighty Tour of Oman yet have we...?

 

[raindog]

Fantastic win for Kittel from nowhere! What a rider.

 

[thom]

Quite a bumpy stage in the last 15 km, enough to make it interesting.
The local team's breakaway caught on the penultimate hump, Valverde, Tony Martin, Rui Costa all had attacks.
Sagan was up there at the end, as was Steve Cummings and Taylor Phinney as a group of around 30 came to the line.
All eyes on Sagan when out from nowhere popped Kittel to take the win. So actually an entertaining finale.