Giro Rosa 2020 (May contain spoilers)

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mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
Highlights 6pm to 7 pm on Rai Sport tonight. An ideal show for before the TdF highlights.

edit: encoded :cursing: but "pmg sports" on youtube has 5 and 55min highlights, plus I suspect the UCI channel will have highlights a couple of days late again like last year
 
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andrew_s

Legendary Member
Location
Gloucester
The expected result for stage 2 - Annemiek smashed it on the steep gravel climb 10 k from the end, then time trialled to a minute and a quarter lead on the run in (despite the involuntary dismount on the gravel).
The gravel climb looked harder than anything on Strade Bianchi - a smaller road with more loose gravel, and old cobbles showing through in places.

Why are Parkhotel not there?
Apparently their plan was to ride the Boels Ladies Tour, then a series of 1-day races that overlapped with the Giro. I dare say that Giro entries had closed by the time the Boels Tour got cancelled.
 

mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
Big time gaps. Is it all settled?
 

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SWSteve

Guru
Location
Bristol...ish
Been following at a distance, but hoping there will be a full-recap in TCPF, maybe get Lizzie Banks to do a piece about her progress, especially when she’s doing very well.

In other news AVV off to hospital with a wrist injury
 
Ouch I know that pain, twice it’s not good and can break the elbow joint at the same time without realising
 
OP
OP
Dogtrousers

Dogtrousers

Kilometre nibbler
Just caught up on this after the excitement in France yesterday. Another uphill finish for the last stage. Anna Van der Breggen won the overall GC from Kasia Niewieadoma. Battle for third went right to the line, Elisa Longoborghini eventually third 2 seconds up on Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig.

Lizzie Banks took a stage. Hannah Barnes a second. Lizzie Diegnan was working for Longoborghini.
 

mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
There's probably only one women's race each year that I make a real point of following, and that's the Giro Rosa. So why has it been downgraded (something to do with TV?) and what are the implications?
Yes, it seems to be mainly that patience has run out with the crap TV coverage. It should have been fixed for the 2019 edition to have remained in the World Tour calendar. There were accusations that it got special treatment as the nearest thing to a Grand Tour for women.

Frustration was expressed during the race with it being nicknamed "The Invisible Race" in articles like https://cyclingtips.com/2020/09/the-giro-rosa-the-nearly-invisible-race/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/giro-rosa-behind-closed-doors-with-no-live-tv/ar-BB18WGlQ suggests that there was expected to be some live coverage pretty much right up until this year's race started. I wonder if UCI allowed them to get away with 20 minutes instead of the required 45 due to the health crisis and calendar clashes, but the organisers EASD still bait-and-switched them at the last minute.

As I understand it, the main implications are that the World Tour teams won't be obliged to enter, the UCI won't be publishing highlights and no World Tour Championship points will be awarded.

The stage races on next year's World Tour calendar are Tour of Chongming Island (3 days), Itzulia (3), Vuelta a Burgos (4), Tour of Britain (6), Tour of Norway (4), Boels Tour (6) and Ceratizit Madrid Challenge (3). Amongst other changes, the RideLondon Classique returns after being downgraded for 2020 (and then cancelled anyway) but with a date of 30 May instead of its usual late July which is expected to clash with the Tokyo Olympics - the first such move, as the Rio Olympics started on 5 August so did not clash.

My absence from this thread was mainly because I was watching the pathetic 3-5 minute highlights shows published on youtube by PMG in the evening (PMG) and UCI the following morning (with interviews in English not in the PMG one), so by the time I've seen both, the next stage has started and I won't open a spoilers thread. The RAI Sport 50-minutes highlights show was encrypted the time I tried, which is usually done to restrict coverage to Italy (where they can get decoder cards) but I don't understand why they would do that when it didn't seem to have been sold for any other country. Also, I didn't really want to watch 2 hours cycling each night this month, so I would have been choosing between the Giro and Tour anyway, depending on which seemed likely to be most exciting. It all adds up to less "buzz" about the race and the Women's World Tour.

I wonder if this is the Women's version of the ASO-UCI conflict during the creation of the Men's World Tour, where one race organiser thinks they're bigger than the rules, playing out with less money?
 

mjr

Comfy armchair to one person & a plank to the next
[...] just over the border is a ready made women's tour with classic mountains (OK, not this year) and scenic routes. But no one seems interested in it and coverage is woeful. It seems to be a case of Tour de France or nothing.
I feel it's more that viewers and broadcasters are interested (GCN definitely said they were interested in buying more but no one would sell) but the organisers and host broadcaster (EASD and PMG?) are either not interested or incompetent at offering packages the broadcasters will sign contracts for without leaving them making a loss on production.

So the broadcasters talk up a Tour de France because they think ASO could make a saleable job of it, if they choose to.

Are RCS involved at all with EASD? After all, reportedly itv 4 doesn't have the Giro because RCS wanted more for Giro just highlights than ASO got for the package of live+highlights Tour plus highlights Dauphiné, Paris Nice, LBL and Roubaix back then (ASO using the Tour to secure coverage of some of its other races, basically - that's why itv used to show the one day race highlights late evening long after the race).
 
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