General Race Thread 2026 **spoilers**

That's mental.

Kelly says this about most races now. There used to be a slow ramping up but not its full gas from the off. I’ve seen others mention that changes in TV coverage have contributed (ie the first few hours of a race weren’t broadcast so there was no point in the peleton doing anything but now they’re live from the flag drop)

I loved Sagan. He was in a class of his own at the time really - would have been perfectly suited to the modern peloton. I can remember he was more or less the only guy trying to race the way a lot of the power dogs do now and the rest of the peloton used just try everything to mark/ neutralise him. I'm no master race strategist, but since Pog and Wout and MVdP have come on the scene it seems the rest of the peloton has adapted and its the standard thing now to see teams driving it from way out for their all-round diesel leader. Sagan was just never given enough freedom and didn't have the power/ belief to take on the whole peloton. Never really had a team built around him the way the modern teams are.

Often fantasise about how he'd have raced the likes of Pog, Wout and MVdP - he may not have had the beating of them but he loved having a go.

Sagan is the same age as Sam Bennett, more or less.

It's a funny coincidence of timelines - kind of a distortion of perception… cycling really has gone through some quite noticable shifts since the relatively recent days of Nibali, Bertie, Sagan, Boonen, Spartacus and even our own Nico and Dan Martin. The Covid years kind of warped my sense of the passage of time, but when you look at someone like Bernal and think he's yesterday's man you get a sense of how quickly things shifted. Some, like Wout and MVdP just about arrived at the right time and others like Sagan just peaked a few years too early. I think he'd still be racing hard if he was in the same graduation class of say MVdP. Just the wrong side of the sliding doors moments around that time.

Edit: it probably speaks to just how tough a sport cycling is that you're either on it 100% or you're out the back door. Little room for coasting along, especially now with the new breed snapping at your heels to get into the big races.

And just to tie that into the "HOW old / long ago?" theme - currently third on the road in the women's edition is Servais Knaven's daughter Britt. His PR win was a quarter of a century ago.

Good bit of talk again on the web from other riders, not necessarily complaining or giving out per se, but pointing out that the crowd of motos around and in front of Pog and the bigger names is contributing to a not-insignificant extent to their speed and progress and catching back on groups etc. Paris-Roubaix and Milan San Remo specifically.

On that theme, I remember first coming across MvdP and wondering "Is that Adri's young lad?"
Re Sagan, he did have heart surgery before the olympics, so that may have been something brewing which impacted his performance in the years leading up to it. Covid afters? Who knows, but it's a shame he couldn't have eked a few more years out as he was a massive talent and probably the most entertaining rider in the peloton in the Sly Train snoozefest years.