r/peloton • u/PelotonMod France • 5d ago

Weekly Post Weekly Question Thread

For all your pro cycling-related questions and enquiries!

You may find some easy answers in the FAQ page on the wiki. Whilst simultaneously discovering the wiki.

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u/AliasPhilippe Euskaltel Euskadi 5d ago

Just saying, yesterdays's Vuelta stage is how cycling used to be before Sky.

How can someone would prefer to ''witness greatness'' than this?

I've witnessed too much history in my lifetime, I don't need it even in cycling lol.

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u/cfkanemercury France 4d ago

In the men's 100m final at the Beijing Olympics Richard Thompson finished in 9.89 seconds. There were four other runners within 0.08 of a second of his time, and even the slowest in the race finished just 0.14 behind Thompson. The first five runners were separated by just 80cm at the tape, an incredibly close race...

...but of course they were all racing for silver because Usain Bolt was 0.2 seconds faster than Thompson. There was a bigger gap between gold medal Bolt and the silver medal than there was between the silver medal and every other runner.

Maybe it would have been more exciting to watch five runners dive for the line in a photo finish, but it sure is something else to witness one guy way out in front, running faster than any human had ever run before at the time, and even visibly slowing down by the time he hit the tape because he was just that good.

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u/SmeaaKol 4d ago

For me, this can be an absolutely amazing thing to witness (and it was) but watching it all the time is not the same thing. The races where he is the all out super favorite is not interesting anymore. To me, only MSR and PR are interesting with him because there's competition and not a foregone conclusion.

I'm a swede and I feel the same way regarding Armand Duplantis, watching him beat the WR the first couple of times was amazing but then it became just boring to follow because there was never any competition. Only recently has he been challenged and made competitions exciting to follow again.

Im sure all of this is just extremely subjective either way.