Must… resist… name jokes…

Burgodos!

On Wednesday, the Giro del Veneto is 167 km long, for a total of 1550 m of D+

UAE locked the race pretty harshly: 40 km from the line, there was no breakaway. Only Pietrobon (🇮🇹 Polti) tried something but, alone, he wouldn’t go far.

McNulty (🇺🇸 UAE) attacked in the climb one lap from the finish. He was followed by 2 or 3 other riders, and there were multiple counter-attacks and splits until the descent was reached, notably by Hirschi (🇨🇭 Tudor) and Fabio Christen (🇨🇭 Q36.5). After the descent and complete regrouping, McNulty lead the peloton in order to bring Cosnefroy (🇫🇷 UAE) to the uphill sprint. The Frenchman delayed his action, waiting for others to attack first to take their wheel, but when A. Covi (🇮🇹 Jayco) and Charmig (🇩🇰 Uno-X) launched their effort, he followed them without being able to take them over.

Just behind him, Fabio Christen🇨🇭 takes the 4^th place, unexpected result after the multiple efforts he had done in the fist half of the same lap: he is the only one among the guys who attacked/chased then who still managed to get a result in the end.

Giro del Veneto🇮🇹 14/10/2026; Veneto classic🇮🇹 18/10/2026

This time, this is really the closing week, with these 2 ProSeries races in Italy on Wednesday and Sunday. These hilly/punchy races are pretty open.

I am not sure, but the races might be streamed on Youtube

On Wednesday, the Giro del Veneto is 167 km long, for a total of 1550 m of D+

On Sunday, the Veneto classic is 158 km long, for 2200 m of D+.

This one bears two particularities:

• there is a narrow cobbled wall (300m at 15%) on the main 12 km long circuit repeated 5 times;
• before the finish, there is a detour through a gravel section inside the private property of the owner of the ‘Diesel’ brand, and the second part of this gravel section is downhill, which is relatively accident prone (well, last year, they managed to crash in the uphill part…).

Next morning at 8 AM, he was in France for the start of the MTB race “Roc d’Azur”. He stayed a long while with the top guys in the reduced first group, but didn’t want to take any risk in dangerous downhill sections and finished far from the win.

Mwell… A very passive race attitude overall. Basically no one tried to really break away or harden the race, except on two places where a short climb was immediately followed by a short gravel track. The rare attempts were not followed; when someone broke away, relays were not passed well at all, or it was a solo. There was a truly massive crash on a flat, wide road at some point where the morons in the peloton decided to push like morons because who knows what, as usual.

The final setup was strangely decided in the very last small climb (one of the easiest ones if not the easiest one!) 10 km from the line, as it looked like we were heading toward a (semi-)massive sprint.

Seixas🇫🇷 (we shall see how the new Hinault Bettiol digests the 240 km this year),

It was the former rather than the latter today!

He frightened me when he was keeping on pushing, pushing, pushing and taking risks because he didn’t know he had a big gap over isolated chasers.

World Championship of Gravel 🇦🇺 10-11/10/2026

https://gravelchampswesternaustralia.com/

• women on Saturday, for 126 km,
• men on Sunday, for 144 km.

On the map, the women just skip the rightmost loop:

Both start at 10:10 local time, which seems to be UTC+8. I guess that makes it 4 AM in French time, for example?

Day 6 (last) individual time trials

Women:

The two favourites came 1^st and 2^nd, but Reusser🇨🇭 dominated Vollering🇳🇱 everywhere, even in the climb. It looked (I haven’t checked) like the Dutchwoman’s final section was also worse than for a couple of other riders: she was cooked.

Labous🇫🇷 took a nice Bronze medal (after the team Gold the day before), just ahead of the Italian rider Longo Borghini🇮🇹.

Men:

In the absence of top guys, France becomes a nation of TT specialists 😊, but Roglitch🇸🇮’s 2026 revival continues! The Slovenian was faster on the climb, and not much slower on the other sections.

Decomble🇫🇷 was very happy to get his Bronze medal, a few seconds ahead of Van Wilder🇧🇪 and Küng🇨🇭 who lost too much time in the climb.

Armirail🇫🇷 was very disappointed with his Silver medal. I think he was a bit cooked in the last mile, as the rider he overtook (Schmidt🇨🇭) was then trying hard to… not overtake him again in the last hectometres, while already in a relaxed position while the Frenchman was still in a pure TT position.

I just noted something funny about Roglitch🇸🇮. In terms of PCS points, 2026 is his worst season in 10 years. Yet I, and I suppose most people, would say thus year is better.

I reckon two things happened: last year, his best performance was very early in the year, while this year he woke up late in the season, so that make a huge hole in between; and then we probably got lower and lower expectations about him along the last few years, so each new performance stands out more and more.

Well, another thing is the PCS points scale, of course, that may not reflect exactly what each persons considers a better performance.

As the courses were the same for men and women, and the men race took place immediately after the women race, we can a make a few little comparisons.

Reusser’s winning time would have put her beyond 30^th place, if men and women had been riding together.

Strangely, the U23 men performance (the race happened earlier) was very dense, close to elite men: the first 4 U23 would have made it into elite top-10! Perhaps the weather was significantly different.

Either it always falls on advertisement breaks, or they decided not to show the descent any more. Anyway, I haven’t heard of crashes.

France🇫🇷 dominated a weak field, as Belgium was absent, as well as Britain who didn’t take part in the EC at all, and Italy didn’t bring Ganna or any of its mass start top performers.

Its women team was very strong and homogenous. All 3 were climbers of a sort. Squiban is not categorised as a climber yet she won two consecutive stages in Tour de France 2025 by attacking in mountain passes… A pity others didn’t wait for her after the downhill section (she was frightened by the descent), as she did the last 8 km flat section, alone, as fast her two teammates and finished just a few seconds behind them.

On the men side… pff… I am going to rant again about the coach. He was set up on Armirail and Cavagna. OK, why not, 1 TT & all-terrain, 1 TT specialist. Cavagna was expected to be a weak point in the climb, but could do it if they were careful. But then, I would have thought he would select a climber as 3^rd man (climber-climber, climber-puncher, climber-rouleur, climber-whatever): the climber would have given a couple of relays in the beginning, lead the climb under the command of the other two (possibly dropping Cavagna if needed), arrived fresh as a daisy on the top and therefor able to pull on the hilly plateau, then rested in the descent, and perhaps given a last big relay at the start of the flat section.

Instead, the men’s coach picked yet another TT-specialist, even more limited in climbs than Cavagna (by far) and who’s been crap all along 2026 (even in his discipline, he was beaten by an amateur in the National Championship ITT…). So the guy completely blew up after 6 or 7 km, and left the other two at the mercy of any sort of problems: Cavagna blowing up, a puncture, a big or small crash.

The coach is still dead set or underestimating the climb after seeing it ridden 20 times, that’s amazing.

Poland🇵🇱 lost their medal on the women side, after an honest performance by the men (Kwiatkowski was present).

There too, they had brought, among the 3 gals, a TT specialist who blew up as soon as the climb started, and a kid the third one had to always wait during the climb, arrived cooked on the top, and therefore had to be waited again on the hilly plateau as soon as there was 2% of slope as she never recovered.

They were taken over by the French team, who had started 4 minutes later…

Day 5 15:30, mixed relay

I hope that there won’t be accidents in the descent. It was spectacular, borderline scary, on the U23 men mass start race.

This downhill is a rare case of being at the same time very fast and very winding. So if you make a single mistake, there is no second chance and the consequences can be disastrous.

TT bikes are both faster and harder to handle. So are teams…

Tre Valli Varesine 🇮🇹 6/10/2026

There were again Italian classics everyday since Saturday, when the Tour of Emilia took place.

Today is a very hilly one (PCS profile), which happens almost only in a circuit with a variant among the last laps. The slopes are never hard except a bit in the variant, but there is little place to rest; the finish is on the small ‘plateau’ in the middle of the hill of the regular circuit.

Many big names were expected, but most of them cancelled in the last couple of days. As it is unlikely that they move to the next classic tomorrow (Gran Piemonte), they will just be resting until Saturday’s Tour of Lombardia.

Official site

To your comment about leadership, I tend to agree, but I think it’s worth it to point out that McNulty won worlds because he WASN’T a leader. He made his move and the chasing group didn’t tag him as important enough to chase him down until it was too late (and maybe some extra indifference from Del Toro).

So there could be some strategic gamesmanship my intentionally not labelling someone as your leader, it takes the spotlight off of them slightly.

Slightly, yes, but I think that the major part of the effect is that all main riders know the qualities and flaws of other main riders. In that respect, both McNulty and Jorgenson meet my “strong guy without a sprint” category. Those guys who can help one leader/co-leader/second-leader until very far in a race, but in normal conditions cannot expect to win.

What’s funny is that other riders do not consider them dangerous because they don’t have a sprint, yet let them go in the only way by which they can win without a sprint.

I can’t find the race, but I think I remember a day when they let S. Küng go in the final miles. Just quietly on the other side of the road, and no one cared. The guy has absolutely zero sprint, so they don’t ‘register’ him a threat, but that doesn’t mean that this TT specialist is not fast, on a regular pace, alone. And he won. (At least in my memory 😁.)

Back to our national coach, I saw a glimpse of an interview today where he said he wanted Cosnefroy for Slovenia. Again, this confirms a double mistake, a complete inversion of the riders needed for Canada and for Slovenia. It had to be the rider himself who refused because he rightfully though the Slovenian climb was too hard for him. How could the coach not know that? And how couldn’t he see that the Montreal profile fitted him (even though he never had great results there, but that dates back a bit and he was in shape this year)?

Add to this that Lenny Martinez also refused to come. Ou coach would have selected him otherwise, while he is completely out of shape at the moment (4 withdrawals out of 6 Italian races…)?

That means that if those 2 riders hadn’t refused, we would have started the European Championship with extra 2 riders unfit for the race (1 extra puncher, and 1 out of shape guy), therefore 2 potentially useful riders would have been left at home, perhaps the 2 of the 3 climbers which did well (compared to the rest of the team), since the coach wrongly saw that race as more suitable for punchers than climbers.

Finally, about Canada, “we may have seen ourselves better than we were”. “We”, and “may”… This goes the way of what I was saying on the race day, that it looked like the French team believed they only had one opponent to beat on this race, and the rest of the field was peanuts.

By the way, if I am so pissed about the guy, it is because people praised him and his ‘ideas of genius’ so much after the 2 Alaphilippe victories (and Laporte’s) that he started believing them. Even though he himself confessed by then, that 2 of them happened without following his orders and even against the plan, he then forgot that and started believing he was an actual genius, and not just someone who likes to voluntary mess things and got lucky doing that.

I was of the mind that he should have quitted after those good years, to leave with a good (brilliant even!) image. But nope, he stayed. And his discourse is less and less light-hearted, becomes more and more defensive, he starts denying things anyone can see. And the winds of public image have finally started to turn. And when those things turns, they tend to erase the good things that were done in the past. It seems he will stick to his position at least one more year. Probably counting on a Seixas miracle. I heard that after next WC, the profiles may get flatter and not suit Seixas very well, so 2027 would be his only chance in a while.

Day 3 Elite men race

It was far from being uninteresting as I feared. The race was ran much more dynamically, even though this dynamic was seen more at the front of the peloton then through successful attacks.

Of course, Evenepoel’s choice to look behind him while (not) preparing for a tight curve allowed the interest to be kept until the last 2 mm of the race. Otherwise it may very well have been another 35 km solo win.

Contrarily to the World Championship where the pace was irregular and the last 3 laps raced at glacial pace; here the speed went up which each lap (I admit that I didn’t check the last one).

It was lucky that France🇫🇷 didn’t repeat a monospecific team as in Canada, and brought a more varied team with a couple of second-rate climbers (Rondel, Bisiaux, and perhaps Braz) because, of course, its top punchers were easily dropped. The two climbers are the only French riders who made it into the final first/second group. When I think, that France’s national coach declared, in the beginning of the race, that Pedersen was the main favourite today… that’s because of that vision that I said we can be lucky he didn’t bring a 100% punchers team here like he brought a climbers team to Canada.

Even like that, the result was not great, barely scratching top-10: 9^th, 11^th, 12^th, 14^th, 17^th and 18^th! 😆 Wrongly placed density 🤣

But at least we could entertain for a while some hope that Rondel could get a medal; a small hope because we know that he cannot compete on flat sections, even though the climb was exactly the type of effort he is good at (but even with finishes-on-top he never wins, there is always 1 or 2 guys better than him in the last hundred metres, and by the way that’s what happened again today with Scaroni).

Italy🇮🇹 was both active and efficient.

Continuing my rant about the French coach. He also told he didn’t bring to Canada Grégoire or any other potential co-leader / backup leader, “because there shall only be one leader”. We saw how it harmed the USA (and Great-Britain to a lesser degree) to have several strong guys 😬 If you don’t bring several leaders, you must bring someone as strong as a leader, whom you don’t call a leader because he has no sprint, but has a similar level, so that he can support your leader until very far in the race. And perhaps that in the end he will find himself in a situation were he can bear a moustache and win without needing to sprint 🤣

And today he brought Grégoire on a race the climbs of which haven’t suited him in a year or two, while the repeated shorter efforts of Montréal fitted him. I mean the guy is on the television motorbike for the Tour de France and several other races, he must have noticed that climbs that long are too long for Grégoire-2026?

At least 2 other teams (Italy and Poland) copied our tactic later! They’ve got no respect for creativity and innovation 😄

I don’t know what can happen with tomorrow’s race and its 5 laps, but so far the races on this circuit were rather uninteresting. Today, the riders entered the circuit fresh as daisies since the inline section is devoid of any difficulty (some had a difficult wake up after 2 hours of strolling). There is only one climb per lap, therefore a single style of climb too, so options are limited. There is the plateau after the climb, but of course it you were dropped in the climb, you can’t use it to try anything (but attempt to join back the front rider(s)). No wind is expected tomorrow, so the flat sections will just be flat sections; a bit of tactic is possible there, but it all depends on available manpower for teams: if others do have manpower, a single or a few riders cannot hope to create much of a gap before next climb.

Basically, my feeling is that the circuit was designed so that Pogatchar could win it without needing to tire himself out.

Day 2 Elite women race

France: launches a pre-planned attack, crashes after 50 yards! 🤡 🇫🇷 🤡

Day 1

After bringing climbers to a WC race that turned out to be for punchers/hard-classicmen, France🇫🇷 brought punchers to the EC U23 race that was mostly dominated by climbers. 😏 Keep up the good selection work 👍 😆

Btw, someone needs to tell Seixas not to be so hard on himself, he’s almost ready to jump from a building after not winning the WC at age 20. France rode a good race, Amirail was impressive, and Seixas will get stronger for the next 5-6 years at least. Chill out.

The problem changes when you know that Seixas already decides of most things. His team and national director seem to be confined to a role of advising councils. The mystery is how this happens, how they allow a 19 yo to dictate their choices and strategies. Is there active blackmailing from the Seixas family (“if you don’t comply, he’ll be in UAE next year”), or is it self-inflicted?

He decided to go on the Tour of France against the advise of his team. He decided of his teammates. Even in this WC he decided of most of the team. (Like Zidane insisted of having his club pal Dugarry back then).

So, that’s why he takes responsibility to this extent. Because he decided of many things (and asked to decide of many things); he wasn’t just a (final) cog in a machine decided by others.

Now there are people who wouldn’t charge themselves so hard even after being having decided even more and fucking up harder, but that’s not his mentality indeed.

France strategy was no good, considering the team that had been built: no co-leader or even leader number 2, just single leader. No good domestique except for Armirail, whom they decided to wear out way before we even came 100 km from the line… No puncher who could risk casting a shadow over Seixas. Just small climbers, most of them out of shape.

Strategy-wise, they applied a stereotyped plan. Armirail to forbid other from attacking, and then the little climbers would attack in order to… in order to what? In a single-leader team, you fuck yourself if you do that, and that’s exactly what happened. Icing on the cake if you don’t have the manpower to regain control; and you don’t have it because of both the team composition and the fact that you already used most of the manpower you had to do whatever.

After Armirail stopped, there was nobody in the team to pursue his effort (due to the absolute lack any other rouleur in the team), so they went with part B of the plan way too early. France themselves created the mess that would kill them. Paret-Peintre, Jegat played their little 2 minutes act to start messing things up and disappeared. Baudin initiated (or simply took an active part to?) the movement that would ultimately become the Van der Poel breakaway…

Then you have tactics. There was zero tactical adaptation, neither about the A & B parts of the plan, nor within the mess which happened later.

That part when there were still a few teammates and they were chasing at the front the peloton, Jesus… You had Labrosse (I reckon?) dying pulling the peloton, and… there wasn’t a single French anywhere in the line behind him! Nope. The 4 riders including Seixas were aside, in the wind a bit behind, using 1 other rider to make their own line… Result: out of Seixas’ 4 teammates, they lost 2, thus 50%, in this short action. Instead of using only Labrosse (?).

Before or after that, what the heck was this ridiculous solo counter-attack attempt by Prodhomme at some point? A vast overestimating of his own shape and a misjudgement of the situation (was he hoping to compete with Van der Poel and the likes later, ahem?)

Seixas remained focused on sticking to Del Toro. That was the only tactic he applied. The original orientation can be understood because he had done too much on the Montreal GP and the Mexican had finally beaten him. But not seeing what was going on, not seeing that he was soon going to be solo with more than 100 km to go… And sticking to racing 100% the opposite way of 2 weeks ago… He never followed an attack or counter-attack by all the outsiders who were breaking away.

Then when leaders were isolated, many times there were several occasions to join the head after Del Toro had made a big effort to start reducing the gaps; but he never relayed nor counter-attacked to jump to the head of the race, in order to re-establish a calmer situation.

All Del Toro actions, gaps over the following riders were aborted this way. On a profile like that, you cannot only count on gaps created in the short climbs. It is a berg classic. A berg classic without the mutant. A mutant-free berg classic, a ‘classical classic’, therefore the gaps have to be created for real by keeping on pushing very hard at and after the top of the climbs, after you have only created a tiny gap in the climb. That’s what the Seixas/Del Toro did perfectly on the Montreal GP: they considerably grew the gap on the false flat and descent of the University plateau area. Because Del Toro immediately relayed Seixas when he joined him on the top 2 weeks ago, which Seixas always refused to do this Sunday. On this profile and in this racing situation, efforts need to be extended longer than what the short climbs naturally allow, or they are worthless.

In fact, the whole strategical and tactical mistake may well come from my previous paragraph: France wrongly decided it was a race for climbers. There was a slight possibility to turn it into a climbers race, and it was part of their goal, but they completely failed at making it so (wrong team composition, wrong timings, wrong moves).

That and the fixation with Del Toro.

The synthesis of the strategical mistakes + Seixas charging himself can be highlighted by his declaration before the race, when he said there was no other objective for him than the victory.

That means a wrong analysis was made (by himself, by his entourage or by the head of the French team, I don’t know who started, but in the end everyone involved held that analysis), that consisted of considering everything would be as on Montreal GP and there would be no new opponents and no new configuration. This analysis saw the WC race unfolding exactly the same way as the GP, with the same and only opponent, except that in the end that opponent would be more tired and Seixas would not fail at sprinting.

They didn’t plan for teams being different, for a few extra riders coming, for a few riders being worse and a few being better. They didn’t plan for different races configurations and situations.

They only had one very basic plan, against one single opponent, and ignored all the rest of the field and all the rest of options.

The only new inhabitants they can get there are virtual ones 😄

I checked the lap times, and can you imagine that the last 3 laps (­≈ 40km) were raced slower by leaders than on the U23 race?! (and their fastest circuit laps were when Armirail🇫🇷 was pulling as a domestique!)

Those guys exhausted themselves before that, when Van der Poel🇳🇱 was ahead, I’d say. Especially Del Toro🇲🇽 and Seixas🇫🇷, who both started experiencing troubles at the same point, and started ingesting anything they could find in panic mode.

Also contributed to the low final speed the fact that their pace was switching ON-OFF-ON-OFF-… all the time in the last laps.

Men race

Holy moly! over 100 km of kamikaze attacks and LOL-tactics! 🥳 🥳 🥳 🎆 🎆 🎆

The 3 favourites failed.

France: I love it when a crappy plan comes together…

Belgium: the cyclothymic Evenepoel must be happy, he’s beaten Seixas and his charlie horse 🤣

The unexpected ones and the comebacks from nowhere : Matthews, Pedersen, Küng, Schmid, Ayuso, Roglic.

I never saw M. Woods but he finishes 35^th. I guess that’s honest after such a crazy race.

Armirail:

– come on Bruno, you have 2 laps to catch a 16-man breakaway 8 minutes ahead…

– Okay!

– it includes Leknessund…

– I said ‘OK’!

Even the main race (next Sunday) is not broadcasted unencrypted? (In France there is a law saying that major sports events must be so, and a decree lists said ‘major events’. Funnily, Paris-Roubaix is part of the list, but not the WC.)