Tour de France rules ??

[shouldbeinbed]

Good thread I'm interested in learning about this race / tour as well , I think that I get most of it but the commentators keep talking about "GC" teams / riders what do they mean by GC please ?

General Classification I think

Yep. GC teams are the teams such as Sky & Movistar who have a rider likely to win the overall race, Froome, Quintana.... By completing all of the stages in the shortest cumulative time. These riders are generally very good climbers who can also ride a decent time trial and have the other riders on the team employed to protect them on flat stages and support them in the mountains, the GC teams are usually more focused on the overall win and tend not to be employing a top notch sprinter such as Cavendish, Kittel and other fast riders on the flat to support their individual stage win ambition. Their riders don't tend to participate in the daily breakaways.

Edit: cross posting with winjim but doing other things at the same time

 

[winjim]

Edit: cross posting with winjim but doing other things at the same time

Probably explained it better than me anyway

 

[jarlrmai]

Gilet de Custard is the new name for the yellow jersey for me.

 

[Dave7]

Lots of men (never women, for some reason) get togged up in stretchy bike clothes and go for a very long bike ride around France across three weeks. Despite the name it's not always all in France. They're not serious cyclists, and can't carry panniers or saddlebags on their fancy bikes, and so lots of cars go with them to carry their drinks and sandwiches. The route they travel is chosen by a sadist - they almost never choose the quickest, or flattest route from A to B, and instead go over lots of hills when they could be in their hotels having a nice dinner.

They're basically riding advertisements for their employers, but once in a while some of them get penalised by having to advertise someone else. There's the Yellow Jersey (the GC - Gilet de Custard) for the one who takes the piss the most and ends up getting home first. There's the Green Jersey, for the one who gets to each coffee stop first (except that the ones at the front never seem to stop for coffee). There's the White Jersey, for the token youngster in the tour. And then there's the Polka-dot Jersey (which is our very polite translation for Bean Jersey). That's given to the vegetarian, because the only vegetarian breakfast they can find in France is beans on toast, so they get a good farty pump up all the hills.

Eventually they make it to Paris, drink champagne at lunchtime to celebrate being able to go home and go for a pissed ride up and down the Champs Elysées around the Arc de Triomphe.

All of this is considered a bit of fun by the telly folk, so they lay on motorbikes and helicopters in case any of the riders need a lift home.

But.........why do they wear helmets ?

 

[fimm]

It is possible to win the Tour de France without winning a stage:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yello...llow_jersey_winners_without_winning_any_stage
6 people have done so.

 

[suzeworld]

1) Cavendish won 2 stages (not seen today's).........does that help him in the overall ratings & finish positions ?
2) How is the overall winner decided i.e. is it possible to not win any stages but win the overall race ?
3) How does a rider get KoM ?...........can someone in the peloton win it ? (surely they don't time every single rider on the hills).
4) I understand that all riders in the Peloton are given the same finish time (to avoid crazy behaviour near the end). So.......yesterday, at the end, there were no break-away riders but a mad dash at the end. Do 2nd/3rd/4th place etc. etc. get anything for the effort ?
Lots more questions keep coming to me as I'm watching e.g. where/when do they pee but the above will suffice for now

1. No, not really. The stage wins are often free-standing achievements for those riders. Cav will never have the speed over the hills to be up top in the GC (general classification)
2. The overall winner is a cumulative time, everyone's individual time is kept each day and added to their time from the days before. I think it IS possible to win the overall without winning a stage, esp if the GC winner is pipped to the post by breakaways every day, so long as the main man keeps coming in ahead of the other main contenders. This year the main men seem to be Froome and Quintana, ... maybe Contador and it looks like NOT Niblali who already lost a lot of time very early. Breakaways are "allowed" if the riders are not main contenders, but the peleton tries to catch up anyone who is likely to be a threat to the GC . that is where a lot of strategy comes in. Who to chase? and who leads the chasing? Often it is the yellow jersey's team, but othe GC contenders might (or might not) join in leading the chase.
Yesterday, Movistar (Quintana's team) put a lot of effort into chasing the break and I do not really know why. This is being discusses in the Td F spoilers thread, you learn a lot by reading what other ppl are saying about strategy in that thread (as well as having a laugh).
3. There are points for that, you can find the detail in one of the links you've been given, I imagine, only the first few over the top get any points at all.
4. there are a few seconds extra time to be won for the first few over the line, which rewards the effort, plus you might open a gap which gives you a few seconds over those behind. The closest gap a tour was ever won by was only 8 seconds .. so it is worth chasing everything in that context!

 

[h1udd]

But.........why do they wear helmets ?

Aerodynamic advantage .... Have you seen Sagans hair/mane ?? ..... Without that helmet it's doubtful he could average 11mph

 

[Tim Hall]

But.........why do they wear helmets ?

Aerodynamic advantage .... Have you seen Sagans hair/mane ?? ..... Without that helmet it's doubtful he could average 11mph

<serious answer> Because the UCI (cycle sport's governing body) says they must.

 

[Aravis]

When you say " awarded to the first , and places, over the top of each classified climb"...........what if the FASTEST over a designated section of mountain is actually one of the last riders............does that count ? i.e. is everyone timed over a given climb or do you mean it is literally the first rider over a certain point ?

In normal circumstances (i.e. a road race stage, not a time trial) it is the order in which they reach the summit, not how quickly they climb. If there's a categorised climb in a time trial, that is dealt with like a Strava segment.

This means of course that on big mountain stages a rider can bag a lot of KOM points by riding suicidally fast on the flat and hanging on in front as long as he can over the climbs, eventually being caught and easing his way to the finish. The title has been won this way - Laurent Jalabert in 2002 is the most obvious example. This isn't what the organisers want; they'd prefer the KOM to be someone who's truly competitive in the mountains. So when things like this happen, they often modify the rules to make it more difficult. Nowadays the points are distributed very differently, with far more weight given to climbs near the end of a stage.

That brings its own problems. Froome was the overall KOM last year almost by default. It's a much better spectacle if there are two or three riders overtly fighting for it. So the rules are always being looked at, and whatever we've been used to for the last few years might not apply this time round.

The Green Jersey competition changes a lot as well. One year the rules were framed specifically to let Cavendish win. They had to let him back in the race twice after finishing outside the elimination time, but in the end they got the result they wanted.

 

[jarlrmai]

They should just rename the Green Jersey the Peter Sagan Jersey for being ridiculous

 

[al-fresco]

The Great Bike Race by Geoffrey Nicholson - based on the 1976 TdF - has been reprinted. Worth reading for the elegance of Nicholson's prose and, despite being 40 years old, still a great introduction to the rules and conventions of the Tour.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Bike-Race-acclaimed-introduced/dp/1911162020/