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Crossing the Addington Road heading out, as you were crossing it coming back in. Think I was in a Rapha EF Education training jersey (at my age you can't remember what you wore the day before).
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Was that @HoKe in Coney Hatch/West Wickham about 1245 yesterday in a LFGSS skinsuit or jersey?
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I rode the Pilgrim's way to Whitstable this morning and was completely alone in the lanes once I got past Sevenoaks for the most part. I just had the route on my to do list and thought sections were off road - they weren't! 38c was overkill.
You missed out most of the offroad sections - after Wrotham there's a long off road section, about 6 miles long, that brings you out in Upper Halling. After that you cross the Medway on the M2 bridge (although there's a new bridge at Halling that means you can pick up the Pilgrims Way without the detour north), there's another long off road section which gets you close to Boxley. After Hollingbourne, where you cut north to go to Whitstable, the PW is close to 50/50 road and off road down to Wye.
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I've dropped you a PM.
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No-one, outside of a small part of the UAE team, knows Pogacar’s watts per kg figures from yesterday. Anything you see on the Internet is speculation. Some of it may be informed, but these stats get bandied around like they are gospel, but they really aren’t.
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It's been a long time, 2014 I think, where the final TT has been an hour long effort. The tendency in recent years has been to shorten them to around a 30-40 minute effort, precisely because they tend to distort the overall standings so much. Chris Froome has been extremely effective in gaining significant time on his rivals in late race TTs.
If you look at the 2014 race, where the GC had been long decided by Nibali's dominance in the mountains, Tony Martin won by over 1:30 from Tom Dumoulin. Neither was riding for the overall classification, but gaps that size in TTs of this duration aren't unusual.
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I think the looks on Dumoulin and Van Aert's faces were disbelief at Roglic's collapse as much as they were to do with Pogacar.
The fundamental essence of sport is its capacity to surprise; that instance where an athlete or a team pulls out a performance which goes so much against the received wisdom or expectations that we are all left shocked and astonished. We saw that yesterday. The expectation was that Roglic would defend his lead and win the Tour, as we thought would happen before the race and was reinforced throughout by his, and Jumbo-Visma's, performance.
I don't know if Pogacar is doping or not, but his evolution as an athlete follows the usual pattern of a young prodigy; he won the Tour de l'Avenir two years ago, as Bernal did before him, put in an amazing first season as a WT pro, as Bernal did before him, then wins the Tour with a stand out performance deep into the third week of the race, as Bernal did before him. He's looked like Roglic's main challenger since the Pyrenean stages and a lead of less than a minute going into a final TT as hard and unusual as yesterday's was never enough to be certain of victory. If you look at Roglic's performances in a final TT in a GT, he's always done worse than expected so when you break it down, his performance yesterday wasn't atypical. With Pogacar, because of his youth and lack of a body of results, we don't have a yardstick with which to measure him. His final stage win in the Vuelta last year, which also secured his podium place, was a 40 km attack on the penultimate stage of the race, so clearly he has the recovery characteristics a Tour winner needs.
Time will tell if he's doping or not, but I don't think you can tell from a one off performance like yesterday's, no matter how surprising it might have seemed.
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But he did win yellow, green and polka dots in 1969.
Sell it for £50 million to one of Boris’ mates?