Felix Gall

What's the maximum group size at the finish line? Like four? Three? I mean, we're looking at the top guys, right? Remco van der Poel, Isaac Taltoro, Paul Seixas, Van Aert maybe, Van der Poel.

You've got other sort of really good grand tour racers like Felix Gall and whatever else.

Filipowicz is here.

Lawrence Pithy.

So you're going in the sort of like more classics rider kind of direction.

Is Montreal hard enough? Is that climb hard enough that we start looking at all of the other sort of top riders on that list that have like done something at a Grand Tour, for example? And I'm not necessarily saying for a victory, but to put them in sort of the same category as Paul Seixas, they're unlikely to be dropped.

If I look down this list, are your Felix Galls an interesting name? Is Florian Lippowitz an interesting name? Is Julia Ciccone an interesting name for Sunday?

Well, I think what you said about Seixas there is interesting, because Seixas may not win, but he could help choose the winner.

And we have additional updates on that at this point.

So Felix Gall is now formalized with that team.

And Matthias Sklmoza, who was the source of what we were hoping to be a bunch of drama between himself and Juan Ayuso.

But we haven't really gotten it.

A little, but not a lot.

A little.

We're getting a little more now, now that there's also Felix Gall, right? And I think Scalmos is just sort of sitting there going, guys, I'm here.

I still have done the thing.

Enric Mas adopted the leader's jersey.

And outside of Primoz Roglic passing Felix Gall on GC, courtesy of a strong TT by the Slovenian and a pretty expected mediocre TT by Gall, general classification didn't change otherwise for all intents and purposes.

I think one of the best takeaways from this Vuelta is how strong Wout van Aert is right now.

He is storming, which presents a wonderful bit of drama for the Belgian national team, presumably with two co-leaders now, Wout and Remco.

stage 18 was it it was

late on wasn't it yes it was the stage 18 time trial went into that with in fact Roglic had dropped to third there were 2.10 on Roglic and 2.6 on Felix Gall and we're thinking yeah it's going to be tight you know expected him maybe to ship a minute or so and I think in the time trial ultimately it was well just check Eric Maas 51 seconds it was what 42 43 seconds yeah in fact it wasn't even that it was 33 seconds And I think coming out of that, you know, you finish 12th, you finish behind the guy that was fourth, a guy who is a really, really good time for us.

I mean, that must have been just like a weight lifted off his shoulders at that point, knowing that we still had, you know, the weekend stages to go.

But I have nothing but admiration for Henrik Maas.

I just thought they had one leader, it was Eric Maas.

The team worked hard for him and they attacked when they needed to.

There was no panic when any of the rivals, when Felix Gall was looking like he could do something.

There was no mysterious plan C as they were working out plan A still.