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Slovenian cyclist Tadej Pogačar is dominating the Giro d’Italia: he is first in the standings with over seven minutes ahead of second, he has already won five stages and continues to entertain fans every day with spectacular performances. In some stages Pogačar used Strava, a very popular application among athletes that uses GPS tracking to record a physical activity such as a run or a cycle and measure various parameters such as speed, altitude, kilometers and altitude difference covered . It is usually used by amateurs, but there are also many professional cyclists who use it to have more data on their training and races.
The peculiarity of Strava is that it allows users to compare their statistics with those of other cyclists who have cycled on the same route. Even amateurs can therefore redo a climb or part of a stage of the Giro d’Italia for example, and see how much slower they were compared to professional cyclists. Usually a lot, especially in the case of Tadej Pogačar, who won practically all the stages with an uphill finish.
On Strava, in many climbs the Slovenian is the King of the Mountain (king of the mountain), or KOMa title that the application assigns to the cyclist (Queen of the Mountain, in that case) who covered a given climb in the shortest time. On Sunday 19 May Pogačar uploaded the track of his route in the most demanding mountain stage of this Giro d’Italia, the one that went from Manerba del Garda to the Mottolino ski area in Livigno, with climbs on the Mortirolo and the Foscagno pass.
Pogačar started the Foscagno pass more than three minutes ahead of the cyclist who was leading at the time, the Colombian Nairo Quintana, and there were several other cyclists in between. Six kilometers from the top, and thirteen kilometers from the finish of the stage, Pogačar accelerated, overtaking all the opponents in front of him and arriving first at the finish line. Looking at the data on Strava, he climbed the 14 kilometers of the pass in 34 minutes and 50 seconds, the best time ever recorded on the route out of the more than 20 thousand present on Strava (thus earning another title of KOM).
If you scroll through the ranking, other professional cyclists are in the top positions, many of whom were present at this Giro d’Italia such as Valentin Paret-Peintre and Filippo Zana. Most, however, are probably amateurs. It took the last three over 3 hours and 50 minutes to climb the pass, if we exclude the last three who probably forgot their GPS was on at night, given that it took them over sixteen hours.
In publishing the data on the stage, Pogačar also said that a user “flagged” him on Strava, that is, reported him, questioning whether he had taken so little time to do that route, a perhaps ironic way to highlight the Pogačar’s exceptional nature. On May 22, in the description of the stage from Selva di Val Gardena to the Brocon Pass, in which he came second (earning further seconds in the general classification), the Slovenian wrote «haters gonna flag», the haters will flag me.
– Read also: «If it’s not on Strava, then it didn’t happen»
2024-05-23 13:42:34
#amateur #cyclists #challenge #Tadej #Pogačar #lose
