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Per Race Radio….. Marca reporting that ASO and RCS have come to an agreement on dates. Tour de France will be held from August 2 to 25, Vuelta in September and the Giro in October. All races will remain 3 weeks. Of course this all depends on how the Coronavirus crisis develops.
Thanks for this update.
Hope springs eternal!
I am in favor of hope.Next Euro shoe to drop is soccer. Huge issues there. Meanwhile here in the US, it’s still a combo of smart people, clowns with power, and chaos.
We will see. Sports events will not be palatable unless the general population can get back to a reasonable normal. That reasonable normal may not happen until next year with a widely available vaccine (a limited availability vaccine for medical personnel may happen as early as Fall optimistically.
We will get surge capacity on ventilators and rapid testing earlier than that (June) but that will only allow us to partially get foot off the brake. Not enough to allow mass gatherings.
My plans involve a lot of remote solo riding and no sports watching.
I hope the Tour(s) come to their senses. If they do this, folks are going to get sick and die. They will be congregating wherever there is a way to watch. Ban them from the roads? Good luck! Are their enough gendarmes in all of Europe, let alone just France, to pull that off? (And a spike in police cases.)
There will be a spike in cases starting week 3 in the general population and there will be teams that come down with it. Some will get very sick and there will be Tour/team deaths. Maybe not riders. Maybe just older DSs, mechanics … And they will be bringing it home to their families. This will cost the tours millions and a lot of bad publicity for a long time.
Wake up, tours. I don’t want to be the “I told you so”. (I love the tours. If this was war, some deaths in exchange for hope might be warranted. But the virus simply doesn’t care. Every death means more spread of the disease and probably more deaths.)
Ben
Just saw on local news that Tour de France has been called off entirely. It’s based on decision by Macron to cancel all major events until mid-July at the very earliest.
Due to the unique nature of professional cycling, it just seems prudent to accept that it can’t happen this year. It would be irresponsible.
6ix that is incorrect. Just not happening at its original date for now.
Personally, I think all sporting events (and concerts, etc) need to be cancelled through the summer, if not the fall, too.
Until there is a vaccine, any large gathering is a game of Roulette….with added bullets in the chamber.
But we do need to open up the economy some once this surge is mitigated. Allow some virus to circulate among less vulnerable people to build up herd immunity, with vulnerable folks taking it upon themselves to self distance/ isolate. O/w the price of a collapsed economy would create even more misery and death.
The economic impact (both financial and personal) is brutal, there is no doubt. I still can’t believe there has not been an effort to freeze mortgage and rent payments for at least 3 months.
That said, the economy will bounce back…eventually. People who die won’t. I’d rather see a prolonged period of social distancing, with gradual relaxing of people going back to work, then simply “opening the economy back up”.
But to your point, there is a balancing act because a longer term economic impact has definite, negative health impacts on a great many people.
But there is simply no way you can open restaurants, bars, etc for months….and likely not until well in 2021.
Since Mrs. CK is high-risk, I will be social distancing / isolating for a long time. I figure I’ll have to start going back into my office in June, but I will be wearing masks / gloves and staying the fook away from everyone.
This came up in my Twitter feed today and hits on some of the points lsd raised. Good food for thought….(and if you are on the Twitters, Ian Bremmer is a really good follow. Logical, non-partisan takes on the global economy, healthcare and national security)
https://twitter.com/ianbremmer/status/1250101935237222401?s=20
Segue into my current rant– since my wife is the anesthetist whose face is literally inches away from infected people as she intubates them to keep them alive I hear the words “open it back up” as, “Dale, let’s let your wife take one for the team” and frankly if it were YOUR wife whose life is at risk over restarting the economy you might take a different tack.
And when she and the others in anesthesia get sick along with the pulmonologists and critical care nurses whose going to fill in? Jamie Dimon or the head of the Fed? Good freaking luck having one of them do your emergency appendectomy, c-section, or provide the correct dose of propofol.
She’s gone from having a new N-95 mask every procedure to having two a week. Two.
And where she practices there hasn’t been a huge spike in cases. God help us all if there is.Re: opening up – I read an article yesterday that reviewed a study done years ago on the effects of closure, how soon, how long and how tight on various cities in the US during the1918 Spanish Flu epidemic. Consistently, the cities that fared best and recovered faster and stronger were the cities that did the most. The effects of the strong post-epidemic growth of the longest shut down cities rippled years down the line.
Two cities they looked at were Minneapolis and St. Paul. Close to the same size, separated by a river. Minneapolis took it seriously and had one of the earliest and longest shut downs. St. Paul stayed open weeks longer and opened up sooner. The epidemic cost St. Paul far more in lives, $$s and recovery for many years after. (And to this day, Minneapolis is the stronger city economically.)
“History repeating itself? We’ve never seen that.” (Nor have we ever opened that history book.)
Ben
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