Welcome back to the Lantern Rouge cycling podcast supported by LeCole here with Benji Nice and today on Saturday evening with Twitter Romity Stage 4, the big mountain test 159 kilometers from Seon to Teon 2000, a ski resort at 2100 meters altitude is where this is supposed to finish the finish got brought forward with the stage got brought forward by two hours in advance of the original starting time.

Because of bad weather we still had the bad weather today and poor visibility it's 14.6 Ks at 7% is the first category one then they do another count one the soon climb 14 Ks at 6.7% then a descent into the last beast of a climb over an hour it would take them 20.7 Ks at 7.6% with some steep sections in it the GC standings going into this stage in Romity if you've not been following too closely.

Mark Solae from other star 14 seconds ahead of Thomas and Port both on the same time other GC contenders of note Kelderman 21 back to 21 back is a gear at 26 back and woods was about 30 seconds back at the same time as is a gear that got caught and fast to Maznada but Benji fall and break went in the wet conditions it think they wouldn't have a chance.

That some pretty good guys in there. Yeah and became very interesting towards the end but first of all the riders in the break way included use of charity we saw him do that do attack and eventually lead on the day to a victory and on one of the earlier race of the season.

Not switch mid for the start up nation at goblins once again two days in a row trying to test out the pronunciation of lr once again then mad homes was in there as well so teammate for a lot of sit out and Magnus court nilsson put tilly and pale now from this group what's important to this is that.

Corsans is on roughly i think a man and a bit in gc for the stage and minus court nilsson fifty nine seconds so let's say that the break gets a huge gap that it could come into play towards the end of the stage but i didn't have that huge of a gap four minutes ish until uh well for the first part of the stage and we saw that i'm going to the second last one today and that gap started being reduced by the likes of movie star who was using the likes of a villa villa my bad in the

group and towards the top the gap was down to a good three minutes forty five and well some of it interesting happened because on the up hill of that

climb we saw that the fog was getting immensely heavy and very difficult to see the visibility was very low and i bet it looked like we had points where we could see like 10 meters ahead

and no further than that the camera almost couldn't see right at the certain point so pretty crazy weather but um what was happening was that we heard that the radio of the race race radio ended up calling out that they're going to neutralize three kilometers in the

descent a certain tree kilometers we the viewer did not really know which part that was yet at that point and i was generally curious how are they going to do this how are they going to make sure that the gap between the

peloton and the breakway is going to stay the same well turns out they weren't so uh their plan was as simple as putting a car ahead of the breakway and putting a car ahead of the

peloton and making sure that the peloton and the breakway need to ride behind their own cars with a guy waving a stop sign in front of the group and while that's actually a pretty good way of

making sure that the gap in between could stay the same the only thing that might make it troublesome is if one car rides faster than the other and that was the case here because by the end of that

tree kilometer section the gap had expanded by I think a minute and five seconds which is quite substantial and afterwards they uh they basically just yeah they basically just

wrote on again and the neutralization stopped in general it's good that they made a decision because on the uphill it was looking very dangerous for the descent itself.

But I think that the execution was a bit flawed and it isn't the first time that this happens but I want to throw it over to you and I want to hear what you think about this neutralization and how they handled it.

Well this has been a problem for a while I think twenty thirteen zero rig about to run still believes he would have won that zero to tell you on the

stelvia stage where I think a descent was neutralized that's why he was so uh or in such disbelief on the cold as the rest stage nineteen of the two to

France twenty nineteen when I think you might remember on that descent people were telling him it been cancelled neutralized it was like no it's not because

he was remembering the stelvia stage where I think cantana attacks the neutralization to us do of laundrom they neutralized because ambulance needed this is this year needed to get to the

women's race and I think personal burger who was in the break they then stopped the break and the break was called by the pelton and they let the

break go ahead and they didn't include personal burger in it and he had to like hold on to the sports and

...