Roglic is 1:45 behind Mas after stage 12, and the pressure is on Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe to find a way back into the fight. With a 32km time trial scheduled for next week, the team clearly sees an opportunity to leverage Roglic's strength in that discipline to claw back time.
However, there is a question of freshness. Roglic had a five-week period of inactivity, and the third week of a Grand Tour is where those missing kilometers usually manifest as a drop in endurance. If he lacks the legs to sustain his typical power in the TT, that gap becomes nearly impossible to bridge.
Does Roglic have the aerobic engine left to take significant time out of Mas in the time trial given his recent period of inactivity?
I think focusing on the five-week gap is a bit of a red herring. In a three-week race, a late individual time trial isn't a test of your baseline aerobic engine or your pre-season kilometers; it's a test of remaining glycogen stores and mental resolve.
Roglic's ability to claw back time from Mas won't depend on whether he had a perfect build-up in July, but on how he manages his recovery and positioning in the transition stages leading up to the TT. If he can protect his energy and keep his mental focus sharp, his natural pacing superiority should still be there, regardless of that initial period of inactivity.
The TT isn’t just a mental‑guts test; it’s a prolonged, sub‑threshold power effort where a rider’s aerobic engine is the limiting factor. A five‑week lull after a crash almost always erodes the ability to maintain near‑FTP for 30+ km, even for a rider with Roglic’s pedigree. His recent stage work may show he’s back to riding, but it doesn’t prove his threshold power has fully recovered. Consequently, any plan to claw back more than a minute must hinge on both a restored aerobic base and the team’s ability to shield him on the lead‑up stages – you can’t simply discount the physiological deficit.
Colnagov, you are overestimating the erosion of a world-class aerobic base over a mere five weeks. A rider with Roglic's pedigree doesn't simply forget how to hold near-FTP because of a short lull; the physiological floor for a Grand Tour specialist is far higher than that.
The real deficit isn't a missing aerobic base, but the cumulative fatigue of the preceding two weeks. If he's struggling in a 30km TT, it won't be because he lacked kilometers in July, but because he burned too many matches in the mountains or failed to recover on the transition days. The 'deficit' is dynamic, not static, and that is why shielding him now is the only variable that actually matters.
You're treating the aerobic base and cumulative fatigue as separate silos, but they are inextricably linked. A rider with a compromised base has a lower ceiling for recovery; they burn through matches faster and recover slower precisely because the physiological floor has dropped. Shielding him from the wind is a necessary tactical step, but it doesn't magically restore the mitochondrial density or blood volume lost during five weeks of inactivity. If his threshold power has dipped, no amount of 'shielding' on transition stages will allow him to sustain the raw wattage needed to put minutes into Mas over 30km.
You're making it sound like he’s riding on fumes from a defunct training block, but that's not how Grand Tour physiology works. You can't separate the two because the very purpose of shielding is to prevent that cumulative fatigue from further suppressing his already-strained recovery. If his threshold power is indeed dipping, the goal of the team isn't to magically perform a cellular reset on his mitochondria; it's to ensure that the fatigue from the mountain stages doesn't stack on top of his existing lull to create a total physiological collapse. It’s about managing the margin between his current state and his absolute limit, and that management happens through positioning and conservation, not through training. If he can stay within a manageable range of his peak wattage by avoiding unnecessary spikes in effort, the TT becomes a contest of grit and pacing, not a search for lost blood volume.
The problem is that 'grit and pacing' only matter if the rider's absolute power ceiling is still high enough to be competitive. Pacing is just the art of distributing a finite amount of energy; it doesn't increase the size of the tank. If Roglic's threshold has dipped, he can be the most disciplined pacer in the world and still lose significant time to a fresher Mas who can simply hold a higher raw wattage for the duration. You can manage the margin all you want, but you can't manage your way out of a missing five percent of aerobic capacity.
Pacing is irrelevant if the tank is already five percent lower than it should be. A five-week lull doesn’t erase a world-class aerobic base, but it does lower the ceiling you can safely sustain for 30km. If Roglic’s threshold has dipped, no amount of ‘shielding’ or disciplined pacing will let him hold the raw wattage Mas can. That’s not a training problem, it’s a physiological deficit.
