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Modern life is so fast-paced that there’s rarely time to read full features, right? That’s how Team Sunweb Chad Haga understands it. His daily Twitter updates offer great insight into the racing… with a minimum of fuss.

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Social media makes it easier than ever for riders to provide updates from the action and Chad Haga has created the ideal summary of racing at the Tour in 2018: #oversimpLeTour – daily reports with a minimum of fuss. Who needs thousands of words when the events of a day on a bike race can be simplified?

The beauty of his approach is that most of his followers have watch the action and can therefore relate to his, at times, cryptic summaries. It’s a great concept and ideally suited to the #CouchPeloton…

Let’s take a random example of a stage most of RIDE Media’s readers would know something about… say, stage nine when Richie Porte crashed out of the Tour.

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Photos: Yuzuru Sunada

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It’s not nice to laugh at misfortune and although there is humour in Haga’s writing, he manages himself in fine style, rarely denigrating anyone or anything even while being brutally honest in his appraisal of the action and antics of riders and/or fans.

 

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After bumping into Haga on his way back from sign on a couple of days ago, I asked a little about #oversimpLeTour.

“I try and keep it was brief as possible but also to really just encompass the highlights of each day’s stage in an unusual fashion,” he said, before adding, “to summarise the stage in a way that doesn’t actually contain any information is truly a challenge.”

Haga was 73rd on GC after 16 stages and, like his team leader – Tom Dumoulin, in second place – the 29-year-old American is doing his second successive Grand Tour. He finished 71st in the Giro and admits that the challenge is taking a toll.

“It’s a really challenging race,” said Haga about his Tour debut.

“I’m finding that two Grand Tours back-to-back is a real physical feat that’s making my legs struggle, for sure. But the racing is very hard and tactically we’re in an interesting situation with Tom [Dumoulin] doing really but Sky has got the top two on GC so it’s going to be a really explosive final week, I think.”

Is there a way for Sunweb to overcome the Thomas/Froome partnership?

“I really don’t know,” he said, concluding our brief chat. “It’ll be interesting to see this week how it goes without [Gianni] Moscon because everybody has to move up one space in their train. And so Froome and Thomas could be isolated earlier. That might really force something.”

 

Each answer to a sequence of four quick questions were given in lots of 107, 82, 285 and 191 characters, respectively. Haga, it seems speaks the way he writes. And there’s nothing at all wrong with being succinct and to the point.

 

– By Rob Arnold

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