Indholdsfortegnelse for May 4, 2023 i Cycling Weekly

This week we have a new page in the magazine (page 62) and it’s one that nearly cost me a lot of money. The page is ‘Classic Bikes’ and each week it will include everything from Colnagos to Moultons, monocoque TT bikes to Flying Gates. The idea came to us following our first visit to Golden Age Cycles near Oxford. After running that feature in January I knew we had to go back to take a closer look at all the wonderful bikes on sale there. However, I decided not to go, and for good reason. I knew I would end up spending a lot of money as I have a hankering for a classic bike. On seeing the photos I knew I’d made the right decision. We found around…

New Zealand champion Ally Wollaston won the two-day Festival Elsy Jacobs on a lumpy course in Luxembourg last weekend in a race of contrasting styles. Wollaston’s young AG Insurance-Soudal-Quick Step team were ever present at the front of the peloton, racing with aggression and youthful exuberance. Even when the 22-year-old was naively caught out of position a couple of times, she had the legs to recover. Defending champion Marta Bastianelli arrived as a clear favourite and her powerful squad’s tactics fitted that bill, UAE Team ADQ reacting but rarely creating. They’d not reckoned on Wollaston, though. Late during Saturday’s opening stage she bridged alone to a four-woman break which survived into the final 500m, where she inexplicably took a wrong turn but was still able to sprint to second place…

Ineos Grenadiers have expressed their alarm at their worsening general classification results, with the British team failing to win one of cycling’s four European WorldTour spring stage races for only the second time in the past 10 years (not counting the truncated Covidaffected spring of 2020). While Tadej Pogačar (Paris-Nice), Primož Roglič (Tirreno-Adriatico and Volta a Catalunya) and Jonas Vingegaard (Itzulia Basque Country) have shown good form since racing returned to Europe in 2023, Ineos’s best stage race result has been Tao Geoghegan Hart’s encouraging win at the Tour of the Alps. With the Giro d’Italia approaching, and the Tour de France only 10 weeks away, Ineos DS Steve Cummings confessed that the team has a lot to do if it is to avoid its first time of going two…

Ferrand-Prevót eyes return to road The only female rider on the Ineos Grenadiers team, Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, is looking to return to road racing, but not before the 2024 Paris Olympics. The Frenchwoman has won rainbow jerseys in cyclo-cross, road racing, on gravel, and mountain biking, but is currently focusing on the latter. Tour de France Netflix series out 8 June Netflix’s Tour de France documentary series, officially called Tour de France: Unchained will be released on 8 June, it was announced last week, along with a trailer. The highly anticipated series follows seven teams, and is made by the people behind Drive to Survive. 16.8% The percentage fall in Shimano’s revenue from bicycle components in the first three months of 2023, compared to the first three months of 2022. First…

Confidence and a deep sense of belief in oneself are essential traits for an elite sportsperson, and when Remco Evenepoel finished second at the Volta a Catalunya in March, winning two stages and finishing just six seconds behind overall winner Primož Roglič, he loudly exhibited both in his poststage interview. “Were you expecting such a good result here in preparation for the Giro d’Italia?” asked the TV journalist. “Yes, I knew I was good, so I was hoping to come here for the podium and to win some stages, and in the end coming second in GC by only six seconds is like the same time, no? It’s almost the same,” Evenepoel said, his face devoid of a wry smile. “If you see how strong Primož was, and how strong…

GERAINT THOMAS 36 | Ineos Grenadiers | GBr Giro starts: 4 Best GC result: 80th, 2012 Best stage result: 2nd, 2012 and 2017 Geraint Thomas is heading back to Italy on not quite a revenge mission, but a personal assignment to prove to himself that his relationship with the year’s first Grand Tour isn’t as cursed as it appears. Twice the Ineos Grenadier has targeted the maglia rosa, twice he has been foiled by the sort of accidents that he might say only seem to happen to him. First, in 2017, he was caught in a crash provoked by a parked police motorcycle that eventually preceded his early withdrawal. And then, most distressingly, his 2020 hopes evaporated as early as stage three when he was felled by a stray bidon…

The home hero DIEGO ULISSI 33| UAE-Team Emirates | Ita Il Pendolino – The Little Train – has an insatiable thirst to always animate his home Grand Tour, the now-33-year-old amassing eight wins across 10 participations. A wily climber with a quick punch, expect to see him competing for stage honours on uphill finishes and from breakaways. The stage hunter MAGNUS CORT 30 | EF Education-EastPost | Den There are few riders who possess such a broad skillset as the Dane does, the 30-year-old having won sprints, up mountains, on undulating parcours, and from the break. He has eight Grand Tour stage victories, and he can be relied upon, at the very least, to come close to adding to that tally. The TT supremo STEFAN KÜNG 29| Groupama-FDJ | Fra…

ROAD RACING SUNDAY, 30 APRIL 2, 3, 4: 1. Lance Childs (TAAP Cervelo); 2. A. Robertson (Ride Revolution Coaching); 3. L. Armenta Butt (Trash Mile); 4. B. Matthewson (Sigma Sports-Cannondale); 5. A. Wylie (Musette Café RT); 6. L. Simpson (unattached). Sloan Trophy Road Race (Stamfordham, Northumberland): 2, 3, 4: 1. Jack Hartley (BCC Race Team); 2. H. Stroh (TAAP Endura); 3. C. Stubbs (Open Collective); 4. J. Russell (05/03); 5. J. Howcroft (Otley CC); 6. R. King (VC Briganti). SATURDAY, 29 APRIL Northants CRA Handicap Series round five (Southwick, Northants): 3, 4: 1. Oliver Bates (unattached); 2. S. Anderson (Lee Valley YCC); 3. R. Jones (Ride Revolution Coaching); 4. G. Fox (George Fox Cycling Solutions); 5. O. Sewell (Beeston CC); 6. H. Gregory (West Suffolk Wheelers). Peebles CC Road Race…

Getting home is normally simple – you know where it is, and you ride there. It gets more complicated when bits of your bike or bits of you (or both) break. There are a variety of emergency bodges – filling a punctured tyre with grass, repairing a broken chain with a safety pin (as if you’ll have your sewing kit with you). When these fail, the most obvious course of action is to walk. The first thing you’ll notice about walking is what an unbelievably poor means it is of getting anywhere. It can take days to walk home from the far end of even a moderate ride, camping under hedges and foraging for roadkill, only to get home and find your family have breathed a sigh of relief, sold…

Charlie Burton, Beryl’s husband and one of the great characters of British and Yorkshire cycling, has died at the age of 93. A member of the Morley Cycling Club for more than 70 years, including its heyday in the Sixties and Seventies, Charlie was integral to Beryl’s historic achievements, which included seven world titles and an incomparable 122 national titles. “Without Charlie at hand I could rarely bring out my best – I feel as if half of me has been left behind,” Beryl once said. Charlie and Beryl first met in 1952 when they both worked in the same factory in the centre of Leeds. He invited her out on a Sunday club run through the Yorkshire Dales and Charlie had to push her up the hills to begin…

First cycling mentor? “Iljo Keisse. He tried to teach me everything. Not just on the bike, but off the bike I could learn a lot from him and he did a magnificent job. He helped me a lot to become a different athlete but also a different person off the bike.” First race? “A Belgian kermesse that ended with a 1.5km climb of 4%, which for juniors was pretty hard. I was going well into the last two kilometres and then there was a massive crash. I was caught behind with riders touching wheels, some rolling over each other, and I finished 76th.” First crash? “The first stage of my first race in France a guy in front of me got a flat on a corner of a descent, and…

Who’ll be Mark Cavendish’s biggest rival in the seven nailed-on sprint stages is hard to judge, with Mads Pedersen (Trek-Segafredo) and Fernando Gaviria (Movistar) the only two top-10 ranked sprinters on the start line. The former, although now consistently showcasing his turn of speed, doesn’t even class himself as a bona fide sprinter and is instead targeting the points classification, while Colombian Gaviria still looks some way short of the form he had between 2017 and 2019 that brought with it five Giro stages and the maglia ciclamino. The paucity of big name fastmen presents a golden opportunity to riders in the infancy of their careers, namely Kaden Groves (Alpecin-Deceuninck) and Jonathan Milan (Bahrain-Victorious). Australian Groves, 24, won two stages at the recent Volta a Catalunya and is adept at…

umbo-Visma have seen encouraging signs that Jonas Vingegaard is stronger than ever, with his defence of the Tour de France just over two months away. The Danish rider responded to Tadej Pogačar’s beating of him at March’s Paris-Nice by dominating the recent Itzulia Basque Country, where he won three stages and the GC courtesy of uphill sprints, fast descending and long-range solo attacks. “His head is stronger because he knows he’s the best climber” Much has previously been made about the 26-year-old’s quiet persona and his aversion to public attention, but since winning yellow last July, his team has noticed a shift in his personality. “I think when he won the Tour, something fell off his shoulder,” the team’s DS Frans Maassen told Cycling Weekly. “In the past he sometimes…

Brit Claire Steels pulled off an impressive solo victory at the Spanish ReVolta .1 ranked race at the weekend. The Israel-Premier Tech-Roland rider soloed clear of the pack and ended the race with a winning margin of 50 seconds over Belgian Clara Koppenburg. Sparkling junior racer Cat Ferguson put another win on her palmarès at the weekend with victory in the Oakenclough race, finishing ahead of her Shibden-Hope Tech-Apex team-mate Imogen Wolff. In the US the victory of trans woman Austin Killips (Amy D foundation) in the Tour of the Gila, a .2 ranked stage race won by Mara Abbott and Tayler Wiles in the past, generated a predictable measure of outrage from sections of the US press. Killips took the jersey in the mid-race time trial before sealing victory…

I’m a lifelong cycling fan so for my 70th birthday last year my family bought me a surprise trip to Copenhagen to see the first two stages of the Tour de France. After the car, train, plane and Copenhagen metro we finally made it to the Scandic hotel. As we rounded the corner, wheeling our cases, there in front of us in the hotel car park were all the Jumbo-Visma team vehicles. So another surprise. The evening before the stage one TT I was in the hotel lobby with one of my sons and started chatting to two of their DSs. They asked where I was from and we talked about various riders both past and present. As we left their company I happened to say what a pity it…

On board Jumbo-Visma’s bus on the morning of a decisive mountain stage in a Grand Tour – one which will decide the final destination of the leader’s jersey – there are riders kicking their feet, fidgeting. Some have butterflies in their stomach, apprehensive about the parcours ahead of them. The nerves are tangible. “When we are doing the meeting, everybody starts sweating a little bit about the nervous moments that will come in the race,” says Dutchman Robert Gesink. That is everybody but the team’s leader, Primož Roglič. Game plan Despite all the focus and expectation being on him, Roglič – a three-time Vuelta a España winner and favourite for this month’s Giro d’Italia – is a picture of serenity, of calm. “We’re all like that and he’s just sat…

JACK HAIG 29 | Bahrain Victorious | Aus The Queenslander has been building form nicely. He was 11th at Vuelta a Andalucia, 10th at Paris-Nice and then on the podium in third at the Tour of the Alps. Over the years Haig has proved himself steady and reliable rather than sparkling but his best ever Grand Tour result was third at the Vuelta a España last year so if others get into trouble he could just come up on the outside to snatch a result. HUGH CARTHY 28 | EF Education-EasyPost | GBr The Lancastrian has settled into the next-best-lot of GC riders since he placed third at the 2020 Vuelta a España, an eighth and ninth at the last two Giros his best returns. Backed by an ever-improving team,…

Superstar of the 1990s Johan Museeuw, 57, the best Classics rider of his generation, underwent rehab with Lieven Maesschalck four times “If you start rehab with someone, you have to believe in them. The first time in 1992 after I broke my femur was very, very hard, and sometimes quite painful, but the rehab with Lieven worked,” the Belgian tells CW. The second time Museeuw visited Maesschalck was in 1998 when he shattered his left kneecap after a fall on the Paris-Roubaix cobbles in the Forest of Arenberg. Two years later, Museeuw won Roubaix for a second time, famously pointing to his knee as he crossed the line. What sets Maesschalck apart from others in his field is his calming presence and approach to treatment, according to Museeuw. “He is…

'It’s not all that long since I wrote a column in praise of the ‘Road Closed’ sign – and the nirvana of peace and quiet that almost always lies beyond. Not long afterwards I was out for a ride with my friend Bernard, when, in deepest Hertfordshire, we came across a big red sign with ‘Emergency Road Closure’ written on it. If we’d had a Champagne glass each, we could have clinked them together as we breezed past. We were rewarded with glorious, empty road. Then we passed a traffic cone in the road with a small blue ‘Police – Road Closed’ sign sticking out of it. This caused me a flicker of concern. Bernard, on the other hand, foresaw the only thing he likes better than a closed road;…

The gravel bike revolution has been a bit slow around my way. That’s because the arable flatlands don’t have much in the way of suitable paths and tracks. Which is why a friend, having bought a gravel bike, found it spent all its time in the garage. Eventually he put it on his turbo trainer and left it there. Until last week, when he got home from work in a state of excitement, grabbed the bike and headed out the door again. They’d put chippings down on the road through the village. He had a great time.…