Indholdsfortegnelse for August 10, 2023 i Cycling Weekly

Great Britain’s para-cyclists continued the stunning form that saw them win 20 gold medals at the World Championships in Paris last year. Among the most successful riders were tandem duo Jenny Holl and Sophie Unwin, who won three world titles in four days, prevailing in the blind kilometre time trial, sprint and three-kilometre individual pursuit. There were rainbow jerseys, too, for Paralympic stars Jaco van Gass, Fin Graham, Kadeena Cox, Fran Brown, Sam Ruddock, Neil Fachie and Jody Cundy. Cundy’s victory in the C4 kilo – his 14th in a row – came in what has been a difficult year for the 44-year-old, in which he has battled depression following an injury. “It was getting to the point where I had no motivation,” he told the media, including CW. “But…

The recent history of the 10-mile road bike record is a fascinating story that starts with the phenomenal achievement of Colin Sturgess in 1988. Sturgess set the time of 18.48, which at the time was not just the fastest road bike record, but the fastest competition time on any type of bike. As TT bikes became popular from the 1990s onwards, the overall 10-mile record tumbled many times over the next 25 years – until Marcin Białobłocki set his blistering 16:35 in 2016, which still stands today. All the while, Sturgess’s mark still stood as the fastest road bike 10 – until George Fox turned his attention to the effort in 2019. In May that year, Fox smashed through the 20-minute barrier on a road bike with a time of…

Awomen’s race at the Herne Hill Velodrome as part of the ‘Kings Kollege Karnival’ in September 1930. To those unfamiliar, it might appear unusually progressive for the time, with the women not only racing but wearing shorts too. But track cycling in general was surely the most forward-looking arena of the sport during the first half of the 20th century. It not only allowed riders to go head-to-head without angering the establishment (or indeed, even raising an eyebrow), but women were welcome, if not necessarily equal. As early as the first decade of 1900s, women could be seen lining up for massed-start races wearing shorts – while on the road massed-start races, let alone women’s massed-start races, were seen as reckless and unseemly by many. It was a time when…

If Frank Sinatra’s Love and Marriage was rewritten with a cycling theme, Sean Kelly and the Vitus 979 would surely be the top contenders to replace the horse and carriage of the original. The famous French bike, with its slender anodised tubes and smooth aluminium cast lugs, was ridden to countless pro victories in the 1980s by the hard-as-nails, charismatic Irishman. But for his second and final Milan-San Remo victory in 1992, Kelly descended the Poggio at an impossible speed to catch and outsprint Moreno Argentin on a brand-new Vitus 992. The 992 shared its method of construction with the 979: aluminium tubes were bonded into cast lugs to make frames that were much lighter than their steel counterparts. Vitus claimed its patented method – dry heat-activated epoxy bonding aluminium-magnesium…

Duelling tandems Sophie Unwin and her pilot Jenny Holl are held up against the fence by their Australian opponents Jessica Gallagher and pilot Caitlin Ward in their gold-medal sprint. The Australians won the first round but the British pair came back to win the next two and take the women’s B sprint title as Great Britain dominated on the boards. Tandem racing was once the highlight of able-bodied track events, but fell out of favour. Now it wows the crowds at Para-cycling events and is a spectacular sight.…

After nine years away from the top step at the World Championships, Great Britain’s women’s team pursuit squad won a resounding gold medal on home soil in Glasgow last Saturday. The team – composed of Katie Archibald, Josie Knight, Anna Morris, Elinor Barker, and Meg Barker, who rode in the first round – clocked a time of 4:08.771, beating New Zealand in the final by over four and a half seconds. The victory was met with rapturous applause inside the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome, and when the team stepped off their bikes, they received a guard of honour from the GB staff. The last time the women’s squad won the rainbow jersey in the team pursuit, Elinor Barker was just 19 years old and riding her first World Championships, alongside…

The British team lined up for the 70km junior women’s road race last weekend as the strong favourites following a season of international success on the road. But a late attack from Julie Bego of France saw the British team and lead rider Cat Ferguson finish in a desperate bid to save the silver medal. After Bego had launched her move, Ferguson, Imogen Wolff and Awen Roberts led a small group in the chase behind, but their efforts were disrupted by French riders while other countries, fearful of Ferguson’s fast finish, were unwilling to work. Bego soloed to the win, and coming into the final kilometre the group behind was lined out with gaps appearing as Belgian Fleur Moors had also jumped clear. It looked like the podium was out…

One of the most highly anticipated bikes of 2024, the Specialized Tarmac SL8 is finally here and I was lucky enough to be the first person outside Specialized to ride it in the UK. Here are my first ride thoughts. Traditionally, the Tarmac is Specialized’s do-it-all road race bike. However, this version of the bike could actually be seen as a bit of a Frankenstein’s monster as it is clearly influenced by, and uses the carbon layup of, the brand’s super-light weight Aethos model. Redesigned frame If you draw a vertical line through the SL8, you’re left with a split which is Aethos-inspired at the rear and ‘next gen’ Tarmac at the front. It’s really obvious on the down tube, as the lower half is more circular and thinner compared…

Pirelli P Zero Race TLR tyre £78.99 Being the first of Pirelli’s tyres to be made in Italy (France is the usual country of manufacture), the tubeless-ready P Zero Race TLR incorporates the Italian brand’s ‘Speedcore’ technology and its ‘SmartEVO’ compound. Let’s unpack that a bit. Speedcore refers to the aramid fibres which bind with the other chemical elements in the tyres to improve puncture protection while adversely impacting the rolling resistance. SmartEVO, on the other hand, refers to the three different polymers which Pirelli combines into a single compound to improve grip and lower the rolling resistance – in all weather conditions. Since the launch of these tyres back in March of this year, Pirelli has issued a recall of the 28mm width (the width we had on test)…

The musette is a flimsy, cheap cotton bag that regards its sole purpose in life as being to get tangled up in a front wheel. In fact, if you’ve lost a front wheel you can pop a bottle in a musette and use it like a water divining rod. They only exist because of a serious wrong turn pro cycling took after World War Two. Before that the usual form for a feed zone was a series of trestle tables offering a full buffet, and the riders dismounted and sat down to dine in style. To this day the pictogram for the feed zone is a knife and fork, and it was a much more civilised way to do it. After the war, riders started ignoring the feed, and took…

Dutchman Mathieu van der Poel sealed his first road world title in Glasgow at the weekend at the end of an attritional race that saw just 51 riders finish. The much-criticised 14.3km city centre finishing circuit featured 45 corners and blew the bunch to pieces early in the race. In scenes not witnessed in years at a Worlds road race a small elite lead group including van der Poel, Wout van Aert, Tadej Pogačar and Mads Pederson found themselves clear with 40km still to race. Van der Poel made his winning move on a small rise with 22km remaining and after a crash on a wet right hand corner which all but destroyed his right shoe, he quickly picked himself up, remounted and went on to build a comfortable lead…

Last week, in the space of just 24 hours, Great Britain’s women’s team sprint squad shifted their goal from simply qualifying for the Paris Olympics, to winning the gold medal. At the World Championships in Glasgow, the trio of Emma Finucane, Sophie Capewell and Lauren Bell went home with a silver medal behind Germany as both teams beat the previous world record. In the aftermath of Victoria Pendleton’s career, British Cycling struggled to develop enough female sprinters to be competitive at this level and failed to qualify for the team sprint in Tokyo two years ago. But that has all changed and the current trio – with an an average age of 22 – are confident they can beat the best next summer. “We’re no longer the underdogs,” Capewell told…

Charlie Hatton became the fifth British male to win the downhill mountain bike world title at the weekend as he sailed to victory in challenging conditions in Fort William. Compatriot Laurie Greenland took the bronze medal with Austria’s Andreas Kolb finishing second. Celebrating his win, Hatton said: “I’m absolutely speechless, it’s absolutely insane. I love this track and when the rain came down I had a little smile on my face, and I was just like ‘this could be it.’ “We did some good things at the start, we had longer mudguards so my vision was better, we had an extension on the peak for the roll-offs… everything just came together.” The 25-year-old was the 15th last rider to go and when he did he took the lead by over…

British Cycling’s newly appointed CEO Jon Dutton has revealed the organisation’s plans to rejuvenate the domestic cycling set-up in the United Kingdom in the years ahead. In an exclusive interview with Cycling Weekly at the World Championships in Glasgow, Dutton revealed that the organisation has set up a new working group – named the Road Task Force – with the aim of managing the issues faced by teams, race organisers and other stakeholders within the struggling domestic racing scene in Britain. In a wide-ranging interview Dutton said he was also seeking to increase BC’s membership, sign a new headline sponsor and promote inclusivity within the sport after a bruising year of controversy for the governing body in 2022. Dutton explained that forming the new group on road racing is just…

For this latest Gen 7 version of the Madone, Trek’s aero bike, the US brand removed the IsoSpeed Decoupler of the previous Gen 6 model and left, in its place, a big hole. OK, it’s not the crude, reductionist approach it sounds like. The old bike’s suspension system at the top tube/seat tube juncture added weight and was mostly redundant since Trek discovered most riders would ‘set and forget’. And by radically reengineering the frame Trek claims to have saved 300g, and says the new bike is almost 20 watts faster than its predecessor, which equates to 60 seconds per hour when ridden at 45kph. It looks radical, too – always a good thing for a new bike. In our recent 2023 Race Bike of the Year group test we…

Earlier this year, British time triallist George Fox set a new TT record, beating an unofficial mark that had gone unchallenged for three-and-ahalf decades. Fox, a coach and bikefitter (gfoxcycling.co.uk) based in Northamptonshire, claimed the fastest ever 10-mile time trial on a road bike, 18:41 – that’s 51kph or nearly 32mph – seven seconds faster than British icon Colin Sturgess’s time from back in 1988. While the achievements of these two time trialling heroes may seem beyond the dreams of us mere mortals, there is in fact a lot to be learned from these remarkable rides, most notably in the potential for aero gains we can all exploit in our own riding – not just in races but every day. The road bike aero optimisation of Fox and other time…