Indholdsfortegnelse for August 5, 2021 i Cycling Weekly

Hands up whose cycling started on a BMX? When asked I usually say that my sky blue Raleigh Elan was my first bike. But that was my first road race bike. Before that I had a mountain bike and before that a BMX. It’s not out of disrespect that I say the race bike is my ‘first bike’, it’s that my focus has always been on road riding and the fact it was the first bike that I had to pay for myself. I’m now racking my brains to try and remember what BMX I had. I remember the race plate on the front and the foam padding around the top tube, and I think it was blue. But that’s about it. I’m going to have to search through my…

Unstoppable van Vleuten Not even jet lag can stop Annemiek van Vleuten as the Olympic TT champion flew straight back to Europe to win the Donostia San Sebastián at the weekend. No other rider from the top 20 in the road race in Tokyo was even on the start line. Neilson Powless (EF Education Nippo) won the men’s race ahead of double Tour de France stage winner Matej Mohori? (Bahrain Victorious). Bigger gears, smaller chains GB’s track riders took to the Izu Velodrome in Japan with smaller chains and chainrings. With gearing getting so big in recent years the squad has been using chains with a 10mm pitch (standard is 12.7mm) which gives smaller rings that save weight, increase rigidity and improve efficiency as the load is spread around the…

You can’t blame Carl Fredrik Hagen for feeling more than a little alarmed in the immediate aftermath of his March training crash – he couldn’t find his arm. The Israel Start-Up Nation rider had been training around his home in Norway and was nearing the end of a four-hour endurance ride on a road he’d ridden many times before, when he hit a pothole. “I immediately lost control,” he says. “There was a barrier at the side of the road and my bike went up it. I went from 40kph to zero in one second.” The barrier hooked his arm as he flew over it, violently dislocating his right shoulder. He ended up in a ditch on the other side, nearly breaking his leg. “The first thing I remember was…

With travel outside the UK remaining complicated and restricted for at least the next few months, the best place for us to put into practice the advice found on these pages is within the British Isles. To that end, we’ve picked four climbs on which to deploy the tips and techniques from our pro climbers. TAN HILL YORKSHIRE DALES 18.4 KM, 1.8% AVG Approach Tan Hill from the village of Reeth in the east and you are faced with a steady ascent for 18.4km – the third longest stretch of ascending road in England. The gradient is shallow, save for a fierce ramp that points skywards in the finishing section, so it allows you to practise climbing as a TT-like effort, trying to maintain a constant rhythm, a la Bradley…

In association with ROAD RACING SUNDAY, 1 AUGUST Upton CC Summer Road Race (Pontefract, West Yorkshire): Men E, 1, 2, 3: 1. Jim Brown (Canyon-DHB) 80 miles in 2:52.33; 2. F. Crockett (Wheelbase-CabTech); 3. J. Crook (Dolan-Ellesse); 4. O. Rees (Trinity Racing); 5. S. Wilson (Ribble-Weldtite Pro Cycling); 6. A. Mitchell (Crimson Orientation Marketing) all same time; 7. D. Watson (Clancy Briggs Cycling Academy) +1.07; 8. D. Clayton (Canyon-DHB); 9. J. Wilson (Ribble-Weldtite Pro Cycling); 10. F. Barber (Spirit RT) all st. Nick Clayton Memorial (Aston on Club Shropshire): Men 2, 3, 4: 1. Travis Bramley (Nopinz-Motip RT) 69 miles in 2:30.30; 2. D. Hird (Halesowen A&CC); 3. G. Moore (Cero-Cycle Division); 4. C. Genner (Zappi RT); 5. A. Cross (Bristol RC) all same time; 6. E. Baratt (TAAP Cervelo)…

This issue from early in World War One features what must be one of the most eye-catching headlines the magazine has ever run: ‘Tactical use of Machine Guns for Cyclists.’ Not a piece you’d read nowadays. This seems to be on a section for military cycling. Bikes were widely used in the military at this time, and some war historians believe the use of machine guns was the real strength of the German’s trench warfare. It starts with the line: “The advantage of the machine gun for an army in general and cyclists in particular in a recent article elicited much interest.” We’re confident this would have been an article very much aimed at soldiers using bikes, rather than anyone facing road rage on their way to work. The writer…

Summer is in full swing: we’ve enjoyed a brilliant Tour de France and the Vuelta is just around the corner. If you’re anything like me, these Grand Tours always leave you wishing, if only I could climb as well as the pro mountain goats! OK, so we can’t really hope to match the powerful rhythm set by the world’s finest, but we certainly can learn from them. That’s why we’ve asked a selection of climbing specialists for their advice on how every rider can climb faster – without losing weight. Being chivvied to shed kilos to climb faster is just too obvious, and too often leads to counter-productive crash diets, so we’re not going there. Amateur riders cannot reasonably be expected to reach pro-level leanness, which demands a monastic lifestyle…

My big hope for July was to do some racing and prove that my training was taking me in the right direction. Well, as it turned out, racing doesn’t always follow the script. My main event of the month was the National Sprinters League at Herne Hill on 11 July. In my first match sprint I was narrowly beaten, a disappointment that was promptly followed by a puncture – leaving me frantically hunting down a replacement wheel. The next repechage [second chance for non-qualifiers] was delayed for me, so thankfully I won it! Without any time to recover, I was called up for my next race, and placed a disappointing sixth. Ah well, I lived to fight another day! The keirin racing afterwards was better, but I just didn’t have…

I don’t think it would be entirely wrong to suggest that recent social and political trends in the Western World have come to regard knowledge as overrated. It’s not about what you know, it’s about what you feel. Which brings me neatly to the Olympic women’s road race, where there was ability, commitment and skill, but knowledge was indeed thin on the ground. While I run the risk of skirting close to Donald Rumsfeld territory here, as viewers we don’t even really know what it was the riders didn’t know. Or if they knew they didn’t know it. Or why the ones that seemingly did know it kept it to themselves. To summarise, apparently no one in the dominant Dutch team knew that the last member of the breakaway, Anna…

“There are lumps to it, it’s certainly not a drag strip,” recalled John Archibald (Eolo-Kometa) when we asked him about the National 25 course in Keswick. He has ridden a 10-mile and a 50-mile test on the same course before. “Even the hills are big ring all the way,” he continued. “There’s quite a bit of traffic so the times there are quick even though you might not think it when you first ride it.” CONTENDERS Alex Clay (The Independent Pedaler - Nopinz) Although Clay racked up a host of podiums at National Championships last season, she’s yet to bag a crown for herself. Shorter distances tend to suit her better. CW rating Joanna Parsons (The Independent Pedaler - Nopinz) Winner of the National 100 a few weeks ago was…

In response to the letter of the week; ‘Cav’s comeback considered’ (CW 22 July). This was surely the most negative perspective on Cav’s performance and I am sad that Chris has this view on it. This was never a case of ‘he simply got lucky’ as Chris would have it. You cannot say that what Cav has come through is down to luck. There are no soft options in the Tour, these are the best cyclists in the world and you can only beat what is in front of you. That is true in any sport, luck no doubt has a part to play, but it’s a minor part and is certainly not the deciding factor. You have to train very, very hard and have an awful lot of talent…

Amazingly, Lachlan Morton wasn’t the only madcap Australian riding the Tour and beating the peloton this July. Jack Thompson, an ultra-endurance cyclist whose many accomplishments include riding 3,505km in seven days – a Guinness World Record – gave the peloton a head start of 10 days and then beat them to Paris by two, averaging 300km days and battling through near-constant rain, mist, cold and scorching heat. For his ride unlike Morton he took the transfers by car and was supported by a crew of five who had been planning the challenge for three years. The 32-year-old had dreamt – like many of us – of winning a yellow jersey, but after overcoming depression as a teenager, suffering drug abuse and addiction after finishing university, the Perth-born Girona resident realised…

“It’s no offence to any other companies, but we find it easier to do things ourselves,” says Hope’s Ian Weatherill. Collaborations are great but they can stifle things so it’s a lot easier if we do it all in-house. “We’ve produced our own fork now. The bike was made by us anyway – it was just the forks and the bars that weren’t. “Making the components ourselves we can make things specially. The bridges on the fork are all 3D machined out of aluminium. There are some very elaborate creations on there. We haven’t 3D printed any of the components - we can produce them faster thanks to our machines and know-how. “When you’ve Lotus and Renishaw and British Cycling involved, they love titanium 3D printing but it’s so prohibitive…

Our Grand Tour stage-winners know a thing or two about climbing, but if they could send us to practise our climbing on only one mountain in the world, which would it be? TEJAY VAN GARDEREN MT FIGUEROA, CALIFORNIA, USA It’s the mountain that makes me strong. It’s 14.5km and averages around 8.5 per cent gradient; it would be a HC climb in the Tour. When I need fitness or need to step up my training, I head there. I have ridden it so much I have tyre marks on the road. I also have the Strava KoM for all three ways – just saying! ROBERT GESINK COLLD’ORDINO, ANDORRA Both sides of Ordino are fantastic. There’s barely any traffic, the sun’s always on you and the gradient is nice. The forested…

Rhianna on Adey I first met Adey at a starts session at Derby Velodrome in 2019 when I was just starting out and still had no idea what I was doing! It was a great session, and I spoke to Adey afterwards to ask him for advice. He was the only person in those early days who actually made time for me and sat down with me. Adey on Rhianna Rhianna is great! When I first saw her on the track, I was just ‘wow’ – the raw talent was so striking. Because she came from a running sprint background, starts were relatively easy for her. The challenge for Rhianna, not having come from a cycling background, is that she is playing catch-up – and Covid has limited her track…

If you run road tyres with inner tubes (that’s most of us), you may think you don’t need to find a puncture because you can just use a new tube. But wait. If you don’t remove whatever caused the puncture, how do you stop it happening again? First, then, run your fingers round the inside of the tyre carcass. This does two things. It covers your fingers in a black goop. Don’t worry. You can wipe it off onto any white bits of your kit and be confident it will still be there after it’s washed. The other thing it does is apparently make the flint, thorn, glass or whatever caused the puncture fold itself flat to the carcass, because you will never find anything. Next, try to get a…