Indholdsfortegnelse for April 13, 2023 i Cycling Weekly

I rarely talk about helmets in my editorial. It’s a subject that sparks fierce debate, as emotions understandably run high. First things first, I wear one and in general think it a good idea for others to as well. But a bit of compressed polystyrene is no substitute for sensible riding and, more importantly, safe driving by all road users. The reason I want to raise it this week is not just because of our feature on concussion (page 46) but because of two press releases from helmet manufacturers that genuinely shocked me The first one, from Endura, included the stories of two riders who were hit by vehicles. They weren’t wearing helmets and were badly hurt. Unsurprisingly, they are now campaigning on helmet use. But suggesting the solution to…

Besides the strength of Mathieu van der Poel, the thing that struck me most about this year’s men’s race was the sheer speed of it. Last year’s edition, won by Dylan van Baarle at 45.792kph, was the fastest in five years, until his compatriot came along and kicked the benchmark out by another kilometre per hour. It was a sight to behold, and a tough one to keep pace with for me and the journalists with whom I was car-sharing at the race. Setting out from Compiègne, we decided to try to catch a cobbled sector en route to Roubaix. It’s cars versus bikes, we thought, this should be easy. How wrong we were. When we turned up to the first sector, we noticed the television helicopter drifting away into…

Initially a reserve, British road champion Alice Towers only got the call-up to this year’s Roubaix two weeks before the race. “I was really nervous,” she said afterwards, which is why she chose to escape up the road. There, safe from the perilous proximity of the bunch, she rode for 100km as part of the breakaway move from which Alison Jackson eventually won. “I’d been on one recon, and I just sort of dived in,” Towers told CW. “The plan was to be vigilant. I was more of a support rider for the first bit of the race, and then the break actually went quite a long way, and I was there at the very end. So I’m pleased about that.” On her Roubaix debut, the 20-year-old crossed the line in…

Garmin Edge 540 and 840 unveiled Garmin has brought solar charging and climb tracking to its latest editions of its two mid-tier GPS bike computers. Both units are now available with solar charging built into the glass of the screen and have a host of other training and tracking features not on the outgoing models, such as the ability to set power targets for a given course. Campag responds to Open Cycle recall Italian marque Campagnolo has sought to dismiss any notion that its brake hoses are defective after frame manufacturer Open Cycle recalled a raft of its frames. Open Cycle urged consumers to stop using any Campag Ekar-equipped bicycle immediately. It said it had found the hoses were susceptible to damage from the cable guide. Responding to Cycling Weekly,…

On a hot, cloudless March day in 2009, a young Chris Froome took to the roads of Africa for the Cape Argus Giro del Capo Challenge. Riding for the Britishregistered, Italian-based Barloworld team, Froome already had a Tour de France in his legs and comfortably won the first of three days of racing in South Africa against a small field of riders most of whom had never been anywhere near a Grand Tour. The former Kenyan mountain biker was still working life out as a professional rider, and that win was his third ever on a road bike. Days later he was back in Europe and settling into a season of more intense racing. Looking back at his results that year with the benefit of hindsight – 36th overall in…

If you’ve ever fancied a real, bona fide rainbow jersey of your own, the Gralloch on 20 May is your chance. At least it is one of 16 chances to get a ticket to this year’s gravel World Championship in Veneto, Italy. The Gralloch is the seventh race in the 16-round Trek UCI World Gravel Series, and riders in the top 25% of their age group in each round will qualify for the Veneto Worlds. Win your age group there and you get to wear a set of real rainbow bands and thumb your nose at anyone who tells you you’ve got to earn them to wear them. The series kicks off in Spain this month with La Indomable on Sunday 23 April and is truly global, with events as…

Dov Tate, founder and CEO of British wheel brand Parcours, is an Oxford educated engineering graduate whose groundbreaking study into real-world yaw angles with Nottingham Trent University is being written up as an academic paper. How does he define a white paper? “A white paper is an in-depth report on a specific topic. In our case, wheel design. It starts with a problem and presents the solution. It isn’t just a score sheet. if you think back to writing up an experiment it’s your abstract, method, results and conclusion. And in our wheel development white papers the abstract is the summary, the method is ‘this is how we went about the design process and this is what we were looking to achieve’, the results are ‘this is the output of…

When Romain Bardet crashed on stage 13 of the 2020 Tour de France, live TV footage showed him holding his head before being helped gingerly to his feet. He appeared shaken, unsteady and almost certainly in need of medical assessment. Despite this, he was allowed to ride the remaining 90km. The next day, the Guardian celebrated Bardet’s having ridden “through the pain barrier”. Scans after the stage diagnosed the French rider with a brain haemorrhage, calling into question the actions of officials at the crash scene in allowing him to continue. Riding with a brain injury is not heroic – it is potentially lethal. Thankfully times are changing: pro cyclists and those around them are starting to take concussion far more seriously. Amateur riders need to be aware of the…

Concussion symptoms to check for in a rider who has crashed and potentially sustained traumatic force to the head: ▪ Dazed, blank or vacant look ▪ Lying motionless on the ground, and/or slow to get up ▪ Unsteady on feet, balance problems, falling over and/or poor coordination ▪ Confused, not aware of events leading up to the injury or surroundings ▪ Grabbing/clutching of head ▪ More emotional or irritable than usual ▪ Damaged helmet The less obvious signs include: ▪ Headache ▪ Dizziness ▪ Confusion or brain fog ▪ Visual problems ▪ Nausea and/or vomiting ▪ Fatigue ▪ Difficulty concentrating ▪ Pressure in head ▪ Sensitivity to light and/or noise If you suspect a rider is concussed, do not leave them alone. If they develop severe neck pain, a loss…

Within the space of a few days last month Kristen Faulkner was disqualified from third place at Strade Bianche and Wout van Aert was not disqualified from first place at the E3 Saxo Bank Classic. Faulkner’s crime was that she used a blood glucose monitor, and Van Aert’s acquittal related to him having had his chain lubed by a mechanic hanging out of the window of a moving team car. There have been a lot of cries of injustice and inconsistency, since both of these things appear equally clearly banned by the UCI. As luck would have it, my absence of any life outside cycling meant I was watching both incidents on live TV. When the TV camera zoomed in on the little round bottle-cap of the monitor visible through…

A club rider, well-known for a truculent approach to authority, arrived at a road-closed sign. There was a diversion indicated, which for once he decided to follow. The reason he obediently followed it was because he suspected it would route him down the M3, thus offering an unmissable chance to mount a protest against a diversion that failed to take into account the needs of non-motorway-legal traffic. And that was exactly the route he was shown. He set off down the hard shoulder, primed for confrontation. He had to do it twice before the police stopped him. In some ways the highlight of the story is that when the police delivered him home (they insisted), his wife greeted him with a weary, “What did you do this time?”…

There was one statistic on everyone’s lips at the start line of the men’s Paris-Roubaix. Josh Tarling, just 19 years and 53 days old, was set to become the youngest male rider since 1937 to compete in the race. The day turned out to be a baptism of fire for the young Brit. With 150km to go, Tarling crashed with his Ineos Grenadiers teammate Luke Rowe, bloodying his knee and tearing his kit. He ended up riding over 100km alone to Roubaix velodrome, where he finished six and a half minutes adrift of the time cut. How did he find the race? “Long,” he smiled, standing proudly under the sun. “[I had] a crash and two punctures, so I’ve done Paris-Roubaix right, no?” For Tarling, abandoning the race was never…

How to get there The nearest station is 45min drive away in Dumfries, so you’re likely to be arriving at Gatehouse of Fleet by car. Coming from the north you’ll need the A74(M) before turning west at Lockerbie. From the south it’s the M6 to Gretna Green where again you’ll head west. From either of these, allow around 1hr 15min on single carriageway A-roads to get you to Gatehouse. Where to stay and eat We stayed with the Ship Inn, a lovely old building in a great town-centre spot, with excellent food on offer and very friendly service (theshipinngatehouse.com). We stayed in the hotel’s extremely comfortable selfcatering accommodation. Also in town is the Murray Arms Hotel and the Masonic Lodge (we had a slap up pre-ride fish ‘n’ chips in…

Concussion is caused by force, usually sudden deceleration, which may or may not be the result of a direct impact to the head. Therefore, a helmet cannot prevent concussion. Assessing your helmet post-crash can be helpful, though, as any visible damage strongly implies the possibility of concussion. There is some evidence that helmets with MIPS (Multi-directional Impact Protection System) may reduce rotational forces in cases of angled impacts to the head. However, the primary role of a helmet is not to prevent concussion but to protect from structural skull injury.…

Manx legend Mark Cavendish equalled his best result yet for his new Astana-Qazaqstan team last week when he placed third at sprinters’ Classic Scheldeprijs. Considering his other third was on stage one of the UAE Tour it was arguably his best result in 2023. No one in Belgium that afternoon was, however, a match for Jasper Philipsen (Alpecin-Deceuninck) who took his fourth win of the season. The women’s edition of the race was also won by the bookies’ favourite Lorena Wiebes (SD Worx). Benefitting from a textbook lead-out Wiebes held off a strong challenge from DSM sprinter Charlotte Kool who was coming up fast on her compatriot’s left but ultimately ran out of road to get the overtake done. Wiebes has now won all three runnings of the race, which has…

I was heartened to hear of the efforts to reinstate a velodrome in the Midlands that would provide much needed all-weather facilities and draw on a huge reservoir of talent. It may not be obvious now, but from the 1950s the area was a hotbed of track cycling with well supported meetings and leagues at venues such as Wolverhampton, Cannock, Nottingham, Halesowen, Newcastle-under-Lyme, Salford Park in Birmingham, Coventry and Leicester. The events drew top riders from the UK and the Continent. Leicester successfully hosted World and National Championships. Many events were televised and took the sport to the public. The reprehensible loss of the latter three velodromes signalled a decline in UK track sport, until the rise of the Olympians. As they say; the rest is history. Surely it’s in…

Dirk De Wolf and Tom Boonen’s Colnago-bashing Wielerclub Wattage podcast, in which De Wolf claimed there was a 2kph difference between the Italian brand’s new V4Rs bike and the best competitor WorldTour bikes, made the biggest headlines when Colnago struck back. Rather than waving a white flag, Colnago instead waved its white paper: “Here is our data. Where is yours?” The exchange served to reinforce the position of the white paper in today’s bike industry. Namely, if you are going to make particular claims you’d better be able to back them up with data. Boonen climbed down and apologised, despite being invited to Cambiago for a “public conversation”. “I was hoping to be able to ride with Tom,” says Colnago’s head of R&D Davide Fumagalli. “I always admired him for…

Given that all of these shoes are flagship models or similar, expectations were high. Separating them was unlikely to be easy. And that, by and large, proved to be the case. The Sidi shoes received the lowest rating but this does come with an asterisk of sorts; a slimmer shoe, they were poorly matched to the reviewer’s foot shape, meaning comfort was always an unlikely outcome. The other five pairs fared better fit-wise, and as result, delivered better-performing and more comfortable shoes. Both the S-Works Torch and S-Phyre RC903 are hard to fault. Both are lightweight, super-stiff yet still incredibly comfortable, even over long distances – and have clean and stylish silhouettes. The Fizik Vento Stabilita are another pair of superb shoes, and like all of the above, are well suited…

The medical team at British Cycling have collected data on every concussion sustained by a GB team rider since 2017. The mean length of recovery is 14-15 days, with daily monitoring. For recreational riders without daily access to medical staff, the recovery time may be a little longer. BC recommends following these five stages of recovery: ▪ After a concussion, take two restful days, avoiding phones, computer screens and exercise. ▪ On day three, if you have no or only mild symptoms, you can begin a gradual return to daily life – but rest if your symptoms get worse. ▪ Provided you’re feeling OK after a few days, you can step up cognitive activities and add in light training – research has found that safe, nonstressful aerobic exercise can improve…