Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2022 i Procycling

Where’s home? Dendermonde in Belgium, where my kids go to school, not far from where I grew up. There are probably better places to ride your bike in the winter, but Belgium has a good tradition and history, and you can always find nice roads. What’s your favourite race? The Tour of Flanders. I always have the honour of training on those roads. It is my favourite because of the atmosphere, being close to home and the history. But also being capable of winning is part of it. I think if I was a climber it would not be that race. You always search for things that you are good at. What’s your favourite climb? I like the Ardennes. I like La Redoute, for example. There are also some nice…

“Heeeey Iris!! How’s it going, girl?” I have called Harrie countless times over the past 15 years, and not once has he answered the phone without enthusiasm. That first question always used to be followed by the inevitable second: “When are we going again?” He would be referring to the moped training that we used to do together. Nowadays we just have a bit of a catch up. This time, however, I had a question for Harrie. Could I interview him? Well, that wasn’t really necessary for Harrie. Lizzie wanted some unsung heroes in her magazine, but Harrie doesn’t consider himself a hero at all. However after a bit of persistence and a lunch date as a bargaining chip he finally gave in. I met Harrie when I’d been cycling…

CERVÉLO R5 DISC FORCE ETAP AXS £8,599 ||| $8,400 Go get those Strava KoMs with the R5 from Cervélo, Jumbo-Visma’s climbing bike. The Canadian company have improved on the previous model, with the emphasis on less stiffness so it doesn’t feel as harsh on the road. It is a WorldTour bike that rides like one of the best in the world, as it is designed to. This bike comes with Sram Force eTap for flawless gear shifting on those climbs. It can also go downhill just as well as up, and is no slouch on the flat either. A 56cm frame weighs in at just 703g, making it perfect for days in the mountains. www.cervelo.com SHIMANO S-PHYRE RC902 SHOES £319 ||| $378 These are the ultimate road shoes, designed for…

Giro d’Italia, Stage 12 Siena, Italy 20 MAY 2021 The peloton rolls through Siena at the start of stage 12 of the Giro d’Italia. The Tuscan hilltop city usually hosts the finish of Strade Bianche, but this time the riders were able to go downhill from the start. The stage finished in Bagno di Romagna, where Andrea Vendrame would triumph from the breakaway, beating Chris Hamilton in the sprint. Jered Gruber, the photographer behind this picture, says: “I settled nervously around what amounted to almost a city switchback, but there were people everywhere, a car horribly placed almost right in the middle. It was chaos. And then, something happened - it was like the clouds parted, the sun shone through, and someone waved their magic wand. The car drove away…

A very tall Dutch rider with prospects in the classics, then? Daan Hoole is stepping up to the WorldTour in 2022 with Trek-Segafredo after four years with the talent factory that is SEG Racing. What has he achieved with SEG? The Dutchman finished ninth at this year’s Tour de l’Avenir. Daan explains: “With the Dutch squad we were very successful and the way we were riding I enjoyed it. Finishing ninth in the GC is something I never thought I was able to do, as I am 198cm and 82 kilos. This was the first time I enjoyed climbing in the big mountains.” Is there anything else notable in his results? In one of his first races as a stagiaire with Trek-Segafredo, Daan finished eighth at Binche-Chimay-Binche, ahead of multiple…

A lot of teenage boys can say their world turned with a kiss on a dancefloor or perhaps the first guitar chord they ever heard from a soon-to-be favourite band but not many would attribute the same life-altering potential to a cycling magazine. Yet I still remember the place, Lichfield WHSmith, and the date, April 1999. Serendipitously, it was the same day I was being interviewed for an EU-funded programme that would take me to work in Italy for the first time - another future-defining event in my then 18-year-old-life. But it was upon locking eyes with a photo of Marco Pantani, then excitedly scanning the bullet-point headlines of Procycling’s launch issue (Pantani: “Being mad is what keeps me alive”; “Ullrich in Mallorca: Fat Boy Slims Down” - very much…

GENT-WEVELGEM 2012 In her first full season on the road, Deignan presages her future with a solo attack with 25km to go in the inaugural Gent-Wevelgem for women, holding off a pursuit by Dutch rider Iris Slappendel. DRENTHE 2014 Bridges up from a small group to chase down solo escapee Anna van der Breggen then outsprints the Dutchwoman. The win lays the foundation for victory in the World Cup. BINDA 2015, 2016 Takes two wins in the early-season Italian classic. In 2015 she outsprints a small group, while in 2016 as world champion she wins with a late solo break to win by a handful of seconds. PLOUAY ‘15, ’17, ’20 Deignan’s first and second wins in Plouay come from late attacks and subsequently outsprinting select groups; the third time…

YOU HAVE THE LEADERS AND THEY GET MOST OF THE SPOTLIGHT. THAT’S THE WAY CYCLING WORKS. Then there are the people that work for the leaders. It is not a bad thing. I’m not frustrated about it. All you need to know for yourself is that the leaders probably wouldn’t be there without you. If it feels good for you that you have done your work for someone else, and you did it well and the way you were asked to, then that is a big satisfaction. It is a process, it depends where you’re starting from. I was never really a rider that people said would be a leader, so from the beginning I was pushed to be a helper. It was natural, I was always surrounded by riders…

You cannot separate a rider from their training routes, especially when it’s the ones they grew up on. Lizzie Deignan is having a quick blast around a circuit called the ‘After School Loop’, a grippy 12-mile loop starting and finishing in Otley, taking in the countryside to the northwest of the town. The After School Loop is as prosaic a name as you could get for a training route - Deignan used to ride around it after school. What else would you call it? Otley sits in the valley of Wharfedale, but there are hills in all directions, especially to the north and south, and so the After School Loop is mostly up and down. It climbs out of Otley on the B6451, one of those two-lane British roads that…

MIRJAM MELCHERS WINNER IN 2005 AND 2006 After finishing fourth in the inaugural Tour of Flanders Dutch rider Mirjam Melchers went on to win the next two editions “In those years we were really struggling to get a bit more professionalism and that we could compete in those races really helped: we made a big step forward. When you start cycling it’s always a bit of a search for your strong points and after my fourth place, I had the feeling I could do some good results in Flanders. The second time was my toughest race ever. It was an early escape, 40km from the finish, I was one minute ahead of Christiane Soeder and then she came back to me in the last 3k. My legs were really bad,…

We carry our past and our childhood with us. For EF Education-Nippo rider Neilson Powless, the winner of the Donostia Klasikoa on 31 July, these include a chilling tale of racial violence and revenge he heard many times growing up. Simon Antoine, an Oneida Native American, was jumped by four white men. They beat him up and left him for dead. But Simon Antoine survived. He crawled to safety, recovered, then hunted down his assailants and killed them one by one. It’s uncertain when this happened: it must have been around the 1820s, when the Oneida were moved from what white America calls New York State to Wisconsin, a thousand miles away, and the reservations where they are now concentrated. But Simon Antoine certainly existed. He lived into the age…