Innehållsförteckning för October 31, 2019 från Cycling Weekly

When Rod Ellingworth was announced as the new man in charge of the Bahrain-Merida Pro team, along with the move to bring McLaren and its operations deeper into the running of the team, Mark Cavendish must have thought all his prayers had been answered. Approaching the end of his career, with his position at Dimension Data tenuous following his non-selection at the Tour de France, his options for 2020 were limited. Take a look at the WorldTour teams then start crossing out those with a sprinter, those without the budget and those who just wouldn’t fit. There weren’t many options left. Then Ellingworth joined Bahrain and the stars aligned. Ellingworth is the coach who turned Cavendish into the rider he is, and one of a few people that the Manxman…

ROB HAYLES Former pro If you take a look at the newly-formed composition of the Bahrain-Merida management structure, then Cav’s move there should come as no great surprise. Rod Ellingworth, who now heads up the squad, has been instrumental to most of what Cavendish and a great number of the British riders have accomplished. If you know, then you know. But to casual followers of cycling, Ellingworth will probably not come high on their list of conduits to success for riders from these shores over the last 14 years or so. Rod set up the Academy where the likes of Swift, Stannard, Thomas and Cavendish himself learnt their trade. He nurtured them, coached them, on and off the bike. Gave them the tools to become as good as they could…

■ The Giro de Rigo series is a partnership with Rigoberto Urán’s official sportive in Colombia. Giro de Rigo runs as a group workout series in preparation for the main event which takes place on Sunday November 3 — this will be an epic Zwift challenge ride. ■ There will be a series of Movember rides in game as well as an in-game mission. Once 10,000 people have ridden 9.9 hours in game, this unlocks a $25,000 donation from Zwift to the Movember charity. Why 9.9? This represents the 9.9m living with prostate cancer worldwide. ■ The Tour de Zwift and Tour of Watopia will be taking place in January and March respectively. ■ Well-attended weekly races include: The Friday night criterium: 19:00 (GMT) Time trial Tuesday: 18:00-19:00 Kiss 100km…

Second place. With time, it’s a finishing position to be proud of. In the immediate aftermath though, most rue the missed opportunities. For James Phillips, though, the middle step on the podium at the inaugural British Cycling eRacing Championships in March was greeted with satisfaction and no regrets. “I was pretty happy. It was a surprise I wasn’t expecting,” he reflects. Phillips was content because just four months earlier he had broken his leg and collarbone in a cyclo-cross race. “I wasn’t on my bike until the end of December,” he reveals, “and it wasn’t until February that I sprinted without pain. I was racing on Zwift and getting beaten by people I would usually easily beat. “I knew I had the potential to win but I wasn’t at 100…

Just about holding on in Europe and America, traditional roller racing is alive and well in the UK. Though it has neither the mass appeal of 75 years ago nor the championships of e-racing, Rollapaluza has been instrumental in its UK revival. “We started when one of the couriers I was working with saw a home trainer contest in the Cycle Messenger World Championships in Switzerland,” says Rollapaluza director Caspar Hughes. “We’ve got a straight knockout format, where we turn up with two bikes and you race everybody until you find the fastest person. On our four-up rig we’ve got a format that involves a devil-takes-the-hindmost, team time trial Madison. “The atmosphere borrows heavily from the courier events, though not quite as rowdy, but it’s a really good, entertaining night…

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In a move that will likely frustrate those who train with their phones, Strava has announced its app will no longer support Bluetooth and ANT+ devices such as power meters or heart-rate monitors. Strava has informed its users that a bug was causing the app to crash. “We recently discovered that pairing Bluetooth heart rate monitors and power meters directly with the app is causing Strava to crash for millions of athletes — most of whom don’t even use these kinds of sensors,” Strava said. “So to significantly improve the stability of the app, we’ll no longer be supporting direct Bluetooth and ANT+ device pairing.” The decision to remove the feature has been met with consternation by some users, but Strava’s UK country manager Gareth Mills said that the company…

Though you can hold on to most of your fitness if you spend all winter confined to the turbo trainer, certain aspects will suffer. Most of us opt for interval sessions or Zwift races indoors, while continuing to do lower-intensity riding outdoors. If you stay inside and do only shorter, high-intensity efforts, your endurance will take a hit. A long spell of neglecting base miles will leave your long-duration endurance lacking. What’s more, your bike-handling and bunch skills will grow rusty. The ideal way of countering these problems is to get off road once or twice a week, allowing you to head out in more treacherous conditions. Better still, racing cyclo-cross will keep you sharp for when the road season kicks off. “CX provides a lot of carry-over to road…

Former pro cyclist James is now a British Cycling-qualified coach spraggcyclecoaching.com Brendan was already training quite well. He doesn’t (yet!) have access to a power meter, other than the gym Wattbike, so all training has been set by rate of perceived exertion (RPE), on a one-to-10 scale. How a session feels is an incredibly important metric. The difficulty without a power meter is measuring the amount a rider has improved. The addition of the five-minute RPE effort each Monday on the Wattbike will allow Brendan to track how he is adapting to the training and decide when to rest and when to push on. I have tweaked Brendan’s schedule to provide greater consistency throughout the week, giving each session a focus without significantly increasing his overall volume. The sessions are…

It is autumn. And as the warm glow that can only be produced by the Tour of Guangxi fades into golden memory, it’s time to accept something. It’s the nadir of the cycling year. Even hill-climb season is over. Winter stretches bleakly ahead. The only people who are happy are cyclo-crossers. When cyclo-crossers were children they were the sort of kids who would fling themselves full-length in any patch of mud they could find, while those of us who’d been brought up properly primly attempted not to get splashed. Their opinion is not something to take too seriously. For normal people there is not much racing. There is not much sun. There is not much daylight, and it’s only going to get worse. However, I regard it as my mission…

A friend of a friend reports that when his octogenarian grandparents downsized to a new flat a couple of years ago, the vendor was a cyclist. Specifically, a cyclist who left a Colnago locked to the radiator pipes in the spare bedroom but promised to retrieve it the next day when he had found the key. A year later it was still there. “He’ll come back,” said Grandad, “it would be embarrassing if we’d moved it.” When his grandparents were out, the friend removed the radiator and freed the bike. He told them that the “owner had finally reclaimed it”. There is one issue: “I’m terrified he’ll show up and discover I’m riding his bike. And that I’ve swapped the Campag groupset for Shimano.”…

Apparently the riders in the men’s field at London Six Day go out after the racing most nights, get back to the hotel in the (no longer very) small hours of the morning, then sleep till the afternoon in order to do it all again. They’re basically rock stars. If the women’s field has the same routine, I’ve never been invited. My Friday evening went like this… Our last race finished at 10pm. I did a bit of a warm-down then sat in our cabin. Each pair of racers gets a cabin for six-day races — it’s a wooden box with a curtain, a cushion and a lamp where you can shut yourself away from the mayhem of the party outside for a bit. This was the first time I’ve…

FTP. What does it mean to you? To some cyclists it defines their very existence; to others it’s a seemingly random number bandied about by people with very expensive bicycles. Whether you buy into it or not, your FTP (Functional Threshold Power) — the wattage you can theoretically hold for an hour (during which you are able to flush lactic acid build-up from your muscles as quickly as it accumulates) — might not define you as a human being, but it is an extremely good indicator of how strong a cyclist you are. Therefore, if you intend to take your riding to the next level, this baseline barometer of fitness is well worth establishing. Most of the time, however, it’s difficult to perform formal tests out on the open road,…

Winter rides need company, so it’s a great time to join a club run. As well as offering cycling companionship, club runs are also helpful in picking up group riding skills and the all-important group ride etiquette, which includes the necessity of mudguards — some clubs even set a date after which their use is mandatory. Peppering others in road grime is, understandably, considered antisocial, but fitting mudguards will also make a huge impact on the comfort of your own winter riding. With so many on the market, knowing what’s best for you and your bike can be confusing, so we asked experts SKS to offer some helpful tips on how to pick the right mudguards for you. Fixed or clipped? Broadly speaking there are two kinds of mudguards: fixed,…

A former elite rider and regular winner on the road, Phillips says that e-racing’s tactics “are exactly the same as the road — they play out the same way”. To be successful, though, a rider has to become more of a time trial specialist with a good burst of power. “You need a good five-minute and one-minute turn of speed, plus a good sprint. It’s like a time trial with a sprint at the end.” Phillips and his team-mates communicate in-race via microphones and act to exploit weaknesses in rivals. “In the Zwift Classics recently, one of my team-mates realised one of the favourites — a sprinter — was struggling up a climb so he drilled it at the front and the guy was taken out of the sprint.” But…

■ Choose a spot The key to a good image is invoking a feeling in the viewer. As a cyclist, you want to look at the picture and think: I wish I could ride there/like that/as fast as that. Selecting a great vantage point is crucial. For road bikes, it could be the corners where the rider will (hopefully) be in a dynamic position. You’ll know that on hills, the rider may be out of the saddle — get the pain in their face. ■ Background Getting a clear shot of a rider isn’t easy. Spectators, billboards or even just a lone dog walker can spoil a great image. Your options are to compose your image carefully and leave them out, or to make all of those distractions part of…

Choose any of the four smart trainers covered in this grouptest and you’re assured of a good indoor training experience. All feature an impressive list of capabilities and more importantly each has that crucial interactivity element, enabling the user to connect with software such as Zwift and Sufferfest. Elite’s Drivo II is certainly an improvement over previous versions and holds the title of most powerful trainer. The ability to command up to 2,300 watts of resistance makes it perfect if regular sprint sessions are your thing. Cyclops’s Hammer is a solid contender. The large 9kg flywheel provides excellent ride feel and it’s a stable and good looking unit. Sadly it loses points on the lower level of power accuracy and an unwieldy design. It’s unsurprising, then, that the two heavyweights…

Smart trainers and online racing certainly are making indoor training a lot more fun than it used to be. However, even the most ardent fan of The Sufferfest or Zwift is likely to admit that it does take more motivation to train indoors than out — so prepare yourself mentally for the winter ahead. “The more our training matches our personality preferences and values, the more motivated we are to do it,” says sports psychologist and CW writer Dr Josephine Perry. “Riders need to know themselves — what they enjoy and where they’ll find motivation. If you’re someone who loathes turbo training, don’t force yourself to do massive amounts of it.” There is the risk that too much time indoors strips the joy out of riding a bike. Ciaran O’Grady…

HILL-CLIMBS SUNDAY, OCTOBER 27 National Championships (Haytor, Devon, 3.125 miles): Men: 1. Ed Laverack (SwiftCarbon Pro Cycling) 11:37.0 (course record) 2. P. Double (VC Venta) 11:46.1 3. R. Bussell (AeroCoach) 12:15.2 4. T. Nancarrow (NOPINZ) 12:16.7 5. D. Evans (ASSOS Equipe UK) 12:25.1 6. K. Vickers (Holohan Coaching RT) 12:27.3 7. H. Wood (Mid-Devon CC) 12:30.6 8. A. Feather (Champion System UK) 12:31.0 9. R. Gildea (Didcot Phoenix CC) 12:31.8 10. L. Wright (Race Hub) 12:34.7 Team: Cycles in Motion (Patrick Clark, Eugene Cross, Archie Cross) Women: 1. Hayley Simmonds (AeroCoach) 14:17.8 2. J. Lowden (The Independent Pedaler) 14:29.3 3. R. Richardson (Brother.UK-Fusion) 14:41.7 4. H. Rhodes-Patterson (Congleton CC) 15:20.6 5. M. Sennema (Paceline RT) 15:25.1 6. F. Burnie (GS Metro) 15:29.8 7. K. Mactear (Bristol South CC) 16:02.1 8.…

We nicked this from runners, to be honest. It originates with the legendary distance runner Arthur Newton in the 1920s, and was revived at the end of the 1960s. It’s the idea that the best form of training, even for racing, is a big volume at a low speed, ideally low enough to hold a conversation. It was, essentially, an attempt to turn the whole year into one big, trundling winter club run. It had the attraction that it avoided the pain and suffering of training at or beyond threshold level. The problem was the sheer distance required. Many long, slow practitioners of the 1970s and 80s ground out over 300-400 miles a week for months on end, and if you’re doing 400 miles slowly, it takes a very, very…

Track Cycling World Cup round one (November 1-3) The opening meet of the six-round Track Cycling World Cup takes place in Minsk, Belarus. British Cycling is sending its national team and Team Inspired, while trade outfits Huub-Wattbike and BEAT CC will once again be looking to make their mark on the international stage. There are six World Cup rounds in total this winter, with Glasgow staging round two the following week. Koppenbergcross (November 1) Riders tackle the legendary and iconic climb of the Koppenberg in Flanders, with thousands of yelling spectators guaranteeing a memorable event. Last year Toon Aerts (Telenet-Fidea Lions) triumphed in the men’s race, and Kim van de Steene (Tartoletto-Isorex) won the women’s race. It’s the first race in this season’s DVV Verzekeringen Trofee that was won overall…

Hayter takes National omnium title Former world champion team pursuiter Ethan Hayter lived up to his pre-race favourite tag to claim the national jersey at the Omnium Championships at the weekend. It will be a fillip to his chances of riding the event at the Olympics next year, a title no British man has ever won. Ella Barnwell followed suit in the women’s race. 19…teams are set to ride in the WorldTour in 2020, up from 18 this year While the number of teams in the WorldTour will increase, two other teams will be invited to all top-tier events next season. French team Cofidis will make the step up to WorldTour from the Professional Continental division to swell the ranks. Froome returns to ‘racing’ Chris Froome made his return to…

My 14-year-old daughter Anna was diagnosed with a terminal heart disease in January 2018 and has been waiting for a heart transplant for the last 18 months. Diagnosis came with doctor’s orders to stop all strenuous exercise. For a sports-mad teenager that news was equally as devastating as the diagnosis. Cardiologists at Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) agreed to her switching to an e-bike which would help combat any hills. After a year without riding, Anna finally got back in the saddle and the smiles returned along with her freedom. She did not waste the opportunity to ride and undertook a 132-mile ride over four days to raise funds for GOSH and raise awareness of the lack of child organ donation. We know there are other teenagers out there just…

FAST ROADIE SKS Raceblade Pro £49.99 The clip-on Raceblade Pros enable you to ride in all weathers. The quick-release system fits aero forks and is compatible with disc and direct-mount brakes as well as thru-axles. The the Pro XL version will fit tyres up to 29mm. WINTER ROULEUR SKS Longboard 45mm £41.99 The fixed Longboard mudguards use an aluminum foil core with a PET coating and stainless steel struts to create a rock-solid design. Accommodating up to 38mm tyres, they provide the ultimate winter protection. ADVENTURER SKS SpeedRocker £49.99 Developed for gravel and adventure bikes, SKS SpeedRockers will fit tyres up to 42mm. A dual-height spoiler deflects muck out front while a telescopic extension keeps you and your bike clean and dry at the rear.…

WHAT If you’re not sure what makes a trainer a ‘smart’ trainer, it’s really just a matter of interactivity. A smart trainer links with various electronic devices, from smartphones to laptops, allowing the selected device to automatically adjust the way the trainer provides resistance to pedalling. The result is a more immersive and versatile training platform and one that injects interest and, dare we say it, fun into indoor training. WHY The appeal of smart trainers has grown since the rise of interactive training apps such as Zwift and Sufferfest. These apps brought structured training out of the confines of rigid coach-led sessions and gave them a more universal appeal and a level of accessibility unheard of just a few short years ago. We’ve chosen four smart trainers to test…

Tour of Guangxi (October 17-22) Spaniard Enric Mas won the final WorldTour race of the 2019 season in China, the Deceuninck-Quick Step rider taking the queen stage to set up overall victory ahead of his off-season transfer to Spanish outfit Movistar. Sprinters Fernando Gaviria (UAE-Team Emirates) and Pascal Ackermann (Bora-Hansgrohe) won two stages each. National Madison Championships (October 26) Fred Wright became the national champion in the track discipline for the second successive year, this time partnering with Rhys Britton. Anna Docherty claimed her second title, too, emulating her 2017 victory alongside Jenny Holl. Superprestige Gavere (October 27) Team 777 scored a one-two in the women’s race, Yara Kastelijn finishing 19 seconds ahead of her team-mate Alice Maria Arzuff. Eli Iserbyt comfortably won the men’s race.…