Innehållsförteckning för December 31, 2020 från Cycling Weekly

■ Working throughout lockdown and commuting on near empty roads for a few weeks. Completely surreal and something I never thought I’d experience. Lee Wood ■ Getting my old post office bike back on the road – it’s like riding an armchair. Brilliant. Al Brown ■ Getting over 7,200 miles in since lockdown and being the fittest I’ve probably ever been and racing for a French team in Zwift. Julie Clark ■ The highlight of my cycling year has to be winning a dream bike at the end of August! While lockdown no.1 with open roads and beautiful weather reminded me of Sunday cycling 30+ years ago… bliss. Two furlough periods meant having the time to ride too. Every cloud. Raphael Van der Boonen ■ Blowing away my CW5000 goal…

It’s the early hours of Sunday morning on the slopes of the famous Box Hill in Surrey. The mercury has dropped below zero and the surface is starting to get slippery. Bombing down through the darkness for the umpteenth time, his way lit only by the lights on his bike, ultra-endurance athlete Chris Hall tentatively squeezes the brakes through the Olympic climb’s off-camber hairpin. He’s lost track of the number of times he’s done this now, his body and brain chilled to the bone and his head is starting to loll with fatigue, his eyelids getting heavy. An icy slip could derail his whole quest to complete his metaphorical, and literal, descent into the darkness. Things are getting dangerous. Hall’s mission that night was the same as it had been…

Early boneshakers had straight, vertical forks. Due to that perennial enemy of cyclists, physics, this meant that as if riding a 35kg wooden bike with iron tyres wasn’t bad enough, it was almost impossible to either steer or balance. Penny-farthings acquired a rake to the forks, as experimenters discovered that a degree of ‘trail’ – the distance the contact patch of the front tyre is behind the extended steering axis – gave a bike more stability. Trail is the key to bike handling. Too much and the bike is leaden and wallowy. Too little and the steering is too sensitive. There is a happy medium. It’s not that hard to find. Most frame builders had worked it out by the end of the 19th century. All the same, for the…

There’s always a surprise or two when looking through the archives. Delving back into the 1930s we found this cover with a brilliant bright orange masthead – a colour we didn’t know the magazine had used. Bit of a shame the cover is used for an advert, but the industry was clearly booming in this pre-war period, judging by the 10 pages of adverts before the editorial even starts. The strapline above the masthead, ‘It’s cooler on a bicycle’, is something that could still be used today. It is in fact a cover line, pointing to the feature on ‘The importance of Food, Clothing and the Bicycle in a Heat Wave’. Rather than dispensing advice, it was a rambling story based on the reaction of ‘The Man of Sussex’ –…

How do you counter the problem of advancing years and rivals surpassing you? Radically change your riding style and strengths. Upon his return to Ineos Grenadiers at the beginning of the 2019 season after two “strange” years away with UAE-Team Emirates when he “dropped off the radar”, current national road race champion Ben Swift realised that to stay relevant he had to make some changes. And so the Yorkshireman best known as a sprinter – a winner of 14 professional races and twice a podium finisher at Milan-San Remo – decided to work on his climbing and develop into a breakaway rider. The wins haven’t yet come, but progress is clear: remarkably, the 33-year-old finished 18th on GC at the 2020 Giro d’Italia. “My sprinting hasn’t necessarily got worse, but…

Tom has been knocking on the door of that first elite level CX win for a while now. He’s been close quite a few times, but it just never materialised for him until now. So stoked for him to take that win. Made even better by MVDP being in the race. Dustin Lansing Finally we get a cross rider that’s world class and we lose him to Ineos Grenadiers and a career on the road. Myles James A fantastic result for Tom, who is getting stronger with each race. He was third on the Saturday, and first on Sunday. Charlie Mcdougall At last the MVDP bore fest is over. Well done Tom for an amazing achievement and bringing us some proper cyclo-cross competition back! James Dear I think MVDP gave…

1. Primož Roglič (Slo) Jumbo-Visma 72:46:12 2. Richard Carapaz (Ecu) Ineos Grenadiers 00:00:24 3. Hugh Carthy (GBr) EF Pro Cycling 00:01:15 4. Daniel Martin (Irl) Israel Start-Up Nation 00:02:43 5. Enric Mas (Spa) Movistar 00:03:36 6. Wout Poels (Ned) Bahrain-McLaren 00:07:16 7. David de la Cruz (Spa) UAE-Emirates 00:07:35 8. David Gaudu (Fra) Groupama-FDJ 00:07:45 9. Felix Grossschartner (Aut) Bora-Hansgrohe 00:08:15 10. Alejandro Valverde (Spa) Movistar 00:09:34 11. Aleksandr Vlasov (Rus) Astana Pro 00:09:36 12. George Bennett (NZl) Jumbo-Visma 00:14:04 13. Mikel Nieve (Spa) Mitchelton-Scott 00:14:47 14. Guillaume Martin (Fra) Cofidis 00:15:07 15. Sergio Luis Henao (Col) UAE-Emirates 00:15:36 16. Sepp Kuss (USA) Jumbo-Visma 00:16:26 17. Mattia Cattaneo (Ita) Deceuninck-Quick Step 00:17:45 18. Marc Soler (Spa) Movistar 00:21:01 19. Gorka Izagirre (Spa) Astana Pro 00:21:46 20. Gino Mäder (Swi) NTT…

When the first lockdown took hold in March, hundreds of thousands of riders across the globe took to Zwift – many of them for the first time. Through spring and much of the summer, racing in the virtual world became the best available replacement for real-world racing, for amateurs and pros alike. In July, CW decided to get directly involved by launching our own event, the Wednesday evening Club Ten TT. A second Zwifting venture came in November, with the Autumn Chase Series – and much more is planned for 2021. Watch this space! For now, let’s take a look back at an extraordinary year of CW-hosted indoor racing… 15 July – The Club Ten is born! The first ever Cycling Weekly Club Ten, held on the Tempus Fugit course,…

Well, the news is out, I’m going to be riding in the colours of Hagens Berman Axeon next season. I’m excited. Very excited. It’s no secret that 2020 was a tough year for me, but a line has been drawn and I’m looking ahead. With a new team comes a whole host of emails. From a tentative 2021 race schedule, to kit sizes and training camps. It seems like every other day is like writing a new Christmas list. When I was younger, I told myself I’d never take new kit day for granted. I’ll admit that I have become a little bit numb to team-issue clothing, but new bike day is always the best. When I left France, I had to leave my team bike at the service course…

1. Tadej Pogačar (Slo) UAE-Emirates 87:20:05 2. Primož Roglič (Slo) Jumbo-Visma 00:00:59 3. Richie Porte (Aus) Trek-Segafredo 00:03:30 4. Mikel Landa (Spa) Bahrain-McLaren 00:05:58 5. Enric Mas (Spa) Movistar 00:06:07 6. Miguel Angel Lopez (Col) Astana Pro 00:06:47 7. Tom Dumoulin (Ned) Jumbo-Visma 00:07:48 8. Rigoberto Urán (Col) EF Pro Cycling 00:08:02 9. Adam Yates (GBr) Mitchelton-Scott 00:09:25 10. Damiano Caruso (Ita) Bahrain-McLaren 00:14:03 11. Guillaume Martin (Fra) Cofidis 00:16:58 12. Alejandro Valverde (Spa) Movistar 00:17:41 13. Richard Carapaz (Ecu) Ineos Grenadiers 00:25:53 14. Warren Barguil (Fra) Arkea-Samsic 00:31:04 15. Sepp Kuss (USA) Jumbo-Visma 00:42:20 16. Pello Bilbao (Spa) Bahrain-McLaren 00:55:56 17. Nairo Quintana (Col) Arkea-Samsic 01:03:07 18. Pierre Rolland (Fra) B&B Hotels-Vital Concept 01:08:26 19. Carlos Verona (Spa) Movistar 01:19:54 20. Wout van Aert (Bel) Jumbo-Visma 01:20:31 21. Marc…

On 7 November, we launched the CW Autumn Chase Series – six 30km races on Saturday mornings for six weeks, on a variety of different courses from largely flat to mountainous. Following the time-honoured handicap format, riders were grouped by ability level (Zwift cats A, B, C and D) and set off at staggered start times – the slowest taking off first and the fastest last. The top 15 scored points, with each rider’s best three scores (max) counting towards their total at the end of the series. The racing was fast and furious, with the fastest ‘A’s slicing through the field and, in all but one race, making it to the front to bag the point-scoring places. Former CW Training Makeover participant, 27-year-old Kouros Driscoll – a junior doctor…

Swiss rider Georges Antenen dusts himself down after coming a cropper on the 12th stage of the 1932 Tour, from Gap to Grenoble. With goggles and a spare tube around his neck, plus a frame pump and handlebar-mounted bidons, Antenen is the picture of a Thirties continental bike racer. Only the blood running down his leg and the stricken look on his face betray the chaos that has just taken place. The photo was taken looking down the bonnet of an open-top car, and we suspect it was taken in the streets of Grenoble itself, seeing as Antenen completed the stage just three minutes off the back of the bunch that day. He went on to finish 29th on GC behind French winner André Leducq. Antenen was at the height…