Innehållsförteckning för February 24, 2022 från Cycling Weekly

The Spring Classics get under way this weekend with the task facing every men’s WorldTour team being the same as every campaign for the past decade: how to stop the might and force of Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl. Omloop Het Nieuwsblad with its successive bergs and cobbles comes first on Saturday, followed by the flatter but cobble-featured Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne on Sunday in what is traditionally referred to as the Opening Weekend. The women’s race also kicks off the conventional northern European calendar for the female peloton, with Omloop van het Hageland on Sunday. Last year’s men’s winner Davide Ballerini is not on the start list for Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl, thought to be due to only recently recovering from Covid-19, but the Belgian team staggeringly, though not unexpectedly, can count on six of…

Bit stupid of Ineos to make it so obvious. All they had to do was fake a mechanical issue, pull in and swap the bike. Then there would be no issue at all. Fergus Mac Eochaidh What I find strange is why an 88kg rider would need to change his bike to save a few hundred grams on a stage where he is likely to drop down the leaderboard anyway. Stephen Knight Just start the stage on rim brakes. No issues with having to change bikes before the climb. Andrew Cleveland Like it made a difference to the results. Darren Perry Blame Eurosport. A commentator explicitly pointed out this was illegal when he did it. UCI must have been listening. Chris Lambert Why not just take it off a team…

“It is striking that five British riders have joined this quintessentially French team” Midnight, and a blue, red and white Skoda pulls into the car park of a hotel in Besançon, eastern France. A teenager of medium height and slight build, with short mousy-brown hair emerges from the vehicle into the cold October night. Bleary-eyed and tired, he’s ready to hit the sack straight away after a five-hour drive. It has been a long day. Earlier that day, while the sun was still up, he competed in sodden conditions at the Paris-Roubaix Juniors race. There he toiled in the mud to help his team-mate Max Poole finish sixth, before coming home outside the time-cut himself. Worn out, mud still under his fingernails, his season now finished, he endured the long…

Look, this was my idea,” I tell Sam. “And if that means I get ground to a pulp under a 10 ton lorry, like I very nearly just did, then so be it. I’m sure the readers of Cycling Weekly wouldn’t want it any other way.” It was meant as reassurance to Sam, CW’s video manager, that I would be spending most of our ride out in the centre of the lane while he would be closeted in the gutter. It was the least I could do. After all, it was I who had roped him into an experiment of somewhat dubious scientific merit on how the changes to rule 66 in the Highway Code had worked out in the real world. It had been two weeks since the new…

Ortlieb’s celebrated approach to durability and functionality has been applied to perhaps the most lovingly engineered handlebar bag we’ve yet come across. Starting with the mounting system, Ortlieb’s Handlebar Pack uses two cords working in tension to keep the bag locked in place. The system might not be immediately intuitive, but it doesn’t take long to understand either. And once you do, it certainly does live up to its ‘quick-release’ moniker. Standing a little proud from the bars, plenty of space is left so that your brake and gear cables don’t get crushed, as well as for handlebar mounted devices to sit flat. Storage is massive at a full 11 litres, but thanks to the compression straps, the bag can be used with much smaller loads without rattling. STORAGE IS…

Castelli Alpha RoS 2 jacket £300 Weight 515g The Alpha RoS 2 Jacket slots into Castelli’s range as the cold-weather option: it’s more heavily insulated than the Alpha RoS 2 Light jacket while the Perfetto is intended for milder conditions still. Like in much of Castelli’s mixed-conditions kit, Gore-Tex Infinium Windstopper fabric is used extensively in the construction. Although Gore doesn’t rate it as being fully waterproof, it is at least highly water resistant. In combination with the most exposed seams (those around the shoulders) being taped, this meant the jacket did a remarkable job of keeping me dry in some quite foul conditions. There are limits – particularly intense showers or extended periods of rain are enough to overwhelm the jacket, but I think that’s a fair trade for…

This issue marked the passing of one of the greatest ever British cyclists. Frank Southall once held 28 national records on the track at the same time, and also held records on the road. From the one-mile record to the ‘End-to-End’ (now referred to as LEJOG) Southall’s talents covered every aspect of the sport. He won the first four Best British All-Rounder crowns and an Olympic bronze medal on the track and a silver on the road. The silver was one of his biggest disappointments, however, as it was widely believed the winner had ridden a shorter course. “Frank Southall, the idol of his generation and the greatest of all British cyclists, is dead,” Cycling wrote. “This powerful man started life as a plasterer and went on to break every…

“My opponents attacked me but I had good legs… on the last climb I pushed a high tempo” Belgian wunderkind Remco Evenepoel took a comfortable victory at the Volta ao Algarve last week as Brit Ethan Hayter put up a spirited challenge for the race he came close to winning last year. The 22-year-old Quick-Step Alpha Vinyl rider built his victory around an incredible win in the race’s stage-four 32km time trial. There he put over a minute into all the general classification riders and cemented his status, if it was ever in doubt, as one of cycling’s most exciting prospects. All that was left for him to do was survive the hilly finale to the race’s final day and he did so pushing the pace on the final climb…

In a race which was notable for the breakout performances of a gang of younger riders, it was veteran Wout Poels whose measured and canny riding won the Ruta del Sol at the weekend. The Dutchman rode into yellow on the race’s penultimate stage when on an undulating run-in to the finish he watched Astana and his team-mates soften up the group of favourites before breaking away with Astana’s Alexey Lutsenko. Poels shouldered most of the pacesetting duties on the way to the line as cooperation between a group mostly made up of leaders from other teams fell to pieces, in no small part because of the presence in their midst of Bahrain Victorious and Astana riders. Poels would go on to win the two-up sprint for the line. After…

Forgoing the snug warmth of the duvet to haul yourself out of bed and stand on a windswept junction with a lollipop for a few hours might sound like a sacrifice (other volunteering jobs are available, of course). But while we make much of the noble idea of ‘giving back’ to the sport, there are a number of benefits to be enjoyed through volunteering. “Belonging provides a foundation for success” We spoke to sports psychologist Dr Josephine Perry, author of 10 Pillars of Success and regular CW contributor, who described five different benefits with a reach and depth well beyond cycling and sport. For starters, it’s a great confidence builder, Dr Perry says, because it allows you to try new things without undue pressure. “Often it’s the baby steps you…

The Specialized Roubaix is built for handling rough terrain and remaining comfortable over long distances. The proof of the pudding is very much in the eating, with a total of seven cobble-munching wins over the last 15 years at the Queen of the Classics, Paris-Roubaix. Naturally, the platform has been refined over the years, benefiting majorly from many clever tech developments. As a result, although the Roubaix Sport here is the ‘entry level’ model, it comes in at £2,900, with the prices only increasing through the range. Frame Perhaps the Roubaix’s most distinctive feature is the Future Shock 1.5 front suspension system, offering 20mm of travel between the handlebars and the head tube to help soak up the impacts. It’s a very discreet design, looking at first glance just like…

Is there, for amateur riders, an impossible number – a power figure so high that only pros can achieve it? Likewise, for pro riders, is there a figure that’s literally beyond the limits of (clean) human performance? We cyclists are preoccupied with questions like this – we are obsessed with data and comparing ourselves to the eye-popping outputs of WorldTour riders. So much data is available that you’d think it would be easy to predict who is going to be the best in the world. But it’s not. Cycling performance is like an onion, it has many layers – and in this feature, we’re going to find out why. Cast your mind back to spring 2020: the whole world was in lockdown and attention turned to online racing. WorldTour riders…

In Britain, mass-start road racing was banned until somewhere around World War Two. When the first road races began to appear, what we were actually dealing with was ‘time trial bike’ road races. This meant single fixed-ratio gears and just a front brake, which helps explain the sheer scale of the thrashings GB road racers were on the embarrassing end of when they raced at international events in the late 1930s. The more recent reversal is the idea that time trialling would be cheaper, safer and easier if everyone had to ride ‘road bikes’. In this context no one is very clear on what a ‘road bike’ is, other than it has dropped handlebars. A common argument is that until the 1980s everyone rode a road bike for time trials.…

Months away from his family at training camps started to pay off for Mark Cavendish on Monday as he announced himself as the sprinter to beat, taking the win in the biggest sprint of the year so far, and giving his boss Patrick Lefevere a Tour de France selection headache. An all-star field of fastmen has assembled in the desert for the UAE Tour, including Dylan Groenewegen (BikeExchange-Jayco), Sam Bennett (Bora-Hansgrohe), Elia Viviani (Ineos Grenadiers), Arnaud Démare (Groupama-FDJ) and the Manxman himself. The only big-name sprinters not present are Cavendish’s Quick-Step team-mate Fabio Jakobsen and Caleb Ewan (Lotto-Soudal). Their first proper showdown on Sunday came after a messy and nervous lead-in left most team’s sprinters with no proper leadout, and the sprint was chaotic, with both Groenewegen and Cavendish left…

One of the UK’s biggest cycling events, the London-Edinburgh-London Audax ride, is running this year – and you can be a part of it. Like nearly all grassroots cycling events in the UK, the ‘LEL’ relies on volunteers, 700 of them to be exact, and recruitment for the many roles on offer is currently under way. “We’re a really nice, easy way to dip your toe into the water of volunteering,” said LEL’s Liam Fitzpatrick. “Because A, you’re not going to be on your own, you’ll be with a bunch of other people who are enthusiastic. And B, the work is packaged in a way that you rock up and you’re given a defined job. And, you know, you’re part of something that’s quite a big deal.” LEL has been…

Midlands-based bike rider James Willcox is a coach with Ilkeston CC’s youth academy, helping youngsters of all ages, from those on balance bikes all the way up to 16 years old. He found solace in volunteering after the death of his parents, 12 months apart in 2019, with his wife battling cancer in-between. “It sparked a midlife crisis,” he says. “I thought there must be more to life, something more rewarding on a personal level.” The 38-year-old had volunteered previously on British Cycling’s HSBC rides some years before, and realised this could be the answer, throwing himself back into helping others out. “I quit my job and now work for myself and a cycling charity, as well as focusing on volunteering with the academy as much as I can. It…

Wahoo has launched two brand-new products simultaneously, both of which it says are firsts in their categories. One – a power meter version of its dual-sided Speedplay pedals – was expected and has been an item on the wishlist for Speedplay users across the world. The other, a roller-based smart trainer, is a product we weren’t so aware of the demand for. But, says Wahoo, the two are made for each other, and it’s even offering a bundle option so that customers can buy and use them together. Let’s first take a look at the Wahoo Powrlink Zero, which will be available in both single-sided and dual-sided options. WAHOO POWRLINK ZERO Wahoo acquired Speedplay in 2019 and launched an overhauled, pared-back and improved version of the range in March 2021.…

Tom Simpson leads Rik van Looy and Rudi Altig on the race’s second stage. Altig, who Simpson had beaten to the rainbow jersey the year before, is sitting fourth wheel in the yellow jersey. He’d hold it for the first week of the race as they crossed into Belgium for this stage, before returning to France for stage three to Dunkirk then following the coast west to Caen and then south all the way to the Pyrenees. Simpson was at this point having a difficult year with injury and would suffer several crashes later in the race, which led to his abandonment. The race was notable for it being the first to feature a set of anti-doping tests that were sprung on the riders in the first week. There were,…