Innehållsförteckning för December 19, 2024 från Cycling Weekly

There is one rider who dominated 2024. One rider who not only won almost every race he started but did so in a dominant fashion. He attacked from miles out, riding to victory in a manner we associate with bygone eras. Winning across different terrains, in one-day races and three-week Grand Tours. This was undoubtedly the year of Tadej Pogačar. So for our Christmas double issue, we have devoted much of the magazine to the young lad from Slovenia. I say ‘young lad from Slovenia’ because behind the sunglasses and the all-conquering nature of his riding, that’s what he still is. And our exclusive features this week bring out that fun-loving side of him. We met his parents in Slovenia, who shared stories and family pictures from his youth, and…

After Simon Yates left Jayco-Alula to move to Visma-Lease a Bike, there was a real possibility that the Australian WorldTour team would be British rider-free for the first time since 2013, with the Yates twins joining the team that winter. However, the squad have ensured they keep flying the Union flag by signing Paul Double and Robert Donaldson for 2025, from Polti Kometa and Trinity Racing, respectively. While the latter joins from a highly rated development squad, Double is a WorldTour neo-pro aged 28, proving that there are long and winding pathways to the top still open. When he signed, Double said: “I arrived in the sport later than most but I’m also seeing my trajectory as a rider positively increase at a rate I didn’t experience in my younger…

I’ve cracked! Two weeks into December and the British winter has got to me and seemingly many of my coaching clients simultaneously. Back when I was a junior you could convince yourself that when you rolled out in three-degree rain that you were getting an advantage on your competitors, ‘they won’t be out in this’ you’d tell yourself. Now thanks to Strava I know all too well this is a lie, because they are in Spain. Not only did they ride for longer but they also have the smug satisfaction of not having hypothermia. I know ice baths have become popular but I’m yet to see the benefits of my cold-water plunges around every corner. Still, you tell yourself ‘we’ll be dreaming of these conditions once the ice comes!’ The…

Van der Poel to return to CX this weekend Mathieu van der Poel is to race 11 cyclo-cross races this season, starting with the Zonhoven World Cup this Sunday, and finishing with the cross World Championships in Liévin, France, on 2 February. This will leave the Dutchman a small window to prepare for his early season road targets of Flanders and Roubaix. Lidl-Trek on Instagram Thibau Nys uses an innovative new way of coffee delivery, and a new kit announcement, all in one Instagram video. £4,253 The amount Harry Gray, a 28-year-old active travel campaigner, received in damages after taking legal action against a car driver who struck him from behind. He was hit in Bolton in 2022, and pursued civil action. Remco off bike until February Remco Evenepoel faces…

With his achievements in 2024, Tadej Pogačar has torn up the rulebook. No rider in the modern era has so dominated over such a variety of races and terrains. To win the Tour de France and the Giro d'Italia as well as the Worlds in the same year would have been aweinspiring enough. But he also threw in major one-day races Strade Bianche, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Il Lombardia. He didn’t just win them, he turned them into one-man exhibitions. The question became unavoidable: is he the greatest rider of all time? We tackle that debate head-on, calling on the riders and experts best qualified to judge. Just as importantly, we seek to understand the man behind the legendary feats. Going directly to source, we speak with Pogačar’s parents about his formative…

1 At what race did Marianne Vos take her 250th pro win? 2 Team GB won 11 cycling medals in Paris. What was their target? 3 Where did this leave them in the cycling medal table? 4 Dom Jackson set a new KOM on Box Hill. To the nearest second, what was his time? 5 How many Rayner Foundation riders signed WorldTour contracts for 2025? 6 Stevie Williams won the Tour Down Under, but another Brit was in the GC top five – who? 7 Legendary British cyclo-cross rider Mick Ives died in April. How many races is he believed to have won over his six-decade long career? 8 Which women’s WorldTour team started the season with the most riders under 24, and how many did they have? 9 Who…

Rating During our recent bike lock test, we used a highpowered battery-operated angle grinder to attack them and the OnGuard showed barely a scratch. The RockSolid coating applied to the 15mm hardened steel shackle stood up to the grinder with ease – in well under the five-minute time limit we burned through three grinder discs, the most of any lock we tested. At its core is a 15mm hardened steel shackle featuring OnGuard’s patented RockSolid coating, which is where the magic behind this incredible lock can be found. The 8590 weighs in at just 1.3kg with a shackle reach of 17.5cm and an internal width of 9cm, giving it a 157cm 2 locking area. In short, it’s lightweight and user-friendly. The main body of the lock is connected to the…

Pogačar has revealed that his long ride power – his Zone 2 – is an astounding 320-340 watts. CW decided to find out if we, as a tag team effort, could keep up for a whole endurance ride. Surely between us, as a relay effort, we could hang on to Pogačar’s wheel at his ‘easy’ pace. This is his five-hour power – so how hard could it be? The answer, it turns out, is very. First to take to the saddle of the trainer, our wattage set at 330, was CW’s merchant of brute force Steve Shrubsall – no surprise, this challenge was his idea. His opening effort was a sterling 50min. Next came CW’s editor Simon Richardson, who, at nearly 30kg lighter than Steve, couldn’t be expected to match…

In a world where cycling kit seems to get more expensive with every passing day it is hard for a cyclist to look at Christmas as anything other than an opportunity for a bit of a general update to your set-up at someone else’s expense. I appreciate that you may feel this attitude lacks the festive spirit. If so, I simply suggest embracing Christmas with the same childish delight and capitalist avarice as an eight-year-old. There is, however, a significant problem. There is a theory that it is better to give than to receive. While that’s obviously not true, it remains the case that most people like to get some pleasure from what they’re handing over. They need to understand what it is and why you want it. The worst…

Sir Mark Cavendish was given the lifetime achievement award at the BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards on Tuesday, becoming the second cyclist to win after Sir Chris Hoy. The 39-year-old called time on a career spanning two decades last month, retiring as the all-time stage win record holder at the Tour de France, and with the accolade of being the greatest male sprinter to have ever lived. After winning a record 35th stage in July, Cavendish was among the bookies’ favourites to win this year’s BBC Sports Personality of the Year, an award he previously won in 2011. He was left off the six-athlete shortlist, announced last week, but his career was celebrated during the ceremony on Tuesday. “It’s such an amazing feeling – what an honour,” Cavendish…

Last December, Tadej Pogačar unveiled his bold plans for 2024. He said he would aim not only for the elusive Giro-Tour double, but also the rare triple crown – adding victory in the road race World Championship. Yet, in his characteristically laidback manner, seemingly unfazed by the weight of expectation on his shoulders, the then 25-year-old seemed not to be taking anything for granted: “[The season] could be super good, really good, or not so good – I won’t say bad, but mediocre.” What transpired went beyond “super good” – it was one of the most spectacular displays of dominance we’ve ever witnessed in pro cycling. It has left fans and pundits asking the inevitable question: is Pogačar the greatest male cyclist of all time – is he the GOAT?…

Tadej Pogačar was very impressionable as a young child. Whenever he was introduced to a new sport or activity, he was curious about it and wanted to know more. Like the first time he saw someone on a unicycle. “There was a guy in the neighbourhood who had a unicycle, and one time he came to an event with it,” his mother Marjeta tells me in a spacious cafe in their home town of Komenda, 20km from the Slovenian capital of Ljubljana. “He showed people how to ride it and our kids were really interested. They wanted to learn, so we bought them one.” Sibling competition soon called for the purchase of a second unicycle, and in no time the 10-year-old Tadej and his older brother, Tilen, were regularly riding…

JANUARY Straight out the blocks Brits Stevie Williams and Oscar Onley got their seasons off to flying starts with GC and stage victories at the Tour Down Under, respectively. Both results were a precursor of what was to come. Williams proved what he could do when injury-free by winning a Flèche Wallonne run off in cold and wet conditions, and in September, the Tour of Britain. Onley, still only 22, enjoyed a breakthrough season with a top 10 on GC at the Tour de Suisse, a solid Tour de France debut and a late season flourish with second at the Tour of Guangxi. Aero brake The UCI updated its regulations to limit the angle brake levers could be turned inward, on the grounds the aero gain could compromise safety. FEBRUARY…

Of course we can’t match his power, but can we amateur cyclists learn from the training routines and methods of Tadej Pogačar? “If an amateur emulated what Tadej does, they would quickly be overtrained,” says Jeroen Swart, head of performance at UAE Team Emirates, “but yes, an amateur could do similar types of training to Tadej, and most would see improvements in their performance.” Over recent months, Pogačar has shared details of his training, including to CW (see page 100) – and he went in-depth to Peter Attia for his The Drive podcast. We asked Swart, and Tim Podlogar, an exercise physiologist at the University of Exeter and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s outgoing nutritionist, to describe how amateurs can best draw on his methods. 1 CRANK UP THE HEAT What Pogačar said:…

How has your new coach Javier Sola helped you improve? He speaks with me every day, so I can’t slack at any point, not that I ever slacked, but it feels good to always have somone on hand whom you can trust and communicate super well with. I’m also training a little differently – a bit more specific stuff, more targeted towards the races that are coming up. I bring something to him; he brings something to me, some new methods and some new ways of training, and so far it’s working well. How do you train for those lightning-rapid attacks? We did a lot of VO2 max this year and also a lot of Zone 2 where you work on your fatigue resistance. This is where I think I…

Once again, I thoroughly enjoyed having the CW5000 as a target this year. I made it over the line – the fourth year in a row – a few weeks ago and the highlight of my year’s riding was undoubtedly completing the Kirkpatrick C2C challenge over the August bank holiday weekend. That ticked off both of August’s monthly challenges too. Not the greatest weather, but an amazing ride through some stunning scenery. Ed - Congratulations on completing our annual ride challenge Chris, and for taking on the Kirkpatrick C2C - a ride we can’t recommend enough. Our Big Ride Challenge starts all over again on 1 January: just go to www.cyclingweekly.com/ bigridechallenge to sign up for one of the four distances.…

2018 Second year U23 rider (Age 19) Wins Tour de l’Avenir 2019 Turns pro with UAE Team Emirates (Age 20) ● Wins February’s Volta ao Algarve, his second pro stage race ● Wins Tour of California ● Wins three stages and finishes third at Vuelta a España, his maiden Grand Tour 2020 First yellow jersey (Age 21) ● Wins two stages and GC at Volta a Valenciana ● Wins three stages and the GC at the Tour de France, overturning 57s deficit to Primož Roglič in penultimate day time trial 2021 Dominance begins (Age 22) ● Wins UAE Tour and Tirreno-Adriatico in the spring ● Wins first Monuments: Liège-Bastogne-Liège and Il Lombardia ● Wins second Tour de France by five minutes, taking another three stages 2022 Meeting his TdF match…

Tilen, two years older than Tadej, was the first Pogačar to take up cycling. Just like his younger brother, he displayed great promise at a young age, even riding in the Slovenian national championships and a handful of UCI races in his early 20s. “Tilen was the first in the family to train and when he was younger he was good on climbs and could sprint quite well,” his first coach Miha Koncilija says. “It’s hard to say what type of rider he was, in the younger categories, but he was talented, more of a puncheur, quite good at everything.” But Tilen’s relationship with cycling was less straightforward than Tadej’s. “Tilen had a problem in that he’d find something new but Tadej would always be better than him,” Koncilija says.…

Not too long ago, it was standard for every bike brand’s race line-up to include an aero bike, a climbing bike, and a ‘somewhere-in-between’ bike. But in recent years, there’s been a resurgence of the ‘do it all’ machine. Trek, Specialized, Lapierre and many others have prioritised a singular race bike encompassing aero features whilst edging close to – or creeping under – the UCI’s minimum weight limit of 6.8kg by merit, often, of slimmer tubing. These tube profiles appear to undermine the ‘wider is more aero’ rule of thumb that was often prevalent in white papers published by the same brands; there’s certainly room for some cynicism here. But despite their appearances are these modern ‘aero’ bikes actually faster than their deep-section counterparts? And if so what’s driving this…

The cycling corner of the internet was taken by storm in the summer by a mysterious account. Posting on X and on the Cyclingnews forum under the username ‘Mou’, he or she claimed to have inside information on Tadej Pogačar’s training. “He is right about some, but most of it is wrong,” Pogačar said at the Tour de France. “I don’t know who this guy is and what his purpose is.” CW understands that UAE Team Emirates are deeply concerned by Mou’s regular tweets, many of which are disparaging to team staff and certain riders, and are still trying to figure out his (or her) real identity. It’s possible that Mou’s knowledge has been gleaned from studying Pogačar’s Strava files, social media posts, and everything else team-related on the internet.…

Word reaches us of one of our number who was lucky enough to get an actual bike for Christmas last year. His family wrapped it, in the sense that they wound a mile and a half of wrapping paper round every tube, round the bars, round the rims, round the chain and even round each spoke. There was so much tape applied to the wrapping paper on the spokes that he gave up trying to get it off, and rode the bike as it was in the hope that it would just fall off. Remarkably, a year later it’s still there, through rain and wind. What he doesn’t know is that his daughter is replacing it when he’s not looking.…