Innehållsförteckning för Issue 65 från Cyclist Australia

As you’ll have already seen from our incredible cover shot, this issue has something of a Swiss flavour – and we’re not just talking chocolate and fondue. But before we get into that, we’d like to draw your attention to some roads closer to home. Specifically, to an area of Australia we’ve never explored previously in over 64 issues of Cyclist magazine, but which we were thrilled to visit in this, our 65th. We’re talking about New England High Country, and you can start with a small glimpse of what we found in the beautiful picture at the top of this page. When most Aussie cyclists think of the phrase ‘high country’ they think of the world-renowned climbs, gravel roads and rail trails of the Victorian High Country – hot…

I want to let you in on a little secret: indoor bike training isn’t like riding outdoors. Love the feel of the wind whistling through your helmet? Not on a trainer. Want to see how fast you can bomb your favourite descent? No chance indoors. Love sitting next to your friend with sun on your back talking endlessly about precisely nothing? Not likely. Okay, so maybe it’s not a secret. But it’s still worth mentioning, because here’s the good news about riding inside: it’s getting better all the time. Wahoo was at the forefront of the indoor trainer revolution thanks to its Kickr, which was the first universally available smart trainer. It allows cyclists to ride indoors using interesting, interactive platforms like Wahoo X (Wahoo’s own online platform), FulGaz, Rouvy…

Saturday, 30 August 1958. A host of the world’s best female riders lines up in front of the grandstands of the Reims-Gueux motor racing circuit. Poised, they wait for the pistol crack that will start the first women’s World Championships Road Race. Thirty riders have signed up across eight countries: Britain, France, Belgium and the Soviet Union have six riders apiece, and they are joined by riders from the Netherlands, Romania and the German Democratic Republic. Alongside them is a lone 25-year-old Luxembourger: Elsy Jacobs. Jacobs was born in March 1933. The youngest of nine children in a family that lived in the small community of Garnich, close to the Belgian border, she grew up surrounded by cycling, with elder brothers Roger, Edmond and Raymond all racing bikes (Edmond would…

The sun is well above the horizon, its warming golden rays sparkling off the dewy grass outside. The clock on my phone begins with a seven, which for most cyclists is a complete novelty I’m from Adelaide, live in Sydney and have spent almost all of my holidays at various places between the two. I knew about New England, knew that Armidale was north-west from home and further than Tamworth, but had never actually ventured to this part of the state. So when my mate Esjay asked me if I wanted to join him on a ride through New England High Country, I didn’t think twice. An easy drive up after work on Friday for a Saturday gravel ride in idyllic spring conditions, a great excuse to escape the city…

Team Sky popularised the idea of sleep as the greatest recovery tool a rider possesses. A week in July wouldn’t pass without tales of a van pulling up outside a French Ibis and some poor driver offloading a team’s worth of bespoke mattresses and toppers so that Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome could have the same sleep setup as they had at home, which would hopefully result in a rapid ride the next day. Fast-forward to 2023 and the whole peloton is at it. Mattress company Dorelan supports – literally – Mads Pedersen and the crew at Lidl-Trek; Latexco sponsors Soudal-QuickStep, while Jumbo-Visma aim even higher thanks to Australian company Box Altitude’s rarefied-air sleep systems. With a sprinkling of irony, Team Sky (now Ineos Grenadiers) awoke the competition to the…

I’ve just sat down at the dinner table with a plate full of cheese and I have zero pangs of guilt. I take a big gulp of my delicious wine and marvel at the various types of Swiss cheese in front of me. It’s been one hell of a day. Less than six hours ago I was riding up one of the greatest hairpin-cobblestone combination climbs in the world. I can still feel the vibrations in my wrists from when my bike was clattering over the jagged stones like a speedboat on choppy water. ‘You feeling okay?’ I snap out of my cobblestone reflections and smile at Elke (from Belgium) sitting next to me. ‘Mate, I’m on top of the world!’ I reply. She laughs and puts her arm around…

‘I love a good steel bike as much as the next tedious man in his thirties,’ wrote Matthew Loveridge on this very page last month. ‘But I don’t think steel deserves the near mythical status it now enjoys… that’s inextricably linked to our collective fetish for all things retro… to our notions or artisanal integrity.’ Why, I nearly spat my naturally processed cold brew all over the coffee table. Me, tedious? Because I am 39. And I do love steel. Let me count the ways Bartali rode steel, Coppi rode steel, so did De Vlaeminck, Burton, Canins, Roche and Pantani. Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault and Indurain all won five Tours on steel bikes (despite what many people say, Indurain did ride a steel Banesto at the 1995 Tour; Fausto Pinarello showed me…

Cyclist: G’day Nick. We’re coming to the end of another road season. How do you assess your 2023? Nick Schultz: I think overall it has been satisfactory. I haven’t achieved a lot of personal success, but I have been very focused on doing my best to deliver good performances for the overall team goal. I’m always aiming to improve so if I can combine those rides with some personal success next year, things are moving in the right direction. Cyc: What does your off-season typically look like? NS: My off-season plans change each year. I sometimes spend the full winter in Europe or spend a short stint in Australia. This year I’ll probably enjoy November in Australia before spending Christmas in Europe with my partner and her family. I definitely…

Last time we imagined ourselves as a newly minted cyclist taking our first pedal strokes on the ambitious voyage from wholly sedentary to elite performance. After only a few weeks we’ve started to enjoy dividends, delivered largely by shifts in blood plasma volume and chemical upticks in the shape of performance-catalysing enzymes. Thanks to millions of years of evolution, our brain has reacted by quickly dialling up what it can, and the early results are profound: power is up, heart rate is down and perception of effort is becoming normalised as more oxygen is being delivered to hungry muscles. As a new athlete we are emotionally surfing this transformational progress – little wonder cycling is highly addictive. But what’s next? The changes that follow fluid and chemical alterations are even…

Even pushing my bike through the mud is causing it to clog up; soon my trusty stick is so muddy it needs its own stick Emporia, Kansas: small town in the Midwest, population 23,844. Pre-2006: self-proclaimed Disc Golf Capital of the World as host of the Disc Golf Open. Post-2006: widely acknowledged as Home to the Spirit of Gravel thanks to hosting Unbound Gravel – 4,000 riders, hundreds of miles of dirt, self-supported. Unbound has been compared to the Super Bowl or the Tour de France and is unofficially the biggest race on the gravel calendar, the race everybody is desperate to win. So although the majority of participants are in it for the challenge, to line up in Emporia is to line up next to the biggest names on…

Colnago has been popping up in Cyclist a lot recently, which is a reflection of just how busy the Italian brand has been over the last year or so. Its C-Series has not only received an update (see last issue’s review) but sprouted two new models, and the brand has just revised its racy V-Series too. UAE Team Emirates’ Tadej Pogačar rode the previous model, the V3Rs, to victory at two Tours de France, but Colnago says changes in the composite fabrication mean the V4Rs is even stiffer, stronger, faster and a touch lighter too. In comparison to the C-Series’ distinctive modular construction, V-Series bikes are more conventional, being made in monocoque fashion, where the frame is fabricated in a mould as one piece. ‘With monocoque we can achieve the…

WIN! Epic Bike Rides of Australia & New Zealand by Lonely Planet RRP $44.99, booktopia.com.au With stories of 50 brilliant bike trips, plus a further 150 suggestions, from the Mawson Trail to the Old Ghost Road, Lonely Planet’s Epic Bike Rides of Australia and New Zealand will inspire a lifetime of cycling adventures. Go road racing with the pros in Margaret River and Adelaide, hit the mountain bike tracks of Tasmania and Rotorua, take some friends on a relaxed bikepacking jaunt, follow a family friendly rail trail or venture into the outback on two wheels. Each adventure is illustrated with stunning photography and written by an expert who has pedalled the route. They all share one defining feature: being truly epic. Ekoï C-4 Full Carbon road shoes $589.99, ekoi.com/en-au After 20 years…

Kitchen cupboards are often where foods go to die. One day you go on a superfood health kick, the next that jar of fenugreek at the back of the pantry is three years out of date and gathering dust. That’s a waste of cupboard space, because as busy cyclists we should be stocking up on staples that are tasty and versatile as well as healthy. ‘Cyclists like to spend a lot of time on the bike rather than in the kitchen, but riding a bike causes muscle damage, especially if you’ve done a race or high-intensity session,’ says Mayur Ranchordas, performance nutrition consultant and Professor of Applied Human Nutrition for Sport and Exercise at Sheffield Hallam University. ‘There are plenty of staple foods you can keep in stock that help…

The Susten Pass takes time to really get going before it transitions from merely pretty to truly, breathtakingly stunning Did you know that until just a few years ago, much of Switzerland’s major infrastructure – bridges, tunnels, roads and so forth – was packed with explosives, ready to be detonated when invasion threatened? The practice was a hangover from the Cold War, a time when irritable superpowers menaced one another with complete annihilation. How times change. There’s a tortured analogy in here somewhere about a road’s hidden dangers, or perhaps something about blowing up when it all gets to be too much on a tough climb, but like every major tourist route in Switzerland, the Susten Pass is beguilingly perfect and largely free of jeopardy – legions of cars and…

If someone wanted to encapsulate the shifting trends of race bikes over the past 20 years, there is no better example than the Trek Madone. ‘While the Madone has changed dramatically over the course of its lifespan, fundamentally we’ve always been trying to do the same thing, which is make the perfect race bike,’ says Jordan Roessingh, Trek’s director of road bikes. Even the bike’s name hints at its racing roots: the Col de la Madone is a climb that sits just outside Nice on the French Riviera and is well known as a proving ground for pros to test their legs. Arguably the climb’s most (in)famous patron was Lance Armstrong. It was his use of the climb for training, combined with his relationship with Trek, that prompted the genesis…

Reports of the death of endurance road bikes are greatly exaggerated: a famous Mark Twain saying, or probably would have been were he alive today. It was certainly my feeling after my first ride on this new Defy Advanced SL0. The same ride, incidentally, where I listened to Dave Rome – on an Escape Collective podcast – cry out for performance-engineered endurance road bikes to re-enter the market. ‘What happened to them?’ he queried. Like The Sixth Sense, without any hope of anyone hearing, my internal voice replied: ‘It’s here! Giant has heard your prayers!’ Dave Rome isn’t wrong. In a confluence of events that combines road bikes moving to disc, opening space for more clearance and wider tyres; the rise in popularity of gravel; and the general recognition that…