Innehållsförteckning för May 2021 från Procycling

A Dutch rider on a French team? Marijn van den Berg is a 21-year-old who rides for Groupama-FDJ’s Continental team. He’s from De Meern in the Netherlands, on the outskirts of Utrecht, which is not far from where his illustrious compatriot Annemiek van Vleuten comes from. This is his first year with FDJ, and his final year at under-23 level. What kind of rider is he? He’s a classics rider with a bit of a fast finish, so looks good for the one-day races. He told Procycling: “I’m more of a classics rider, but a little bit all round. I can do small climbs too, 10 minutes max. I like Flanders and races like that.” How is he finding FDJ? Pretty good so far, he says. Marijn’s older brother Lars…

The “spiritual home” of the Tour of Britain. That’s how the race’s Chief Executive Hugh Roberts described Devon in 2014, and who are we to argue? We’re proud of our long-standing connection with the UK’s premier cycle race and that kind of recognition from the Tour has helped us to realise our ambition for Devon to provide a world class location for cycling. It takes a huge amount of dedication between the team in Devon and the Tour of Britain organisers to make it happen. We’re lucky that our small team and the County Councillor responsible for cycling are all passionate about cycling and the race. We work hard to make it as straightforward as possible for the Tour to run their race on our roads. With 8,000 miles of…

Progression isn’t linear. In principle, I accept this. In practice, it is hard to swallow. I arrived into pro cycling with an embarrassing amount of inexperience. I had every right to feel imposter syndrome in my first race outside Australia. That was Trofeo Alfredo Binda in 2018. The year prior, I did one road race - the Nationals. Team Tibco took me under their wing to give me a shot. I was excited by the unknown, and I still am now. What can I do among the best in the world? On a ‘small’ team in the WWT, you are really riding to survive and see how you compare against the best. You mostly have to look out for yourself. Top 20s reap points, which get your team into more…

THE GIRO D’ITALIA MARKETS ITSELF AS ‘THE TOUGHEST RACE IN THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACE’. IN 2021, THE ORGANISERS HAVE STAYED TRUE TO THAT SLOGAN. PROCYCLING LOOKS AHEAD TO LA CORSA ROSA During the past year, ‘Everesting’ has become a popular activity. Last month, Irishman Ronan McLaughlin broke the record by climbing the equivalent of the 8,848 vertical metres of Everest in six hours 40 minutes. This year’s Giro d’Italia attempts something similar on stage 16, as the riders will climb 5,700m in their 212km race from Sacile to Cortina d’Ampezzo, through the Dolomites. This is just 64 per cent of Everest. But the 5,700m of vertical metres are more than any mountain in Europe, almost 1,000 metres more than Mont Blanc. It is about the equivalent of cycling up Mount…

A date plagues French cycling and will keep haunting it until a saviour comes along: 1985. The last victory by a Frenchman in the Tour de France, that of Bernard Hinault. Three Frenchmen have become world champions since – including current champion Julian Alaphilippe. France has still taken a grand tour victory since then – Laurent Jalabert in the 1995 Vuelta. And France has achieved several podium finishes in the Tour itself through Laurent Fignon, Richard Virenque, Jean-Christophe Péraud, Thibaut Pinot and Romain Bardet. Regardless of all that, 1985 remains to French cycling what 1966 is to English football: the end of an era and the start of a decline fuelled by the growing globalisation of the sport. While Britain can claim to have invented most modern sports, France takes…

HIGH-TECH INSIGHT VeloViewer is a course reconnaissance phenomenon. It connects to Strava and provides a clear and practical world of 3D graphics, gradients and waymarkers for teams to identify potential race-defining sections. Incredibly, 18 of the 19 WorldTour teams now subscribe to VeloViewer’s WorldTour package, while recreational riders can subscribe to VeloViewer for £10 a year. The likes of Ineos and Movistar get a touch more, says founder and Sheffield resident Ben Lowe. I was a computer programmer who loved cycling. I’d played around with Strava and created these 3D graphics. Some of my friends used it and then it spread online. One of my friends was on the Donny Chain Gang [famous northern UK training group] and he overhead Ben Swift saying one of Team Sky’s DSs was using…

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When Jasper Stuyven attacked with 2.5km to go in the 2021 Milan-San Remo, he’d chosen his moment perfectly. He was still on the descent of the Poggio, the last couple of hundred metres or so, and this gave him an easier acceleration than if he’d done it on the flat. And his chasers, who dithered very briefly in following, had less descent to work with, so any acceleration they made would be more physically expensive. Moreover they’d momentarily slowed, as Tom Pidcock’s surge down the descent tailed off. Whether Stuyven’s brain was processing this or not, almost 297km and six-and-a-half hours into the race, or whether he just saw an opening, is unsure, though he did say after the race that he had planned to attack. However, his success was…

Two against one in a bike race usually favours the pair. The theory is that they can take turns attacking the individual, and eventually one will get away. However, when the finale of the GP Miguel Indurain pitched Alejandro Valverde against the Astana pairing of Luis León Sánchez and Alexey Lutsenko, things didn’t exactly go to plan, as Valverde escaped to win alone. To be fair to the Astana pairing, a lot of bike racing had happened by the point the trio came together. Sánchez had attacked in a group of four with 45km to go and so had already expended a lot of energy in the final hour. On terrain as tough as that offered by the GP Miguel Indurain, that would inevitably be costly. When Valverde finally bridged…

1.WT: One-day UCI WorldTour race / 1.Pro: Major one-day race / 1.1: Minor one-day race / 2.WT: UCI WorldTour stage race / 2.Pro: Major stage race / 2.1: Minor stage race / WWT: Women's WorldTour race TRO-BRO LÉON 16 May | France | 1.Pro One by one, the big races are discovering the attraction of incorporating gravel roads in their races. Strade Bianche is a recent innovation in this area; Paris-Tours has started taking incursions into the bumpy tracks between vineyards in the Loire Valley, and the Giro this year is getting in on the act. But the original modern gravel event is Tro-Bro Léon, which has been running on the ribinoù (short cut) roads of Finistère, Brittany, since 1984. Tro-Bro Léon embodies all the contradictions and realities of cycling…

E3 Saxo Bank Classic Harelbeke, Belgium 26 MARCH 2021 Mathieu van der Poel rides ahead of a peloton which is splitting under the pressure of a tough race at the E3 Saxo Bank Classic, formerly known as E3 Harelbeke, between the Boigneberg and Eikenberg climbs. The race pitched Van der Poel against arch rival Wout van Aert. However, Deceuninck-Quick Step may not have had a rider to equal either of these riders in terms of pure power, but they had the riders and ambition to use strength in numbers against them. Kasper Asgreen went on a long-range attack with 65km to go, taking the pressure off Deceuninck. However, when he was finally closed down, with 12km to go, the lead group counted only seven riders: Asgreen, his team-mates Florian Sénéchal…

Winter was good to me this year. The weather was pretty awful but I soldiered on through the freezing temperatures and never missed a beat through illness or incident. Then the races arrived and I got sick before Haut Var. I made it to the start line but I was not feeling myself. Just as I should have recovered from that race to start putting in some solid work, I felt like something was off. I was hitting my power numbers and doing my efforts without much trouble but didn’t feel good. I did a covid test, which was negative, so on I pushed with Tirreno-Adriatico around the corner. UCI protocol says we need to do a PCR test six days before the race starts. I got a positive result…

2016 Joins ProConti squad Androni Giocattoli and makes his race debut in Europe. The high points include the youth jerseys at Settimana Coppie Bartali, Giro del Trentino and Tour of Slovenia. 2017 Bernal takes his first pro victories, winning two stages and the GC title at the 2.1 ranked Sibiu Cycling Tour in Romania. Wins the mountainous day to Bâlea Lac by over a minute to cement his race lead. 2017 Follows in the footsteps of countrymen Miguel Ángel López and Nairo Quintana to win the Tour de l’Avenir, the most prestigious under-23 stage race on the calendar. 2018 Signs for Team Sky and gets off to a good start by winning the Colombian National TT title and the GC at Colombia Oroy Paz, the latter eight seconds ahead of…

Injuries are considered part of being a professional cyclist. For a start, crashes come with the territory of road racing, and that’s before accounting for cycling being so physically demanding that eventually it will take a toll on the body in various ways. But what happens when the injury isn’t a broken bone, or something with a quantifiable recovery timeline? What if it’s an injury that’s debilitating, chronic and endures for years and years? Between the 2017 and 2018 seasons, Giacomo Nizzolo spent almost as much time on the sidelines as he did performing his job as a bike rider. Then aged 27, he should have been hitting the best years of his career. He’d just enjoyed his most successful season in 2016, winning seven races, including the Italian national…

OXYCLEAN CLASSIC 1 Grace Brown BikeExchange 2 Emma Norsgaard Movistar 3 Jolien D’Hoore SD Worx GENT-WEVELGEM 1 Marianne Vos Jumbo-Visma 2 Lotte Kopecky Liv Racing 3 Lisa Brennauer Ceratizit-WNT DWARS DOOR VLAANDEREN 1 Annemiek v. Vleuten Movistar 2 Kasia Niewiadoma Canyon-Sram 3 Alexis Ryan Canyon-Sram TOUR OF FLANDERS 1 Annemiek v. Vleuten Movistar 2 Lisa Brennauer Ceratizit-WNT 3 Grace Brown BikeExchange SCHELDEPRIJS 1 Lorena Wiebes DSM 2 Emma Norsgaard Movistar 3 Elisa Balsamo Valcar-Travel…

BRETT LANCASTER DS, INEOS GRENADIERS Adam Yates, Ineos Grenadiers’ new signing, was the strongest climber in the Volta a Catalunya, and he laid the ground for his GC win with a solo win at Vallter 2000. But Ineos were so strong that they took the top three places overall. Their DS Brett Lancaster explains how. Taking the top three was not just a first for the team; one of our Spanish mechanics said it was the first time it had happened in Catalunya since 1960 so it was an awesome result. We were looking for it too: if we had sent Adam up the road on that second Pyrenean stage, I’m pretty sure he could have taken that out. But instead we opted to ride a bit more comfortably and…

What did it feel like to win? I feel lighter now. Five hundred plus days without a win is a really long time. That feeling was good. It was mixed though, because for sure I was happy with the win, but it was not the place where I wanted to be. We decided that this was the best race for me, because I needed a win. The most important thing is that I am back to winning. The climate was starting to be a bit heavy. This isn’t my finishing line though, this is my starting point. How have you got through the period of not winning? I never stopped believing in my potential, I have just tried to analyse everything. Changing team was big. You change the equipment, you…

LIĒGE-BASTOGNE-LIĒGE 25 April | Belgium | 1.UWT/1.WWT Three years after the route was adjusted so that the race finished in Liège proper and not the suburb of Ans, it is clear that the move has been a success. With the final test now the Côte de la Roche-aux-Faucons 15km from the finish, a winning move has the room to form, or a single rider has the space to solo off the front. In the past two editions of the men’s race we have seen both occur: a breakaway win for Jakob Fuglsang after he went clear from the top of Roche-aux-Faucons, while last year’s edition saw the decisive group form on the same climb, before Primo� Roglic prevailed. The oldest of the monuments, La Doyenne has a reputation for being…

TOUR DE ROMANDIE 27 Apr-2 May | Switzerland | 2.UWT The second stage of the Swiss race should be electric, as it is over the parcours which was supposed to be used in last year’s World Championship road race, before the event was moved to Imola. The route, from Aigle to Martigny, will pass the UCI’s headquarters before the climb of Côte de la Petite Forclaz severely tests the peloton. The 4km climb is at an average of 10.2 per cent with ramps of up to 14.5 per cent. Expect the GC to start forming here.…

There were other teams in the Volta a Catalunya than the Ineos Grenadiers, but to look at the final podium, you wouldn’t have known it. The British team took all three of the top positions on general classification: Adam Yates was the winner, with Richie Porte in second place and Geraint Thomas in third. Best of the rest was Movistar’s quadragenarian Alejandro Valverde, three times a winner here, and probably enjoying his best form since the pandemic, but the Spaniard had never looked like dislodging even one of the Ineos trio, let alone all three. And nor did anybody else: though João Almeida spent a day in the race lead following the stage 2 time trial (where Ineos ominously put four riders into the top 10), he couldn’t live with…

Where’s home? I live in the south part of Germany, in a city called Lörrach. It’s just on the border of Switzerland and France and is a beautiful area for riding. What’s your favourite race? In general, I prefer stage races and races with big climbs, so the Giro Rosa is quite highly ranked. I raced in America twice and I absolutely loved it, so I’m looking forward to racing there more often, especially the races in the mountains. What’s your favourite climb? Last year I did some riding in the area of Andermatt, which was awesome. The old ‘Gotthardstrasse’ with the cobbles was an unforgettable experience and I recommend every cyclist to put that climb on your bucket list. Where in the world would you like to get lost…

Ride your bike north out of Turin, and follow the signs for the Lanzo and Aosta valleys. In an hour or so you’ll find yourself in the Canavese, an aggregation of market towns and villages whose locals speak an indecipherable dialect and whose capital is a UNESCO World Heritage town. Ivrea is famous for having been home to Olivetti, but there’s much more to the Canavese than that. As a people, the Canavesani are famously obdurate, and famously taciturn. That’s probably because their climate and geology are famously implacable, and it’s no coincidence that the area was once one of Italian cycling’s most fertile breeding grounds. Between them, the Canavesani Giovanni Brunero, Giuseppe Enrici and Franco Balmamion accounted for six Giro d’Italia victories, but it’s fair to say none of…

Tour de Wallonie, 2012 Paris-Nice, 2020 Tour Down Under,2020 Vuelta a Burgos, 2019 Tour of Slovenia, 2019 Tour of Oman, 2019 Vuelta a San Juan, 2018 Abu Dhabi Tour, 2016 Tour of Croatia, 2016 (2) Tour de Wallonie, 2014, 2012 Tour de San Luis, 2014 Tour of Luxembourg, 2013 (2) Tour du Poitou Charentes, 2012 Eneco Tour, 2012 Bayern-Rundfahrt, 2011 Clásica de Almería, 2021 European Continental Championships RR, 2020 National Championships RR, 2020, 2016 Giro del Piemonte, 2016 Coppa Bernocchi, 2016 GP du Canton d’Argovie, 2016 GP Nobili Rubinetterie, 2015 Dubai Tour, 2016 Vuelta a Burgos, 2019 Tour of Slovenia, 2019 Vuelta a España, 2018 Adriatica Ionica Race, 2018 Tour of Croatia, 2018, 2017, 2016 Vuelta a San Juan, 2018 Abu Dhabi Tour, 2016 Giro d’Italia, 2016 (2), 2015 (2),…

TURIN MAY 8 The grande partenza takes place in Turin for the third time and, as on the two previous occasions, the coming of the Giro d’Italia doubles as a commemoration of the unification of Italy. Having already marked the centenary in 1961 and the 150th anniversary in 2011, the Giro returns to the city that served as Italy’s first capital after it was unified under the House of Savoy in 1861. Four years later, the seat of government moved on to Florence, but Turin’s grand palaces, sweeping boulevards and elegant porticos still hint at its former status. Even though Rome and Milan are Italy’s political and economic capitals respectively, Turin has remained a centre of industry, culture and learning, wielding its own degree of influence over the country at…

Procycling: You’re the only siblings on the men’s and women’s equivalent of the same team in the WorldTour. What has that been like so far and have you had the opportunity to spend much time together within the team yet? EMMA: So far we’ve been spending a lot of time together. First we were on the training camp with both the men and women and then again now. Omloop Het Nieuwsblad is my first race for the team and we are here at the same hotel with the men’s team, and we are travelling together. So far, we have been basically on the same team. MATHIAS: The thing with Movistar is we share a lot of staff members between the two teams. I was in Almería to start the season…

BIANCHI SPRINT FORCE ETAP AXS 12SP £5,040 ||| $5,000 The Bianchi Sprint, an icon of cycling, is back, and it remains a fast, carbon bike for racing. This model comes in black, but of course it can be bought in celeste as well. It has aggressive geometry, giving a good platform for a rider to launch themselves in sprints, or chase down breakaways. It comes with Sram Force eTap AXS, meaning fully wireless shifting, and disc brakes for perfect control. The Fulcrum Racing wheels are light and complement the bike perfectly. www.bianchi.com GAERNE CARBON CHRONO+ SHOES £289.99 ||| $348 These performance shoes from Italian company Gaerne have been designed to give you complete control on the bike. Make your efforts on the pedals count with the stiff carbon sole. They…

There is really only one team in town when it comes to the Belgian classics. Out of the seven main races that make up the Belgian spring cobbled races, Deceuninck-Quick Step won four this year. Of the past 33 editions of these races, over the last five seasons, Patrick Lefevere’s team have won 16, almost half. Their favourite race is what is now known as the Oxyclean Classic Brugge-De Panne, which they’ve won four times in the last five years. These are their highest positions in the seven. MOST WWT WINS With five rounds of the 2021 Women’s WorldTour raced, who has won the most WWT ranked races since its creation in 2016? Annemiek Van Vleuten and Mariane Vos lead, largely thanks to stage wins at races such as the…

TOUR OF THE ALPS 19-23 April | Italy | 2.Pro Before the Giro gets there a month later, the Tour of the Alps tackles the climbs of Tyrol and Trentino. All five stages are hilly, with two definitely well within the ‘mountainous’ category. It is traditionally the final warm-up for the Giro d’Italia, but didn’t happen last year for pandemic reasons, being replaced in the run up to the Corsa Rosa by Tirreno-Adriatico. Despite the understanding that it is a fixture for those tackling the Giro, it has not been won by someone who would go on to win the Giro since Vincenzo Nibali in 2013. The last three times that the Tour of the Alps and then the Giro have been held sequentially, two of the Giro winners -…