Tabla de contenidos para July 2020 en Procycling

The last day of top-level racing was March 14. On that day, we celebrated a stage win for Nairo Quintana and a GC win for Max Schachmann on the final day of Paris-Nice. This magazine comes out on June 12, which means we’ll have had 89 days without a race by the time you read this. That’s not much different to the off season - though there are smaller races in between, there were 100 days between Lombardia 2019 and the Tour Down Under this January. But while this has been a stressful and hard period for many, just in terms of everyday life, summer is here and we can be optimistic about better times ahead. It’s not certain - nothing is - but it may be fewer than 50…

On October 25 I was planning to have a day full of celebration for the 805th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, celebrating Henry V’s victory over France. Instead, however, according to the revised UCI calendar, I will be spending my Sunday watching not one, but three bike races all at the same time. For this is the day on which it has been decreed that Paris-Roubaix will occur. Also the final stage of the Giro d’Italia, a time trial that might decide the race, and stage 6 of the Vuelta a España. I’m not an epidemiologist so I offer no medical opinion on whether racing should return. Just that, if it really is safe, I would quite selfishly like bike racing back on TV, with or without fans. But…

For Movistar in 2020, their 41st year in the pro peloton, there’s a big break with their history, as their choice of gearing shifts from Campagnolo to Sram. The move to the new groupset ends a 37-year partnership with the old-school Italian company. For Jurgen Roelandts, his classics bike is still the Canyon Aeroad CF SLX, but with brand new finishing kit. The Sram Red AXS groupset means 12-speed shifting for the Spanish team, and HRD shifters on the ends of the handlebars, with extra Blips under the tops. The new partnership also means Zipp replaces Campagnolo as the wheel sponsor, and Quarq provide the power meter. The other big change for 2020 is the introduction of disc brakes, at last, for one of the most traditional teams in the…

Confession time: I’m now yet another person who has inherited a sourdough starter, and named it. Before you judge me for jumping on the sourdough bandwagon, know that it did show up at my front door without me requesting it. The bandwagon was forced upon me, and I have yet to make a single loaf of bread with it because everytime I peek at a recipe, I think about what a poor ROI it’ll yield. So much effort and time for such mediocrity, at least coming from my oven. I’m so painfully below average when it comes to producing good bakes. I’ll leave the bread-making to the masters. However, I do enjoy reflecting on the nostalgia of baking because it’s something I never thought I’d have time to do at…

If you were to decide which race could join the Big Nine to make it into cycling’s Top 10, which one would it be? There are only three grand tours, and it’s unlikely that it would be possible to set up another one, so if the 10th addition to the calendar were to be a stage race, it would have to be one of the weeklong events. Historically, the Tour de Suisse was the best of the rest - even to the late 1980s, it was arguably more important than the Vuelta. Of the other races, the biggest are Paris-Nice, Tirreno-Adriatico and the Critérium du Dauphiné. Perhaps the Tour Down Under, Volta a Catalunya, Itzulia Basque Country or Tour de Romandie would be your choice. Or even the BinckBank Tour or…

601 minutes the amount of time it took Boels-Dolmans rider Katie Hall to climb 8,848m vertical metres, the equivalent height of Everest from sea level, setting a world record. She completed 27 laps of the 3.7km climb to Bonny Doon, California “Our team uses ketones, so it’s a bit hypocritical for me to be a member of the MPCC” Tom Dumoulin quit the Mouvement pour un Cyclisme Crédible, because of its stance on ketones, but also because of the “farce” of Paris-Nice continuing during the pandemic. €5.5m the amount that Peter Sagan reportedly gets paid a year, topping a list of cycling’s biggest earners, which also includes Ineos riders Chris Froome, Geraint Thomas, Egan Bernal, Micha? Kwiatkowski and Richard Carapaz in the top 10. “I’m blindsided & heartbroken” Aevolo Cycling’s team director Michael…

David has been developing hugely over the last three years. He’s a skilled rider, with his sprint, but what he lacked was the big step up in training and nutrition, the last steps to become a pro. We have that at SEG, so we go together quite well - he wanted to become a pro, and find improvements. David has been a bit more playful in his cycling in the last couple of years, so we added a plan and training structure, and that has really made a difference. He has a big engine, and he is a combination of a sprinter and a classics rider. If you were to compare him to a current pro, I would say he’s like Alexander Kristoff. He’s fast, he can win bunch sprints,…

The last few weeks have been mainly waiting for the arrival of our baby. Our first daughter was born two weeks early and with the second one we thought they might come early, too even though the due date is June. It’s been a bit more relaxed the last week, but my fiancé is looking forward to having the baby in her arms and not in her belly any more! It can happen any minute, any day, so I’m waiting for the phone call, if I’m doing my training, that I need to turn around and go home. I’m going out for three, four hours today, the standard ride, with a little group. It’s nice to be able to be together again and talk to more than one person, and…

IN 1990, JIM RABDAU, ORGANISER OF THE WOMEN’S CHALLENGE, WANTED HIS RACE TO MAKE A STATEMENT TO MARK THE CENTENARY OF THEIR HOME STATE OF IDAHO Idaho is affectionately known as the ‘gem state’ thanks to the multitude of precious stones its landscape contains, Its vast open spaces, empty countryside and extensive mountain ranges make the western US state a perfect cycling playground, even if it did have almost no cycling heritage to speak of. This was the seventh edition of Rabdau’s race, and it was growing in stature each year, but with such a reason to celebrate, he wanted to create an event never done before, something that had the scale to live up to Idaho’s expansive landscape. Rabdau created a race route that covered a mammoth 17 stages…

Leader is a mantle that Carmen Small has always worn well. Whether it was at her high school, in Durango, Colorado, where she was a member of the volleyball team that won the state championship in her senior year. Or after graduating from Colorado State University when she became a high school maths teacher, unfazed by the challenge of educating classes full of angsty teenagers. Or during her cycling career, which she came to later than most via triathlon - she was aged 27 when she signed her first pro contract in 2007 - as she settled into a role as road captain. Or perhaps as a coach, a job she held alongside her racing career. Or as one of the founding members of the Cyclists’ Alliance, the organisation that…

After a couple of months of indoor living, the lockdown restrictions started to ease in Andorra. Initially residents were allowed an hour a day to be outside on alternative days, and then gradually more and more. As these restrictions eased I was also able to get the correct papers to travel home to Cumbria, through France, and it’s where I’ve been ever since. It was a long drive back across two countries to the Lakes, but with little traffic on the roads it wasn’t so difficult. Back at my parents home it’s been pretty easy to remain basically self isolated on my return and it has personally been a huge relief to be back around my family and in familiar surroundings. For the last few years, family time has been…

Life, sang John Lennon, is what happens to you when you are busy making other plans. Lizzie Deignan’s had her fair share of life in the last few seasons, what with the whereabouts business, the baby and now the covid-19 crisis, and it has gone further than interrupting her plans; it’s upended her whole self-image. “I’m a plan-focused person, but we can’t plan anything. That’s been difficult” she tells Procycling over a WhatsApp video call from her home in Harrogate. “I’m learning,” she adds, “to take each day as it comes.” Deignan loves a plan. She wrote in her autobiography Steadfast of the colourcoded, hand-written training plans tracking her progress towards specific targets over months and months of micromanaged detail. The first time I interviewed her, after her 2016 World…

Mike Teunissen couldn’t sleep on the night of July 6. The adrenaline was still pumping through his body. His mind wouldn’t relax. His phone kept pinging with an endless stream of messages. His team-mate Dylan Groenewegen was also tossing and turning in the bed next to him. The pair were sharing a hotel room in Brussels, though it was the stinging road rash all over Groenewegen’s body, rather than elation at winning stage 1 of the Tour de France, that was keeping him awake instead. Teunissen was the winner no one was expecting on the opening day of the Tour last year, the young Dutchman claiming the double prize of a maiden Tour stage victory and also the first yellow jersey of the race, under beaming sunshine in the Belgian…

I have a love of mid-century Italian light fixtures. Italy is, in a lot of ways, a really dysfunctional place. But they are great at design. Think about Ray-Ban, Persol sunglasses, all those Italian brands in fashion, cars, art… I like interior design, and my apartment in Nice is an old Niçois place, with a pretty mid-century vibe. I’m not necessarily stuck in that particular era, but for the light fixtures I’ve gone in that direction. If you only think of cycling all the time, it’s a bit boring. You need to also have distractions, so you are not too focused on any one thing all the time. It doesn’t have to be detrimental to what you are focused on - it’s just good to have other interests. I only…

At the start of 1991, if followers of cycling had been asked to nominate a rider who would dominate the sport in the next five years, most would have come up with the same man. José Miguel Echavarri, long-time manager of Reynolds, would have been the exception in nominating his protégé Miguel Indurain, but ‘Miguelon’ wouldn’t have been the first name on most lips. If the future of cycling at the start of 1991 didn’t belong to Indurain, then who? Not Greg LeMond, Stephen Roche, Pedro Delgado or Laurent Fignon. They were on the downward slide. Claudio Chiappucci, the surprise runner-up to LeMond in the 1990 Tour, was widely viewed as a one-hit wonder, and he was no spring chicken. Laurent Jalabert and Tony Rominger were not exactly unknowns, but…

Crazy? Yes. Bad idea? Hell no. Somewhere early in November 2020 the peloton is still racing. Normally they would have been on holiday somewhere, on a tropical beach, but now 150 tired bodies will reach Madrid. After a lot of discussions and negotiations and behind-thescenes talk between stakeholders, the pro peloton has a new WorldTour calendar. I dived into it and here are the stats: in the small time frame of three months, or 100 days, they will race 15 one-day races, five week-long stage races and three grand tours. I recommend putting a red cross in your calendar on Sunday October 25. It’s the last day of the Giro d’Italia, one of the mountain stages of the Vuelta a España and Paris-Roubaix all on the same day, which will…