When I was a kid watching the Tour de France in the late Eighties, my rider allegiances often switched with whichever was my favourite jersey design. I would find myself supporting Renault one year, PDM the next, Z-Peugeot the year after that. As with football a few years earlier (and in the very same way as my young children today) I was something of a ... Read More
20 Results for tag procycling
Portrait of ‘The Cycling Podcast’ – with Richard Moore, Lionel Birnie & Daniel Friebe
It’s just after 3pm on a Tuesday afternoon in Hackney and Richard Moore, Lionel Birnie and Daniel Friebe are looking for a bit of peace and quiet. The trouble is that around the busy East London streets of Broadway Market and London Fields school kids are heaving out onto the hot pavements and the nearby building sites that are sprouting up yet more flats ... Read More
Giro d’Italia – Final Roundup
Read The Jersey Pocket’s first three Giro Rest Day Roundups here, here and here. As expected, actually being in Italy during the final week of the Giro affected my ability to follow the race as closely as I could at home. That said, watching some of the stages as they were broadcast live and highlights of others in Italian did give the experience an ... Read More
Giro d’Italia – Rest Day Roundup #3
Read The Jersey Pocket’s first two Giro Rest Day Roundups here and here. We finished our last round-up with the suggestion that we were heading for new territory on the Giro GC and the middle week of the Corsa Rosa eventually provided that, but not before more familiar fare had been dished up. More rain, more crashes, more cautious riding by the top contenders ... Read More
Giro d’Italia – Rest Day Roundup #2
Read The Jersey Pocket’s first Giro Rest Day Roundup here. Having flown 2,500km down to the Mediterranean, the gruppo might have been forgiven for thinking that they had left the poor weather behind in Ireland, along with a great deal of good feeling and a fair few hangovers. In fact they were in for a set of rude, and often painful, shocks when the ... Read More
Pantani:The Accidental Death of a Cyclist – Film Review
The new Marco Pantani film had its premiere in London’s West-End this week. I went along to see the film and also spoke with director James Erskine about it. – Often alone on the mountain climbs upon which he made his name. Ultimately alone in the Rimini hotel room where he died ten years ago, aged just 34. Always, it seems, alone in ... Read More
Giro d’Italia – Rest Day Roundup #1
So, four days in and the Giro entourage finally hit Italian soil this morning. A massive transfer of cargo planes and charter flights took place last night and today to transfer the 196 continuing riders, probably twice as many support staff and countless more media personnel to the decidedly drier climes of sunny Puglia. Something like 500 bikes and a couple of ... Read More
Giro d’Italia Preview – Whatever happened to all the heroes?
“Whatever happened to all the heroes? All the Shakespeareos?” – The Stranglers: No More Heroes With the Giro d’Italia starting in Belfast on Friday, and the inaugural Women’s Tour of Britain breaking new ground in England this week, there are probably more top-level cyclists currently on UK soil than for many, many a year. But whilst the Women’s Tour has attracted the& ... Read More
Methods in the Madness – Spring Classics Round-Up
“This be madness, yet there is method in it” – Hamlet And we are done. Bergs have been beaten, cobbles have been conquered, pavé passed and Murs mauled. The Spring Classics season is over and there is a small chance to draw breath and reflect on the tumultuousness before the Grand Tour season comes to rule our lives once more. It has been an undeniably classic ... Read More
The Ups and Downs of the Round and Round – Track Life
For most there was a carnival-like atmosphere accompanying the return of competitive cycling to the Olympic Velodrome last weekend. The sun shone unseasonably brightly on the crowds who made their way to the fifth and final round of the 2013-2014 Revolution Series and they were also treated to some magnificent racing in the superb building affectionately known as The Pringle. But not everyone left the ... Read More
Wheels of Steal – Pro-teams suffer spate of stolen equipment
In what is becoming a regular feature of the early and late season races, pro-teams have again suffered a number of large scale equipment thefts in the past weeks. After Garmin’s high profile withdrawal of the Tour Mediterranean in February last year following the loss of 17 bikes from a team truck, 3 World Tour teams have lost significant amounts of bikes, wheels and other items ... Read More
The Sky is Not the Limit – the other British riders in the pro peloton
Team Sky (or Sky Procycling as they were until the start of this season) have undoubtedly changed the way that cycling is perceived in this country. Although they were set up from the start as an internationally rostered team – albeit with a very clear aim of initially achieving success in the Tour de France for a British rider – they were often described as a de ... Read More
“Another Fine Mesh” – Pro-cycling clothing debate hots up
Cyclists are often a bit funny about their tan-lines. Cultivating a set of razor-sharp transitions, which switch instantly from the deepest mahogany to a blinding alabaster white, half way along a thigh or bicep is seen as one of the heights of being ‘pro’. Tan-lines like these tell of days in the saddle, not days on the beach. They are worn with more than just ... Read More
Weekly Round Up – Tour Down Under & Tour De San Luis
It’s been a hard week to follow the start of the cycling season from the UK. Races in Australia and Argentina are not so easy to watch live; it either involves getting up at 4.30am and disturbing the rest of your non-cycling life with sleep deprivation to watch the Tour Down Under; or risking your eyesight squinting at a fuzzy web-cam whilst trying to ... Read More
Three is a Magic Number – The Trials of a Balanced Outlook on Life
“Somewhere in the ancient mystic Trinity, you get Three as a magic number” – Bob Dorough, Schoolhouse Rock! Trouble, they say, comes in threes. The way the back half of last year went personally I would have to add in a factor of at least 10 to that figure, but the notion of a Triad of Adversity seems to be a well held adage. Once a couple ... Read More
In The Court of the King – An Evening with Sean Kelly
For a man who made a career of letting his legs rather than his mouth do the talking, An Evening with Sean Kelly at Cadence Performance in Crystal Palace this week could easily have been a painful experience for both speaker and audience. Kelly makes no secret of the fact that he is not a natural raconteur but he was most certainly a natural competitor ... Read More
The Off Season (or What the Hell Do We Do Now?)
The absence of competitive road cycling from mid October has not really been a big issue for me in the past. As a kid and then as a teenager I only followed the Tour de France and never even considered the fact that cycling had a wider season which waxed and waned around it. The Tour was everything and everything was the Tour. It was ... Read More
Foreign Starts – Grand Tours on Tour
With both the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia set to start outside of their own borders next year it seems like a good time to have a look at this increasingly regular phenomenon. In 2014 the Giro will spend three days in Ireland during May, visiting both Belfast and Dublin, before Le Tour comes to Yorkshire, Cambridge and London in July. Whilst the ... Read More
The Mavericks – Adam Hansen – Seventh Heaven for Grand Tour Glutton
Lotto Bellisol’s Adam Hansen has just completed his seventh straight Grand Tour. Since late 2011 he has ridden the Giro and the Tour twice each and La Vuelta three times – all without a break. He has covered almost 24,000 Grand Tour kilometres in those 2 years and raced an incredible total of 16,059km over 106 days last year alone. In an era of ever increased targeting of races ... Read More
None More Black – the shifting spectrum of the pro peloton
“It’s like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black.” Nigel Tufnell. Spinal Tap. The recent news that Cannondale’s new 2014 kit design will be a mainly black affair has been greeted by cycling’s fashion watchers with barely more than a raised eyebrow. ‘Copying Sky’ is the main criticism that most can muster and, given that ... Read More