Month: February 2014

  • The cobbles, climbs and cobbled climbs of Belgium

    Crack open an oud bruin, smear some samurai sauce on your frites and brace yourself for Belgium. It’s time for cobbles, short climbs and short cobbled climbs as we build towards the Ronde van Vlaanderen (the Tour of Flanders) on the 6th of April. Okay, that race is still some way off, but the reconnaisance…

  • Chris Froome can still cycle uphill at great speed

    Not the greatest revelation ever. Up there with ‘oranges are still orange’ and ‘online marketing is a pointless, zero-sum game practised by cold, dead-eyed charlatans who talk the talk to a far greater degree than they walk the walk’. But if you write a cycling website, you take what you can at this point in…

  • Why Peter Sagan isn’t a sprinter

    Peter Sagan won the green jersey in last year’s Tour de France and he always contests the sprints, yet people don’t tend to talk about him as being a sprinter. Why is this? Stage four of the Tour of Oman answered that question. What happened? During four ascents of the same hill, the peloton was…

  • What’s going on in the Tour of Oman?

    In my last article, I slightly talked up the Tour of Oman, but have since written nowt about it. I should probably bring you up to lead-out speed on what’s been going on. Stage one Greipel wins. Take that, pedals! Stage two Alexander Kristoff won. Stage three Greipel wins. Take that, pedals! In summary It’s…

  • Steve Cummings wins a stage race

    Britain is still very Wiggins/Cavendish-centric when it comes to cycling. There’s been semi-adoption of Chris Froome, who races as a Brit and Geraint Thomas is quite well known. However, if you haven’t won a Tour de France or Olympic gold, most people would sooner spit in your face than hold a door open for you.…

  • Middle Eastern foreshadowing

    Never let it be said that I am detached from my readers. I know what the readership is crying out for and that’s a half-arsed update about the Dubai Tour and stage one of the Tour of Qatar. The Dubai Tour This is the kind of race that’s decided by a prologue. Taylor Phinney’s 15-second…