Author: Alex

  • Rounding up The Dolphin

    Chris Froome won the Criterium du Dolphin. He won it on stage five. Team-mate Mikel Landa attacked on the final climb and Froome followed as his rivals chased the Spaniard down. The moment they caught him, whoosh, Froome was off. Richie Porte was the only one able to follow and the Tasmanian had nothing left…

  • Alberto Contador gets out of the saddle

    There was a period, not so long ago, when every time Alberto Contador raced the Tour de France, he won it. He won in 2007, he won in 2009 and he won in 2010. The last of those was later stripped from him after what with hindsight feels like the first of the modern doping…

  • Highlights of the 2016 Criterium du Dauphiné are on ITV4

    The Criterium du Dauphiné starts today (Sunday). ITV4 are doing a daily highlights programme, same as they do for the Tour de France. It’ll also appear on the ITV Player, which is available via all sorts of modern technology. It’s still worth recording if you’ve got the facility though as from experience programmes can sometimes…

  • Giacomo Nizzolo can’t even win a stage of the Giro when he crosses the line first

    Quite a neat trick, really. After nine second places and four third places, Giacomo Nizzolo finally crossed the line before everyone else in a stage of the Giro d’Italia. Shortly afterwards the race judges concluded that he’d veered across while sprinting and in so doing had blocked off his rival, Sacha Modolo. They demoted him…

  • Vincenzo Nibali’s horrific and shameful Giro d’Italia somehow ends in victory

    After Vincenzo Nibali won stage 19, Esteban Chaves said: “It’s not easy to follow Nibali downhill. He’s crazy to do that, but I must be crazy too to follow him.” Descending is perhaps an underrated aspect of cycling. Grand Tour winners are always among the strongest climbers, but you don’t see the impact of a descent…

  • Nibali or Kruijswijk – choose your story

    Remember those Choose Your Own Adventure books where you’d have a choice to make at the end of every passage? “If you choose to drink the potion, turn to page 110. If you choose to throw the potion in the angry hippopotamus’s face, turn to page 83.” This is nothing like that. There are only…

  • Matteo Trentin as if from nowhere

    Matteo Trentin won another for the breakaway. It was an odd one though. Worth watching. For the last quite-a-few kilometres, stage 18 seemed certain to be a mano-e-mano duel between two Italians (mano nella mano?) – Moreno Moser and Trentin’s team-mate, Gianluca Brambilla (who we already know from earlier in the race). The day’s break…

  • Roger Kluge didn’t sprint

    Previewing stage 17, I did ask whether there were any sprinters left in the race. There are a handful, but flatter stages no longer see a significant number of teams hammering away at the front of the bunch in the closing kilometres, trying to set things up. Shorn of their fastest finishers, a lot are…

  • Alejandro Valverde is still in the Giro d’Italia

    Alejandro doesn’t always sprint for fourth place. Sometimes there aren’t three riders ahead of him and he has to settle for sprinting for the win. That’s what happened at the end of a short but gruelling stage 16. The attacks started early and continued throughout. Without wishing to walk you through who attacked when, the…

  • Steven Kruijswijk fastest uphill – handy when you’re already first and there are only mountains to come

    Well that was a bit weird. Alexander Foliforov of the Gazprom-Rusvelo team won the cronoscalata. In cycling, weird is usually bad, but let’s not jump the gun. Foliforov, essentially an unknown, does have a certain amount of pedigree. In 2014, he came fourth in the Tour de l’Avenir, a Tour de France for under-23s which…