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Author: Alex

  • Philippe Gilbert goes into the red

    An important aspect of cycling is that different terrain suits different riders. That’s why I always like to see the Grand Tour contenders beaten on an incline. It reinforces the notion that the sport’s a little more nuanced than just ‘fastest uphill’. Philippe Gilbert is fastest uphill, but only for a bit. Give him a…

  • Another Giro stage, another win for the break

    Looks like I didn’t click ‘publish’ on this piece. Pretend it’s yesterday… The way it’s supposed to work is that a bunch of riders form the break early in the day and then the peloton laughs about their foolhardiness for a few hours before reeling them in pretty much whenever it feels like. Only it…

  • Richie Porte realises the perils of ‘mateship’

    A puncture with 5km to go and the racing in full swing was not what Richie Porte wanted. Where were his team-mates and where was the team car? No matter, here’s Porte’s fellow countryman, Simon Clarke, to lend him his wheel. If that's not Aussie mate ship them what is? Punctured and clarkey gave me…

  • Astana continue to bully the peloton

    It seems I was premature in describing Rigoberto Uran’s return to fine fettle. He’s still not dead, but doctors are frowning at his charts. On stage nine, a familiar sequence of events played out. Fabio Aru attacked and his main rivals followed – except for Rigoberto Uran. The top riders opened a gap on the…

  • Rigoberto Uran not dead yet

    Death would actually have been a somewhat catastrophic outcome. He only had a cold. A blocked nose may have been why he lost a bit of time earlier in the race, but on stage eight’s summit finish, he finished with the main contenders, hinting that he may be back somewhere near his best. Uran is…

  • Diego Ulissi briefly emerges from the inaction

    It was a weird stage. Which wasn’t to say that it was exciting, because it wasn’t. It seems that 264km in the middle of a Grand Tour is enough to sap any enthusiasm for attacking. Maximum effort moves a lot closer to sustainable effort after that sort of distance until eventually the former can propel…

  • Andre Greipel engineers a win

    Greipel wins. Take that, pedals! I didn’t see this. Not even the highlights. I was busy watching Prometheus for the second time in a week. Even so, I have a fair idea how it went. A wide-mouthed man emerged from behind a team-mate and punished his bike all the way to the line. After that,…

  • Alberto Contador drags everyone onto the podium

    The way a Grand Tour’s supposed to work is like gravy. You mix everything up, heat it and it’s delicious, but it’s only as it cools that you see the fat slowly rise to the top. In this analogy, fat’s the good bit because fat equals flavour. The thing is, fat alone doesn’t do the…

  • Infant-faced Formolo first following bloody big break bedlam

    Stage four was won by Italian rider, Davide Formolo, who looks like Peter Sagan’s younger brother’s even younger cousin. Yes, that does basically just add up to being Peter Sagan’s cousin, but saying that wouldn’t express how young Formolo looks. Really young. Formolo was in a monster break that contained about 30 riders. At one…

  • Pozzovivo’s apparently not too bad considering he’s been hospitalised with head injuries

    Speaking about being held up by a crash on stage two, Domenico Pozzovivo said: “I try to console myself, saying that the time lost isn’t as important as getting injured and I got through it okay.” A few hours later, he’d crashed. And not just your average slide-off-and-expose-your-buttocks-through-ripped-shorts crash. This was a bad one. He…