Author: Alex
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Chris Froome not carrying invisible weight
If a guy puts a couple of minutes into his rivals in a flat time trial, the only way he’s likely to fall behind them on an incline is if he’s a few kilograms heavier than they are. Chris Froome is far from being a porker, so it wasn’t entirely surprising to see him get…
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Dolphin maths
The Dauphiné region takes its name from the coat of arms of Count Guigues IV of Albon which featured a dolphin. ‘Dauphin’ means ‘dolphin’ in French, so I guess Dauphiné means ‘dolphinny’ or something. Anyway, today’s stage of the Critérium du Dauphiné was a time trial and as it was almost entirely flat, we got…
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Has anything happened in the Critérium du Dauphiné yet?
There’s been one stage. Can we draw any conclusions yet? The Critérium du Dauphiné doesn’t muck about. It kicked off with a short stage which featured a decent whack of climbing. No-one seemed quite sure whether a breakaway would stick, whether it would be a sprint finish or whether the general classification lads would be…
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Bradley Wiggins’ knee problem
The somewhat tiresome media-fuelled battle for Sky team leadership at the Tour de France might have been resolved. Bradley Wiggins is apparently suffering from knee-knack and can’t train properly. You need knees as a cyclist. They move quite a bit when you’re on the bike. I haven’t done the exact maths, but I think you…
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Pro cycling in June
So, the Giro’s done and dusted. What comes next in the cycling year? According to my unofficial list of the races that matter, it’s the big one – the Tour de France on June 29. With that in mind, the coming weeks constitute the build-up. On Sunday, the Critérium du Dauphiné begins. It’s an eight-stage…
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Some sort of review of the 2013 Giro d’Italia
Let’s quickly take stock of the 2013 Giro before moving onto the Tour de France build-up. This year’s Giro was mostly a cold, brutal race – frequently wet or snowy – but we learnt a lot. Grand Tour contenders Vincenzo Nibali established himself as one of the favourites for any Grand Tour he enters from…
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The best of Mark Cavendish
Mark Cavendish won his fifth stage at this year’s Giro yesterday and so took the maglia rossio passione (great name). He has now won the points classification in all three Grand Tours and it has been far from easy. Many feel that Cav is at his best in a sprint finish, but that doesn’t actually…
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Vincenzo Nibali’s happiness (and the varied feelings of others)
It would be wrong to say that Vincenzo Nibali would have been happy at the bottom of the Tre Cime di Lavaredo climb at the end of stage 20. He was about to face 20km of increasingly difficult uphill cycling and the weather near the top was about as pleasant as an old man’s scrotum.…
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Danilo Di Luca – unfit for employment
When it comes to riders who have been caught doping, there are those from a previous generation where such things were considered the norm; there are those who made a mistake and learnt from it; and then there are repeat offenders who simply don’t seem to give a toss. We could perhaps label that last…
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Vincenzo Nibali positively monsters the cronoscalata
There’s a headline you wouldn’t get on most websites. If you want a clear picture, get yourself a cronoscalata. What did today’s cronoscalata reveal? It revealed Vincenzo Nibali, then a big gap and then everyone else. On a normal stage, two riders can finish simultaneously but in radically different states. One can be cycling within…