Category: Classics and day races
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Demi Vollering? Imagine a full one! | a 2023 spring classics recap
Some people really don’t like surprises. These people will no doubt be lapping up the 2023 road cycling season thus far. Let’s start with the women’s races and specifically 2021 Liege-Bastogne-Liege and La Course winner, Demi Vollering, who has – let’s not beat about the bush – won everything. Okay, not everything. She came second…
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Enough Belgians? | A 2022 Spring Classics recap
So where were we? Last time we spoke – all the way back in March – I was advising you not to assume that Tadej Pogacar would hoover up victories left, right and centre this season – which is what a lot of people felt after he won Strade Bianche. Let’s see how that prediction…
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Don’t assume that Tadej Pogacar will win even more big races than last year
It’s fair to say Tadej Pogacar had a pretty tidy 2021. As well as winning the Tour de France for the second year in a row, he also took two of the five Monuments. In April he edged out World Champion Julian Alaphilippe in Liege-Bastogne-Liege and then, right at the end of the year –…
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Unfamiliar faces v familiar faces | a 2021 spring classics recap
The big springtime one-day races represent the divide between people who really follow cycling and people who very much like it and will definitely watch it when it’s on ITV4 but probably won’t actively seek it out. Whichever group you fall into, here’s a recap. Milan-Sanremo Milan-Sanremo came to a head as it always does,…
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Van der Poel’s power, van Aert’s adaptability, Pogacar’s form and Roglic’s matter-of-factness – scene-setting in early spring
The season is now definitely underway and we’ve been given a couple of sighters for the bigger events to come. Let’s take a look at who you need to be keeping an eye on this year. This early part of spring provides a bit of a warm-up for everyone. We’ve had our first big one-day…
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When does the 2021 pro cycling season *really* begin?
The professional road racing season is theoretically international these days which meant the 2021 World Tour officially got underway in the UAE in February, following the cancellation of the Tour Down Under and the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race in Australia earlier in the year. But everyone knows that isn’t the real start of…
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Julian Alaphilippe wins, loses, crashes out | An Autumn classics recap
The Giro d’Italia is still limping on. (Although it’s Covid-19 testing again today, so that sentence might not see out the afternoon.) Let’s take a break from Grand Tours this week though and instead turn our attention to the one-day racing that’s been taking place in recent weeks. This October batch of classics kicked off…
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Woot! Wout! | A 2020 Italian classics recap + talking points from the Critérium du Dauphiné
The second phase of the World Tour season kicked off with Strade Bianche, the gravelly one-day race that actually only started in 2007 but which everyone has agreed to talk about like it’s been going for at least 100 years. It was an inauspicious start in some ways with Sylvan Dillier hoicked from the start…
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Team Ineos are bad at cobbled classics because Team Ineos aren’t Belgian
Dig out your thermal base layers and your SealSkinz gloves, winter is sorta, kinda, almost over and the Spring Classics are underway. They race in Australia, they race in the Middle East, but the road racing season only really starts with the Omloop and Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne (even if they’re not technically top-ranked events). We know what…
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Jakob Fuglsang hammers a twist into the tale of the 2019 Spring Classics
At one point this season, the story of the spring classics was that Julian Alaphilippe had won every one-day race he’d entered, except for the ones Mathieu van der Poel had ridden, which had been won by van der Poel. The subplot would have been that Jakob Fuglsang had been Mr Third-Best, finishing second to…