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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Philippe Gilbert: the rider Bradley Wiggins perhaps wishes he could have been
Cycling’s a little like a giant volcano that rises from the seabed. Britons, in particular, see the obvious bit that pokes above the water – the Tour de France and Olympic track cycling – and…
How many Italians have won the Tour of Flanders?
The cobbled classics started out normally enough. Zdenek Stybar – a man best known on this site for taking his false teeth out during the 2015 Tour of Flanders because they were rattling – won…
So that’s why Julian Alaphilippe was practising his sprint
I don’t tell you much useful on this website, but I did inadvertently drip-feed you a teaser of Julian Alaphilippe’s win in Milan-Sanremo. First, I told you he’d win a bunch of stuff this season….
