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…
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…
Vincenzo Nibali has a Monument
Not a statue, not a commemorative building of some description, but a win in the Tour of Lombardy (Il Lombardia), one of cycling’s five Monuments. It’s a big deal. When people measure a cyclist’s worth,…
Vincenzo Nibali – part man, part sidecar
The most interesting aspect of stage two for me was big Tom Dumoulin finishing second. It would be good to see a time triallist competing for Grand Tours again. It would bring a new dimension…
Nairo Quintana in the third week
After Chris Froome hurried his way to what appeared an impregnable lead after stage 10, I wrote that Grand Tours aren’t just about who’s fastest, they’re also about how tired you get and I pointed…
Peter Sagan finishes second to… Ruben Plaza?
No, me neither. Ruben Plaza won a stage of the Vuelta a Espana a decade ago and he’s been Spanish national champion a couple of times, but I’d have had him down for break fodder;…
Vincenzo Nibali loses a little more time ahead of The Big Mountain Sort-Out
The team time trial was an intriguing prospect, but it didn’t amount to an awful lot in the end. BMC won it and it increasingly seems like their leader – the American, Tejay Van Garderen…
Alexis Vuillermoz forces people to learn his vowels
Alexis Vuillermoz is the kind of cyclist I’m happy to see finishing sixth in La Fleche Wallonne. This is because I don’t have to write about the guy who comes sixth and therefore don’t have…
How did Vincenzo Nibali win the 2014 Tour de France?
Last year, I looked at where Chris Froome gained time on his rivals in a bid to explain how he came to win the Tour. That’s not really so necessary this year because the result…
Marcel Kittel’s back off holiday
Because that’s where he’s been, right? On the eighth of July, he’d won three out of four stages and then, on the 27th of July, he won a fourth. In between those times, he disappeared….
