Table of contents for August 2022 in Cyclist

As I write this, however, the race has yet to start. The stories have yet to be written. Will Tadej Pogačar cement his status as the new Merckx by crushing his opponents with ease and adding a third straight title to his palmarès before his 24th birthday? Or will compatriot Primož Roglič finally shrug off the poor fortune that has plagued previous attempts and make it to the top step of the podium, carried by his mighty Jumbo-Visma team? Maybe a new star will emerge to surprise us, or an old campaigner will rediscover their form to upset the bookies – Geraint Thomas, perhaps, or Romain Bardet or Chris Froome (OK, maybe not Froome). This year’s Tour is riddled with opportunities for race-winning moves and memorable moments. The return of…

Limar has claimed to have produced the world’s lightest helmet more times than most cyclists have had hot disc brakes, yet at 250g for a size medium its new Air Pro Mips is a whole 75g heavier than its most recent record breaker, the Ultralight+. The reason, says Limar, is because it has tried to incorporate a more balanced set of attributes in this design. According to the brand, the Air Pro is 20% more aerodynamically efficient than the Ultralight+ thanks to the ‘pyramidal’ surface shape of the longitudinal ribs that form the helmet’s shell. The ‘CarbonCoreTech’ design helps too. By co-moulding five layers of 3K carbon fibre weave in with conventional EPS foam in the shell, Limar claims the Air Pro can be as strong and protective as helmets…

At first glance, the Bryton S800 looks to offer similar features to other bike computers. It weighs 106g (claimed), offers more data than you could ever hope to crunch, and has climb-specific features and different bike profiles, as well as maps and navigation. But what makes the S800 stand out are its display and battery life. The new Bryton has a 3.4-inch colour screen and a claimed 36-hour battery life. This might not sound overly impressive, but it is the clever way the two work together to maximise the device’s potential that deserves attention. Bryton uses a technology called ‘memory in pixel’ (MIP) in the screen that lowers power consumption by only refreshing the pixels in the display that need to be changed. This combination promises to give users a…

1 ELITE VICO GLAM BOTTLE CAGES £49.99 each, freewheel.co.uk A weasel walks into a bar and the barman says, ‘Wow, I’ve never served a weasel before, what can I getcha?’ ‘Pop,’ goes the weasel. Just like that joke, Elite’s Vico Glam cages are a new twist on a long-established design – still carbon composite, still a claimed 29g, but now in a host of spangly colours. 2 KNOG SCOUT BIKE SECURITY £39.99, silverfish-uk.com Holy water and laxatives – that’s a fine way to start a religious movement. And 85-decibel alarms and GPS? That’s a fine blueprint for bike security, and it’s what underpins this clever widget. It mounts onto your bottle bosses using tamper-proof bolts, and has a thief-deafening alarm as well as a GPS transmitter that uses Apple’s Find…

Ever wondered how sun protection factor (SPF) ratings are calculated? They’re determined by comparing the time it takes for intense ultra-violet rays (UVR) ‘to cause erythema on human volunteers’, acccording to a study in the Public Health Research And Practice journal from Australia’s Sax Institute. In other words, SPF is calculated by how long it takes someone to burn with or without sun cream. If you would normally burn in ten minutes, SPF 15 means it will take 150 minutes. For SPF to ring true, however, ‘approximately 35ml, or seven teaspoons’ should be applied, ‘one teaspoon per limb, one for the front of the body, one for the back of the body and one for the head’. When sunscreen sprays were measured, the study notes ‘as much as 93% of…

The town of Carcassonne in the south of France is deserted at this early hour. It’s almost as if the streets are closed in expectation of the Tour de France passing through, but the only person on a bike is me, and the only race is the one I have created for myself as I clip in and set off. With nothing but empty tarmac ahead, I’m soon out the other side of Carcassonne and heading south at speed. The terrain is fast-rolling – the Pyrenees wear their foothills like a delicate perfume – but after 21km the high mountains come into view. This road, the D118, is small enough to be quiet but big enough to be smooth and quick. The prevailing easterly gives me a cross-tailwind, which helps…

1 Pinarello Grevil F p134 The big changes to the Italian marque’s gravel bike push it more into the gravel mainstream, but is that a good thing? 2 Fara F/AR p140 Norwegian brand Fara takes inspiration from the mix of tarmac and trails around Oslo to produce an all-rounder that ticks all the boxes. 3 Giant Revolt Advanced Pro 1 p146 The 2022 Revolt boasts a completely new frame, with additions and tweaks that aim to answer the question of what riders really need from a gravel bike.…

Gravel cycling, like the peasants, is in revolt. As the pendulum of bike fashion swings wildly from one extreme to the other, bike makers are falling over themselves trying to decide if gravel riding necessitates a road bike with abnormally large tyres or a mountain bike with strange curly handlebars. Just maybe, there is no right answer. Designed, according to Giant’s David Ward, to be ‘as adaptable as possible’ for a world where ‘people’s needs for a gravel bike are changing rapidly’, the new Revolt Advanced Pro is the lightest yet, its frameset saving a claimed 200g over its already respectably light predecessor. And it manages this despite the addition of rear dropout ‘flip chips’ – more on those in a minute. Subtly, completely new The 2022 Revolt is a…

Winston Churchill is Prime Minister, rationing comes to an end, Elvis releases his first single, both Lord Of The Flies and the first Lord Of The Rings books are published. It’s 1954 and, on top of all that, Ernesto Colnago begins making lugged steel bicycle frames. Colnago is a company steeped in history and tradition, one that prides itself on producing bikes steeped in history and tradition, but 68 years on and the Italian brand’s latest bike, the C68, is embracing a whole new world and finally leaving lugs in the past – kind of. Despite no longer being Colnago’s go-to race bike (the monocoque V-series took over those reins several years ago) the C-series, which can claim to have been one of the world’s first full-carbon composite frames, remains…

For a device so small, the new Varia RCT715 sure packs in plenty of tech. It includes Garmin’s Varia radar, which detects cars up to 140m behind the rider, a rear light that the manufacturer says can be seen from over a kilometre away, and now a camera too, which captures footage at up to 1080p and 30fps. The camera is constantly recording, but if it detects an incident, the video footage from before, during and after the event is automatically saved. The Varia RCT715’s battery life is said to last between four and six hours depending on the light mode used.…

Going anywhere nice on your holidays this year? If you’re going by car (ever more likely considering the state of air travel), Elite’s new Sanremo 40 carrier system is a simple, compact and secure way to fix a bike onto car roof bars. The front bit locks onto the fork dropouts once the front wheel has been removed, while the back bit straps around the rear wheel. It secures bikes of up to 16kg, fits up to 66mm tyres and accepts both thru-axles and quick-release skewers via different end caps.…

It is believed that knitting originated more than 1,500 years ago, probably in the Middle East. The oldest preserved example of knitting as we know it is a pair of socks that dates from the 11th century, and a thousand years later it is still the foot that remains the beneficiary of knitting technology, except for modern cyclists it is in the form of shoes rather than socks. So far has the knitted cycling shoe come in the past few years that Tadej Pogačar is currently attempting to win a third straight Tour de France in a pair woven by Italian brand DMT. Shoes that use knitted or woven uppers are claimed by manufacturers to bring improved comfort, enhanced breathability and reduced weight. Amercian company Giro pioneered the knitted cycling…

‘The 2022 edition of the Tour de Suisse was one of the hottest on record, with temperatures over 30°C most days. And this specific day was even hotter, closer to 37°C. So although this is a picture of Geraint Thomas [Ineos Grenediers], it’s a great visual representation of how everyone was feeling. ‘I shot G in the opening first few kilometres of the last stage, a time-trial, then made my way to the finish to catch him after he had crossed the line. Going into the last day G was two seconds down on race leader Sergio Higuita [Bora-Hansgrohe], and although he finished the TT in second, his advantage over Higuita was plenty enough to take GC overall by more than a minute. He’s the first British rider to win…

Cyclist: You claimed your first Monument by winning the fastest-ever edition of Paris-Roubaix in April. Why were you shaking your head in the velodrome? Shock? Dylan van Baarle: Yeah. I’ve been part of five Classics campaigns with the team and we have always aimed to win one. In the past couple of years we were getting closer, and this year everything came together. I couldn’t believe it. When I reached the velodrome I checked the screen to see if it was really happening, you know? It was just disbelief. Cyc: Is it true you really hate cobbles? DvB: It’s not one of my favourite things to blast over in training, that’s for sure. But I just went fast over them at Roubaix and that made it nicer. I like the…

Heat hurts. We don’t mean the pain of sunburn but rather the physiological and psychological pain you can feel from riding in extreme heat. It’s a paradox of cycling. We spend all winter moaning about the wet and cold, dodging the rain or taking to the turbo, only for the weather to leave us feeling like our clothes have been glued on when the sun finally shows its face. Thankfully there are things you can do to perform at your best and recover without melting into a puddle. I just need to drink a lot, right? Hydration is critical – and complex. The idea that we should all be necking two litres of water per day is no longer considered accurate and has been replaced by formulae depending on your…

Meet the Grevil, Pinarello’s answer to gravel, a platform that debuted in 2019 and which I really rather liked (see issue 104). For 2022 the Grevil gains an ‘F’, and most obviously adds full internal cabling, which runs inside the Most bars and stem (Most is Pinarello’s component arm) and into the frame via huge 1.5-inch headset bearings. Less obvious is that that frame is made of T700 fibres from Japanese carbon specialist Toray, not the stiffer, more expensive T1100 of its predecessor, the Grevil+. It’s the same fibres that the non-plussed Grevil used in 2019, and which helped it shed £2,500. It’s this switch that helps keep the price down here despite two years of inflation and upgraded kit – the Princeton Grit wheels are a princely £2,900, and…

Cyclist: The Transcontinental Race is a self-supported ultra-distance bike race across Europe, founded in 2013 by your late husband Mike Hall. The pandemic halted the TCR in its tracks in 2020, but now it’s back for the eighth edition. How does that feel? Anna Haslock: I’m really excited for TCRNo8. The route is great and we have got so many good riders signed up. There are mixed emotions though because this will be my last race as race director. I wanted to do ten races – it’s a nice round number – but Covid got in the way and I didn’t feel like waiting another two years to do the other things I’ve been planning. I’m going back to university to do a PGCE and become a teacher. But I’ll…

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As recently as 1985 this was nothing more than a steep, unpaved dirt track Imagine for a moment you are a die-hard West Ham fan. You’re so desperate to see your beloved claret and blue army closer to home that you decide to build a football pitch outside your front door. You then get out a pen and paper and write a letter to Newham Council requesting that the team starts playing its home games here. Now imagine that the council and West Ham’s owners say yes. Before you know it, you’ve got Declan Rice, Mark Noble and the rest of the team playing against Manchester United in full view of your bedroom window. It’s a dream that lives solely in the mind of a certain journalist who writes for…

The summer solstice occurs in the northern hemisphere when the North Pole reaches its maximum tilt towards the sun, providing the year’s most prolonged dose of daylight. It has been celebrated by cultures around the world for millennia, and more recently it has also been marked by a growing cohort of cyclists who use the extended ride time to chase the sun from one coast to the other. It’s for this reason that I am up and in my Lycras at an hour more conventionally reserved for staggering home. Behind me, the sun is hiding just beneath the horizon beyond Belfast’s famous dockyards. Scheduled for 4:46am, the sun’s appearance will trigger the start of a self-supported 336km dash across Ireland that will take us from Belfast in the northeast, across…

Fara Cycling is a Norwegian brand founded in 2016 by Jeff Webb. In a previous life, the Canadian-born Oslo local was a pro rider, but after calling time on racing he went on to forge a career in the sporting goods industry. ‘During that time I was able to get familiar with how the bike industry works and got to spend a lot of time with Gerard Vroomen, who was running Cervélo with Phil White at the time,’ he says. ‘Their philosophy of form following function was something I appreciated. Having lived in Norway for 25 years it resonated with me on a cultural level too as Nordic design is innovative but simple in the same way. So it became my primary source of inspiration for how Fara should work…

The Greatest Escape p68 Met Trenta 3K Carbon Mips helmet, £240 met-helmets.com SunGod Vulcans sunglasses, £150 sungod.co Santini Redux Vigor jersey, £169 santinicycling.com Santini Cubo gloves, £29 santinicycling.com Santini Unico bibshorts, £199 santinicycling.com Santini Cubo socks, £16 santinicycling.com DMT KR0 shoes, £354 chickencyclekit.co.uk Paterberg p96 Kask Valegro helmet, £175 velobrands.co.uk 100% x Maap Glendale sunglasses, £195 maap.cc Universal Colours Spectrum gilet, £100 universalcolours.com Universal Colours Mono jersey, £100 universalcolours.com Universal Colours Mono bibshorts, £120 universalcolours.com Universal Colours Mono socks, £14 universalcolours.com Adidas The Road Cycling shoes, £130 adidas.co.uk Bikes p133 PINARELLO Giro Aether Spherical helmet, £289.99 giro.co.uk Oakley Sutro Lite Sweep sunglasses, £152 oakley.com Pas Normal Studios Escapism jersey, £155 pasnormalstudios.com Pas Normal Studios Escapism bibshorts, £225 pasnormalstudios.com Rapha Reflective Brevet socks, £22 rapha.cc Suplest Edge+ Gravel Performance shoes, £220…

On a recent damp day in Lancashire I rode with a group of Tour de France veterans that included a World Champion, an Olympian, a couple of national time-trial and track champions and an End-to-End record holder. It’s fair to say I was breathing out of my backside at times. The sprinters and track riders moaned incessantly on the climbs, while the grimpeurs queued up behind my significant bulk for shelter on the flat stretches. At one point the World Champion had a puncture and we ground to a halt with the rain drumming on the trees above us. As a new tube was inserted, the group started reminiscing about their careers. One of the sprinters recalled how they’d been selected for the Olympic road race in 1984, only to be…