Table of contents for November 2021 in Cyclist

When Covid first struck, seemingly back in another lifetime, we were faced with a bit of a dilemma: how to produce a magazine about foreign travel and cycling when you can’t travel abroad or cycle more than 5km from your front door? That’s when we hit upon the idea of doing an epic ride in the UK – all we’d need is a brief window in lockdown restrictions and someone with legs of steel. The first was granted in the summer of 2021; the second appeared in the form of Marcus Leach, a rider and writer who has never been known to pass up an opportunity to punish himself for the sake of a good story. Just our sort of guy. Next came the plan. Plenty of cyclists have done…

Unsurprisingly from a brand that cites ‘Swissness’ as one of its three guiding principles, these off-road shoes from Suplest are all about exacting performance. Designed for aggressive off-road riding, the Crosscountry Performance’s carbon composite outsole has been made in collaboration with SUPtraction, a Swiss rubber outsole specialist, to create a stiff platform that also has plenty of grip when you’re unclipped. At the top of the shoe, the foot is held snugly in place by the Anatomic Wrap closure system that aims to adapt to any foot shape, while an extra layer of carbon in the upper works to evenly spread the pressure across the top of the foot. It’s finished off with a Boa dial for an adaptable fit that can be altered on the go. On the inside,…

Given that pros are paid to wear particular brands, you can probably take what they say about their kit with a pinch of salt. Geraint Thomas’s loyalty to his infamous Oakleys, however, is far from PR. Every time he loses his white Racing Jackets in a crash, a new pair pops up – even after they’ve been discontinued. It felt like a crime seeing him briefly sport a different model but the faithful Racing Jackets always found their way back. The Oakley Plazma sunglasses pick up that legacy with a design very much lifted from the classic Racing Jacket model and they continue to fight the good fight for normal-sized sunnies in the peloton. They’re packed with all the technology you’ll find across the rest of the iconic brand’s range,…

Not many people would call themselves lucky to be mowed down by a motorist, but Pi Manson does. Having cycled from an early age, he raced cross-country, worked in bike shops and had spells as a mountain bike instructor and guide. Then about five years ago he met Ryan, a wheelbuilder who had dabbled in frames, and they decided to get a workshop together and learn how to build bikes. That’s when he got hit. Obviously it’s not an experience that Manson enjoyed but the compensation he received was, ‘fortuitously’, the perfect amount to cover his bike repairs and a year’s rent on the workshop. Some kick-start. ‘I began building racks because you don’t need complicated fixtures or anything – you just sort of freehand it – and I went…

Four stage wins and four runner-up spots saw Slovenia’s Primoz Roglič soar to a third consecutive Vuelta victory in the tyre-tracks of Switzerland’s Tony Rominger and Spain’s Roberto Heras – the only two previous riders to manage such a thing. Bookended by time-trial triumphs, Roglič’s hat-trick was never in doubt. The 31-year-old may have conceded the red jersey twice – and crashed twice in three days during the second week – but he never fell below third overall. He then applied the icing to the cake by sweeping past closest challenger Enric Mas of Spain just ahead of the finish line in the closing TT. Van Aert edged Ethan Hayter by six seconds, with Julian Alaphilippe completing a stellar podium. Fans were treated to a genuine GC battle of the…

There really is no such thing as a do-it-all exercise – the human body is just too complicated for that – but the Turkish Get Up might be the nearest thing you’ll find to one. It promotes strength, stability, coordination and mobility. It works core muscles and stabilisers in the back, shoulders, hips, glutes… hell, it works almost all muscles. ‘If you look at it carefully, it combines nearly all the basic human movement patterns into one exercise,’ says Will Newton, endurance sports coach and former instructor at British Cycling. ‘There’s a push movement, a hinge movement when you raise your hips into a bridge, and the last part is a one-legged squat. ‘It’s a great test for mobility and when I first started doing it I found it was…

TRAVEL The ferry from Holyhead to Dublin takes around three hours and costs around £270 for a car and one adult. Alternatively, plenty of airlines fly to Dublin from as little as £30 (expect to pay substantially more for luggage and bike carriage), and take just over an hour to get there. ACCOMMODATION We stayed at the four-star Morrison Hotel on the banks of the River Liffey in downtown Dublin. Rooms start from €160pppn and the hotel has a very passable restaurant and is in walking distance of the major tourist sites. See morrisonhotel.ie THANKS A big thank you to Aidan Duff, owner of bespoke framebuilder FiftyOne Bikes (fiftyonebikes.com), who not only loaned us a bike but expertly put the route together, chaperoned us around it and, most importantly, got…

The bike industry has been waiting for this for months. There have been spy shots, leaks, forums rife with speculation and predictions made on the basis of patent applications. Now Shimano Dura-Ace R9200 is finally here. It brings with it an extra sprocket on the cassette and a semi-wireless shifting format, yet the overwhelming opinion is that it follows Shimano’s well-trodden (and well-proven) path of evolution rather than revolution. So why does everyone get so excited about the prospect of a new Dura-Ace launch? Part of it is historical. ‘For many years Dura-Ace was the pinnacle of road bike componentry with little competition and was much anticipated because it was traditionally the first road groupset to get technological innovations,’ says Giant UK’s product manager David Ward. ‘For example, it was…

An army marches on its stomach, and so does a cyclist. Well, this cyclist does, anyway. I need a lot of fuel to keep me going on the bike, and when I’m averaging nearly 200km a day for two weeks, the occasional gel just isn’t going to cut it. There comes a time when I need a proper meal. Thanks to FirePot I had a constant supply of decent meals that were both filling and tasty, which isn’t something you can usually say about dehydrated food. They are easy to make – just add boiling water and allow to sit for 15 minutes – and full of flavour. They can be eaten straight from the pack, plus there is a wide variety of meal options, including plenty of veggie and…

BMC’s stereotypically Swiss reputation for clean design and clinical performance means it is often thought of first and foremost as a road brand, but it has equally deep roots in the rough-and-tumble of the mountain bike world. Grand Tour-winning road bikes rub shoulders with World Cup-winning XC mountain bikes in its portfolio, yet despite this pedigree at either end of the riding spectrum, BMC had been notably absent from the gravelly space in between until it released the URS. Any move into the discipline by BMC would have turned heads, but the URS’s combination of features were such that the bike caused quite a stir in what is already a rapidly developing and open-minded discipline. ‘Gravel was totally new ground for us, so we wanted to push the envelope a…

Selle Italia’s new Model X Green Superflow may look like a fairly ordinary saddle, but it represents an exciting new direction for saddle design. Selle Italia says it is the first saddle to be made in an entirely automated process, with all the parts fitting together mechanically, meaning there’s no need for adhesives or polyurethanes. Its resultant 315g weight is a little chunky by modern standards, but the way it has been produced makes it much better for the environment as well as helping to keep the price notably low. Could this be the future of saddle design?…

For tubeless users, sealant tends to do a decent job of fixing small punctures. However, for gashes too big for sealant to heal alone there is ostensibly no quicker way to get back up and running than Dynaplug’s neat Air system. The Air works like a regular tubeless tool – a plug housed in an insertion shaft is jabbed into the puncture hole – but this one comes with a CO2 canister head as well. If the tyre has lost too much pressure the canister can be discharged through the insertion tool before removal. That should mean the tyre is plugged, re-inflated and ready to roll in one swift action.…

Aerodynamic helmets are nothing new, but it’s only in the past decade that they’ve become a realistic option for the everyday cyclist. Prior to Mark Cavendish riding to victory in the 2011 World Championships with a plastic cover on his S-Works Prevail, the only truly ‘aero’ helmets were those worn by time-triallists. For the rest of us, their silly looks and general unwieldiness far outweighed any potential performance gains. Fast-forward to today and aero-optimised lids make up a sizeable segment of the road helmet market. Every major manufacturer now offers at least one aero road option alongside its traditional vented helmets. But what are the benefits, and is it worth making the switch if you’re not Mark Cavendish? ‘A well-designed aero road helmet will provide a measurable reduction in aerodynamic…

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Total distance: 60km Total elevation: 1,480m To download this route, go to cyclist.co.uk/119dublin or scan the QR code. This mixed-terrain route is quite complex to follow without GPS, however in broad strokes it starts on the road at Hunters Wood on the outskirts of Dublin, then heads south and off-road into the Dublin Mountains. Then it’s a case of hitting marks: first the Hell Fire Club, then Fairy Castle Peak, then the town of Glencullen, home to ‘Ireland’s highest pub’, Johnnie Fox’s. From there, head north through the Glencullen Adventure Park (GAP) towards Marlay Park, then southwest to Glenasmole, where the road swings south then north up along the edge of The Waterworks reservoir. Finally rejoin the R114 road back towards Hunters Wood, with a stop for a pint at…

Every great climb comes with a story to tell, and the Madonna del Ghisallo’s is a real page-turner. Legend has it that a medieval count by the name of Ghisallo was on a pilgrimage when he was attacked by a band of savage bandits. Fleeing for his life, he reached the peaceful hilltop hamlet of Magreglio, where he found a small sanctuary to the Virgin Mary. With nowhere else to go, he hid behind the sanctuary and prayed for a miracle. Sure enough it was granted – the bandits somehow failed to find him and departed empty-handed. Ghisallo credited the Virgin Mary with having protected his life, and a short time later he returned to the spot and built the first chapel on the peak with the name La Madonna…

I find myself wishing that I could keep pedalling, craving just one more climb, one more rain-soaked day My finger hovers above my bike computer but I just can’t bring myself to press the button. ‘End ride?’ it asks me patiently. For two weeks my sole focus has been on reaching Land’s End, on completing the toughest and most scenic of JOGLE routes and, in so doing, discovering large tracts of Britain that I’d previously overlooked in favour of foreign roads. Now, standing with my front wheel leaning out over the edge of a precipitous cliff with nothing but ocean in front of me, I find myself wishing that I could keep pedalling, longing for the journey to continue, craving just one more climb, one more rain-soaked day. ‘End ride?’…

Twelve-grand bikes are like buses – you wait ages and then two come along at once. Last month it was Bianchi’s all-new Specialissima; this month it’s another Italian brand’s stalwart – the return of the Pinarello Dogma, now in its 11th generation. That’s a dynasty and a half, so you’d expect any bike to have hung around that long and cost this much to be good. And you’d be right. Weight obsessives To me the Dogma always represented something about our Britishness. We’re secretly obsessed with the flamboyant because we routinely fail to be so ourselves, and we come to dislike things that are too successful. We champion the underdog, so while the early Dogmas with their crazy, swoopy tubes took the UK by storm (Fausto Pinarello once told me…

1 INNERMOST BOOSTERS £24.95 (300g), liveinnermost.com Until recently it was accepted that swordfish had no natural predators, but last month marine scientists at Hawaii University discovered the penfish, which is thought to be mightier. And just when you thought you couldn’t get any stronger, Innermost comes along with its Booster powders, which use everything from BCAAs to creatine to acetyl L-carnitine to enhance performance. 2 MUC-OFF PUNK POWDER BOTTLE FOR LIFE BUNDLE £29.99, muc-off.com People who claim to have swum the rivers of Paris and Cairo are either insane or in denial. But people who claim to have ‘the world’s first plastic-free bike cleaner’ are almost certainly called Muc-Off. And that cleaner? It’s a powder that mixes with water and gets put in the aluminium spray bottle provided, thus making…

Jens Zemke is the tall, silver-haired sports director who has been driving team cars and deciding on team tactics for more than a decade. Having worked with the Cervélo Test Team, the HTC-High Road women’s team, MTN-Qhubeka and Dimension Data, next year will be Zemke’s sixth season with Bora-Hansgrohe. But the change from 2021 to 2022 will be more radical than in any of the German sports director’s previous switches of team. ‘It will be like pushing the reset button,’ he says. Ten riders are joining Bora-Hansgrohe, but an equally or even more significant fact is that one is leaving. And not just any one. It was a huge surprise when Peter Sagan joined the German team at the same time as Zemke in 2017. Then the biggest star of…

‘T he great battle is on.’ That was the all-upper-case front page headline L’Auto went with on 28th June 1914. Underneath the splash was a montage of photographs of the 34 men considered by the paper most likely to vie for victory in the 12th edition of the Tour de France. Former winners Gustave Garrigou, Lucien Petit-Breton, Louis Trousselier, François Faber, Odile Defraye and Octave Lapize were all pictured, as was the solemn face of Peugeot’s Philippe Thys, the man who had won the previous year’s race. By the time most Parisians had read that headline, the riders of the 1914 Tour had been on the road for hours. Having assembled at midnight before large crowds at the Parc des Princes, the 145-strong peloton was then led to the western…

Since I’m in the land of poets, and since, you know, everything, it only seems appropriate to wax with flowery prose about how wonderful it is to be able to trot this glorious globe again astride a bicycle – to do that very thing we all took for granted until it was denied with a matronly finger waggle and the strict instruction not to ride for more than an hour. So hello you wonderful feeling of a passage unimpeded; of pursuits unencumbered; of being an alien in new lands; of wind-in-hair freedom. I have missed you sorely, Madam Cyclotouring, so this one is for you: My legs feel like brittle baguettes/My heart makes irregular threats/My lungs burn like coal/Eyes weep for my soul/I should have brought bigger cassettes. I’m on…

From the bespoke-built, custom-painted framebuilder comes the Assassin, FiftyOne’s latest gravel bike. Unlike previous tubeto-tube offerings, however, the Assassin is a monocoque frame, allowing FiftyOne to play around with tube profiles to hit modern marks in geometry and clearance. Thus the dropped driveside chainstay affords a compact rear end plus room for 48mm tyres, while ‘flip-chips’ offer variable geometry. You may have seen flip-chips in forks before – alloy inserts in dropouts that can be repositioned to change fork trail – but there are few bikes that use flip-chips at the rear too. Thus a front fork ‘flip’ sees a change from a well-mannered, cargo-carrying 87mm trail to a faster handling 76mm, while a rear flip changes chainstay length across three positions, from 420 to 425 to 430mm (the longer,…

Crowds out in their thousands, shaking off the Covid-fuelled fallow year; the sun surprisingly keeping its hat firmly on for most of the week; and of course a Scottish schoolboy receiving a water bottle from Jumbo-Visma’s Pascal Eenkhoorn as reward for not only sprinting in the shadows of the peloton but pulling on the heartstrings of a global audience. This year’s Tour of Britain was a joyous affair. And don’t forget the sight of British Continental rider Dan Bigham sucking in the Lancashire air as he fought to stay clear of a chasing pack of WorldTour stars. The Ribble-Weldtite rider dug deep but would eventually miss out to an Ineos Grenadier, Ethan Hayter. It was a brave effort from Bigham that garnered great publicity for his team but concealed a…

1 Pinarello Dogma Fp124 There’s no question that the Dogma has divided opinion down the years, but one fact is indisputable – the latest incarnation is the best yet 2 Merida SculturaVp128 Team-issue paint and a flexible seatpost make the new Scultura ideal if you’re tackling Paris-Roubaix. But is it suitable for the rest of us? 3 BMC URS 01 p132 The Swiss brand’s first-ever gravel bike takes a lot of inspiration – and technology – from its MTB siblings. Arguably a little too much……

Who’s really in charge? When it comes to beer look no further than AB InBev-SABMiller, which owns everyone from Bud to Stella to Beck’s to Hoegaarden. When it comes to cars its Volkswagen AG, which includes Bugatti, Ducati, Bentley and Lamborghini. For food it’s Walmart, which also happens to be the world’s largest company, turning over $559 billion annually. And for bikes? There’s every reason to suggest it’s Merida. Think of a bike that isn’t a Giant (the other big bike-manufacturing hitter) and there’s every chance one of Merida’s factories made it. You could say the brand is quite specialised. So with all the manufacturing abilities at its disposal, all that knowhow and expertise, Merida bikes should be the best ones, right? Maybe. Spec savers I’ll get it out the…