Inhaltsverzeichnis für February 2021 in Cyclist

We’ve been under the cloud of Covid for so long now that we may find it hard to revert to past habits. Even if the national rollout of vaccines proves to be a success, will we want to go back to hugging friends and shaking hands with colleagues? Will we be happy to stand nose-to-armpit in crowded trains or sit in a packed cinema while the person behind us coughs gently throughout the film? Will we dare to consign our facemasks and empty hand sanitiser bottles to the recycling bin for good? I suspect we may be wary of mass gatherings for some time to come. I, for one, have reached the point where if I see a crowd scene in a movie I can’t help fretting that everyone is…

Fizik was such an early adopter of knitted fabric in its cycling shoes that despite this technology still feeling new, it is already releasing the second generation of its top-of-the-line Vento Infinito Knit. The brand says it has refined the knitted construction in the upper, stripping away more weight, while targeted areas of heat-fused TPU yarn create additional support for better power transfer. As far as the carbon outsole is concerned, the update is much like we’ve come to expect with bikes - lighter and stiffer. The twin Boa dial closure system appears not to have altered much from the previous generation, save for the use of the latest Boa Li2 dials which have a lower profile, further reducing weight and improving aerodynamics. At a claimed 225g per shoe they’re…

Sported by Egan Bernal and Giro hero João Almeida, Oakley’s Sutro sunglasses have been a popular choice in the pro peloton in recent times. To earn the ‘Lite’ moniker these glasses have lost the bottom half of the frames, which Oakley says increases the field of view and improves ventilation. Another upgrade is that the arms now use Unobtainium rubber, a material that was previously used only on the nosepads. According to Oakley, Unobtainium – not to be confused with the sought-after mineral in the film Avatar – not only makes them more comfortable but also actually increases its grip with sweat. The rest of the setup is the same as the original Sutro: the contrast-enhancing Prizm lenses, durable O Matter frame and the oversized form factor. With wünderkind Remco…

Being more visible is the best way for riders to protect themselves from the dangers of busy roads. Hi-vis clothing has come a long way (reflective materials mean riders can boost their visibility without looking like they work on a building site), but if you really want to grab the attention of oncoming motorists you might want to consider investing in some DRLs – daytime running lights. Bontrager, which has offered DRLs for several years, says its Flare RT light is visible from 2km away, and the company’s stats suggest daytime lights can have a big impact on rider safety. Apparently DRLs make a rider 2.4 times more noticeable to other road users and decrease accidents by 33%. Mark Swift from light manufacturer Exposure explains why they are such an…

An enforced two-week quarantine on entering Australia gave Cyrus Monk the chance to showcase his talent: the 24-year-old Aussie saxophonist once won the U23 nationals while studying for a major in physiology. But if the fruits from his hotel isolation were anything to go by, there’s much more to his armoury than cycling, sax and science. Monk revealed himself to be a veritable renaissance man by combining hotel utensils (plastic cutlery, sachets of sugar, doors, drawers, a steaming iron) and his own falsetto, harmonica and a mini recorder to perform stonking cover versions of anything from Fatboy Slim to A-ha’s ‘Take On Me’. The Continental rider for EvoPro Racing sure lived up to his Twitter bio as a ‘cyclist with a few side hustles on the go’, and he’s not…

Although it resides in northeast Italy, South Tyrol operates much like a semi-autonomous state, able to pass legislation and control much of its own spending. It’s why, unlike elsewhere in Italy, many roads here receive regular resurfacing specifically in time for the Maratona dles Dolomites sportive, a huge deal for the region. Is there a north Tyrol? Yes, and an east, both over the border in Austria, and together with South Tyrol and Trentino (below South Tyrol), these regions were once the County of Tyrol, a Holy Roman Empire state in the 12th century. Which is where the Ladin language and culture comes in. The Dolomites were claimed centuries before by the Roman Empire. That introduced the region to Latin, which then blended with local languages to form a Vulgar…

TRAVEL The best time to visit the Dolomites is March to June or September to mid-October, when the weather is warm but it’s not the school holidays (the area can get busy). Venice Marco Polo is the closest airport to Arabba, a 2.5-hour drive away, and flights in September cost around £70 return. ACCOMMODATION We stayed in Arabba, a great base for a cycling holiday with many more routes to ride besides this one. The area has a strong German influence so expect great beer, and if you stay at the Hotel Malita (hotelmalita.it), expect some seriously good pasta and a blinding tiramisu. See arabba.it for more details. THANKS Our warmest thanks to Jessica De Vallier from the Arabba tourist board, who found us the excellent Hotel Malita at the…

Six hundred kilometres in one go. Consider how that might feel. You’d better be wearing your comfiest bibshorts. Now imagine those bibshorts are in fact woollen plus-fours, your bike is made from pig iron, the wheel rims are wooden and you only have one gear. That’s because your name is George Pilkington Mills, born in 1867 in Middlesex, and you’ve just won the inaugural 1891 Bordeaux-Paris in a time of 26h 36min 25sec. Impressive as that is, back in 1886 at the age of just 19, you stamped your name on a record that had stood for 133 years, Land’s End to John O’Groats on a penny-farthing, 1,450km in five days, 1 hour and 45 minutes. So you call that 8kg disc brake bike with the slack head tube an…

The morning arrives with the ashen skies that are becoming a hallmark of my time in Scotland. At least today the air is calm so I shouldn’t have to deal with the headwinds that have punished me for the past three days. An eerie silence fills the glen as I turn my back on Eilean Donan Castle and reluctantly begin pedalling, accepting that it isn’t a matter of if it will rain but when. The steely waters of Loch Duich are strangely still, disturbed only by the occasional breaching fish sending ripples dancing across the surface. I notice a lone fishing boat anchored a little way from the shore, tired-looking with teal blue paint flaking from its hull and old tattered nets hanging over the side. Aside from the occasional…

1 Specialized Aethos p124 It is claimed to be the world’s lightest production disc brake bike, but what is the S-Works Aethos like to ride? Spoiler: it’s sensational 2 Vielo R+1 Alto p128 There’s no question that 1x gearing divides opinion, but the R+1 Alto is a bike that proves just why it’s the future for road riding 3 Lapierre Aircode DRS p132 It doesn’t look like an aero bike, but the Aircode’s unusual geometry and aggressive fit combine to cheat the wind in a highly effective manner…

Cadex is stepping out of the Giant shadow from whence it came, taking high-end production and WorldTour standards with it. Built for all roads and all conditions, the Classics tubeless tyres have a Kevlar casing that Cadex says provides 34% more puncture protection than its racing model. The silica-based tyres are made with a compound designed for maximum grip in the wet and, according to Cadex, have ‘significantly less’ rolling resistance than standard road tyres.…

1 BERYL LASERLIGHT CORE/PIXEL £69.99/£17.99, beryl.cc If you ever see cows sleeping in a field, it must be pasture bedtime. And if you’re ever out so late it’s dark, that means you absolutely need lights. So enter stage left the Beryl Pixel, a two-in-one front or rear light, and the Beryl Laserlight Core, which along with a white LED beam projects a laser image (in green) of a bike on the road ahead. With runtimes up to 10 and 41 hours respectively, they’ll last until the cows come home. 2 HIPLOK DXF £74.99, hiplok.com When the inventor of the hokey cokey passed away it caused a terrible kerfuffle at the undertakers. Every time they put his right leg in, he put his right leg out. Fortunately the Hiplok DXF is…

‘I went out training and was unable to do a simple 20-minute session I’d done easily the week before, which made me start to panic about the Hour record’ Cyclist: You recently announced that you would be attempting to recapture the Hour record but plans were curtailed when you tested positive for Covid-19. How frustrating was that? Alex Dowsett: I feel like I’ve been at the centre of every Covid scandal going this year, from being at the UAE Tour in February when the race was abandoned, being sent home from Vuelta a Burgos, racing the Giro and then ending up catching it at home, in isolation, while not seeing anybody in Essex. I took as many precautions as possible but it’s sod’s law I guess. I started to display…

To download this route go to cyclist.co.uk/109italy or scan the QR code. Head north out of Arabba on the SP244/Passo Campolongo, which segues into the SS244 before heading through Corvara. Stick with the SS244 all the way to Piccolino at around kilometre 28, where you’ll see the road double back on itself next to a bus stop. Take that left, ride over the bridge and just before the Agip garage head right onto the old road. At around 33km the old road joins with the SP29/Passo delle Erbe. Continue until San Pietro where a stop for coffee at Hotel Kabis is a good idea. Follow the natural path of the road towards Gudon, paying special attention for a sawmill on your left and a tight left-hander at around 70km, signposted…

It took me some time to adjust to the switch from Garmin to Wahoo, but when I did I was left wondering why I hadn’t made the change sooner. The Roam is hands down the best bike computer I’ve used. The level of functionality on it is brilliant, the mapping top notch and it has a plethora of data fields available at the tap of a button on the companion app. I particularly like that I can change any data screen and field in the app, even while still recording a ride, and it will automatically reflect those changes. For example, if on your map screen you decide you want to see your three-second average power or the distance still to ride on a preset route, you simply select that…

Every day’s a school day. I recently learned from an article by fellow journalist Carlton Reid that British marque Carlton Cycles made a carbon-tubed, alloy lugged bike back in 1971. Motor Cycle and Cycle Trader magazine reported at the time, ‘The weight of the complete machine is 13lbs 12oz,’ continuing that ‘most certainly the experimental Carlton in carbon fibre is the most exciting adaptation of modern materials to cycle building that we have seen for many years’. Sadly the bike never went anywhere, but it struck me as wonderfully coincidental that I’m testing what’s claimed to be the world’s lightest production disc brake bike – the S-Works Aethos – and its weight? It’s 6.23kg, or 13lbs 12oz in old money. Is anything new under the cycling sun? Number, number, weight,…

Lapierre’s new Aircode DRS doesn’t look like a typical aero bike. Its 7.6kg weight is a little hefty by modern standards, and where are the hugely extended tube depths we’re used to? The lack of a sleek proprietary cockpit assembly is notable too, and that head tube and fork crown combination looks like it presents a comparatively blunt frontal area to the wind. Things get stranger still – the seatstays meet the top tube for goodness sake. That’s miles away from their more conventional ‘aero’ location of attaching halfway down the seat tube. Yet Lapierre has pedigree in producing idiosyncratic bikes that perform superbly, and from my time with the Aircode I can confirm that this is one rapid bike. So how does it do it? Settle in – I’m…

The Garden In The Mountain p64 Lazer Genesis helmet, £169.99 freewheel.co.uk Roka GP Series sunglasses, £210 uk.roka.com La Passione PSN jersey, £80 uk.lapassione.cc Sportful NoRain armwarmers, £28 saddleback.co.uk Castelli Perfetto RoS gloves, £65 saddleback.co.uk La Passione Prestige bibshorts, £145 uk.lapassione.cc La Passione PSN socks, £12 uk.lapassione.cc Sidi Wire 2 Carbon Road shoes, £340 saddleback.co.uk The Long Haul p110 Giro Aether helmet, £259.99 zyrofisher.co.uk SunGod Vulcans TF sunglasses, £125 sungod.co Castelli Idro 2 jacket, £260 saddleback.co.uk Castelli Perfetto RoS vest, £130 saddleback.co.uk Castelli Italia 20 jersey, £130 saddleback.co.uk Castelli Nano Flex 3G armwarmers, £40 saddleback.co.uk Castelli Free Aero Race 4 bibshorts, £150 saddleback.co.uk Castelli Superleggara 12 socks, £17 saddleback.co.uk Specialized S-Works Recon shoes, £350 specialized.com Bikes p123 SPECIALIZED Rapha Pro Team Thermal aerosuit, £320 rapha.cc Castelli Estremo gloves, £95 saddleback.co.uk Vittoria…

Phil Taylor is one of those people for whom there seems to be more hours in the day, and more petrol in the tank, than everyone else. Originally a PE teacher, he worked as a behavioural specialist at a school in Brighton, where with wife Tessa and friends Sarah Young and Jon Tutton he founded the Brighton Art Fair in 2003 – in his spare time. He has since retrained as a psychotherapist, but along the way he added the bowstring ‘framebuilder’, a skill that still keeps him busy. On top of all this he also somehow found the time to create Bespoked, which together with America’s NAHBS is the West’s most prestigious handmade bike show. So how did it all begin? ‘I’d ride part way along the South Downs…

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In the frenetic minutes after Tao Geoghegan Hart clinched the Giro d’Italia, doing enough in the time-trial into Milan to take the pink jersey for the first time on the final day, the former Team Sky rider Bernhard Eisel spotted his old boss, Dave Brailsford, in the shadows of the Duomo. Eisel, now working as a Eurosport presenter, was live on air when he intercepted the Team Ineos Grenadiers principal. ‘We have Dave B here now,’ said Eisel. ‘Would you have a second?’ Brailsford, clearly giddy with the excitement of what he’d just witnessed, gave Eisel a bear hug, ruffled his hair, then invited him to tell a story about Geoghegan Hart’s initiation at Team Sky as a 20-year-old stagiaire in 2015. Back then Eisel was in his final year…

The terms ‘gene’ and ‘genetics’ are used in everyday language, but because their scientific definitions are so complex it’s easier to explain what genes do than what they are. Genes relate to what’s passed down from parents to children, including traits such as hair colour, eye colour and risk of disease. We can predict the likelihood of a child’s eye colour from their parents. Eye colour has a genetic code that we can see, and the simplicity of the outcome here is important. With sports performance the genetic code is less clear because the determining factors are multi-faceted. That’s why researchers have long been trying to identify genes that characterise the world’s best athletes. There are genetic markers that relate to performance, so following this logic it would be useful…

In the UK you’d count yourself lucky to find a Shell garage with a Ginster’s-branded microwave and a working Costa machine. The average service station in Italy, on the other hand, is a culinary delight. Espresso is deliciously rich, arancini are made on-site and there are little tables to stand around and read the paper. People stop there for the food itself, not as an add-on to the petrol. I can recommend stopping at any of the dozens of such service stations en route from Marco Polo Airport in Venice to the Dolomites in the north of Italy. I can also recommend taking the route that passes through the town of Agordo – so picturesque it might be walled with giant postcards, and a superb spot to grab another coffee.…

Some years back I tested a ‘regular’ Diamante and found it to be stiff with a capital ouch, a quintessential Italian race bike for smooth roads and even smoother legs. It was brilliant, but not for everyone. Fast-forward to 2020 and this latest incarnation holds more universal appeal. It’s a better-behaved bike in a sense, yet still one with a healthy dose of aggressive attitude. Geometry-wise things stack up to be racy, the bike sporting a short wheelbase, stout rear triangle and front end kept low by Basso’s-11° stem (most bikes are-6°). Stiffness-wise the SV still packs a hefty punch, and DT Swiss 1400 PRC wheels with midsection aero profiles ensure the bike climbs in a spritely manner and more than holds its own on the flat. But where it…

There was at least one thing we agreed on here, quite by accident, and that’s the existential question of endurance bikes. Do they exist? How are they different from – in Sam’s words – that encroaching threat of lightweight bikes and gravel bikes, which seem to be drifting inexorably towards each other, despite starting poles apart. But there’s a difference, at least for now, because try as they might there is no bike from any other category that can match what these bikes do, and that’s to make fast comfortable. It’s to make robust lightweight. It’s to make the classically highly strung racer truly hardy. And it’s the Cannondale Synapse that trumps them all, receiving one first place and two second-place votes in our proportional representation voting system. But before…

Riding from one end of Britain to the other is a major undertaking, and Cyclist had help from a number of sources. Firstly, thanks to komoot (komoot.com) for help with creating a route that takes in many of the best parts of the country for riding a bike. The ride took place during the period just after the Covid-19 lockdown so we couldn’t use hotels or B&Bs, so many thanks to Bailey of Bristol (baileyofbristol.co.uk) for the loan of an Autograph 74-4 motorhome, which proved to be an excellent moving base for the trip. Thanks also to Mercedes (mercedes-benz.co.uk) for the loan of a Marco Polo campervan, as used by our photographer for the duration of the ride. Good kit choices are vital on a challenge such as this to…

I’m just going to come right out and say it: 1x gearing is the future for road bikes. Mark my words. This has been the case for mountain bikes for years, cyclocross too, and while there are undeniably some situations within road riding where a 1x drivetrain can present limitations – mainly racing at WorldTour level – for the majority of us, less is more. I’ve been riding 1x as my preferred gearing on the road for a long while now, and I’ve lost count of the times I’ve had to defend the system against people who claim that it is unsuitable for road bikes. So here’s my reasoning… Pros not cons Firstly 1x is lighter, obviously, given there’s one fewer chainring and no need for a front derailleur, cabling…

The glorious sport of cycling extends all the way from epic stage races across snow-capped mountains to Mrs McGregor pootling home from the shops with a wicker basket full of groceries. And while I personally have more respect for Mrs McGregor than I do the weekend warriors exchanging fist bump emojis in a frenzy of mutual adulation on Strava, I acknowledge we are all united by our use of the bicycle, whether it be for utilitarian, recreational or competitive reasons. I even have a grudging respect for those self-appointed helmet camera vigilantes who celebrate the number of drivers they manage to get prosecuted the same way a sniper puts notches on his gun. They may care more about the number of views their YouTube channels get than actually making our…