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The Passo dello Stelvio is the jewel in the Giro’s crown, a climb to match – surpass – anything the Tour de France has to offer. It is the second highest paved pass in the Alps, after the Col de l’Iseran, but is more beautiful, more brutal and more storied. Its inclusion in the Giro’s parcours always causes a thrill of excitement in cycling fans, but also a slight sense of foreboding because we know there’s every chance it simply won’t be passable when the big day comes. Just last year, Stage 16 of the Giro had to be re-routed because freezing temperatures and snow at altitude made the planned crossing of the Stelvio too dangerous to contemplate. The same happened in 2013 when snow stopped play, and on three…

Ricky Feather. Name ring a bell? If you’re a long-time reader of Cyclist the chances are it does, as Feather has popped up on a number of occasions. You’ll know we’ve covered his acclaimed framebuilding business in Yorkshire, Feather Cycles, and featured several of his award-winning handbuilt bikes over the years. What you might not know is that Feather’s lifelong obsession with bikes started not with 700c wheels, but 20-inch ones. ‘The moment I threw my leg over a BMX bike I was obsessed,’ Feather says. ‘I knocked football on the head almost immediately and all I did for about 12 years straight was ride BMX. It took me around the world: the States and all over Europe, just from BMX trips.’ Feather’s earliest memories are all bike-related. He remembers…

1 Apidura Expedition stem bag £53, apidura.com Why did the keyboard factory worker lose his job? He missed too many shifts. Why did Apidura dream up its new 1.3-litre stem pack? For an extra-secure spot to stow gear when bikepacking. It’s claimed to be 100% waterproof and ultra-durable, has multiple mounting options, weighs just 120g and has a magnetic closure for easy access. 2 Spatz Windsock 2 oversocks £44.99, spatzwear.com German sausages are the wurst. British aero overshoes are the best, and Spatz’s Windsock is the crème de la crème, being the overshoe of choice of Mathieu van der Poel and his Alpecin-Deceuninck team. They’re on the UCI sock length limit and the aero fabric is cut neatly around the ankle and doesn’t crease when pedalling. They feature sticky silicone…

Italy has an incredible number of the world’s most beautiful climbs. We’ll never stop waxing lyrical about the likes of the Stelvio, Gavia, Zoncolan, Grappa, Mortirolo, Giau, Finestre, Pordoi, Nivolet, et cetera, but the presence of those big names means there is a whole host of stunning climbs that don’t get the attention they would if they were in other parts of the world. Rest assured, if the Passo Manghen were in the UK, it would be far and away this country’s greatest climb. If you’re unfamiliar with the Manghen, that may have something to do with its geography. The southern ascent begins in Borgo Valsugana, a small town on the SS47 motorway that connects Bassano del Grappa to Trento. The mighty Monte Grappa is about 40km to the east…

Pristine mountain lakes, towering cliffs that plunge into fjords, ancient woodland, tumbling rivers and endless gravel tracks – these are the scenes that accompany riders on The Bright Midnight self-supported bikebacking adventure in Norway. Competitors start in the mountain village of Tolga, about 250km north of Oslo, and face a 1,100km route of mixed tarmac and gravel with 20,000m of elevation and six and a half days to do it in. The route winds its way through moss and lichen-encrusted forests and past Mardalsfossen, one of Europe’s highest waterfalls where the water plunges 655m. After skirting the coast, it heads inland through Jotunheimen, ‘Home of the Giants’, where glaciers and jagged peaks dominate the landscape of Scandinavia’s highest mountain range. ‘I created this race for people like me who don’t…

The Alpitude Navene saddle is an update on the Italian company’s Gardena model, which was its first full-carbon design. ‘The Gardena was originally intended as a road saddle, but naturally – given that we handmake these in the heart of the Dolomites – it wasn’t long before we started using them on gravel and mountain bikes,’ says Andrea Sega, the man who started Alpitude back in 2015. That research led his team to tune the Navene more towards the rough stuff. Alpitude maintained the full carbon fibre construction but bridged the otherwise pronounced cut-out at the rear to avoid shorts getting caught, and bulked up and rounded off the shell edges to improve impact robustness. It resulted in a weight gain, but we’ll let Sega off the extra 7g the…

Cyclist: Who were your sporting idols growing up? Tim Declercq: My first was Johan Museeuw. One of my first memories of the sport was seeing him smashing up Tenbosse in the Tour of Flanders. I was also a big fan of Jan Ullrich. Those were my two idols. It was a different time in cycling; I’m very happy that it changed a lot. Cyc: When did you decide that you wanted to be a professional cyclist? TD: I was always one of the better ones in my age group, but my parents said it’s important to have a degree so I started studying and enjoyed being a student. I had severe Epstein-Barr virus during my last year as a junior, so actually I just did cycling as a hobby, not with the…

Sipping coffee in Bormio’s Hotel de Funivia, I’m feeling a touch anxious about the 100km and 3,000m of climbing that await me in Italy’s most northerly slopes. Fortunately I’m accompanied by someone who knows exactly what’s coming. Sitting opposite is Daniele Schena, otherwise known as Stelvio Man, who – as his nickname suggests – is very familiar with today’s main climb. As we pump tyres and double-check supplies, I settle my own flutters with some gentle humour: ‘Ti senti nervoso?’ I say in my best GCSE Italian. Having ridden it multiple times a week for years, and more than 600 times in total, if the Stelvio still makes Daniele nervous then his expression masks it well. ‘Er, no,’ he replies. Borm ready Sitting at around 1,200m altitude, Bormio is a…

The Classics are changing. To have a high mountain climber who routinely wins Grand Tours now also winning Monuments is something we haven’t seen since the days of Bernard Hinault. But does that change anything for the photographers responsible for documenting the titanic one-day battles of our time? ‘I feel it’s a great time to be photographing these races because these guys – Van der Poel, Pogačar, they’re superstars,’ says Harry Talbot, a cycling photographer who’s been at every Monument and Classic this year. ‘And I get the opportunity to photograph them at the front of races. Races open up earlier than they used to, giving us a bigger window to shoot.’ Aside from the riders themselves, the spectacle put on by the fans is almost as big a draw…

When the gravel scene emerged a few years ago, it was with an American hipster vibe that was all about freedom and not being tied to the stuffy conventions of the road racing scene, man. Baggy shorts, Hawaiian shirts, hairy legs, moustaches, getting lost in the wilderness, camping out under the stars… gravel bikes were going to help us rediscover the carefree adventurer inside us all. That lasted about ten minutes. The collapse of America’s biggest road races left a void that was quickly filled by gravel events such as Unbound and Rebecca’s Private Idaho, which morphed from quirky get-togethers into pro-level races attended by the sport’s big names. In response, a new category of gravel bikes appeared, which was less about exploration and more about speed. And Trek’s new…

Campagnolo has been on a journey in recent years. Having dropped out of the WorldTour briefly in 2024, the Italian brand returned this year to adorn the Look bikes of Cofidis. And while the launch of the Super Record Wireless groupset recovered some of the electronic shifting ground seized by Sram and Shimano, there is still the sense that its groupsets are trailing its American and Japanese rivals. Fortunately for Campagnolo, its wheel business has not had to weather the same kind of turbulence, and it has recently released the revamped Shamal to sit just below its premium race-going wheelset, the WTO Bora Ultra. ‘Shamal wheels were the first to feature a high-profile aerodynamic design, which in 1992 was groundbreaking,’ says Federico Gardin, Campagnolo’s head of product and marketing. In…

‘The wind continued to blow in from the Channel, carrying a biting cold. From the long straights before La Rivière-Thibouville, the lousy clouds burst like balloons above the peloton, pouring out their thick contents, mixed with hailstones that drummed in the wheels. There were not ten of them who had equipped themselves with raincoats.’ So ran the opening of L’Auto’s race report of the 21st edition of Paris-Caen, held on 14th April 1935. One hundred and thirty riders had started the race under those heavy clouds. The wind was ferocious, the cold bone-numbing and the rain unrelenting. So atrocious were the conditions that, according to Le Miroir des Sports, the peloton was ‘pulverised into a quantity of small, helpless, frozen, unrecognisable sections, a sort of mud block advancing with difficulty…

At the end of last year, Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe announced they were pulling out of the Mouvement Pour un Cyclisme Crédible (MPCC, or Movement for Credible Cycling). In a statement, the team said, ‘We are ending our membership after 12 years. In that time, many of the MPCC’s demands have become WADA/UCI rules. This shows how important our involvement has been during this time. Now we can move on to new challenges.’ The team’s withdrawal reduced the MPCC’s men’s WorldTour membership to just seven out of 18 teams. Some, including Ineos Grenadiers, have never been members. But why? In a sport still bearing scars from decades of doping scandals, why not sign up to a voluntary anti-doping body? Like many aspects of elite performance, it’s a grey area… Born out of…

The flight from London to Billund in the west of Denmark is a short one, the kind where it feels like no sooner have you gone up than you’re on your way back down. Such a quick transfer makes the contrast between the grubby bustle of our capital and the serene cleanliness of Denmark’s rural west especially stark. A sense of calm percolates through the place. Everything from car journeys to restaurant menus is well ordered and precise. It isn’t hard to see why the area gave rise to the creation of Lego, which originated in Billund in 1932. Or CeramicSpeed, a bearing and components company that has developed a reputation for quality and performance in the cycling world and beyond. Considering it now distributes in more than 50 countries…

Sometimes it’s possible to be too far ahead of the curve. You could argue that was the case with 3T’s first road bike, the Strada, in 2017. Its design was based around wider tyres and 1x gearing in a bid to improve aerodynamics while streamlining maintenance and upping comfort, but it bumped up against insufficient component choice and entrenched opinions on what a road bike should be. ‘There were not the groupsets to support the frameset,’ says Andrea Bortolin, 3T’s product manager. ‘The jumps on an 11-speed cassette were too big for racers. Now it’s a different story. Pro riders understand the benefits of wider tyres in races, not only for comfort but for speed.’ Five years on, with pros routinely sporting 30mm+ tyres and 1x groupsets, 3T has largely…

BMC markets its URS gravel bike using the word ‘explore’ quite a lot. It’s a very broad term that can conjure up images of everything from multiday expeditions in the wilderness all the way down to simply taking a right on your local loop when you’d usually take a left. Take one look at BMC’s URS, though, and it’s not hard to get an idea of what BMC is aiming for when it chose that word. At the rear there’s the same MTT elastomer at the seat tube cluster as on the previous bike, which adds more compliance on top of the already low seatstays and short seat tube that leaves plenty of D-shaped post exposed to flex. There’s only 10mm of travel in the elastomer but it’s exaggerated as…

How do you measure a life? In years? Achievements? Love affairs? Or bike rides? The question arose after I received a page of scribbled notes from a reader. The lined paper, ripped out of an A4 notebook, was a summary of their cycling year. Written in biro down one side of the page was a list of destinations they’d ridden to from their home in North Yorkshire. The longest ride was 99 miles to Nottingham, the shortest eight miles to Thornton-le-Dsale. Their distance for the year added up to 4,225 miles with 101,803 feet of ascent. They were resolutely Imperial with their units. But it was the data on the other side of the page that was far more intriguing. Under a heading of ‘Ice Lolleys’ (sic), it detailed the…