Tabla de contenidos para October 2020 en Cyclist

Between now and early November (Covid allowing) the WorldTour calendar will aim to squeeze in three Grand Tours, three Ardennes Classics and three cobbled Classics, plus a week of Tirreno-Adriatico for good measure. The Giro d’Italia will begin just two weeks after the Tour finishes, and by the time the Giro is over, the Vuelta a España will have already been running for five days. In fact on one single day – Sunday 25th October – cycling fans will have to choose whether to watch the deciding time-trial on the final day of the Giro, a pivotal mountain day at the Vuelta that finishes on the Col du Tourmalet, or Paris-Roubaix. I’m rather looking forward to seeing how Eurosport manages to cope, perhaps with Carlton Kirby attempting to commentate on…

Unfortunately it can be so easy to get caught up in the performance and style of cycling apparel that other, more important factors are forgotten about or ignored. How often do we consider the impact that the production of cycling kit has on the environment? The inconvenient truth is that the apparel industry is one of the dirtiest industries of all. Making clothes requires huge amounts of energy, water and chemicals, whose detrimental effects are further compounded by the waste generated from the offcuts of new items and discarded old ones. One mechanism companies have employed to try to help their environmental impact is external carbon offsetting – the familiar ‘X number of trees planted for Y number of jerseys sold’ construct. However due to the type of materials used…

In all the confusion and fear of the early weeks of the coronavirus crisis, one alarming revelation – at least from a cycling fan’s point of view – was that several WorldTour teams might not survive. ‘Pro cycling managers are worried that the coronavirus Covid-19 pandemic could spell financial ruin for teams across the sport,’ read one report, ‘as major sponsorship contracts could be annulled or ignored by the unprecedented strain placed on major companies by the virus.’ When racing resumed, we were told, it could be with a seriously depleted peloton, with some teams having simply disappeared. Which ones? That was less clear, but Mitchelton-Scott, Bahrain-McLaren and Lotto-Soudal were among those who reportedly introduced pay cuts. CCC confirmed that, whatever happened, they would pull out at the end of…

There are few brands with as rich a heritage in pro racing as Vitus. The French brand began life as a tubing manufacturer in the 1930s but by the 70s it was a marque synonymous with great champions of our sport and its frames, produced from its factory in SaintÉtienne, were unquestionably pioneering. A case in point was Vitus’s now iconic (and very collectable) 979 and its slender aluminium frame with bonded lugs, considered cutting edge at the time due to its exceptionally low weight. Pro riders such as Phil Anderson, Allan Peiper, Stephen Roche and Luis Herrera all tasted international success on a Vitus 979. But it was arguably the supremacy of Irish Classics legend Sean Kelly in the early-to-mid 1980s that really cemented the 979’s lofty status. Vitus…

From the door of our guesthouse, our ride starts with a 45km climb. It’s gentle at first, maybe only 3%. Nothing too punishing on fresh legs, and the coolness of the morning ensures we skip briskly along a main road that is free of traffic at this early hour. In these opening minutes the climb is just sizing us up, throwing the occasional exploratory jab to see how we respond. It’s in no hurry. It knows that this is going to be a long fight and it is saving its big punches till later. Equally, I’ve appraised my adversary and I know that if I’m going to last the distance, I’ll have to fight smart. There’s no point trying to smash this climb into submission. Instead I’ll need to channel…

Argon 18 loves to cover its bikes in meaningless phrases, such as ‘AFS Argon Fit System’, ‘Optimal Balance’ and ‘Horizontal Dual System’. Most exasperating was watching my sweat drip on to a top tube emblazoned with ‘Experience The Fusion’. Thankfully the ride quality makes up for the verbiage. The Gallium Pro Disc is as stiff as a plank, which I was thankful for on the long climbs, but it’s not too harsh thanks to the inclusion of 28mm Zipp Tangente tyres and a skinny 27.2mm seatpost. The short head tube makes for a racy setup, but the Press-Fit 3D system allowed me to add a bit of height, and Argon 18 claims it is much more rigid compared to using standard spacers. Certainly the steering was crisp and confident. The…

There’s a philosophical quandary attributed to 18th century thinker George Berkeley that asks, ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’ Similarly, if a rider crosses a finish line that they don’t realise they’re crossing, is it actually a finish line? And if there is no stage winner then did the stage even take place? These and many other questions arose on Stage 19 of the 2019 Tour de France, when the Col de l’Iseran became the summit finish that nobody knew was a summit finish. This col is the highest pass in the Alps (despite some protestations from those who live near the Col de la Bonette), soaring to 2,764m above sea level – or 2,770m if…

We were never going to agree easily, so in a fit of Euro-style proportional representation, we asked each of our testers to nominate a first and a second choice, and based on those results we arrived at… a tie. That wasn’t supposed to happen. With a first place and two second places apiece, the Trek Madone and 3T Strada turned out to be Cyclist’s favourite windcheaters. However, since like The Highlander there can only be one, we went back to the Zoom debate centre. At first we thought weight might settle it, and after running the numbers the lightest bike here (in comparable size and top-spec form) was in fact the 3T Strada at 7.50kg. This plays to Gerard Vroomen’s idea that losing a front mech and chainring saves significant…

When Cervélo created a bike for racing the cobbled Spring Classics in 2011, little did it know it was designing the bike of the future. Garmin-Cervélo’s Johan Vansummeren rode to victory at Paris-Roubaix that year on board what Cervélo called the R3 ‘Mud’. It was essentially a version of the company’s thoroughbred racer, customised to provide extra clearance for wide tyres and with geometry tweaked to have more stability and comfort at speed on the cobbles. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s because the bike was never successful commercially. Back then there simply wasn’t a market for it – why would we need wide clearance when we were all zipping around on 23mm tyres pumped up to 120psi? And slack geometry was for shopping bikes, right? How times change.…

1 PACT COFFEE GRAN FONDO ESPRESSO £11.99, pactcoffee.com Apparently Geraint Thomas has been working with Pact Coffee to develop this espresso. That’s not to say G has been visiting the farms and fincas of Rwanda and Colombia himself, but we do know that the Welshman enjoys a cup o’ joe, and that Gran Fondo coffee is available in whole bean or ground, delivered to your door, or wherever you find yourself watching the Tour. 2 ELIVAR SUSTAIN ENERGY From £12.99, elivar.com If you live on a farm and find the internet is patchy, try moving your router to the barn – that should provide more stable Wi-Fi. And if you ever feel like energy products are a bit boom and bust, try Elivar’s Sustain Go! and Sustain Plus gels and…

Are you taking on enough sodium during your rides? Probably not, according to a study published in the Journal Of The International Society Of Sports Nutrition. In the study, a group of 15 athletes were given either a ‘prescription hydration plan’ (PHP) based on bodyweight, activity time, fluid loss and sodium loss, or ‘no hydration plan’ (NHP). Assessment of awareness, anaerobic power and heart rate recovery time was undertaken after a series of ‘moderate to hard’ training sessions. The results showed PHP athletes jumped an average of 11.5cm farther in a standing jump, tracked moving objects 0.36m/s faster and exhibited a faster heart rate recovery. So how do you determine if you’re consuming enough fluid and sodium? One way is to weigh yourself naked before and after an hour’s ride…

Cyclist: Tell us a bit about your background. Dr Norman Lazarus: I was born in South Africa and I went to university there. Just before I started my medical degree the apartheid system came in, so I left, came to Britain for a while, moved to America where I met my wife, and came back to Britain in 1970. I worked at Wellcome and in the Department of Health, giving toxicological advice to the Minister of Health. After I retired I went back to King’s College when I was 70 years old, and for the past 14 years I’ve been doing research into healthy ageing. Cyc: What was the basis for your research into how we age? NL: I’m a keen cyclist and I noticed that the cyclists I was…

NEED A FILL UP? After a hard day in the hills, order a big bowl of garbure. A traditional southwest French stew, it can contain almost anything, but expect ham, cheese and cabbage. It’s more peasant grub than haute cuisine, but will fill the hole excavated by 3,000m of climbing. AND FOR DESSERT? If you’re still hungry, ask for gâteau à la broche. This delicious mess of butter, eggs, flour, cream and sugar is like a cake cooked on a rotating spit over an open fire. The end result looks more like spiky coral than food, but don’t let that put you off. SOMETHING FROM THE WINE LIST? If you like a good, punchy red, the local appellation is Madrian, which is produced just north of Lourdes. Perhaps the best-known…

TRAVEL The nearest airport is Lourdes, which is serviced by Ryanair, so the flights are cheap but adding a bike to your luggage is pricey. From Lourdes it’s about a 30-minute drive south to Villelongue. Toulouse airport is served by more airlines, but then you’re looking at nearer to two and a half hours’ transfer time. ACCOMMODATION Cyclist stayed at Escape to the Pyrenees (escapetothepyrenees.com) in the sleepy village of Villelongue. Former cycling journalist Jamie Wilkins and his partner Kitt Blackman have done a beautiful job of converting an old barn into a guesthouse with four bedrooms, all en suite and all well appointed. Home-cooked food is delicious and plentiful, and there is a workshop and large garage for storing bikes. Guests can opt for self-guided or fully supported riding,…

There was Francesco Moser’s 1984 Hour record bike, all cutting edge disc wheels and wildly sloping frame. There was Alf Engers’ 1978 timetrial bike, with its one-piece bar-stem, reversed levers and filed down cranks. In fact, as far back as 1891 riders were aware of the role of aerodynamics in performance, with participants of the 560km classic Bordeaux-Paris allowed to draft behind tandems. Yet when the dust settles, it will always be argued that the Cervélo Soloist set out the blueprint for what’s commonly understood to be the aero road bike. Released in 2002, the Soloist broke new ground with tall, skinny tubes based on NACA profiles, semi-internal cable routing, aero seatpost and… it had been in a wind-tunnel. It’s this thought that helped steer our criteria for Cyclist’s inaugural…

The road breaks free from the shackles of the town and offers dizzying views down the Rhone Valley The hotel breakfast buffet fills me with a mixture of horror and disbelief. Anyone might have coughed over those croissants. During my eight-hour trip to Valais in Switzerland, it had been mandatory to wear a mask on planes, trains and buses, but it seems that Swiss hotels, apart from an economy-size cannister of hand sanitiser at the entrance, are cheerfully unregulated. By the time I’ve drained the last of my café au lait with one vigilant eye on the uncovered pain au chocolat, it has been a stressful 20 minutes. Today’s ride up some steep mountains will be a piece of cake by comparison. Size isn’t everything I’m here to ride part…

Based in Mitcham, London, Isen is the offspring of Hartley Cycles and Talbot Frameworks, bespoke builders founded by Caren Hartley and Matthew McDonough respectively. Both are award winners in their own right, but back in 2015 the pair hatched a plan to start a small-batch bike brand together to cater for a wider audience. It was out with custom geometry and custom tubesets, and in with off-the-peg and stock geometry sizes. Hence the small-batch bit. Because the process is standardised, Hartley and McDonough are able to build bikes in batches, thereby cutting time and costs. A custom Hartley or Talbot frame, for example, could run north of £4,000, whereas Isens are nearly half that. And this is Isen’s road bike, which for legal reasons is technically only ever known as…

Believe it or not, stainless steel is relatively new to the bike world. Reynolds was arguably the first to bring stainless steel tubing to the mainstream (though still niche) framebuilding market when it released the 953 tubeset in 2005; then Columbus followed up with its own version, XCr, in 2007. Those two tubesets are different – only XCr is seamless and cold-drawn, which many argue makes it superior in the way it responds to welding – but both have their fans and both require one very tedious thing to bring out their best: polishing. All told, a builder can spend longer polishing a stainless frame than they do cutting and welding the tubes, which is why this bike from ColourBolt is so, well… mad. Made from Columbus XCr and stainless…

omething strange happened on Monday 10th August: there were no bike races. For the first time in 10 days, the snooker didn’t overrun on Eurosport; it was the Euro sport. After months of zero cycling, famine became feast with the return of WorldTour action on the dirt roads of Tuscany on the first day of the month. But following Wout van Aert’s emphatic solo win in a sweltering Strade Bianche, fans were given a day to stop, breathe through their masks, and take stock. While the irrepressible Annemiek van Vleuten did her best to make women’s cycling a one-horse race, two men’s teams drove the early background narrative as Ineos and Jumbo-Visma vied for supremacy during their pre-Tour skirmishes. If Egan Bernal won the Tour de L’Occitanie blindfolded, the focus…

In the early evening of 18th July 1903, the remaining 21 riders of the inaugural Tour de France peloton left the Café Babonneau in Nantes. They were bound for the finish line of the ‘grandest cycle race organised to date’, which lay 462km away in Ville-d’Avray, a western suburb of Paris. ‘It will definitely seem funny next week not to give more starts to the Tour de France,’ reported Georges Abran, who was responsible for sending the riders on their way. ‘Farewell the Tour de France,’ he concluded. ‘The final start is given. It is 8 o’clock sharp.’ That start time was one hour later than had been originally planned due to a fair tailwind and the organisers wanting to ensure the riders wouldn’t reach Paris too early. As they…

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Watching the first WorldTour race since March, you’d be forgiven for thinking that all the masks were protection from the dust, and the lack of roadside fans a reflection on the fierce Italian heat. In reality, these idiosyncrasies of a unique 14th edition of Strade Bianche were signs of the new normal as the sport bounced back from the Covid-19 crisis. ‘After five months of being at home it was definitely a shock to the system,’ says Hannah Troop, communications director at EF Pro Cycling. ‘The one thing that really struck me about this year’s Strade Bianche was walking into the Piazza del Campo in Siena. It was so strange to not see it full of fans like last year, almost a bit eerie. But obviously we understand why it’s…

1 CervéloCaledonia-5p126 The new bike in Cervélo’s lineup is designed for those who might want to race, ride on a wide variety of surfaces, and definitely want comfort 2 IsenRaceReadyRoadp132 A meeting of minds between Hartley Cycles and Talbot Frameworks was the spark for a small-batch bike maker with big ideas 3 OpenMin.Dp138 Gerard Vroomen’s gravel-focussed brand applies what it has learned off-road to its first road bike, with remarkable results…

This might not be the place to say it, but road riding and I have been going through something of a rocky patch. In fact, that’s a literal explanation, as I genuinely have been spending more of my time riding through patches of rock. I’ve been doing far more gravel riding than road riding, which is something Open would appreciate, having built its reputation developing gravel bikes such as the UP, the Upper and the Wi.De. So it really piqued my interest when I learned that Open’s co-founders Andy Kessler (former CEO of BMC) and Gerard Vroomen (co-founder of Cervélo) had chosen to create a road bike: the Min.D. ‘We basically wanted to design Andy’s perfect road bike,’ says Vroomen. ‘Andy lives in Basel, Switzerland, where if he turns left…

The Worlds That Wasn’t p112 Giro Aether MIPS helmet, £259.99 zyrofisher.co.uk SunGod Velans Pace sunglasses, £140 sungod.co Assos Mille GT wind jacket, £110 assos.com Assos Erlkoenig jersey, £95 assos.com Assos Equipe RS bibshorts, £175 assos.com Assos RS socks, £13 assos.com Giro Techne shoes, £89.99 zyrofisher.co.uk The Old One-Two p62 Specialized S-Works Prevail II MIPS helmet, £200 specialized.com Giordana FR-C Pro Lyte jersey, £104.99 giordana.co.uk Giordana Midweight Tubular base layer, £51.99 giordana.co.uk Giordana FR-C Pro Lyte bibshorts, £104.99 giordana.co.uk Giordana Aero Lyte mitts, £39.99 giordana.co.uk Giordana FR-C socks, £9.99 giordana.co.uk Fizik Infinito R1 Knit shoes, £349.99 extrauk.co.uk Col de l’Iseran p90 Bell Zephyr MIPS helmet, £209.99 zyrofisher.co.uk 100% Speedcraft sunglasses, £139.99 freewheel.co.uk Santini Soffio jersey, £95 zyrofisher.co.uk Santini Scatto bibshorts, £120 zyrofisher.co.uk Santini Soffio socks, £18 zyrofisher.co.uk Northwave Storm shoes, £129.99…