Tabla de contenidos para June 2016 en Procycling

Amstel, Flèche and Liège get a hard time of it these days. Boring and predictable, we decide, before the races have even happened. And then they turn out to be boring and predictable. With team tactics what they are now, and cycling teams being so well organised and trained, these races are formulaic: controlled racing to the last hill, and may the best uphill sprinter win. It’s easy to criticise but I suspect it’s close to impossible to disrupt this pattern while things stay as they are. Armchair DSs may suggest attacking, as if it hadn’t occurred to anybody. But it’s too hard – strong teams keep the pace high through the race; attacks don’t work. There are some answers. First, one rider fewer per team, please. Break the control…

Strade Bianche has earned its status as a modern Classic in just 10 years. The Tro Bro Léon has been going since 1984, becoming fully professional in 2000, but is still an undiscovered gem. It has all the ingredients needed to become part of an elite series of spring races which embrace the cobbles and farm tracks of Europe. The only things missing are a top-class field and money. Unlike Strade Bianche, which is run by Giro d’Italia owners RCS, the Tro Bro Léon is run by volunteers. It has a small budget of €200,000-300,000, plus the cost of live TV coverage, another €120,000, half of which is covered by the French Cycling Federation. Volunteers they may be but the hospitality laid on for a few hundred VIPs – essential…

WILL BARTA Third on GC in the Junior Peace Race in 2014 outlined the promise of this 20-year-old. He comes from Idaho and is sharing the bottom floor of a Nice villa with Costa for the first half of 2016. They’re also team-mates on Axeon. BRANDON MCNULTY Still only 18 but McNulty already has a very decent palmares: he won the Peace Race last year, plus two stages at the Tour of Abitibi. He’s currently under the wing of ex-professional Roy Knickman on the Lux-Stradling team. NATHAN BROWN The 24-year-old Texan is described by his Cannondale team as an all-rounder and the ‘right hand man’ to their stage race leaders. Some good results, such as victory in the Tour de Beauce in 2013, suggest there’s more to come.…

Lizzie Armitstead who wore the rainbows with aplomb and has been almost unbeatable John Main @Adriftinthewood I’d say ‘The Element of Surprise’. Three almost unpredictable Monument winners plus Greg Van Avermaet at Tirreno. Isn’t cycling exciting? Rui Duarte @ruiduarte16 So many to choose from. Lizzie obviously and Wout Poels. He’s had a cracking start to the season. Knight @AK_jnr Sagan. For having a strategy for De Ronde which was practiced at E3+GW. And for his acrobatic skills in MSR + Paris-Roubaix Feargal McKay @fmk_RoI Nobody from Etixx-Quick Step, that’s for sure. Maxi Lopez @max_wardley Lizzie Armistead, by a country mile – astonishing way to dispel the myth of the curse of the rainbow jersey Stage Hopper @stagehopper I think Boonen for his comeback and grace when defeated in Paris-Roubaix…there wasn’t…

Mark Cavendish, André Greipel and Marcel Kittel will be the sprinters that gather the most headlines at this year’s Tour. There could even be scenestealing cameos from the likes of Nacer Bouhanni and Alexander Kristoff. But what is sure is that their time at the top is, to varying degrees, limited. Their eventual demise could even be quickened by the competitive tension developing between the two coming men of sprinting: Australian Orica-GreenEdge rider Caleb Ewan and the Colombian Etixx-Quick Step man, Fernando Gaviria. Gaviria and Ewan have only clashed once properly since turning professional, but that bout, plus their proven class as WorldTour race winners, means that we’re in the salad days of what could be the defining rivalry in Grand Tour sprinting in the next decade. It gets bloodier…

I took my first photo at a race on the Mur de Huy at Fleche Wallonne in 2003, so it’s always special to return. It’s also different from many other days in the year because I don’t take a motorbike: Fleche is all about the Wall, and so I base myself there all day. To be able to spend time walking the length of the hill, searching out new perspectives on this iconic piece of road is a rare pleasure. With the women’s race taking place on the same day, it meant riders passed us five times. There was plenty of opportunity to find new angles. I think my shots gain something by not being confined to a motorbike. I’m able to wait for the perfect moment to present itself…

4 TOP-10 GRAND TOUR FINISHES Four times Rolland has finished 11th or better in the Tour de France, yet he’s never finished higher than eighth. He’s also been fourth in the Giro. He’s twice won the Tour’s queen stage – at Alpe d’Huez in 2011 and La Toussuire in 2012. At the Alpe he outclimbed the Tour's best riders. Theoretically, on the right route, in the right circumstances, Rolland should be a Tour podium contender. You’d think there’d be more excitement about Rolland in France, yet there’s nowhere near the same anticipation about him as there is about Thibaut Pinot, for example. Partly, it’s because that run of GC placings in the Tour – 10th in 2011, then eighth, 24th, 11th, 10th – looks like a plateau. No one gives…

"We need more fixed cameras at the starts and finishes. Then they should reduce the number of motorbikes in the race" Favourite race? That’s the Vuelta, because it’s always warm weather. Best domestique in the peloton? Maciej Bodnar because he’s Polish and he stays with Peter Sagan everywhere – not just in the race but in the room too. When he works he’s 100 per cent for the team and he’s so strong you can’t believe it. Favourite training location? That’s got to be Livigno in Italy. It’s got good roads and there is also a nice atmosphere around the place. Funniest team-mate? [Pauses] This year, not sure, but last year the funniest guy on the team was Chris Juul [-Jensen]. Now he’s with Orica and he’s a really funny…

Here’s the thing - bike racing is dangerous. If it wasn’t I wouldn’t have loved it as much as I did. I loved the thrill of being on the edge. I also enjoyed the training, camaraderie, shared celebrations and commiserations but it was the rush I got from racing that fed my desire. I relished those moments when I was in a state of flow off the front alone or crushed in the peaking stress of a peloton chasing down the finish line, so close to going down yet somehow staying upright. Nothing else mattered. It was damn good fun. I began racing professionally aged 19 and called it quits at 38. I raced 1,057 days. I’d be surprised if any one of those days didn’t involve a single crash…

Alberto Contador has a love-hate relationship with the Tour de France. It’s a race Contador cares for deeply enough to have made the centre of his season, his career and a hefty chunk of his life for over a decade now, even if he hasn’t won it for six years - or five, if you are a Contadorista and count 2010. (Andy Schleck is the official winner, after Contador was stripped of the yellow jersey following a positive doping test for clenbuterol during the race.) But while Contador looks forward to racing the Tour each July, it turns out the better he does, the more he wants it to be over with, too. “Do you know what your overwhelming feeling is when you stand on the ChampsÉlysées having won the…

Fabio Aru is Italian cycling’s great hope. The obvious, the only, successor to Vincenzo Nibali, with whom he has more than a little in common. Like his Astana team-mate, Aru left a Mediterranean island to pursue a dream on the mainland, far from family and friends but close to the teams, terrain and races that make good riders great. That was seven years ago, and his career has been a resounding vindication for that difficult migration: two podiums at the Giro d’Italia plus three stage wins, and he won the Vuelta a Espana in 2015, where he was fifth the year before. Still only 25, he already has the palmares of a campione, and the promise of a campionissimo. We meet in Calella, one of the many concrete abominations that…

When Alejandro Valverde changed the habit of a lifetime and added both the Tour of Flanders and Giro d’Italia to his programme for 2016, it looked a little like the Movistar team were rearranging their hierarchy in public. The message was clear – despite coming third overall at the Tour de France last year, his best-ever result, the Spaniard was now definitively below Nairo Quintana in the pecking order. Quintana, one place above Valverde last July, would lead Movistar at the Tour in 2016, and Valverde could ride the Giro for the first time. It was a little cramped on the Paris podium with two riders from the same team. Over 12 seasons and 14 years, discounting the doping ban, Valverde’s schedule followed a predictable pattern: good results in the…

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DAN MARTIN ETIXX- QUICK STEP The Ardennes are the focal point of the first part of my season and it's a week of racing that I love. They are very popular with the riders yet I often hear them labelled as predictable, even boring. Coming hot on the heels of the cobbled Classics, the Ardennes more closely resemble a ‘normal’ race, the character of the Roubaix cobbles and Flemish bergs replaced with steep, nicely paved climbs. The challenge and difficulty are less obvious to the untrained eye, especially the TV viewer, where the intensity of the fight for position on the narrow twisting roads is lost. It’s true these races are waiting games, the winner often appearing from nowhere in the final kilometres, hidden in the shelter of the peloton,…

2003 Following a traineeship, Contador signs with Manolo Saiz’s Once-Eroski team and takes a debut victory in his neo-pro year: a 19km uphill time trial at the Tour of Poland in September 2004 At the Vuelta a Asturias Contador blacks out on a descent. First aid at the scene saves his life and he’s given emergency surgery to remove a malformation of blood vessels in the brain. 2005 Contador makes a winning return to competition in 2005 when he wins stage 5 of the Tour Down Under in Willunga. In July, at his first Tour de France, he finishes 31st overall. 2006 Contador takes stages at the Tour of Romandy and Tour de Suisse. He is denied a Tour start, however, when Puerto hits and his team is left with…

There was one occasion during the winter when Lizzie Armitstead, feeling a little under the weather, was tempted to train in a plain jersey rather than the rainbow bands of world champion. On one level she was worried she wouldn’t do it justice. On another, more practical level, she was worried that she might be spotted and become a target – a not infrequent occurrence in Italy, where she often trains, and where have-a-go heroes, on clocking the world champion, have been known to attach themselves to her back wheel then sprint past for some imaginary line at the top of a climb. The pressure the jersey adds in races is easy to imagine but it must bring a certain pressure to every ride. Can you go for an easy…

And so, by extraordinary happenstance, to the Rhône Valley. The fourth stage of this, the 39th Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré, would be a 32km mountain time trial around beautiful Valence. It was the afternoon of 28 May 1987, Ascension Day, and for one Valentinois in particular it represented no less than a ladder to the stars. Charly Mottet stood third on GC, and the mountain stages lay in wait. A good ride today and the race – his race – would be there for the taking. His time had come Call it destiny or call it what you will but whatever it was it was lost on nobody. Fifteen years prior almost to the day, nineyear-old Charly been taken to his first bike race. It had been a Dauphiné time…

TEAM ISSUE BIKES – TESTED BY PROCYCLING SPECIFICATION Weight: 7.45kg (inc pedals) Frame: Carbon fibre Fork: Carbon fibre Groupset: Shimano Dura-Ace 9000 Crankset: Look Zed 3, 50/34 Cassette: Shimano Dura-Ace 9000, 11-28 Brakes: Shimano Dura-Ace 9000 Wheels: Mavic Aksium Elite Tyres: Mavic Yksion 25c Handlebar: Look ADH Stem: Look Aerostem Seatpost: Look E-post 2 Saddle: Selle Italia SLR Flow Monolink Price: ￡5,499 (as tested) $5,699.99 (frameset) www.lookcycle.com Look’s clipless pedals tip the scales at as little as 90g each, yet they weigh heavily around the neck of the French brand. In 1984 Look applied its expertise from ski bindings to launch the first ever clipless pedals and create a landmark moment in the sport’s history. Ever since then, Look has been burdened with the expectation of continuous innovation. It began…

TOUR OF THE BASQUE COUNTRY 04-04-16 – 09-04-16 Alberto Contador has a reputation for being an attacking, exciting rider. But if winning is more important to him than maintaining that reputation, the Tour of the Basque Country offered evidence that he might like to rein in the aggressiveness. He rode consistently in the hilly stages, then won the final time trial to clinch the overall. Conversely, at the Volta ao Algarve and Paris-Nice, he was aggressive, yet came away with only podium placings. Contador’s time trial victory, on the final stage of the race, was on a tough, hilly course which suited him, but his results over the week did demonstrate that in a stage race, timing is important. When Sky’s Mikel Landa won the very steep finish on the…

Here we are at the end of the spring campaign and the great spring Classics. Before we start looking forward for the curtain to open for the big stage races let’s reflect a little about the Classics. We saw two former kings getting oh so close to pulling it off in style one last time, we saw the birth of the new king of the Classics and we saw something as close as it gets to a real-life fairy tale. Tom Boonen and Fabian Cancellara are clearly the kings of the cobblestone Classics for the last decade, sharing quite a few wins between them and both entered what seems to have been their last battle well prepared and ready. One of these kings had the bad luck to cross paths…