Tabla de contenidos para July 2017 en Procycling

One of the most interesting things about the Tour de France, apart from the fascinating education about geography, history, culture and gastronomy that the race provides as a free service, is watching how the riders and the route interact to make an exciting race. When I first glanced at the 2017 parcours, I was underwhelmed. However, when you look more closely at what lies between the start and finish towns, there is a lot of interesting detail. It looks as if the Tour organisers are tiring of the race being settled on the summit finishes and time trials and daring the riders to find another way of winning the yellow jersey. The Tour is an evolving series of challenges which the riders master over time. The long time trials used…

A col is the lowest point between two peaks. Often, and particularly in Europe’s populous mountain ranges, there’s a road over the col – a pass – that connects one or several valleys together. Some of these passes are thousands of years old, with rich cultural, economic and military histories – Hannibal and his elephants’ unspecifiable route through Alps, for example, or the Grand Saint-Bernard Pass, which was a crucial renaissance trade route connecting richly productive northern Italy with simply rich northern Europe. In the late 19th and early 20th century, the most important passes were the subjects of ambitious, expensive and magnificent road engineering projects. They have become quieter now thanks to the arrival of motorways which used valley floors and dynamite to get to destinations faster and more…

MICHAEL STORER Perth-born Michael Storer joined Mitchelton-Scott at the beginning of May. The 20-year-old finished fifth in the Herald Sun Tour and is a strong climber and TT rider. He won the Gran Premio Industrie del Marmo in mid-May. CAMERON MEYER The 29-year-old Perth native retired last year, only to reverse the decision and announce his aim to target the 2020 Olympics on the track. He was third at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race and fourth at the Herald Sun Tour. LUKE DURBRIDGE After a great WorldTour debut in 2012 in which he won seven times, the 26-year-old has found the years since tougher going. But fourth at Dwars door Vlaanderen and 12th at Flanders in 2017 hint at a nascent Classics specialism.…

The last month or so has been Tour build-up time for me, meaning many long rides and plenty of kilometres. In past years, I’ve usually gone to altitude but this year I changed it a little by staying at sea level in Calpe and sleeping in an altitude tent instead. My coach Paul Van Den Bosch believes in sleeping high and training low, so I thought this year I’d try it properly and see. I actually like to train at altitude, like on the Stelvio or the Sierra Nevada, because it prepares you for stages which go really high, above 2,000m, but in the Tour it hardly ever goes that high. I don’t really feel so different, just a bit fresher perhaps. When you train at altitude it feels like…

You reported a minor back injury after the Tour de Romandie. About 10 days later you were involved in a hit and run incident at home. Are there any lingering effects from these problems you’ve had to work through? Not really. The incident with the motorist was pretty scary, but I came away completely unscathed, luckily, and in the Tour de Romandie I got an injury in my lower back. I’ve been working pretty hard off the bike to get that sorted, in the gym, and I’m pretty glad I’m on top of it. Your hit and run, Scarponi’s death - there have been some very high profile incidents involving riders and cars... I think these kind of incidents have been happening more and more and there have been some…

arren Barguil won two stages of the Vuelta as a first year pro in 2013. The only rider to have since equalled, and admittedly bettered that achievement is Fernando Gaviria, who took three WorldTour wins in 2016. But Barguil’s bald results don’t do justice to his swashbuckling verve in Spain that year. Despite the expectations that accompanied the previous year’s Tour de l’Avenir winner, he finished in the top 10 twice in the first 10 days. On stage 13 he infiltrated a strong break and attacked the remnants in the final kilometre to win. Three days later and full of bravado, he made another break and helped push the escape to the final climb to Formigal. At the bottom he attacked and rode up alone for more than 9km. He…

Benjamin Franklin, if he had been a cycling fan, might have said that nothing is certain except death, taxes, and Peter Sagan winning the Tour de France’s green jersey. The Slovakian is currently on a run of five green jerseys at the French race. Not only that, but his winning margins are so big that it’s hard for his rivals to identify how they might beat him. His slimmest margin of victory has been 66 points, 432 to André Greipel’s 366 in the 2015 Tour. In 2016, he was an astonishing 242 points ahead of Marcel Kittel in second place. He’s still one green jersey behind Erik Zabel’s record of six wins between 1996 and 2001, but given that Sagan is 27 and possibly not yet at his peak as…

Though Peter Sagan, Alexander Kristoff, John Degenkolb and Arnaud Démare can win bunch sprints, with Sagan and Kristoff even having won them at the Tour, they are more versatile riders. What they lack in the top end speed of Kittel, Cavendish and Greipel, they make up for in their ability to survive hard terrain. They sprint well because they are so strong, but what these riders also have in common is that all have won a Monument. Sagan has won Flanders, Kristoff has won Flanders and San Remo, Démare has won San Remo, and Degenkolb has won San Remo and Roubaix. McEwen explains that Sagan has probably the best chance of a straight bunch sprint win of these four riders. “You never know at the Tour. Sometimes you get these…

ITV cycling presenter Who will win the yellow jersey and who is going to be second and third? Froome’s pre-June build-up was unimpressive but the lack of competition makes me think he can win, and the next-strongest rider may turn out to be his team-mate, Landa. Quintana may not always excel but he rarely !lops, so I’d take him as a safe bet for second. Porte and Bardet look the most likely candidates for third. Who else will be in the top 10? A lot of the same names as in 2016, given that the route is similarly heavy on climbing and even skinnier on TTs: Meintjes, Valverde, Martin and Simon Yates. Landa and Aru will want to make amends for their Giro setbacks. Which sprinter will dominate? At the…

Back in 2012, Trek’s Domane revolutionised endurance road bike ride quality with its innovative IsoSpeed decoupler. It was fiendishly simple but tremendously effective. In one fell swoop, the limits of what a carbon road bike was capable of weren’t just expanded, they were rewritten, and beneath Fabian Cancellara, the Domane quickly racked up one Paris- Roubaix and two Tour of Flanders victories. Cancellara so loved the Domane’s feel that he raced it all year round, until Trek added IsoSpeed to the current Madone. But the original design’s bumpeating rear end was never matched by its IsoSpeed fork, meaning that your hands and arms felt most of the vibrations that your posterior didn’t. Trek’s answer to this IsoSpeed imbalance was to equip the head-tube with an evolution of the same technology.…

1 TOM DUMOULIN SUNWEB Sunweb rider Dumoulin became the first Dutchman to win the Giro and only the third to win a Grand Tour, after Jan Janssen and Joop Zoetemelk. Moreover, he did it with style and resilience. The 26-year-old’s victory was based on the two key time trials: the hard rolling 39km test to Montefalco where he put in the region of a massive five seconds per kilometre into Nairo Quintana, and the slightly downhill 29km test between Monza and Milan where he overturned the 53 second deficit to Quintana by the first time check. But it was what happened around and between the two TTs that demonstrated Dumoulin’s resistance. He got the better of the stronger climbers with a stage victory on Oropa. But between stages 15 and…

The Tour de France is over 100 years old, and I love all the stories from the old days. Like when French rider Octave Lapize shouted “You are murderers!” at the organisers while climbing the Col d’Aubisque on stage 9 in the Pyrenees in 1910. Or riders jumping on the train, and the old black and white photos with riders smoking cigarettes while riding along. Things have changed! Or how about my father-in-law, Hans Jaroszewicz? He rode in the Tour de France in 1960 and in 1961 and, despite the fact that I won the Amateur World Cup in 1994 and had a bunch of good results, he only accepted me as a proper bike rider after I completed my first Tour in 1998. And now his daughter and I…

Robert Millar won stages at all three Grand Tours and the mountains jersey at both the Tour de France and the Vuelta a España in the 1980s. Until Bradley Wiggins, he was Britain's best ever Grand Tour rider, with fourth at the Tour and three runner-up finishes at the Vuelta and Giro. These days he writes insightfully on cycling. 1 SATURDAY 1 JULY / 14KM TT Düsseldorf - Düsseldorf A flat urban time trial along the banks of the Rhine. At 14km it’s longer than a typical opening Prologue WHO DOES IT SUIT? Berlin has the nightlife, the marathon, the Philharmonic and Pride. Hamburg had the Beatles. Munich the football team. If Düsseldorf, the ninth-biggest city in Germany and not even the largest in the North Rhine-Westphalia region, was in…

TEAMS In 2012, Ag2r were the least successful team in cycling’s top tier. They won four races all year, in minor events. But five years is a long time in cycling, and it’s possible that they could provide the winner of the Tour in 2017. Romain Bardet, an improvisatory climber with an attacking streak, was last year’s runner-up and has two more top 10s. He’s impervious to pressure, of which there will be a huge amount if France is to break the 31-year yellow jersey duck. The team will be built around helping him do that. Pierre Latour and Alexandre Geniez will provide back-up in the mountains; Oliver Naesen and Jan Bakelandts are possible and effective helpers on the flat stages; Samuel Dumoulin is the road captain. It’s all for…

The most romantic cycling race of May is perhaps not the Giro d’Italia but the Ronde de l’Isard, in the French Pyrenees. The Ronde de l’Isard? This international race, which celebrated its 40th anniversary last month, doesn’t ring a bell for many fans of cycling. Yet it has become legendary for U23 riders from all around the world, who are dying to experience a first journey over big passes or fight for a contract. It’s a proven path to the top: 19 out of the past 20 winners have become professional. Like the Giro, ‘l’Isard’ is hectic, epic and dramatic. The snow and the mist wrap the climbs in their cold embrace quite often. This is a backdrop of pure and wild mountains. But it all remains at a very…

I’m sitting in a café right now, enjoying a coffee because it’s not the greatest weather here in Girona for once. On grey days like this, when it’s an easy day you need to be able to escape the four walls of home and just chill. Luckily, Girona has plenty to offer the professional rider on a recovery day. It’s no coincidence as many of the businesses have been set up by or have some kind of connection with a pro or an ex-pro. Cafés, bike shops and even, as I’ve found out recently, physio and osteopathy treatment are run by people who used to ride bikes for a living. It’s like a cycling campus really, and I love it. And of course there are the other riders as well…

atching Nairo Quintana battling for victory in the Giro d’Italia this May, Team Sky principal Dave Brailsford admitted that he couldn’t help wondering how the Colombian’s participation in Italy would affect his performance in the Tour de France. “It’s at the back of my mind,” Brailsford said with a grin to a small group of journalists at the stage 8 finish in Peschici. “The trick of it is to try and see the world through his eyes, and if you’re trying to win the Giro and win the Tour, what are you going to be doing here? Just get everything and go as hard as you can every day, or are you going to keep in the back of your mind that you don’t want to get too nailed here…

Of the bunch sprinters in the tier below Kittel, Greipel and Cavendish, the two most prominent may be Nacer Bouhanni and Bryan Coquard, both young and both French. That’s about all they have in common. They have radically different temperaments – Coquard is open, friendly, engaging and equanimous. Bouhanni is chippy, sulky, defensive and pouty. The latter has gained a not entirely unwarranted reputation for getting into fights – he missed last year’s Tour after an altercation with a member of the public. “These two are a little bit lightweight, even compared to Cavendish, but above all in comparison with Greipel and Kittel,” says McEwen. “They are good on a rising finish or a technical finish. But you don’t get so many technical finishes at the Tour – they tend…

Procycling Editor Who will win the yellow jersey and who is going to be second and third? It’s hard to see past Froome. Recent evidence suggests he’s better at cycling than his rivals and he’s hard to beat physically and tactically. Porte and Bardet to round out the podium. Who else will be in the top 10? Valverde and Quintana, probably in that order. Aru and Chaves could be wild cards if their dicky knees allow, though Simon Yates might be a better bet for Orica. Contador, of course, but I can’t see him higher than fourth or !ifth. Meintjes and Martin, possibly Talansky. Maybe Pinot, but I think he’ll go stage-hunting. Which sprinter will dominate? I think Kittel has a point to prove – he was outshone by Cavendish…

The Cycling Podcast Who will win the yellow jersey and who is going to be second and third? Quintana first, Froome second, Valverde third. Having tipped Quintana every year since 2015 I feel obliged to back him again. He is bound to win it one year. Isn’t he? I suspect he’ll be better at the Tour than he was at the Giro. He lacks punch but doesn’t tire. More than last year, there is a question over Froome’s form. Who else will be in the top 10? Bardet, Simon Yates, Porte, Jon Izagirre, Landa, Martin and Barguil. All obvious candidates. Two Movistars and two Skys in the top 10 seems about right, given their strength. Majka, Aru, Meintjes and Talansky could all figure. Which sprinter will dominate? Kittel. It’s unsure…

Miguel Indurain, the story goes, won five Tour de France yellow jerseys in a row in the early 1990s with ruthless and tedious timetrialling efficiency. At the point when his Tours were won and lost and the drama should have been at its highest, Indurain simply strangled his rivals’ aspirations, putting minutes into them in the time trials, then passively defending his lead in the mountains. The iconography reinforced the narrative: the best Indurain pictures of the era were from the time trials: the machine-like Spaniard, his expression mostly hidden behind a halfface time trial helmet, sharply in focus; the background blurred. The stereotypical view of Indurain, perpetuated by the media and reinforced by the rider’s behaviour off the bike, was that he was devoid of emotion, though there was…

It’s been nine years since a rider won two Grand Tours in a year, and Nairo Quintana’s narrow failure to win the Giro d’Italia (not to mention the difficulty of riding the Tour to win just six weeks afterwards) has put the challenge back into the spotlight. It’s not an impossibility, however – three different riders finished on two GT podiums last year alone. We’ve listed all the riders to have finished top 10 in two Grand Tours in all the years since 2008, when Alberto Contador last won two in a single season. Could Tom Dumoulin, or whoever wins the Tour this year double up at the Vuelta?…

1. Ride Bruges (Bruges Cycling Classic) 18 Jun, 1.1, Belgium 2. Italian National Road Championships 18-25 Jun, CN, Italy 3. Spanish National Road Championships 20-25 Jun, CN, Spain 4. Halle Ingooigem 21 Jun, 1.1, Belgium 5. British National Road Championships 22-25 Jun, CN, Great Britain 6. French National Road Championships 22-25 Jun, CN, France 7. Belgian National Road Championships 22-25 Jun, CN, Belgium 8. American National Road Championships 24 Jun - 01 Jul, CN, USA 9. Giro d’Italia Internazionale Femminile 30 Jun - 09 Jul, 2.WWT, Italy 10. Tour de France 01-23 Jul, 2.UWT, France 11. Tour of Austria 02-08 Jul, 2.HC, Austria 12. KOGA Slag om Norg 02 Jul, 1.1, Netherlands 13. Sibiu Cycling Tour 05-09 Jul, 2.1, Romania 14. Grote Prijs Jean-Pierre Monseré 08 Jul, 1.1, Belgium 15.…

It’s hard to believe that it’s Tour de France time again already. With each passing edition I develop a greater affection for the race that essentially defines seasons, careers – cycling even. Before we look at this year’s route I feel that I should highlight that there is never an easy Tour. It’s the only race all season where 100 per cent of the guys on the start-line are at peak condition and motivated. There is rarely an easy stage. Those days when you see the peloton rolling along, serenely bunched and seemingly whiling away the kilometres, are intense mental battles for position. I find the mountains easier because the legs do the work there. What makes the Tour so taxing is the need for full concentration every day. It’s…

I’ve just got back from a two-week training camp at altitude in Sierra Nevada. There’s not much to do up there except train and rest, though we stayed at a sports centre where there’s a spa and a swimming pool, so it felt a bit like a holiday. The cycling wasn’t a holiday, however. We started off with long rides, lots of kilometres, then we upped the intensity once we were acclimatised. Two weeks is about right – enough time to get really into it and focus, but not so long that we get bored. You never know how you are going to go afterwards – my legs always feel a bit weird for a few days, but racing unblocks them, and the evidence we had trained well came at…

WIN TO BUILD CONFIDENCE The Tasmanian turned up at the Tour Down Under in January extremely lean and very keen. Wins in both hill-top finishes in Paracombe and Willunga meant that he won the GC comprehensively. Back in Europe, after two stormy days on stage 1 and 2 at Paris-Nice, Porte dropped out of the GC, which was a “disaster”, but he still rallied to win the key mountain stage on top of the Col de la Couillole. In May, he won the Tour de Romandie for the first time in his career. Richie Porte tells Procycling, “Last year, when I first came to BMC, I took the approach of building up through the season. This year, my coach David Bailey said let’s win races on the way to the…

These three sprinters have dominated the bunch finishes in the Tour recently. Cavendish is the race’s most successful ever sprinter, with 30 stage wins. Kittel won four a year in 2013 and 2014, though he struggled with illness and poor form through 2015. Greipel is less prolific, though he is extraordinarily consistent – he’s won at least a stage in the last 12 Grand Tours he has ridden, going back nine years. He’s also won at least a stage a year for the last six Tours. Only three riders have achieved more, though Greipel will have to go on winning until the 2020 Tour if he’s to equal André Darrigade’s record of 10. McEwen thinks that Kittel will be the man to beat this year, especially as Cavendish has been…

The best of the rest at the Tour currently look to be Sonny Colbrelli, Dylan Groenewegen and Dan McLay. McLay came close on one occasion in last year’s Tour, while Groenewegen has been picking up small wins left right and centre. Colbrelli is more of a hilly Classics sprinter, but he picked up a sprint win at Paris-Nice this year. “These three will be dreaming of stage wins, but are a little way of. I expect them to go in the top five a few times,” says McEwen. “McLay has a good amount of speed, and more importantly he has the balls to mix it at the front. His level of success in the Tour might be dependent on staying on the bike – having balls means you can sometimes…

Procycling Deputy Editor Who will win the yellow jersey and who is going to be second and third? Froome will win his fourth Tour. Porte will be second and an Orica-Scott man, Simon Yates probably, third. Who else will be in the top 10? Quintana, Bardet, Chaves and Meintjes for a start. Quintana’s lacking the e!fervescence of 2013/14, and I don’t buy Movistar’s line that the Colombian will be better in his second major tour of the season. He’s a tough nut to crack though, and I expect he’ll hang on to a top !ive. Which sprinter will dominate? Please let it be Nacer Bouhanni. He’s bad Maverick to Marcel Kittel’s Ice Man and though he’s far from universally popular, Bouhanni could bring the kind of edge to the Tour…

Rui Costa either had a very good or a very bad Giro d’Italia. The good news for the Portugese rider was that he was a perennial fixture in the successful breaks – the nose for a good escape that brought him a rainbow jersey in 2013 is still in good working order. The bad news was that he didn’t win a stage, but came second on three occasions, to Omar Fraile, Pierre Rolland and Mikel Landa, all in different circumstances. Try to define Rui Costa and you’ll realise that he’s no specialist. He’s a Classics rider, with wins at the Worlds and GP de Montréal, podiums in Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Il Lombardia and the GP de Québec, and top 10s in Amstel Gold and Flèche Wallonne. But he’s also a stage race…