Tabla de contenidos para August 2021 en Procycling

For many athletes, the Olympic Games is the peak of their career. To the average canoeist, rhythmic gymnast or shot putter, it is their everything. Road cycling, however, fits less seamlessly into the fouryearly sports jamboree. For men’s cycling especially, the Olympic road race may not exactly be an afterthought, but neither is it a priority. It comes quite low down the pecking order of prestige: first come the grand tours, with the Tour de France first, and Giro second, then the monuments in order of personal preference, then the World Championships. The Vuelta slots in there somewhere. An Olympic gold is potentially a career-changing result for that one rider, but at the same time in the grand scheme of things the race is a little more important than Paris-Nice…

Where’s home? I live in a town called Örebro in the middle of Sweden. That’s where I grew up, and it is where I have found myself coming back to. This year, actually, I was living in Spain, but I decided to move back home. I think I was ready for it, I was done with living in Girona. What’s your favourite race? It’s hard to pick one. Is it strange to say the World Championships? I know that it changes place every year, but I think it is my favourite event. I like building up towards it, and enjoy the atmosphere on the day; it’s always a highlight of the year for me. What’s your favourite climb? I think one of the climbs in Gran Canaria. I usually do…

I couldn’t escape pro bike racing even if I wanted, not when there’s a race that goes past the front door of my house in Euskadi every year - the Circuito de Getxo, held in the summer in my hometown. It was the first race I saw as a child and I always used to race Getxo when I started out as a pro, first with Orbea and then when I went on to Euskaltel-Euskadi in 2010. We did Getxo a few times when I was with Movistar, but never with Sky or Ineos. There’s talk that they’ll do it this August, though, and I’d like that very much. Getting into Orbea was pretty straightforward. I’d raced with Seguros Bilbao, the best amateur team in Euskadi, for a couple of…

The Dutch lived their golden age in the 17th century when the small nation capitalised on their economic and maritime power to become one of the most influential countries in the world. This might feel incongruous today, but the Netherlands was home to the most advanced art, science, and philosophy of the age. It was the time of Frans Hals, Rembrandt and tulip mania. To look at some of the great Dutch art of the time is to see a country with a burgeoning middle class; a nation very sure of itself. The past decade has seen a Dutch golden age in women’s cycling, one that would make the burghers of 17th century Amsterdam smile with recognition. Six out of the last 10 winners of the Worlds road race and…

Deceuninck-Quick Step have never won a grand tour. Yet from 2012 to 2020 their WorldTour ranking reads as follows: fourth, seventh, fourth, fourth, seventh, second, first, first, second. At the time of going to press, just before the Tour de France, they were only behind Ineos Grenadiers. According to results website Procyclingstats you have to go back to 2015 to find a team more successful than them at the end of the season. Without grand tour wins to scoop up the points, a team would have to win a lot of races to score so many points. Deceuninck do exactly that. No other team comes close. Since 2012 they have reliably won over 50 races every season except the curtailed 2020 when they still took 39 victories. Ineos on average…

SCOTT ADDICT RC 15 PRISM £5,549 ||| $5,599.99 The new Addict from Scott is one of the best lightweight bikes that money can buy. As used by Team DSM on climbing days, the bike is more than just feather-light; it is incredibly stiff and aerodynamic, too. Scott say that it is the “first bike with completely integrated cable routing for both mechanical and electronic shifting without any compromise”. This is the model with an Ultegra Di2 groupset from Shimano, for perfect electronic shifting, and Capital 1.0 disc wheels from Syncros. The colour is Komodo Green, which will ensure that you stand out on the road. www.scott-sports.com BOLLÉ SHIFTER MATTE BLACK LE COQ SPORTIF £100 ||| $120 The Shifter sunglasses from Bollé are simple, yet packed with features to ensure great…

After the Giro last year, the Ineos Grenadiers team principal Dave Brailsford waxed lyrical about his plan for a more exciting style of racing for the team. Nobody seemed to much mind that though their winner in that race, Tao Geoghegan Hart, was a surprising and popular one, he’d largely done it with the help of a one-man mountain train, Rohan Dennis, and without making large scale attacks. After a defensive ride in the mountains, Geoghegan Hart cleared everything up in the final time trial. Ineos have steamrollered their opposition since in a series of stage races, and achieved a lot of high placings (see page 116). Their tactic has largely been the same: turn up with strong riders, control the racing and let sporting logic prevail. It’s not what…

The most complex tactics, and sometimes the most simple, come in the national championships road races. Unusually, team sizes are not standard, so the startlist may feature a handful of WorldTour pros from a few different teams, but much larger rosters with more nationally homogenous ProTour and Conti teams. In the case of the USA this pitched Rally Cycling, who compete internationally but also run an extensive home programme, against WorldTour teams with riders who were stronger on paper, but had much fewer options. ProTour team Rally started the USA Nationals with nine riders, while the biggest WorldTour contingent was EF-Nippo, with four. DSM sent a pair of riders, BikeExchange had one. Conversely, US Conti outfits L39ion of Los Angeles and Aevolo had seven and nine riders respectively. Rally were…

CHRIS FROOME Sophie Hurcom caught up with the four-time Tour winner to talk through his recovery and ambitions. Portraits by Ian EDITOR Walton. See page 32. STATE OF THE NATION: USA Joe Lindsey explains the boom-to-bust tendencies that have characterised the USA’s relationship with road racing. See page 52. FESTIVAL ELSY JACOBS Owen Rogers was on the ground at the well established and atmospheric women’s stage race in Luxembourg. Read his colour report on page 72.…

We need to talk about Jakub… The 20-year-old Czech is one of the most promising prospects coming through the U23s, following in the footsteps of countrymen Roman Kreuziger and Zdennek Štybar. What kind of rider is he? He’s still developing, but he appears to be quite a punchy climber with the potential to be good in the high mountains. Where have I heard of him before? If you closely paid attention to the junior road race at the Worlds in Harrogate in 2019, as I’m sure you did, you’ll have seen the young Czech rider finished ninth. The race was won by Trek-Segafredo’s Quinn Simmons. What about other results? 2020 was tough for Jakub, who was riding with Czech team Topforex Lapierre. He did manage to finish fifth at the…

What - if anything - lies beyond the sound and fury of sport? Beyond the kaleidoscopic spectacle of jerseys and the glint of a field of riders aboard gleaming carbon machines, does the effort, expense, and investment in cycling ultimately mean anything? From the vantage point of hard-nosed pragmatism, the answer is painfully apparent: no matter how much one may love cycling, compared to the pressing moral, economic, and practical questions we face, all one can do is shrug and reluctantly acquiesce that in the end bicycle racing is indeed of little consequence. However, this damning indictment isn’t nearly as definitive as it might initially appear. For those fortunate enough to have the basic needs of safety, food, and shelter met, other questions come to the fore - matters of…

2011 Finishes second at the Vuelta a España, behind Juan José Cobo, although nine years later Froome would be awarded the title after the Spaniard was stripped of the victory for doping. 2012 Runner-up at the Tour de France behind team-mate Bradley Wiggins, although the rivalry between the two dominates the headlines. He ends the year by finishing fourth at the Vuelta. 2013 Wins the Tour for the first time, in a dominant display that sees him finish 4:20 ahead of second placed Nairo Quintana, and win three stages. Takes yellow after stage 8 and holds it to Paris. 2014 Abandons the Tour during the first week. He crashed twice early on during stage 5, which took riders over the Roubaix cobbles in the pouring rain, and left with an…

A hard rain was falling over the Passo Giau when Egan Bernal seemed to end the Giro d’Italia as a contest. Three kilometres from the summit of the pass, at the end of a shortened stage, the Colombian launched a long, seated acceleration that his few remaining rivals could not follow. Ten metres quickly became 50, and Bernal was alone on the mountainside. The live television images cut out almost immediately after his attack, but that was but a minor detail. We had already seen enough. It was easy to imagine Bernal’s progress from here. The image of ‘un uomo solo al comando’ is stitched into the fabric of the Giro, after all. Bernal was alone, in charge of the race. On the frigid descent into Cortina d’Ampezzo, the race…

Hidden within the valleys of the cinematic, literary and dramatic landscape are ‘unseen characters’, those who are mentioned but never appear but whose absence always advances the plot in some way. Rebecca de Winter, the titular character of Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca, never directly appears in the novel but shapes the events depicted. The mysterious Godot drives the action or, more precisely, the non-action in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Two such unseen characters played their part in the Critérium du Dauphiné. The two protagonists of last year’s Tour, Tadej Pogacar and Primož Roglic, were not on the startlist. Pogacar had elected to ride his home race, the Tour of Slovenia, while Roglic had not raced since April. Given that he’d crashed out of both last year’s Dauphiné and this year’s…

The first Women’s Tour de Suisse was won by Trek-Segafredo’s Lizzie Deignan. After breaking away with Elise Chabbey and finishing second on the first stage, Deignan was well placed to take overall victory the next day. She targeted the time bonuses at the intermediate sprints to overhaul the four-second deficit to Chabbey, and ultimately collected five bonus seconds to secure overall victory by the finest of margins. I think it’s great that a race like the Tour de Suisse started a women’s race, because it is a really good organisation and we knew a really competitive bike race would come of this. I think that is the main focus of us being there and doing well. You have to ask Lizzie but it is extremely special for her to win.…

You had two wins in a week with the Flanders Diamond Tour and Dwars door de Westhoek. What does this repeated success feel like? It was really nice. Before every race you make a plan with the team and in the Diamond Tour and Westhoek the plan really came together. Especially in the Diamond Tour the lead-out was really strong and the girls did such a good job and I was just really happy to finish it off. It was really great to take those wins for the team because we put effort into the lead-outs, and to set up the train with almost the same team. How much difference does it make having almost the same team in both races? It’s really important to do all these races together…

ARCTIC RACE OF NORWAY 5-8 August | Norway | 2.Pro The first stage of the Arctic Race of Norway begins and ends in Tromsø, the third largest urban area north of the Arctic Circle. The town sits on an island situated in one of Norway’s many straits, connected to the mainland by a bridge that spans a little over a kilometre. Inhabited since the Ice Age, Tromsø’s connection to cycling only stretches back to 2014 when the race visited for the first time. On that occasion, Steven Kruijswijk won the stage and the GC.…

OLYMPIC GAMES MEN’S TIME TRIAL 28 July | Japan | OR Following his break from cycling, Tom Dumoulin has come back to the sport with one big goal on his mind: to win the individual time trial at the Olympic Games. Fresh from winning the Dutch Nationals for a fourth time, Dumoulin must be hoping he is in good form for Tokyo. Unlike some of the other competitors, he will not have the Tour de France in his legs, so should be reasonably unfatigued, especially as he has only had nine race days so far this year. He finished second in Rio in 2016, behind Fabian Cancellara, and has since won the world TT title and three grand tour stages against the clock. The problem for Dumoulin, and for anyone…

Giro d’Italia Stage 17, Sega di Ala, Italy 26 MAY 2021 Dani Martínez of the Ineos Grenadiers leads Simon Yates of Mitchelton-Scott, his team leader Egan Bernal in the pink jersey and Deceuninck-Quick Step’s João Almeida on stage 17 of the Giro d’Italia to Sega di Ala, with just 3.5km of the final climb to go. At this point, Bernal looked in control, with a 2:24 lead on GC ahead of the dropped Damiano Caruso, and nobody else within three minutes. With team-mate Martínez to pace him and Jonathan Castroviejo having set a fierce pace up the climb to whittle the lead group down to just a few riders, he looked to be ticking off another day in the countdown to Milan. Almeida had attacked with 4km to go, then…

Through my career I seem to have inadvertently become a bit of a box ticker with results. I’m a collector of victories - barring grand tour stages in the Tour and Vuelta, I have rarely repeated wins. But having recognised one glaring omission from my palmarès I felt the need to try and fill that gap: a stage victory in the Giro d’Italia. When I raced it in 2010 I was in my formative years and far from the level required for success. We all know how 2014 ended (badly), and this year with a Tour route I felt was uninspiring with regards to a GC challenge, I discussed a run at the Giro. Things went well. I was climbing with the best despite abysmal weather. Early stage placings boosted…

The relationship between Chris Froome and cycling has been an enigmatic one. History shows us that riders who win a lot of grand tours enjoy more popularity after their period of dominance has ended than during it, with the notable and caveated exception of Lance Armstrong, but it has still taken cycling fans a long time to warm to the British rider. All the five-time Tour winners - Jacques Anquetil, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain - faced grumbles about their dominance during their careers. Yet in retirement or defeat, they became more human. Froome remains stuck, even if he’s looked extremely human the last two years. In Froome’s case, this is a function of a few things. His grand tour wins have largely looked straightforward from the outside;…

What happened to America? Given the last five years, you can take that question any number of ways, but specifically, what happened to American bike racing? How could a country go from an afterthought in the sport to winning fully a quarter of the Tours de France since 1980 then fade from contention; endure a 72-year Olympic medal drought and then burst back with nine medals, four of them gold, in a single Games in 1984, only to struggle to keep momentum; invent a new form of bike racing and dominate it and then slowly lose its advantage across every discipline? The story of American cycling is, really, the story of America: of its exceptionalism and ecclesiastical belief in it; of its capitalistic boom and bust cycles, the greedy heights…

1 1 Filippo Ganna Ineos Grenadiers 2 Edoardo Affini Jumbo-Visma 3 Tobias Foss Jumbo-Visma Maglia rosa: Filippo Ganna 2 1 Tim Merlier Alpecin-Fenix 2 Giacomo Nizzolo Qhubeka Assos 3 Elia Viviani Cofidis Maglia rosa: Filippo Ganna 3 1 Taco v.d. Hoorn Intermarché W-G 2 Davide Cimolai Israel S-N 3 Peter Sagan Bora-Hansgrohe Maglia rosa: Filippo Ganna 4 1 Joe Dombrowski UAE Emirates 2 Alessandro de Marchi Israel S-N 3 Filippo Fiorelli Bardiani-CSF Maglia rosa: Alessandro de Marchi 5 1 Caleb Ewan Lotto Soudal 2 Giacomo Nizzolo Qhubeka Assos 3 Elia Viviani Cofidis Maglia rosa: Alessandro de Marchi 6 1 Gino Mäder Bahrain Victorious 2 Egan Bernal Ineos Grenadiers 3 Dan Martin Israel S-N Maglia rosa: Attila Valter 7 1 Caleb Ewan Lotto Soudal 2 Davide Cimolai Israel S-N 3 Tim…

WINS Canadian National TT Champs 2015 Pan American Games TT 2015 SECONDS Canadian National TT Champs 2014 THIRDS Canadian National TT Champs 2012 Stage, Tour de San Luis 2015 FOURTHS Canadian National TT Champs 2016 Stage, Tour du Poitou-Charentes 2018 Tour du Poitou-Charentes 2018 FIFTHS Canadian National road race 2011 Stage, USA Pro Cycling Challenge 2012 Canadian National TT Champs 2011, 2013 Stage, Four Days of Dunkirk 2014 Boucles de la Mayenne 2017 Arctic Race of Norway 2019…

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WINS BY TEAM UAE Emirates 14 Bora-Hansgrohe 13 Movistar 11 Lotto Soudal 11 Trek-Segafredo 10 Israel Start-Up Nation 10 ONE-DAY RACE WINS UP TO JUNE 23 Deceuninck-Quick Step. 12 Jumbo-Visma 9 Alpecin-Fenix 8 Groupama-FDJ 7 Trek-Segafredo 6 UAE Emirates 5 Bora-Hansgrohe 5 Astana 5 Cofidis 4 Israel Start-Up Nation 4 Ag2r Citroën 3 Bahrain Victorious 3 Movistar 2 Ineos Grenadiers 2 STAGE RACE WINS Ineos Grenadiers have been almost completely dominant at stage races this season. Richie Porte's win at the Critérium du Dauphiné and Richard Carapaz's at the Tour de Suisse merely reinforces their lead in the stage race rankings for the season so far. MEN’S WINS BY COUNTRY Thanks to Italians performing at the Giro d'Italia, the country has leapfrogged Belgium and France for most victories achieved so…

OLYMPIC GAMES WOMEN’S ROAD RACE 25 July | Japan | JO A year later than expected, the 2020 Women’s Olympics road race is sure to be one of the most contested events of the year, and that’s just from within the Dutch team. The route covers 137km, beginning in Musashinonomori Park, then wending its way through the endless burbs of Tokyo before tackling Doushi Road, a long climb with a steady gradient, the Kagosaka Pass and a descent to the finishing circuit at the Fuji Speedway. Unlike the men, the women will not race up the iconic Mount Fuji, a slight that prompted an outcry from the peloton at the continued inequality between the different genders. It is difficult, though, to see beyond the strength of the Dutch team composed…