Table of contents for Review of the Year 2021 in Procycling

Another Hayter? You’ve got it. The younger brother of Ethan, Leo currently rides for Team DSM’s development squad. Just like his sibling, he is proving to be a bit of an all-rounder so far, winning races across different disciplines. The 20-year old from South London has one more year left with the German squad, where he has been since the beginning of 2020. Let me guess, he was part of the Herne Hill set up. Indeed. Just like Ethan, Fred Wright and Thomas Gloag among others, Leo got into cycling through the Herne Hill Velodrome holiday clubs and VC Londres, the south London cycling club. What has he done so far? Quite a lot. The end of 2021 was his real breakout, with wins coming in Liège-Bastogne-Liège U23, a stage…

The biggest aim for the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift is, whether it’s with me as the race organiser or somebody else, for the race to still exist in 100 years’ time. The aim is to create a reference point for stage racing in women’s cycling that will always be there, and why not an example for men’s races as well? My job involves a bit of everything. I’m there to help with the parcours, with ideas for the future, meet the sponsors, meet with the staff… We have people with a lot of savoir faire, so in a way it’s easy for me. For the organiser it’s a year’s work and I already knew that from my experience of working on the Tour de la Provence. I can…

Five months after deciding this year would be my last, I have no regrets. But I do want to take my hat off to those who have made this 25-year journey of mine so beautiful and rich. At CSM Puteaux, my first club, I was supported by an educator who taught me everything. Eric Blanchon, our coach, passed his passion and desire for progress on to us by setting us goals. It is men and women like this who create vocations and get the best out of people, both on the bike and off. Wanting to get ahead of my friends and rivals is something that has served me throughout my career. Too bad if it also brought out my bad side. Eric helped me develop the feeling of doing…

Out of the 38 days she raced this season, plus four stage race general classifications, Annemiek van Vleuten finished outside the top 20 just seven times. Three of those occasions were on stages of races where she won overall, a fourth was when she crashed out of Paris-Roubaix. Van Vleuten is 39; she won 12 races this year. It is expected of her, but that doesn’t make it any less remarkable. For any other rider, moving to a brand new team that speaks a different language and has a completely different culture might prove a challenge. Not so for Van Vleuten. After spending the five most successful years of her career with Mitchelton-Scott, the Dutchwoman decided to mix things up with a move to Movistar. At the new team, only…

Primož Roglic’s hold on the peloton was beautifully illustrated at Milano-Torino in October. The Slovenian cajoled and tempted Adam Yates to sprint up the finishing climb of Superga. The Brit had few options. He resembled a puppet, before Roglic cut the strings, for his 13th win of the season and 60th in total. His visage, his technique, his acceleration: all appeared effortless. Of course, it was anything but. At the recent Science and Cycling Conference in Leuven, Mathieu Heijboer, Jumbo-Visma’s head of performance, lifted the lid on what it takes for Roglic to deliver time after time after time. LONGER, LATER PEAK “When we look at Primož’s workload in 2020 and 2021, on paper it was similar”, explained Heijboer. His race kilometres were almost identical – 8,259km in 2020 versus…

WORLDTOUR WWT RACE WINNERS Strade Bianche CHANTAL V.D. BROEK-BLAAK 2 Elisa Longo Borghini Trofeo Alfredo Binda ELISA LONGO BORGHINI 2 Marianne Vos Brugge-De Panne GRACE BROWN 2 Emma Norsgaard Gent-Wevelgem MARIANNE VOS 2 Lotte Kopecky Tour of Flanders ANNEMIEK VAN VLEUTEN 2 Lisa Brennauer Amstel Gold Race MARIANNE VOS 2 Demi Vollering Flēche Wallonne ANNA VAN DER BREGGEN 2 Kasia Niewiadoma Liēge-Bastogne-Liēge DEMI VOLLERING 2 Annemiek van Vleuten Vuelta a Burgos ANNA VAN DER BREGGEN 2 Annemiek van Vleuten La Course DEMI VOLLERING 2 Cecilie Uttrup Ludwig Donostia San Sebastiān ANNEMIEK VAN VLEUTEN 2 Ruth Winder Ladies Tour of Norway ANNEMIEK VAN VLEUTEN 2 Ashleigh Moolman Pasio Simac Ladies Tour CHANTAL V.D. BROEK-BLAAK 2 Marlen Reusser GP Plouay ELISA LONGO BORGHINI 2 Gladys Verhulst Ceratizit Challenge ANNEMIEK VAN VLEUTEN 2…

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RIDLEY NOAH FAST £10,613 ||| $14,349 This team issue Ridley Noah Fast is the bike that Caleb Ewan has won so many races on. The Belgian company says that it is a “pure racing machine, designed specifically to get you maximum speed with minimal effort”. It is made for perfect power transfer. The bike is very much top of the range, coming with Campagnolo Super Record EPS, the crowning jewel of the Italian brand’s equipment. The whole bike weighs in at just over 7kg, meaning it is a brilliant bike for any situation, not just sprinting. But being fast is what it is designed for, and best at. www.ridley-bikes.com ENVE 45S £1850 ||| $1600 The 45s wheelset from Enve is designed to be the best choice for the modern racer.…

World Champs Men’s Road Race Leuven, Belgium 26 SETPEMBER 2021 The colourful international peloton rides along in the early stages of the men’s road race at this year’s World Championships in Flanders. This was the calm before the storm, though it wouldn’t last long. The action would soon kick off, with crucial attacks happening from 200km to go.. Kristof Ramon, who took the photo, says: “I have chosen my emotional choice for 2021: a shot taken from on a motorbike during the Worlds in my home city of Leuven. The high point of my professional career was to be the house photographer for the Worlds 2021, in the city where I was born and raised, and it’s best recognisable through its characteristic old town hall, seen in the background. The…

It was a return to a semblance of normality with the usual calendar structure in 2021, but we approached the year after the shortest off season ever. In hindsight I would have started my season later, not due to missing fitness but being mentally tired. The 12 months from August 1 2020 to July 31 this year I did something like 110 days of racing; pretty much two seasons in one year. It had been seven years since I started the Giro, back in Belfast when my race ended right there where it started. It was great to have fans back on the side of the road and my highlight of the season was riding solo up the final climb to Sega di Ala. The steep sections were well above…

Apart from a small stop on the way back from a race, it was my first real back trip in the UK when I combined the national championships with the start of my off season. It’s been a bit of a strange time, I’d say. In the last 12 or so months, the changes in Covid rules mean I’ve not been able to nip back and see anyone in the UK. There have also been difficulties in racing and the organisation around it, and the various ups and downs that come with the job. But I’m thinking about the wild swings I’ve had in my lifestyle and racing since I signed that contract with Trek back in 2019. The off season is definitely the moment to have a lot to…

Rarely does a photograph say so much about a cyclist or about a bike race in general. in the foreground: Mathieu van der Poel, powering up Siena’s Via Santa Caterina. The blurs in the background are Julian Alaphilippe and Egan Bernal. Though the last gravel sector of Strade Bianche comes 12km from the finish, both riders have been left metaphorically, if not physically in the dust. The image freezes Van der Poel in mid-pedal stroke, but the sense of dynamism, speed, physicality and momentum is palpable. Van der Poel’s final attack peaked at over 1,300 watts. The ability to produce those numbers for sustained periods comes from his background in cyclo-cross and mountain biking, plus a bit of genetic predisposition, and it is telling that it was the Dutchman who…

2011 In the last year of HTC-Highroad Cavendish wins five stages and the points jersey at the Tour de France. Follows this up with the World Champs road race title in Copenhagen. 2012 In his sole year with Team Sky, he wins three stages at the Giro d’Italia and then a further three at the Tour de France. This is despite the team having a strong GC focus at both grand tours. 2013 Moves to Omega Pharma-Quick Step, where he wins five more Giro stages and the points jersey, and then goes on to win two stages at the Tour de France as well. Also wins the British road race title. 2014 A fallow year by his big standards. Chooses not to race the Giro and then crashes out of…

The coronation of Demi Vollering as Dutch cycling’s next queen happened on the run-in to Liège in this year’s Doyenne. As the lead group of five - Longo Borghini, Vollering, Van Vleuten, Van der Breggen and Niewiadoma - came to the finish, SD Worx was the only outfit with numbers: Vollering and Van der Breggen. Instead of racing for herself, world champion Van der Breggen provided the perfect leadout for her team-mate, giving an armchair ride to the younger Dutch rider. With Van der Breggen retiring at the end of the season, the feeling was: the queen is dead, long live the queen. Liège was Vollering’s first win at WWT level, and she went on to triumph three more times on the biggest stage. At La Course, she was once…

The first job of winning a stage race is not losing the stage race. It is often said of a stage that the Tour will not be won on its roads, but that it can easily be lost there. So it was with the first seven stages of the 2021 Tour. Tadej Pogacar spent the first week of the race diligently keeping himself out of trouble. While rivals like Primož Roglic and Geraint Thomas crashed heavily, while three of the Ineos Grenadiers much vaunted four prongs - Thomas, plus Geoghegan Hart and Porte - conceded time after crashes split the peloton through Brittany, and while climbers like Enric Mas and David Gaudu survived the carnage but shipped minutes in the stage 5 time trial, the Slovenian sailed serenely on. By…

Tadej is very calm and very sure of himself. None of this success has gone to his head. Sure, he’s matured a bit in the last few months, but he’s still a 23-year-old who likes to do what all 23-year-olds do. However, he doesn’t go out there looking for the latest fast car to buy, either. He’s taken this on board so naturally. I’ve worked with a lot of riders who haven’t had a quarter of his talent and they didn’t know how to handle success like he does. As for the pressure, I remember when we were in a room together in the hotel that Allan Peiper and the team had rented for him specially to be close to the start of the Tour’s final time trial in 2020,…

Tadej used to be very shy as an interviewee, but that’s normal in a 21-year-old racer who wins the Tour. These days, he’s getting much more self-confident. He won’t give you a two-minute answer to a question, but he’ll always tell you something about what happened in the race. And that he enjoyed it. It’s not like Roglic, who always says, “This is cycling, eh?” Or, “We will see,” at some point in his interviews. However, like all of our sportspeople, Tadej won’t ever talk about anything but cycling, certainly not politics. Both Tadej and Primož Roglic are big stars here in Slovenia in a way cycling has never experienced before, a bit like cycling used to be in Britain before the 2012 Tour de France. I think that Primož…

The kitsune are mythical spirits in Japanese folklore who take on the form of a fox and delight in playing pranks on overbearing samurai or greedy merchants. They are independent and clever, and rely on their intelligence to outwit more powerful but complacent foes. Perhaps the Dutch team for the Olympic women’s road race in Tokyo should have spent less time reading the road book and more on Lafcadio Hearn’s 1894 book Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, which teaches us of the kitsune. After Anna Kiesenhofer took a win in Tokyo that was equal parts unlikely and wildly popular the question was, did she win, or did the Dutch team lose? It was, of course, a combination, and the criticism of the riders in orange didn’t detract from the fact that…

Left to his own devices, Primož Roglic would probably have left it to the final climb to Lagos de Covadonga on stage 17 of the 2021 Vuelta. The Slovenian has historically favoured a safety-first strategy in stage races. His gains come in the TTs, in punchy finishes that are a little too hard for the true puncheurs and on the summit finishes. He has tended less to go looking for the victory than to let it come to him. It took the Giro winner to draw out the Vuelta winner’s inner attacker. Egan Bernal had ridden a comparatively anonymous Vuelta up to stage 17, though he had a good excuse - he’d contracted covid after winning the pink jersey in May. But his average physical form hadn’t taken the edge…

There was opprobrium when the takeover of Newcastle United by Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund, was completed in October. This was despite Saudi Arabia’s appalling human rights record, which includes the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, allegedly on the orders of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who controls the PIF. Amnesty International’s chief executive, Sacha Deshmukh, said: “The way the Premier League waved this deal through raises deeply troubling questions about sports-washing, human rights and sport, and the integrity of English football.” The takeover has led to some soul searching over how clubs are owned and how they are easy targets for foreign investors; Newcastle aren’t the first club to be de facto owned by Middle Eastern states. The club’s situation is the most egregious…

Where’s home? It’s a big question. At the moment it’s Staffordshire. I live there with Dan [Bigham] - we moved in just as lockdown came in. We thought we’d be there a few weeks but it has turned into a year and a half. We are moving to Andorra in January, though, and I’m from Lewes in East Sussex originally. What’s your favourite race? I loved the Women’s Tour this year. It was the first time I’d raced it. To race on home roads with the crowds and stuff was good. Loads of family came to watch, so I definitely enjoyed it, even if it wasn’t the most exciting event. What’s your favourite climb? When you have a favourite climb, it also becomes one that you want to ride really…

You know it’s time to kit up again when you are already looking forward to the 2022 season. As my coach pointed out, when you want to start training again, wait another week, and then get going. For a while there I had little to no interest in wearing lycra, or riding my road bike at all. I personally enjoy mountain biking even in the ‘off-season’, the same way scores of cyclists like to run, ski or hike in their down time. We are talking about athletes here after all. I welcome crisp autumn mornings and the opportunity to trundle leisurely around home roads, feeling the seasons change, and my ambitions rise. The start of pre-season wasn’t throwing myself into a meticulous training programme and gruelling long endurance rides; it…

Stage 11 of the 2021 Giro d’Italia, the race’s homage to the springtime Strade Bianche race, was all about Egan Bernal and Filippo Ganna. Physically, the Ineos Grenadiers pair could not be more different: one is a lightweight climber, the other a cruiserweight rouleur. However, they shared a commonality of purpose as the Giro hit the gravel roads of Tuscany. One would not necessarily think that the sterrato would be the best terrain for Bernal, but he had already excelled at Strade Bianche earlier in the year, with third place. He again showed his proficiency on gravel, but was also given an armchair ride by Ganna. The Italian’s sheer power put those behind under pressure, which caused crashes and splits. Some riders deliberately chose to drop back. Although the biggest…

The world turns, the seasons pass, and Marianne Vos keeps on winning races. The rider from North Brabant has now won 292 times, which includes seven from 2021. However, there was something new this year. For the first time, she changed teams, swapping the various Liv-based teams she had been with for her entire career to the new Jumbo-Visma women’s team. It has been a happy union, with 58 per cent of the team’s victories this year coming from the experienced Dutchwoman. This year, Vos became the first woman to ever win 30 Giro Rosa stages. To put that into context, the next rider on the list - Petra Rossner of Germany - is 13 behind, and retired 17 years ago. The nearest active rider is Annemiek van Vleuten, and…

I’ve been in the same team with Tadej ever since he turned professional. I know it’s what people always say about the big champions, but in that time he really hasn’t changed. Like Philippe Gilbert said about him recently when he saw him in a bike shop, he’ll just stand there and wait his turn in the queue like everybody else. But you can tell he’s a champion. Even when he’s training he’s quite competitive. Sometimes he forgets that his easy training is actually quite hard for the rest of us, and that’s when you have to say, “Okay, off you go.” "Even when he’s training he’s quite competitive. Sometimes he forgets that his easy training is actually quite hard for the rest of us, and that’s when you have…

Tadej reminds me of Miguel Indurain, who I met when he came out to train in Colorado, where I teach at university, before the 1995 Worlds. Like Indurain, he comes across as very normal, aware that not everything in this life begins and ends with cycling. Some riders I’ve worked with live too much for their sport. But he’s not obsessed. He’s also very introverted, but within that he’s handling the pressure very maturely, much more so than some other older riders. I was a bike rider, and the pressure would get to me. Even when I knew I was in great shape, my legs would start to shake before the big climbs. But not Tadej. He’s also got Miguel’s really high self-confidence. It’s like he knows when he’s going…

When Bahrain-McLaren changed their name this year to Bahrain Victorious, the jokes wrote themselves. For the Bahraini-owned but largely Slovenian-operated team 2020 was, in a word, lacklustre. They only secured nine wins, joint 13th out of the WorldTour teams. But in 2021, it was as though everyone involved took the name change to heart, and Bahrain Victorious was very much that. The team racked up no fewer than 31 victories, 32 second places, two grand tour team prizes and the white jersey at the Vuelta. They won and won and won again, and it was the best year in the team’s short history. Some of the prizes were immense, the imagery visceral: Sonny Colbrelli filthy and ecstatic after Paris-Roubaix, Gino Mäder taking a bow in Santiago de Compostela after securing…

And so, this gin-clear autumnal morning, to the shores of Lake Iseo. Here, where the ancient provinces of Bergamo and Brescia connect, Procycling is with the all-new world champion. Since you’re asking, it’s true that Elisa Balsamo is to piano playing as Primož Roglic is to ski-jumping. By all accounts she’s extremely accomplished, but she says she’s barely touched the thing in years. She reckons playing the piano is a lot like cycling, which is to say you need to be doing it properly or not at all. She’ll be back at it when she’s done with the bike, but that’s a long way down the road. We’re happy to report Balsamo is shy, humble and eminently likeable. You can’t help but warm to her, and the same goes for…