Innehållsförteckning för January 2021 från Cyclist

Frankly, it’s a miracle that the 2020 race season happened at all, but now it’s over I can’t help thinking: wasn’t it brilliant? Here are my four reasons why this year was one of the best ever… Attacking, unpredictable racing Remember how it used to be? Sky would suffocate the Tour, Chris Froome would win by four minutes and Peter Sagan would nail another green jersey to the wall of his Slovakian mansion. Not any more! All of this year’s Grand Tours were won by less than a minute, with each race going to the wire. Scripts were ripped up, crowns were relinquished, Carlton Kirby ran out of superlatives and we all had to memorise a host of new names… The rise of the new guard Froome, Nibali, Valverde, Quintana,…

There are so many clichéd objections around bamboo bikes it’s a cliché to list them, but the idea that a doe-eyed Chinese bear might somehow eat one is too wonderfully daft not to mention. After all, with the advent of disc brakes there is no way it could ingest the rotors. For all the worries about strength, weight, waterproofing and fire (we’ve heard that one too), there’s a wealth of evidence backing bamboo as a great material for a bike. And that’s why brother and sister team Andy Pears and Laura Niblett founded Netham Bamboo Bikes in Bristol. ‘We are the first business to offer bamboo bikes exclusively in the UK,’ says Niblett. ‘The Bamboo Bicycle Club in London is build-your-own, and Myboo is a German company. At the moment…

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Cyclist: You surprised many by finishing second at this year’s Giro d’Italia, only losing the maglia rosa on the final day’s time-trial. Has it all sunk in yet? Jai Hindley: Now the dust has settled, it’s mind-blowing! It really hit me when I started doing interviews – I had ABC and 7 News interview me, which is a big deal in Australia. It’s pretty cool to get some mainstream media recognition because cycling isn’t the biggest sport at the best of times and the Giro was already contesting with the AFL grand final back home. If it had been a week later when the State of Origin rugby league was happening my result may as well have never happened! Cyc: Team Sunweb sent you and eventual third-place Wilco Kelderman along…

The ride to the port is only 2km, but a slightly too casual approach to breakfast means we’re sprinting to catch the ferry Climbing into the foothills of Mount Parnitha, Myrto educates me about the local history. She relates the legend of the Greek god Pan, who frequented the forests here to play his flute and dance on his cloven hooves among the deer. I nod silently as she talks, seemingly absorbed in her tales, but the truth is I am incapable of speech. It’s taking all of my energy simply to turn the pedals and mask my increasingly laboured breathing. Myrto is very fast. When she’s not cooking at her family’s restaurant on the island of Evia, Myrto is a successful racer, having finished fourth in the recent National…

For a team more suited to one-day Classics, Deceuninck-QuickStep had a very successful Giro d’Italia. The Belgian squad’s 22-year-old Portuguese rider, João Almeida, clung on to the race leader’s jersey for 15 consecutive days after slipping into pink on Stage 3 with a strong showing on the climb to Mount Etna. By the end of the Tour Deceuninck-QuickStep were the only team to have three riders in the top 15, including Almeida in fourth, Fausto Masnada in ninth and British rider James Knox in 14th. An indicator of the kind of performance required to succeed at a major race came after the stage to Etna, when Masnada and Knox published some of their stats for the public to pore over. On the 18.6km, 6.7% climb Masnada topped out in 48…

As I swing right, away from the loch, I feel a bit like Alice dropping down the rabbit hole to emerge in a strange alternate universe The sound of rain beating a solemn rhythm on the motorhome roof greets me as I wake. I’m reluctant to leave the warmth of my bed but I know I have little choice in the matter. It’s only Day Three of my journey from one end of Britain to the other, but already my legs are aching from 363km of riding that have taken me from John O’Groats, across the top of Scotland and down the west coast to the small fishing village of Aultbea on the shore of Loch Ewe. Despite it being July, the morning is chilly and rain has been my…

Why is it you can spend all afternoon alone smashing muddy tracks like a pro, then when you do finally see a person – an actual human capable of awe and praise of your abilities – it’s right by a puddle that is significantly deeper than anticipated? Yet even that wasn’t enough to dampen what a brilliant ride with the Groadinger that was – one in a long line of brilliant rides in fact. This is not a bike that claims to be fast, light or aero, but it is immense fun in the right situations. Come again another day It has been raining a lot at the time of writing, and some of the trails I go to for my gravel fix are less mud and more clay-based gravy.…

€40 (approx £35), windwave.co.uk Chain lube can have a massive impact on drivetrain wear and efficiency, and it’s not always easy to tell which is the best product to use. According to one independent test source CeramicSpeed’s UFO Drip Chain Coating is among the best drip-on choices you can buy – not far behind the gold standard of hot-melt wax. The Danish brand says it has revised its formulation to make it longer lasting, easier to apply and more efficient. On top of that, it is biodegradable, non-toxic and at almost £30 less per bottle than it was, substantially cheaper now too.…

£70, saddleback.co.uk Enve claims these SES Road tubeless tyres ‘will improve the aerodynamics of any aero road wheelset’, especially if it’s an Enve wheelset. They are designed to bring out the best in aero rim shapes, right down to the CFD-designed tread profile, however it’s important to get the right size to complement the wheel rim. If you’ve got a 17mm-21mm internal rim width, then the 25mm tyre will match best, but for 19mm-25mm internal rim width it’s a choice between 27mm, 29mm or 31mm tyres. Claimed weights range from 255g (25mm) to 285g (31mm).…

Picture the scene: your midwinter Sunday morning has dawned still and crisp. Low, piercing sunlight shines down from a bluebird sky. Your choice of eyewear is easy because your regular, iridium-coated, high-contrast sunglasses will shade your eyes. But what about when the weather changes? Cloud, drizzle and low light create uncertainty. Will normal sunglasses help or hinder? Is a different coloured lens required? Should you use a clear lens? Or maybe even ride with no shades at all? When it comes to that last point, the experts we talked to at Oakley, 100% and Roka are all in agreement. ‘I’d always suggest wearing a pair of sunglasses even in really murky conditions,’ says Tatiana Kalache, R&D project manager at Oakley. ‘It’s impossible to manufacture light, but low-light lenses boost contrast…

When the revised cycling calendar was released back during the first lockdown, all eyes fell on one particular day: Sunday 25th October. Where most years the best we could hope for this late in the season would be a stage of the Tour of Guangxi, this year promised us the Giro d’Italia’s decisive final time-trial, a Vuelta summit finish on the Tourmalet and Paris-Roubaix in a triptych inevitably coined ‘Super Sunday’. In the end, Covid put paid to the prospect of the Vuelta entering France and forced the cancellation of Paris-Roubaix. Nevertheless that Sunday in October was still pretty super if your name was Tao Geoghegan Hart. On the penultimate day, despite a brave attack from Carapaz, Roglic clung on to a 24-second lead as he summitted La Covatilla Outstanding…

Mark Cavendish was standing in the pouring rain in the car park of a leisure centre on the outskirts of the Flanders seaside town of De Panne when someone brushed against his left arm and he winced. The last one-day Classic of the season, Driedaagse Brugge-De Panne, was still being raced, but Cavendish was one of many DNFs. In his case the failure to finish was understandable: he had crashed, hence his delicate left arm. ‘I was in the front echelon too,’ he lamented. It was a wild day in mid-October, the rain hammering down and the wind so fierce that riders were literally being blown off the road. Mathieu van der Poel, three days after winning the Tour of Flanders, was blown from the front echelon into a deep…

At 86km long with 4,500m of climbing, the Hero Dolomites off-road race in Italy is a gruelling event. Which is why sports scientists from Italy’s University of Camerino say the participants make great case studies. In a recent paper published in the Journal Of Human Sport And Exercise, 14 riders who had completed the 2018 race were split into two groups, with the first given a 24-week programme of endurance-only training (ET) while the second undertook the same plus two additional sessions per week of strength training (ET+ST). This involved exercises that mimic aspects of pedalling, namely full back barbell squats, 45° leg presses, horizontal single leg presses, cable kickbacks, horizontal leg curls, seated single leg curls and core stability exercises. FTP and one-rep max tests were periodically assessed, and…

One week after the end of the 2020 Giro d’Italia, Tao Geoghegan Hart sits down in a cafe in London’s Soho and tucks into a breakfast fry up. The pink jersey of race winner is stuffed into his coat pocket, and while he stirs his pot of tea the kid from Hackney slides out of his Ineos Grenadiers shell jacket to reveal a retro Arsenal shirt, vintage 1995 season. He may be a lifelong Arsenal fan, a dyed-in-the-wool Gooner, but Geoghegan Hart is not a kid anymore. Now 25, he finally came of age as a Grand Tour rider in the most spectacular of settings, under a bone-chilling sky on the towering climb of the Stelvio pass, racing Australian rival Jai Hindley through the endless hairpins against a backdrop of…

Unless you have a horse with no name, you’ll be driving through the Tabernas Desert to reach the start of this climb. This arid southeastern knuckle of Spain is so quintessential in its desertness it became the home of cowboy movies in the 1960s and as such there is pretty much nothing and no one for miles. It would take many gruelling hours to cycle here from anywhere you would wish to base yourself in the vicinity. But there are roads, and what roads. The sun beats down the door to the Tabernas year-round. The nights are cold whatever the time of year – candy-striped snow poles line the highest roads – but even in late October it’s still in the 30s during the day. This consistent dry warmth coupled…

Since retiring from pro racing, Alberto Contador hasn’t been sitting around eating paella. If proof were needed that El Pistolero is still in peak shape, earlier this year he smashed the Everesting record – the challenge to accumulate 8,848m of ascent by repeating a single climb – setting a new mark of 7h 27min 20sec. That record has since been beaten, first by Irish rider Ronan McLaughlin with a time of 7h 04min 51sec, then by American Sean Gardner who dipped 22 seconds under the magical seven-hour mark on 3rd October. But there was something else about Contador’s Everesting exploits that caught the eye of the global media: his bike. Intriguingly Contador rode a prototype of his own new brand, a joint venture with another ex-pro, two-time Giro d’Italia winner…

1 VELOPAC CX MULTI–TUBE SNOOD £10, velopac.cc Beef-stew is a terrible password because it’s not stroganoff. And VeloPac’s Multi-tube is a terrible oven glove because it’s so light. But that’s where its limitations end, because being a snood it can morph seamlessly (which it also is) from hat to scarf to balaclava to bandana. You can even tie one end and fill it with shopping such as a whole chicken, which is the exact same size as the human head. 2 PARK TOOL EWS-1 £12.99, freewheel.co.uk Bike maintenance is a lot like being prime minister: it’s grubby and it’s crucial you have the right tool for the job. Enter the ESW-1, a three-way wrench with a puller tip and a pusher tip to remove or install Shimano Di2 cables, plus…

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If you want well-structured, high-intensity training sessions at any time of year, an indoor turbo setup is the way to go. Just look to the pros who have been cranking out the miles on turbo trainers during lockdown. Matt White, directeur sportif at Mitchelton-Scott, recently said he’d never seen his riders so fit, and Lotto Soudal’s Thomas De Gendt reportedly got kicked off a Zwift session for producing what was judged an impossible average power – some 550 watts. Ashleigh Moolman Pasio, who rides for the CCC-Liv women’s pro team, claims she nailed a PB on the Rocacorba climb in Spain after weeks of being confined indoors and training on a turbo. Admittedly most of us typically only dust off the turbo when it gets cold, dark and wet outside,…

When it came to choosing our support vehicle, we had a number of requirements. First it needed to double as a home for our photographer, as stopping at hotels was not an option during the Covid-19 lockdown. It had to be small and nimble enough to get around some pretty tight roads, powerful enough to get over the climbs and roomy enough to store loads of photography equipment and provide a comfortable work space. In the Mercedes Marco Polo we had the perfect vehicle. At around five metres long it looks pretty compact from the outside and is certainly no road-hog, but once you open the back doors and step inside it is Tardis-like in its roominess. There’s seating for four around a table, with seats that fold down into…

With so many advances in bike design it’s easy to forget that geometry remains critical. Yes it has become fairly standardised, but even within a narrow spectrum there is a sea of difference between bikes pitched at either end. And here, with Basso’s reincarnated Diamante SV, the geometry dial is turned all the way up to racy. But there is a twist. Measured approach Reading out a string of numbers is boring, which is why robots make terrible speeches. But I’m going to do it anyway because numbers are vital clues to the SV’s character. From the geo charts this size 56cm has 587mm stack, 386mm reach, 406mm chainstays and 985mm wheelbase. In other words, the SV has a short wheelbase and short rear end, two things associated with fast,…

Mountain Of The Gods p66 Kask Protone helmet, £199 velobrands.co.uk 100% Racetrap sunglasses, £179.99 freewheel.co.uk Dhb Aeron Lab jersey, £90 wiggle.co.uk Dhb Aeron Lab Raceline 3 bibshorts, £130 wiggle.co.uk Dhb Aeron Lab socks, £15 wiggle.co.uk Specialized S-Works 7 shoes, £360 specialized.com Beauty And The Beast p116 Giro Aether helmet, £259.99 zyrofisher.co.uk SunGod Vulcans TF sunglasses, £125 sungod.co Castelli Idro 2 jacket, £260 saddleback.co.uk Castelli Free Aero Race 4 bibshorts, £150 saddleback.co.uk Castelli Superleggara 12 socks, £17 saddleback.co.uk Specialized S-Works Recon shoes, £350 specialized.com Bikes p129 STAYER HJC Valeco helmet, £125 saddleback.co.uk 100% Hypercraft sunglasses, £159.99 freewheel.co.uk Rapha Custom Pro Team Midweight jersey, from £80 rapha.cc Rapha Cargo bibshorts, £195 rapha.cc Rapha Pro Team Arm Screens armwarmers, £35 rapha.cc Rapha Lightweight socks, £15 rapha.cc Rapha Explore shoes, £220 rapha.cc BASSO Lazer…