Innehållsförteckning för October 2020 från Procycling

Even by the intense standards of the rejigged 2020 season, in which almost a year’s worth of racing is being packed into three months, the crashes and near misses that blighted events in August were shocking for cycling fans. The incidents have led to renewed calls by riders and teams especially for a more clear definition of where the responsibility for race safety lies, and for an independent body to work with the sport’s stakeholders to improve matters. At the Tour of Poland, Deceuninck-Quick Step’s Fabio Jakobsen was squeezed into the edge of the road by Jumbo-Visma sprinter Dylan Groenewegen. Jakobsen hit the barriers, which broke into pieces, throwing him over the edge, while the barriers ricocheted into the road and took several more sprinters out. The finish, a regular…

I got into cycling through my Dad. It’s not really a mainstream sport in the US, but there are loads of cool initiatives that are encouraging it popping up. I started because my Dad used to race, kind of at an elite amateur level, but he always says he had a big engine. I went for a mountain bike ride with my friends when I was 11, so we started riding together. He recognised some potential and then we started to go to local races. My first Tour de France is still one of the most memorable experiences of my career. Just getting to the Champs was amazing. When I was a junior we went to Paris one day and I was trying to envision what it would be like…

The first Tour 2003 After two years as a pro, the promising baroudeur got his first chance to ride the Tour in 2003. He’d already won the Classic Loire Atlantique and overall at the Tour of Luxembourg before he headed to Paris for the grand départ THE Tour is a dream when you are young, but when you go professional it just happens. My first Tour de France was the centenary Tour, and I especially remember the start in Paris, under the Eiffel Tower. I have good memories of it, though there was a lot of suffering as well, as I was unable to influence the race. I managed to make a breakaway on stage 18, when I finished seventh, but that’s the only good memory I have of this Tour,…

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Gabriel Rasch, DS, Team Ineos I think it was a really good race for us. We didn’t have to take much responsibility in the first two stages really, like we were hoping. We had some discussions about how we wanted to race on the mountain-top finish on stage 3, and in the end we went for our safest option [Bernal - who won], and it’s easy when you have good bike riders, isn’t it? We didn’t really know where we were form-wise, and we didn’t know much about our opponents as well, so it was a race where we got a lot of answers about ourselves, and the other teams. Thibaut Pinot was there, Bardet was there, and López from Astana. Egan Bernal was the leader from the outset, we…

Lizzie, how does it feel to get your first win of the year? It feels really good to take this first victory, not for myself but for our team. It’s been a difficult year for everybody in varying extents depending on which country you live in and where you spent lockdown. It was a victory to thank all of our riders and staff for staying so professional and motivated during what has been a difficult time. We always race aggressively and all we needed was a little luck to finish with a victory which we finally did. You’ve now won GP Plouay a record three times, why does this race suit you so much? I don’t know what it is about Plouay but I always do well here. The heat…

1.WT: One-day UCI WorldTour race / 1.HC: Major one-day race / 1.1: Minor one-day race / 2.WT: UCI WorldTour stage race / 2.HC: Major stage race / 2.1: Minor stage race / WWT: Women's WorldTour race ADAM BECKET STAFF WRITER WHY I LOVE… UCI WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS 20-27 Sept | TBC | CM It’s not often that you see the best cyclists in the world ride a one-day race on a route they’re not familiar with, with team-mates they’re not used to riding with and without radios, but that’s what happens at the World Championship road races. Riders compete in national teams for the rainbow bands. This unusual dynamic always creates intensity, and inevitably at the end Peter Sagan is there or thereabouts. With the pandemic messing up the racing calendar,…

RICHARD CARAPAZ The Giro champion was a late selection for this year’s Tour. Alasdair Fotheringham asks him about his background and path into cycling. See page 30. CECILIE UTTRUP LUDWIG Cycling’s “crazy banana” (her words, not ours) tells us that she also has a serious side. Sophie Hurcom caught up with the Dane for a chat. See page 42. BLACK CYCLISTS MATTER Why have there been no black British riders in the Tour? Dr Marlon Moncrieffe looks at the barriers that have prevented black participation. Page 56.…

1 Course inspection by a committee of ex-riders 2 Strict application of the ‘three-kilometre’ rule 3 Publication of race routes further in advance 4 No downhill finishes 5 Air cushions along the road in the final kilometres 6 No banners impinging on the road 7 Race radio only from the race jury 8 Red and yellow cards for riders who break rules 9 Clear identification on race motorbikes 10 DSQ for riders who use paths and sidewalks…

Where’s home? I live in Freiburg, in the southwest of Germany, close to Switzerland. I’m originally from Berlin, and my whole family live there, so I would say it’s 50/50. I still have a relation to Berlin. What’s your favourite race? Strade Bianche. It’s very special. You have the gravel sections - I really like that, and it’s a really traditional race. It suits me as a rider because it has those short, punchy climbs. I hadn’t raced a road bike on gravel before I went there for the first time. What’s your favourite climb? Alpe d’Huez, mainly because of the atmosphere. All climbs are similar in that you have to suffer to get up fast, but the Alpe is a nice climb. When we do it at the Tour…

A few years ago, the idea of having more than one team leader in a squad was pretty rare. Movistar, for example, have been criticised for lining up a multifaceted attack, especially at the Tour, with question marks raised over the feasibility of protecting more than one leader. However 2020 transfer policies seem to have become something of an arms race, a battle to add true strength in depth to combat the new superteam that has assembled in Jumbo-Visma. Race tactics are set to change and I believe it is something that can only benefit cycling. Of course, it will mean that the wealthier teams will gain even more of an advantage, but if a high number of teams have multiple race-winning options it should open up the racing, adding…

El Carchi sits on the sierra on the Colombian border on the northern edge of Ecuador, a landlocked agricultural province which averages 2,900m altitude, but whose geography ranges between plains and the high Andes. It’s the 19th most populous province of 24 in the country, and it’s where Richard Carapaz and the other Ecuadorian pros come from. It’s the one place in the country where cycling matters as much as football. “Ecuadorian sport is 90 per cent about football, football and football,” says Ecuadorian cycling journalist Ernesto Almeida of the broadaster Radio La Redonda. “In a country of 16 million, there are eight full-time cycling journalists at most. But El Carchi is different, because it’s so close to the Colombian border, just a few kilometres away, and culturally speaking it…

Benoît Cosnefroy may be French cycling’s best kept secret. He is a talented young French rider, on a French team, most of whose racing has so far taken place within the borders of his home country, and who has yet to win a race abroad. It’s not a bad time to be a young, up-and-coming French rider. The home media attention and fandom are spread equally and lavishly between Julian Alaphilippe, Thibaut Pinot and Romain Bardet, with buffers in the form of Arnaud Démare, Nacer Bouhanni and Warren Barguil. Unlike these riders, who in their time as new professionals filled a long-standing void in successful French riders and had to do their growing up in the full glare of the media spotlight, Cosnefroy has been able to do his developing…

Edward Lorenz was an American mathematician and meteorologist whose most famous paper, published in 1963, was titled ‘Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow’. In it, Lorenz posited that tiny differences in initial inputs in any system would eventually magnify to the point that outcomes would eventually become entirely different. He later called this the ‘butterfly effect’ - the theory being that the movement of air caused by a butterfly flapping its wings could eventually magnify and lead, weeks later, to a tornado. Lorenz was meteorologist, so his interest was in predicting the weather, but chaos theory, the branch of maths the butterfly effect describes, can be applied to any complex and dynamic system. That includes bike races. The 2020 Milan-San Remo went down to a sprint between two riders: Wout Van Aert and…

Strade Bianche Tuscany, Italy 1 AUGUST 2020 The fields of Tuscany, lush and green in spring, have browned and dried out under the scorching sun of the summer heatwave, making the backdrop for the rescheduled August Strade Bianche look more like a race across Mars than the rolling Italian countryside. Temperatures topped a blistering 37 degrees on the day, during what was said to be the hottest week of the Italian summer, making it a sharp contrast to the cold and rain the riders usually experience when they race here in early March. The dust of the ‘white roads’ is still visible, however, blowing up in a cloud around the men’s peloton as it crosses the famed gravel roads that make this race unique. En route to the finish in…

Another national champion at SEG? Yes, along with Dutch champ David Dekker, SEG Racing have Marco Frigo, who wears the Italian tricolore for winning the U23 road race in 2019. Marco will be hoping to follow in the footsteps of team-mate David, who has landed a spot at Jumbo-Visma next year. What kind of rider is Marco? He’s only 20, but Marco sees himself as a GC guy. “My aspiration is to be a stage race rider. I think my characteristics are suitable for this type of competition because I’m a rider who prefers endurance. Probably it’s too early to talk about it, but for now, I perform well on long climbs,” he told Procycling. As a junior, he finished in the top five of stage races such as the…

GIRO 2019 A TALE OF TWO STAGES How the final top four gained and lost time through the 2019 Giro. Carapaz’s (blue line) big gains came on stages 13 and 14, and he eventually won by 1:05 GRAND TOUR STARTS How Carapaz has fared in his four grand tour starts so far MAJOR RESULTS 1st Stage, Vuelta a Asturias 2018, 2019 Vuelta a Asturias 2018, 2019 Stage, Giro d’Italia 2018, 2019 (2) Giro d’Italia 2019 Stage, Tour de Pologne 2020 2nd GP Industria & Artigianato - Larciano 2017 Route du Sud 2017 Stage, Giro d’Italia 2018 3rd Stage, Vuelta Com de Madrid 2017 Stage, Route du Sud 2017 Settimana Coppie Bartali 2018 Stage, Tour Colombia 2019 Stage, Vuelta a Asturias 2019 Vuelta a Burgos 2019 4th Stage, Vuelta a Castillay…

The Black Lives Matters protests across the world this year have exposed how systemic racism is deeply embedded in all aspects of society. The micro culture of professional cycling cannot hide nor be in denial about this. Some national bodies of cycling have fronted up. USA Cycling recently produced a public statement acknowledging their failures with ethnic diversity, and have now committed themselves to championing anti-racism. However, there has been no detailed statement about anti-racism from the UCI on what they will do in policy. British Cycling has also remained silent and hidden on this matter. This is in contrast to other prominent national bodies of sport such as the Football Association, the English Cricket Board and Rugby Football Union; where all have spoken or acted in support of Black…

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Annemiek van Vleuten won the first five races she started in 2020. Is there any stopping her? Strade Bianche was just another bump in the road easily managed, a pesky fly swatted away for the flying Dutchwoman. She won Omloop Het Nieuwsblad in February before the season shut down, then picked up where she left off at Emakumeen Nafarroako Klasikoa, Clasica Femenina Navarra and Durango-Durango Emakumeen Saria, a three-win sweep in four days when racing resumed in July. And then came Strade Bianche. Her winning streak extends to six if you add the World Championships last year into the equation, too. At the beginning of this year, Van Vleuten had won just 15 oneday races out of 67 victories in her career. Five one-day races later, and that number has…

Entering the final 20km of Il Lombardia, Trek-Segafredo seemed mathematically all but nailed on for at least a place on the podium, with three of the six in the race-winning move in their colours. It seemed even better that those three included Vincenzo Nibali, a two-time winner of the monument, and Bauke Mollema, who won in 2019. The third was Giulio Ciccone, also no slouch. Yet at the finish line, those three Trek riders were fourth, fifth, and sixth, having thrown away their numerical superiority. It was redolent of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad in 2015, when three Etixx-Quick Step riders managed to lose out of a four-man break to Ian Stannard of Team Sky Mollema, Nibali, and Ciccone just couldn’t cope when the decisive attacks from Jakob Fuglsang and George Bennett…

ith Mark Cavendish absent from this year's Tour de France startlist, the race is without a rider with 30 stage wins, who's also the rider closest to Eddy Merckx's all-time record of 34. Add in Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas, who are also both missing from the race this year, and that will deprive the Tour of riders with another 10 stage wins between them. So of the riders who are actually starting the Tour in Nice, who leads the way with the most stage wins? After Peter Sagan and André Greipel, there are few riders in the peloton who have multiple stage wins to their name.…