Happy New Year. Here’s the pro cycling calendar for 2022, free to download for your diary or phone. It’s packed with racing and probably a lot more user-friendly than the revamped UCI website so if you’ve got a season to plan, want to visit a race or just need to schedule sofa time, here it is…
You can view the calendar on the page here or at inrng.com/calendar but you can also download it for your phone, desktop organiser etc. As usual if you do this the best way is to subscribe so that all updates are quietly pushed out automatically to your diary. Here is the iCal link to copy-paste into your device:
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/ical/0ifbjtio49ljt75aimlbbhplhk%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics
Google/Android users can click on Google Calendar link on the calendar frame above and for more tech support, see inrng.com/calendar.
What’s new?
The Tour de France Femmes is the big novelty but there’s also the new Battle of the North, setting up a summer of Women’s stage races. Otherwise story is more one of the usual calendar returning in the wake of the pandemic and as it’s not an Olympic year there’s a more usual pattern too.
There’s no Tour Down Under, the Tour of Utah’s been deleted already and some events are on the calendar for 2022 hoping to stage a post-pandemic comeback but we’ll see, it’s one thing to register a race with the UCI, another to be able to organise it on the ground. Update: the Vuelta San Juan’s not happening as an international stage race, it’ll only have local teams so it’s now deleted.
RCS have made some changes to their events, with Tirreno-Adriatico moving to a Monday-Sunday format (head-to-head with Paris-Nice) which should help avoid the feel of the race fizzling-out midweek and we’ll see if the course is redesigned for a box-office summit finish on the final weekend; it’s then chased by Milano-Torino as a Wednesday tune-up before Milan-Sanremo.
Happy New Year to you and all the readers/commenters! And thanks for the photo of what seems like New Year’s Day for me – MILANO-SANREMO.
Except for 2020 when “New Year’s Day” was put off until August!?!?!
I hope the world deals better with the Covid pandemic in the future.
Happy New Year everyone! Here’s to a successful year of building crowds, races and sporting narratives rather than public health and safety narratives. Fingers crossed and hygiene measures respected for our own good.
With apologies to Larry’s hibernation until La Primavera I’m very happy to see less than 7 weeks until the Tour des A-M et du Var, and 8 until the Omloop. Time to look forward.
Happy New Year all.
Why is it Milano-Torino but Milan-Sanremo?
Do you mean why is it Sanremo and not San Remo” This is where a smart-ass like me replies: “Let me Google that for you.” though I must admit I used to screw that up all the time myself 🙂
More my use of Milan then Milano in the next sentence that got past the editors. Should go and fix that now but change to Milan-Turin to use the English names, or stay local and rename it Milano-Sanremo when it’s always Milan-Sanremo for English readers?
Grazie.
See Inner Ring 22 March 2020 Larry –
Sanremo or San Remo? the road signs all say “Sanremo” but the railway station says “San Remo”. It’s officially Sanremo these days, the story is that San Remo has connotations to Mussolini and the fascist era so the town’s authorities issued a decree ordering Sanremo to settle it once and for all.
OK, OK, I Googled it for you:
“A first reason is that in Christianity there is no saint named Remus (to whom to possibly refer). The second is that contrary to the other Gallo-Italic dialects, Sanremasco retains the final unstressed, except after the “r” and “n”: “ö” and “ü” merge into “ü”, while in the Italian language in “or”; to clarify with an example: man (Latin homo ) becomes omu , while orto (Latin hortus ) becomes ortu ; to this, moreover, is added the marked tendency to reduce two or more vowels into diphthong that are close to each other due to the fall of the consonants (for example laurà and lavuràwhich they both want to mean to work). Here, therefore, that “Rœmu”, “Romulus”, would become “Remu” because of the dialect, and therefore, badly transcribed, it became “Remu”, or “Remo”. Only after the approval of the Statute, following various Council resolutions held between 1991 and 2002, was it definitively sanctioned that the official name of the City was in the monoverb form Sanremo .”
As to Milano or Milan, I guess it’s like Firenze-Florence, Torino-Turin, Toscana-Tuscany? Or the reverse, Londra-London, Inghilterra-England or the one that really got me going back-in-the day when my Italian friends had to say “The place where they drink beer!” to make me understand Monaco-Munich, which of course is Munchen in German, but I kept thinking of the tiny country where they have that F1 race through the streets 🙂
München 🙂 (the e after the the u is important for the correct pronunciation!). The locals like to pretend they are really Italian.
Happy New Year to all.
It seems really odd for there to be no World calendar races in Australia, USA, nor UK*. Needs a major regroup and rethink. There are massive attitudinal problems for everday riders mixing in traffic in all these nations where Big Petrol PR holds sway. Holding WT events and the bigger races definitely seems to help.
Huge respect to all other race organisers, especially those with TV and headline sponsors to pay for it.
And a Big Thank You to our host.
* unless I’ve missed something
“There are massive attitudinal problems for everyday riders mixing in traffic in all these nations where Big Petrol PR holds sway. Holding WT events and the bigger races definitely seems to help.”
That’s an interesting idea. Dunno if I’d put a cause-effect on that.
I have experience cycling in USA, Italy, France, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland and Luxembourg with (as you might guess) widely varying experiences with “attitudes” as you describe them. Worst of course is the USA where it’s “Outta my way! The roads are for cars!” for the most part followed by Belgium where too often it was “Outta my way! Get back on the bike path where you belong!” which was a big surprise in such a cycling-mad country. Holland was similar, same for Luxembourg while Italy, France and Spain have more of a “The roads are for everyone” attitude though it varies as a-holes behind the wheel of cars are probably everywhere they have cars?
In Italy they’re trying this: http://cycleitalia.blogspot.com/2021/11/cycling-friendly-siracusa.html
but I think it’s very hard to tell if these signs (or having WT cycling races) make any difference.
Belgium has a law that you have to use the cycling path if there’s one. They’re generally good and they deserve praise for making them… but the obligation/expectation to use them is sometimes frustrating.
In Italy it’s also compulsory under current laws to use the cycle path, if there’s one available. Sadly enough, most of the times what’s available is barely worth the name of “path”, not to speak of “cycle whatsoever” – all the same, in theory you must leave the road and pedal those untrodden ways. Go gravel, that’s the trend of the moment, isn’t it?
But luckily enough in Italy so often the laws are barely worth the name of laws… more of a vague suggestion of sort. I haven’t seen this rule applied in years.
However, that’s not fine at all. If you suffer a crash, although it was someone else’s fault, you’ll probably have serious insurance issues if there was a *supposed* cycle path *supposedly* available. And if you run into the wrong officer, you might also get fined.
It’s a classical strategy in modern governance across the world (it’s been long-known in Italy): force oppressed groups in a constant gray area where they’re not actually fully complying with the law – without having any acceptable alternative. Law isn’t *usually* enforced and sanctions are not *systematically* applied (it would mean chaos), but such a situation can grant instant power to prosecute whomever whenever you need to, even if most of the times the real motives are quite distant from the manifest content of the rules you’ve been *enacting*.
Anyway, back to praxis.
If you happen to be in Italy and have troubles with this norm, take into account what follows:
– if the cycle path isn’t exclusive for bikes, you don’t have to use it as a cyclist. There you go. Shared path? Take the road.
– the cycle path should be “adequately delimited”, otherwise you don’t have to use it as a cyclist. What’s “delimited”? And, even more so, what’s “adequately”? At first, the policeman will fine you anywway, the insurance won’t pay anyway, but then you can try to find a judge with a keen eye for wordings or cycling.
The law also refers to some “regulations and guidelines” which supposedly should define exact circumstances and modalities for cycle path use, but such regulations or guidelines simply don’t exist and never did.
The last option is appealing for a “state of necessity” clause, which says that in case of inmediate danger you can act against traffic laws. Looks exaggerate? You should see some of those “cycle paths”… Sometimes it already worked in court.
Is this one of the most absurd norms ever? Yes, it is. Welcome to the car world.
(However, Italy’s also got some *gorgeous* bike paths which are actually a pleasure to ride even with a road bike – of course, limited speeds will always mean you won’t be able to practice “a sport” there, just going elsewhere, warming-up, recovering or the likes)
Some follow-up on Gabriele’s notes on cycling in Italy: In 3+ decades of riding all over the country I’ve a) Never been stopped by any sort of police for any reason b) Never met anyone else who had. c) Never been chided for riding on the road instead of a “pista ciclabile” as they’re called here.
I tell visitors when it comes to traffic the only laws regularly applied are those of physics, the rest of ’em are merely suggestions though as Gabriele notes, you can never be 100% sure that some authority figure might decide to make an example of you, as we’ve dealt with that with rules and regulations unrelated to traffic.
But unlike the USA, I’ve never run across any of those “cyclist hating cops” in Italy, it’s more the opposite! I have fond memories of driving into Italy from France or Switzerland in vans with bikes on the roof where the Italian border guards were interested in chatting about the best place for lunch as much as chatting about cycling 🙂
Not cycled in the US, but have in those other places, and the UK too. Agree that the Belgians and Dutch are keen for you to be on a bike-path, if it exists, and where it didn’t the Belgians in particular are quite relaxed at zipping past you at a fair speed, presumably because they feel they know their way around cyclists. Italy also had the occasional close pass like that, but didn’t feel overtly hostile. France felt a bit more generous, and the UK a little less, although all were much of a muchness.
The only one that stood out as more bike-friendly than the rest was Spain, though that may just be because I was enjoying myself on holiday and saw everything through rose/Sangria-tinted glasses.
There is no races here in Aussie land due to covid. To hard and expensive to get everyone through lockdown. Until very recently you virtually could not travel here and even if you got permission there’s the 2 week quarantine to get through. Even if the restrictions have eased it was to late in the day to organise anything. Even the tennis is struggling and that get heaps more money to solve the problems. (and the vaccinated tennis players can’t come at all i think).
Presuming the south Australian government want the race still TDU will be back on next year.
The 2021 & 2022 editions of the TDU were cancelled by the UCI, not by either ‘Big Petrol’ or the event owner (the South Australian State Government) which had a comprehensive Covid management plan organised that would have required a minimal 36 hour quarantine (2021) or no quarantine at all (2022).
SA ran a national-level replacement event called the ‘Festival of Cycling’ with road races (which had full road closures and start-to-finish live broadcast, i.e. higher standards of organisation than some WWT races in Europe) and events of other cycling disciplines in the week the TDU was to have run last year, and will be doing the same this year in three weeks time.
Options for a late season TDU this year in the week after the Worlds are being explored, and I would not be surprised if an announcement is made during this year’s Festival of Cycling.
I also expect the event to include an announcement about the first international events (potentially 2022 Supercross World Cup and 2025 UCI BMX World Championships) to be held at the newly built Sam Willoughby International BMX Track.
Worth adding the TDU has been sponsored by Santos, a big fossil fuel company, a reply that probably raises more questions than provides answers.
Fossil fuel and oil products company money is massive in many sports, notably cycling where Ineos is the highest spending.
Ever since it was in competition with the horse and steam, the automotive sector has pushed the myth of the freeway, the freedom of the open road, traffic flowing freely and so on, with the idea that driving further uses more fuel and takes newer cars. This has persuaded all those of us who drive that we can go where we like without impedance, meaning that slower traffic is an evil, with the added kicker that cars have a higher status than bikes.
– This is what I mean about the attitudinal issue. It then goes on to infect thinking about how to provide for cycling within a framework where the ‘freedom’ of car drivers is paramount.
Things like pro bike races and the supporting citizen rides can really help move the debate along, to show that cycling is sport and transport that is worthy of its own freedoms, #1 of which must be the right not to get run down by someone who thinks they have more importance when out on the roads just because they are in a car.
Without the financial, political, commercial power of the oil and automotive sectors in transport decisions over many years, we would not be in this bind. Really, why do we give over so much space for all these vehicles to drive around and to park?
Cycle sport comes late into the melee of ideas, but it can break through and it can help to promote the idea that driving is a privilege and not a right.
Plus, it’s a bit odd that there are so many Australian, USA and GBR riders in the World peloton, so many sponsors from those countries and still there are no races. At least Australia is hanging in there once COVID is done.
Public finances in the U.K. have been severely hit by COVID also and coupled with a general political stance of reducing government income to local authorities anyway, I think many non-statutory public health initiatives (and perhaps cycle races) will be adversely affected.
But there will still be money to gift to big business, via quantitative easing and the like, and for the next war… as there always is.
Covid is not the reason.
Generally agree, and might I suggest some academic reading (yet quite accessible and informative, as it’s mainly a critical review):
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629620300633
Definitely worth a look.
“Without the financial, political, commercial power of the oil and automotive sectors in transport decisions over many years, we would not be in this bind. Really, why do we give over so much space for all these vehicles to drive around and to park?”
While I can kind of agree with you, I still have doubts WT level bike races will have any effect on this when SKODA, Toyota, Suzuki (sponsors the Italian National Cycling Team for Pietro’s sake! WTF?) etc. all spend plenty of loot promoting automobiles…at WT and lesser events.
The perception here in Italy is that the “roads are for everyone” idea is fading, hence the signs along the road and movements for “Via Verde” (green roads) to avoid that “run-down feeling.” Italians I speak with can’t even imagine that it’s worse elsewhere, but that’s usually because they haven’t ridden bikes in gawdawful places like the USA.
Maybe we should just file all issues of sponsorship and advertising under that old saying; ‘The things that are advertised the most are the things you need the least.’
And be happy to have the advertising dollar coming into our sport.
But yeah, it’s odd to have no UCI World races in these places, and I worry this is due in part to a general feeling against cycling on roads.
Happy New Year from Wales everyone – wishing you an enriching and safe 2022.
Good thread above. It’s an interesting thought to consider whether the invention of the petrol driven internal combustion engine is the single most destructive action in human history.