Anyone for tennis? Players in the Australian Open are getting heatstroke on court and next week sees the Tour Down Under start in Adelaide where it’s even hotter.
Racing in high temperatures brings a new set of challenges and some solutions are set out below. Can it get too hot to race?
Evans counts points – Mourey counts to eight – Vuelta counts the decimal places – NetApp count on the Tour – Sanchez sans job – Chris Horner’s Dutch auction – Team Sky change powermeters?
It’s already Monday in Australia and Simon Gerrans is the new Australian road race champion. Rider nicknames are uncommon these days but if he did have a moniker then “The Sniper” seems appropriate for the way he’s able to target a race. Gerrans is a clever rider who doesn’t have the physiological firepower of Cadel Evans or Richie Porte but his “one shot” is making him a good trophy hunter, think yellow in the Tour or Milan-Sanremo. You can read his account of how he won at SimonGerrans.com. He’s now an obvious contender for the Tour Down Under.
Here is the list of who is riding what in 2014. You’ll find all the pro team bikes for the 18 World Tour teams and the 17 Pro Continental teams.
Predicting the future is hard. We can’t pick next week’s lottery numbers but we can predict there will be a draw. You can take trends and measurements to make weather forecasts. What about the bike industry? We can spot the trends and extrapolate to imagine the bike of the future.
With autumn closing in and the days getting shorter many in the northern hemisphere will using an indoor trainer.
With this in mind I thought about reviewing every model on the market.
Coulda, woulda, shoulda
There’s been a lot of post-worlds chat, especially the Spanish tactics and the British vanishing act. It’s part of the fun to review the race but the Worlds has attracted more talk than usual. How come? Is it national pride that makes people more passionate about the performances? Or maybe because the Worlds is just once a year? Bungle the finish in the Ronde van Vlaanderen there’s always Paris-Roubaix; mess up one day in a stage race and you can still have time to come back. No such chance with the Worlds.
Gran Theft Bici – Disc Brakes – Heulot and Goodbye – Cannondale + Tinkov? – McQuaid – Flandrien Award – Giro Mountain TT – Tiernan-Locke case
Here’s the new Italian jersey for the worlds by Castelli. The marketing says it’s faster than a standard jersey, a 20W survey at 40km/h. But if the Italian tricolore flag is green, white and red why do the Italians wear blue?
From the earliest days in the sport there’s been a close link between cycle manufacturers and teams. Marketing and sponsorship played a big part in the sport’s development as companies sought to prove their wares could withstand long distance races to convince consumers that they could ride to the factory or field without problem.
In recent years there’s been a revival with the Cervélo test team and now Argos-Shimano and Cannondale will be joined by Trek in 2014. But are pro cyclists being left on the outside when it comes to having the best gear?
It has to be the wettest racing season living memory. Anecdotes aside, meteorological data show high rainfall for Italy and France and the Tour of Switzerland has seen a stage modified because the road was still closed by snow. There are signs the bad weather is changing and summer must starting as the French air traffic controllers are on strike today, frustrating riders trying to get to the Tour of Luxembourg and the Route du Sud.
So before the weather hots up, here’s a quick look at an item of pro kit that’s not often featured: the rain bag.
This is a small bag belonging to each rider containing the clothing they need on a damp day. It’s packed into the team car and can be brought out when rain falls. The pro cyclist’s version of an umbrella.
With their medieval cobbles the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix are the most extreme races on the calendar. Yet they’re the shop window for bikes destined to be used on the calmest of Sunday mornings.
The cycle trade has its annual trade shows around September with Eurobike and Interbike but as The Velocast argued recently April is another industry event with a sharp focus on bike technology. If Paris-Roubaix didn’t exist, the industry would have to invent it.