Several pro riders are taking part in “Movember” the sponsored charity attempt at growing a mustache. It’s hit many of the Aussie bunch including honorary members like Koen de Kort and more. For a good view of their progress, head over to Cycling Tips.
But these pros have a long way to go if they want to rival Urs Freuler, a man who made the ‘stache his trademark. In fact he’s still got it today.
Many riders have surnames that are also nouns with a range of meanings. I apologise if this ruins your TV viewing, those once exotic Euro names can actually prove more ordinary but here are some more of the peloton’s names translated from their home language into English.
There are 18 UCI Pro Tour teams for 2012 comprising 505 riders. Here you can see the oldest and youngest riders, the average age in the bunch and which nation sends the most riders into the top flight of men’s road cycling.
Having set 10 questions the other day, here are the answers and click on the links to find more explanation and detail if you want it.
It’s Christmas time and the media is full of quizzes and annual retrospectives, a fine way to pad out the content when there is little news around to reflect on the year gone by.
Either way a lot happened in 2011 and here are 10 questions for you. Leave your answers in the comments below and the winner gets a Prendas Ciclismo calendar for 2012 featuring vintage photos from years gone by.
1. Name the two riders in the cartoon above.
Last Friday I put the questions from the IG Markets Pro Cycling pub quiz online and I think everyone found them hard. When IG Markets hosted the quiz Cycle Sport magazine won with 79 points from 112 but that was a very impressive haul. Here are the answers.
Oh Noah
Polls in France regular say Yannick Noah is “the most popular Frenchman”. An odd choice perhaps given the semi-retired tennis player is more famous in France for patronising rip-offs of West African music and tax evasion but he comes across as the cheerful sort, an eternal teenager enjoying life doing some good with charity work.
Go to Spain and the polling is all about the general election today. But if anyone tried asking I suspect Noah would win “most unpopular Frenchman” in Spain by some margin. He’s just managed to upset an entire nation with an article in French daily Le Monde:
IG Markets, the financial company that sponsors Team Sky also has a useful ranking system for riders, the IG Markets Pro Cycling Index.
On Wednesday IG Markets organised a quiz between several teams taken from the British world of cycle sport, media and trade and hosted it in a very British setting, a pub.
With reputations to protect and the shield above to win the competition was fierce. But the questions were even harder. Set by staff from Opta, the sports data behind the index, the people at IG Markets were kind enough to send over the questions so you can have a go.
Here are some more of the peloton’s riders with their names put into English. It’s a light-hearted exercise but the point, if there is one, is to show to any anglo-saxon readers that that if some names might be hard to pronounce, they aren’t exactly exotic. Mauricio Ardilla – Mauricio Squirrel Yukiya Arashiro – Yukiya … Read more