After some established Riders to Watch for 2017, here is a selection of ten neo-pros to introduce ahead of the new season with a mix of stage race stars and classics champions and a couple of riders who have excelled in both and need to decide what they type of rider they’ll become.
Here are the answers to the Christmas quiz. A lot of the questions were set to raise issues and make suggestions, for example pointing out there’s no minimum wage for the Women’s World Tour, that junior riders should be doing cyclo-cross ahead of the road or that almost nobody gets eliminated by the time cut in a grand tour these days or how the Giro’s fair play prize ought to be celebrated more.
Welcome to 2017, also known as 2016 – The Sequel. Here’s the pro cycling calendar for your organiser, phone or computer diary. All of the major UCI men’s and women’s pro races around the world are included and below there’s a quick explainer on how to subscribe, the meaning of the UCI labels and more.
A Christmas quiz with 40 questions. Some are obvious, some odd, most can’t be Googled and a few are fiendish. By all means have a go and there’s a token prize for the winner but most will probably find fun in the answers that will appear here next week.
1: Name the “Santa” dressed in red pictured above.
2: Name the (sometimes) helper dressed in green(edge) kit below.
At the start of the year ten neo-pros were picked as riders to watch. How did they get on?
The Criterium International’s been scrapped. It began in 1932 and has ended up homeless so owners ASO have pulled the plug.
Thomas Voeckler, la langue francaise, has announced he’ll retire at the end of the Tour de France next year. He’s not got the force he used to enjoy and the peloton are wise to his breakaway antics.
Lizzie Armitstead has won an appeal at the Court of Arbitration for Sport over three missed out-of-competition anti-doping tests that could have seen her banned for four years. Athletes regularly miss tests, these things happen but the hushed nature of her provisional suspension and the way her absence from races was reported by some as a choice raises a lot of questions.
The race heads for the mountains and a hard ski station summit finish. Vaujany isn’t famous in cycling now a swank ski resort but it is a hard, selective climb and all this on an intense 140km stage.
A power and politics edition below with on-board bike cams and the weight limits, handling data on TV, politics in France and Italy, snails, beetroot and more…