The World Tour gets underway with the Tour Down Under. After the pre-race criterium and photo ops with local wildlife the race begins on Tuesday and this year’s route features the regular haunts as well as an intriguing finish to Uraidla just over the long climb to Norton Summit.
With the new season about to start do you know your Soudal from your Sky, your Michelton from your Movistar? Here’s an A-Z primer on the World Tour team sponsors for 2018 and what they do.
The route for the 2018 edition of Paris-Nice is out and the race is the first of the major stage races and has been thrilling in recent years. Here’s a quick look at what to expect from the route.
All roads lead to Rome and the route of the 2018 Giro d’Italia was presented late last year with a course going from Israel to the Italian capital. Here are some notes on the course.
Fabio Aru’s Italian champion jersey lasted one day. After finishing 2017 in the Italian flag he was unveiled on the 1 January in a jersey that had the smallest hint of Italian design. This caused some outrage and mockery on social media; and serious enquiries too. The result was that the jersey has been changed. With this in mind why do teams seem to offer such different versions of these jerseys and what, if any, are the rules surrounding their design?
In the past the blog has opened with some predictions for the year ahead but forecasts so far out inevitably go wrong so instead here’s a collection of known things which look promising…
Welcome to another lap around the Sun. Want to know what’s going to happen in 2018? Here’s the pro cycling calendar for your organiser, phone or computer diary so you can at least know when things will happen. 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.
The Christmas quiz was meant to be hard but also to raise a few points about the sport such as weird race names, vanishing events and more. Here are all the answers and some points to discuss too.
This blog’s road to rides section is enduringly popular and consequently there’s stream of email enquiries from readers wanting to know which ones are best, often people are planning a trip to the mountains or even a first visit to Europe and want to visit the roads featured. It’s always difficult to rank them, but for the fun of it here is a suggested top-10, some famous and some that ought to be.
A Christmas quiz with 40 questions. Some are obvious, some are odd, many 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 some of the questions are posed because the answers should set up some interesting discussion points.