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With a new year, a new calendar. You can now see the upcoming races with with the Tropicale Amissa Bongo being followed by the Tour de San Luis in Argentina and then the Santos Tour Down Under whilst the Euro season-opener, the Grand Prix Cycliste la Marseillaise is now in view.
The full calendar of mens and women’s pro races is at inrng.com/calendar or look for the link at the top of the page or see below to download a copy.
As the first part of a series to explore the famous roads of cycling, here is the Alpe d’Huez in France. The idea with this weekly series is to discover the road and its place in the world, whether its part in cycling’s folklore or to explore what it is like on a normal day without a race.
Alpe d’Huez is first as it’s one of road cycling’s most famous routes, an Alpine theatre that has become famous and even had books written about it. Next summer the Tour will climb the road twice in one day.
But for all its fame, this is a new climb that only gained in notoriety during the 1980s where began to feature almost annually on the Tour’s route.
As the 2013 season approaches here is a selection of riders to watch for. I’ve picked six established riders who face different challenges in the new year and six young riders who could impress but first have to hop the chasm from amateur and pro.
“To give an idea of how hard a race that lasts more than twenty days feels, try to remember where you were or what you were doing three weeks ago.”
This simple explanation of how hard a grand tour can be is a good example of the book’s tone. Written by Pinotti himself, there’s no florid prose nor hyperbole. Marco Pinotti is not just a professional cyclist but a northern Italian and a graduate engineer and be brings a concise analytical take to the sport.
Bernard Hinault’s disco disc is not the only example of a Tour winner doing a record. The video above is altogether more classy as Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi share the stage and start singing together.
To list them as Tour winners is restrictive, the pair amongst the greatest the sport has seen and their rivalry was tremendous and supposedly divided Italy. Yet watch as they unite. There’s no tension, just light entertainment.
Bradley Wiggins is reaching audiences well beyond the circle of pro cycling with his guitar performances. For years he would take a guitar from race to race and now the effort looks worthwhile.
But he’s not the only Tour de France winner to get musical. The image above is a record sleeve with with five times Tour winner Bernard Hinault in a relaxed lean on the right of the image. Laurent Olivier is the “musician,” a term that merits quotation marks as you will discover below. Renault team manager Cyrille Guimard stands on the left.
The chart above shows the split of points between stage races and one day races for the UCI World Tour in 2013. Out of a total of 16,664 points available during the season, 69% are to be won in stage races. This is disproportionate on a calendar of 154 days of racing where stage races account for 140 days or 91% of the calendar.
Is this a bias for stage races? Who gains and who loses? And what do smaller teams do when they decide how to spend their budget on riders or deploy tactics on the day?
Gerard Vroomen raises a very good point on his blog that others have mentioned on Twitter in recent days too: if the Katusha team is rejected from the UCI’s World Tour on ethical grounds why did the Licence Commission say the team is free to apply for a lesser Pro Continental licence?
Surely a team could be in the second division because it has weaker finances or less ranking points, but not because it has looser morals and easier ethics?
As a follow-up to Vroomen’s observation here are the rules for the World Tour and Pro Continenal candidates alike. A signed copy of Eugène Christophe’s 1919 maillot jaune if you can spot the difference…
Cycling borrows many French words and for many maillot jaune, peloton and other terms have been absorbed into English, just like blonde or savoir-faire. But panache is an elusive word that’s harder to define. Maybe you know it when you see it?
Typically a rider with panache is said to be one who attacks, displaying courage and flair. But the surprise factor counts and a rider who wins too often can lose this label.
But where does the word come from and what does it mean?