Pro cycling’s off season is arriving but if the racing stops, the planning doesn’t. Whether you’re plotting a victorious classics campaign or a trip to Europe you need to know when the pro races are.
Here’s the 2013 pro cycling calendar. It is blank for October but skip into 2013 and you’ll find the races appear. In addition below you’ll find a link to download an iCal file to import the same calendar into your organiser, phone and computer diary.
If the government says healthy people should avoid outdoor activity should a bike race go ahead?
That’s the question facing the organisers of the Tour of Beijing which starts tomorrow as air pollution levels in Beijing today reaching a red-alert score of 397, a level declared as hazardous for all. Is it safe to race?
Marco Marcato wins Paris-Tours from a three man sprint. The trio held off a surprise attack by John Degenkolb, the German sprinter went rogue with 10km to go and almost caught the leaders in the final straight.
Dutch champion Niki Terpstra launched the sprint and Marcato has swept across the road, forcing Laurens De Vreese to change direction. This briefly robbed the Belgian of momentum and gave Marcato time to sit up and celebrate as he won the fastest ever one day classic, averaging 48.629km/h. This was the moment the race was won.
Labelled “the sprinters’ classic”, this Sunday’s race might have a flat route and a long finishing straight but in fact most of the winners since 2000 have come from breakaways and attacks. Since the majority of bike races end in a bunch sprint, it means the race is far from the foregone conclusion its title suggests and it can offer an action-packed final half-hour.
The wrong side of thirty? Not as fast as you once were? Felt strong in some big races this year? But you’ve not been offered a new contract. It’s got to hurt, you were always in the service of the team, carrying bottles, punching a hole in the wind for someone else and often there when the team got a result. So what do you do?
The UCI won its case against Floyd Landis but as victories go, this is a weak one. What ever Landis might have said in the past a Swiss court has ruled he is forbidden to state that the UCI, Hein Verbruggen and Pat McQuaid:
Yes, those are the exact words of the court translated into English, complete with clowns, shit and Gadaffi. If you want to stop reading now and just laugh, go ahead. The extra text below is a bit more serious.
Tom Boonen won the Flandrien prize for Belgian cyclist of the year, collecting the trophy from the Belgian Prime Minister. The annual award has been split in recent times give domestic prize and an international one, this time scooped by Bradley Wiggins.
If you want to understand how big cycling is in Belgium then note Boonen collected the award from bow-tie toting Elio di Rupo. There are not many awards dinners in the world where the head of government dishes out the prizes. Nor awards where a country’s top politician finds it worthwhile to be seen handing out the prize.
These awards are subjective but for me, often illustrate the best riders of the season better than the arithmetic of a points-based ranking system.
In an ideal world the mention of dirty cycling should remind us the cyclo-cross season is underway and the Superprestige series starts this weekend. We should conjure up images of fields, dunes, drunken spectators, frites and, above all, mud. But we’re not there yet.
If you want those images here’s a chance to win a copy of Balint Hamvas’s excellent review of the cyclocross season. This is a big photobook printed on high-quality paper that captures the mud, frost and frites. For a chance to win a copy just donate money to the Paul Kimmage fund, which as well as helping a specific legal case, looks set to force the UCI to confront a few uncomfortable truths about the kind of dirt that soap doesn’t shift.
Enjoying the blog? If you’re visiting these pages for then note Selle Italia is sponsoring this website and without them the coverage would not be the same. So this is chance for an infomercial and to give another message of thanks to them.
Their sponsorship has helped directly, for example if you enjoy the “the moment the race was won” pieces then the action photos are paid for and the Selle Italia revenue helps offset the cost.
Today Jakob Fuglsang said the Radioshack-Leopard team merger had been a “disaster”. That’s true but it’s only a fraction of the team’s problems. Star rider Fabian Cancellera wore yellow in the Tour and Tony Gallopin is impressing me, even if Thibaut Pinot outshone him in July. But of course Cancellara’s spring campaign was ruined by a crash, Andy Schleck has had a year to forget. There’s also the case of Johan Bruyneel and team doctor Pedro Celaya being named by USADA. A team sponsor fled mid-season. And the chief executive of Radioshack has just quit too.
And this is before we get to the case of Frank Schleck. He’s had an uncomfortable start to the year with pressure from team management and a lack of results, even if he briefly shone in the Tour de Suisse. But the doping positive from the Tour de France overshadows all of this. It might seem like a long time away but we’re now one week from the verdict. Unless there’s a miracle he’ll be banned for two years.