Frank Bonnamour has been provisionally suspended by cycling’s governing body the UCI due to “unexplained abnormalities in his Biological Passport”. Here’s a guide of what this means.
Loyal readers might already know but some of the procedure and management has changed since we last explored this issue and there have been a slew of published decisions too.
The route of the 2024 Critérium du Dauphiné route has been unveiled and here is a closer look at the course including a tough “new” climb. The race will take place from Sunday 2 June to Sunday 8 June.
The Etoile de Bessèges opening stage is cancelled because of protests by farmers. As it happens the race and the farmers’ union were in contact to make sure the the race would be ok. Alas the stage is off because of the knock-on effects of protests elsewhere.
Two labels to describe bike races: top-down and bottom-up. Here it’s not a description of the course profile, instead this is about the organisation and culture.
Simplisitc? Sure, I’ll explain more below but the point is to explore two reasons for having a bike race in caricature and having these labels to hand means they can be referred to in future pieces.
La Française des Jeux, the French lottery and gambling company, has launched a takeover of Kindred, a Swedish gambling company. No, you haven’t opened the Financial Times or Bloomberg, there’s a cycling story here. La Française des Jeux is FDJ, co-owner of the Groupama-FDJ team while Kindred is better known to many as the bookmaker Unibet, title sponsor of TDT-Unibet, the Dutch team. Only cycling’s rules don’t allow one company to own two teams so this spells trouble for one of them.
As we’ll see there can be ways around it but while their sponsors try to merge, it’s down to both team managers to resolve, separately of course.
The Tour Down Under was enjoyable but it was over in a flash. I enjoy it, it’s literally the only race I’ll get out of bed to watch. But it’s also the same race where I know I can be back in bed in 15 minutes having seen the race-winning move, the result, post-race interviews and on-screen top-10 confirmation included. This year was no exception. Can we have some more please?
Here are the tables showing how many UCI points are available in each road race. It’s not riveting but normally if you want to know how many points are on offer then you visit the UCI website, find the rules page, download the right PDF rulebook and scroll past 70 pages for the tables. Here they’re all on one page.
Last year saw big changes to the scales with the grand tours, monuments and world championships becoming even more lucrative. This year and in the coming seasons the difference is the participation rules, which Pro Team qualifies for what.
The Tour Down Under begins on Tuesday. Here’s a preview so I know what time to set my alarm we can all see the stages this week and assess the likely contenders.
Ten riders to watch during the course of the year. Some are picked as rising talents, others will be very familiar but are still interesting to watch and some. As ever the hard pick is picking ten riders from a World Tour peloton of over 500 and the same exercise every lunchtime this month could see all sorts picked but here’s your ten…
