Happy New Year!
The season is now just two weeks away with the Tour Down Under. Today marks the day when riders officially start their new jobs and are able to wear the colours of their new teams. With this in mind, here is the list of 2012 Pro Tour team bikes.
A strict application of the rules would see the top riders banned from the upcoming Jayco Series in Australia and forbid Britain’s top teams from competing in their domestic Tour Series races. Hopefully it won’t come to this but here’s the explainer…
The Katusha team has yet to deliver the results that match its ambitions and its budget. Joaquim Rodriguez and Denis Galimzyanov have had some good wins but for me the most fascinating aspect of the team is the network of people who stand behind the squad.
This is a tale of secret agents, oligarchs, oil and gas, presidents and prime ministers as well as pro cycling. It is like no other team.
Cervélo was a two man start-up company in 1995 and now the bike company is being sold to Dutch conglomerate Pon.
Pon was started in 1895 by Dutchman Mijndert Pon and soon began importing Opel bicycles from Germany. This connection with Germany grew and it started importing Continental tyres in 1920. Today this connection exists even more as it is the main distributor for VW-Audi (Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche, Skoda, Seat) in the Netherlands and it continues to distribute Continental in the Netherlands. It also handles Caterpillar and Man trucks. As well as this it owns several bike brands including Gazelle and is completing the acquisition of Derby Cycles, better known for its Focus brand as used by the Katusha team in 2011, as well as Raleigh and Univega.
It had to happen, having covered food and drink in Europe in relation to cycling, it is time for a beer. The piece here was prompted by a superb article in The Economist that marries brewing with history, business and politics and I’ll borrow from this to explain the subject.
Having set 10 questions the other day, here are the answers and click on the links to find more explanation and detail if you want it.
It’s Christmas time and the media is full of quizzes and annual retrospectives, a fine way to pad out the content when there is little news around to reflect on the year gone by.
Either way a lot happened in 2011 and here are 10 questions for you. Leave your answers in the comments below and the winner gets a Prendas Ciclismo calendar for 2012 featuring vintage photos from years gone by.
1. Name the two riders in the cartoon above.
The UCI has rules on “sticky bidons”, the practice of riders holding to a water bottle passed up from the team car for too long, thus getting a short tow from the vehicle. But now it seems the bottle itself is coming under regulation. The UCI’s Technical Coordinator Julien Carron has written to teams informing them that it will standardise the measurement of saddle angles in 2012 and bottles for 2013.
The UCI is to appeal the Danish verdict that cleared Alex Rasmussen of a doping ban after three no shows. I groaned when I heard the news as it appears Rasmussen has a solid case. But thinking about it, perhaps some good can come of this appeal?
With the list of teams for 2012 in place, several squads are registered in surprising places. New Australian team Greenedge stands out at first as it is listed as an Italian team, see the screengrab image above.
But if that sounds odd, the Farnese Vini team seems to be registered in an empty plot of land in a north London suburb.