A look ahead to the Tour Down Under with the stages, contenders, TV coverage and more. It’s billed as the hardest edition yet but this is a matter of degree, it’s still a fine race where time bonuses often shape the final result as much as any climb.
A dozen riders to watch for 2020, some could break though, some will feel the pressure to deliver and others could surprise.
Bjarne Riis is back, in a press conference today he and colleagues Lars Seier, the founder of Saxo Bank and Jan Beck Andersen, chairman and owner of Brøndby IF, a soccer club have bought 30% of the NTT Pro Cycling, formerly the Dimension Data team.
There will be some online outrage at Riis’s return but some of this is misplaced. Instead surely the problem is the sport can’t seem to attract or promote new faces.
The route for the 2020 edition of Paris-Nice is out and, you guessed it, it goes from Paris to Nice. It’s what’s in between that counts and here’s a closer look at the route of one of the early season races that’s often a highlight of the season. The race will be held between Sunday 8 and Sunday 15 March.
The final invitations have gone out and B&B Hotels – Vital Concept and Arkéa-Samsic get the last two places for the Tour de France. They’re obvious picks but there’s a little bit of detail to explore.
Happy New Year, here’s the calendar of all the major pro races for the year ahead, free to download for your diary or if you want a page online, just remember inrng.com/calendar.
There’s also quick explainer on how to subscribe to the calendar, the meaning of the UCI labels and more.
A Christmas quiz with 40 questions… and now for the answers.
A Christmas quiz with 40 questions. Some are obvious, some odd, most 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 most will probably find fun in the answers that will appear here next week.
It’s hard picking the fifth and final highlight, the trouble with lists is the story is often all the things left off. How to pick between two stages of Paris-Nice ravaged by crosswinds, then rate the winner against other stand-out races in the year? So here are a few more highlights…
