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…
It’s tempting to pick the whole Tour de France as a highlight because plenty of the great moments threaded together to make something even better. Still, let’s focus on one day and here is Stage 8 from Mâcon to Saint-Etienne.
A new UCI rule (2.3.025) says soigneurs must stand no more than one metre from the kerb when handing up musettes to riders in the feedzone. The problem is self-fulfilling where once a soigneur stands in the road, the next must stand a little further out in order to be see and be seen and with, say, 20 teams in race the feedzone becomes an obstacle course.
The third highlight of the year is a vintage edition of Paris-Roubaix. Philippe Gilbert, a pre-race pick, won but it was the manner of his victory and the action for hours on end that made it memorable.
