It is no easy feat to make a name for yourself in cycling if you hail from the Isle of Man. The tiny island boasts a staggeringly rich racing legacy, having produced Mark Cavendish and other top-tier pros including Peter Kennaugh, Mark Christian, Lizzie Holden and Becky Storrie. Yet, Peter's younger brother Tim Kennaugh has forged his own distinct path off the bike, earning a reputation as one of professional cycling's most respected coaches. His elite clientele has included three-time Olympic gold medallist Ed Clancy, Tour stage-winner Heinrich Haussler and Cavendish himself.

Kennaugh initially shared his brother's pro aspirations. Representing Great Britain, he won a silver medal at the U19 European Championships. However, a diagnosis of Hashimoto's autoimmune disease during his U23 years prematurely ended his racing career. Pivoting to support roles, Tim joined domestic squad Rapha Condor-JLT as a soigneur in 2013, stepping up to coach a year later. He soon launched his own business, with early clients including his double-national-champion brother. Before long he had moved up to the World Tour, serving as a performance director for EF Education First in 2018, followed by a seven-year stint at Bahrain, including working for a season with Cavendish.

Now 34, armed with a master's degree in high-performance sports science from the European University of Madrid, Kennaugh has relaunched his solo business. Alongside amateur and Continental clients, he currently oversees the coaching programme of the EF Education-Aevolo development team. We spoke to Kennaugh to find out more about how he gets the very best from every type of rider, from rising stars to ambitious veterans.

What was it like to coach Mark Cavendish?

I'd known Cav for quite a long time, what with us both being from the Isle of Man. He really supported me in my youth by giving me his old cycling kit and then paying for my rent when I was racing in Italy. We then didn't speak for a number of years, but when he joined Bahrain-McLaren [in 2020] I began coaching him. I was a little nervous, as he's a big personality, and when you're dealing with an athlete as famous as that, you're also dealing with their travel programme, their agent and other commitments that you just don't have with most other cyclists. From a coaching perspective, I couldn't have asked for any more. He did everything I asked of him, committed to every training session and gave good feedback.

Why did you leave Bahrain Victorious?

I had burnout after so many years working in the World Tour. I loved it but it was time for a reset. I'm happy to be back working in cycling again with the EF devo team – and I wouldn't turn down future opportunities to work in the World Tour.

What was the personal appeal of coaching?

I've always been a people person, and coaching allows me to use those skills. When coaching young kids, I want them to develop as much off the bike as they do on it. Over time you go through a lot with each individual rider, especially if you've coached them for six years as I did with some at Bahrain. It's great being part of everyone's journey and supporting them as much as possible.

What are the first steps when you begin coaching a rider?

Rather than focusing on the one big goal, it's about breaking it down and working back from that goal and its demands to establish the best processes that will lead to the desired outcome. You have to work out the KPIs [key performance indicators] and what numbers to hit, as well as devise a monitoring programme, such as a regular test to repeat to see if the athlete is on track or not. Then you bring in other members of the performance team – nutritionists, physios, strength coaches – to make sure everyone's pointing in the same direction.

How do you make sure you get the best out of an athlete?

By making sure the training plan fits the athlete's lifestyle and this is especially true of amateur cyclists. I can write the most scientifically optimal programme in the world, but if it doesn't work around the athlete's commitments, or where they are in their development, then it's not optimal for them. Take Fred Wright, for example: when he was doing the Classics for the first time, he needed a certain watts-per-kilo figure to get over the bergs, but that wasn't his limiting factor – what was holding him back originally was that he was so fatigued when he got to the key bergs that he couldn't produce the power. So what we needed to prioritise first was getting him to the finish, and then once he could stay at the front of the peloton it was time to work on his power on those short, steep climbs.

How do you ensure that riders spend the right amount of time at altitude?

First of all, you've got to do blood tests to make sure they're fit and healthy before they go, because if they've got any cardiorespiratory illnesses, they should be kept at home. In their first week there, you've got to keep intensity relatively low. Using wearables that test heart rate variability, or devices that measure blood oxygen levels is essential to continue managing load. Altitude works, but it does cause physical and mental stress.

How do you improve a rider's durability?

The rider obviously needs a strong aerobic capacity first. High training volume helps, for sure, and then it's a case of developing their threshold. From a race-specific perspective, you've got to know the duration and difficulty of the effort that'll be required repeatedly in the race, and then you plan training sessions around that. I often test it by comparing someone's fresh power with the same effort at the end of the ride and seeing how much the drop-off in power is.

What message do you find yourself repeating?

Reminding riders, pros especially, to trust the process. People always want confirmation of how they're going, but it's not about chasing a specific number or peak power – it's instead about being consistent. Holding pros back is the biggest challenge as a coach. Rather than adding to a training plan, it's often about stopping them from doing something, or taking something away. It's the reduction that creates the biggest improvement in performance. Adding altitude, heat training or increasing gym work might mean that all of a sudden the athlete isn't recovering properly and isn't adapting as well as they should be.

What are some of the biggest challenges you've faced as a coach?

When I first started, I was really quite young and I had imposter syndrome, as I was working with guys older and more experienced than me. Also, I didn't go to university, so I was constantly watching lectures and learning more about physiology, coaching and managing people. Once I got into the World Tour, it became even more demanding. There are so many external experts that sometimes it felt like I was trying my best but just treading water. You get back from races and training camps and you're so busy that you don't have time to keep up with things. Now that I've stepped away, I've had more bandwidth to look into topics that I find interesting.

What's one data point you think is underused?

RPE – rate of perceived exertion. We have so many measurements – power, heart rate, lactate, so much data and everyone's always looking at the 1% to improve, but still people don't leave an RPE comment on their training files. There could be a million different reasons for a higher or lower heart or lactate measurement, and RPE is really useful to try to explain that.

What's your view on the role of AI in coaching?

I think it's great for the general population. If I go to the doctor's or see a specialist, thanks to AI I'm now so much more informed. It's the same when I talk to cyclists I coach – they're able to get so much info now that they can ask better questions. I also think a 12-week training plan produced by AI for a beginner is generally not bad. What you'll find with AI, though, is that the more you know, the more mistakes you spot in its recommendations. I see it going the other way: rather than growing dependent on AI, people will crave human connection and want someone on the phone to offer an understanding ear, to hear their tone of voice or disappointment after a race.

What's the future of coaching?

Because there's now so much data, I think we're going to see more coaches on teams, as it's going to become very difficult for one coach to train eight riders properly. We'll likely go down to three riders per coach, and the coaches will end up being like a GP, referring the athlete to individual specialists who will work alongside them.

Coach's CV: Tim Kennaugh

Age: 34

Hometown: Douglas, Isle of Man

Notable riders coached: Mark Cavendish, Fred Wright, Peter Kennaugh

Best achievements as coach: Developing Phil Bauhaus as a sprinter

Best achievements as rider: 2nd – Points race, U19 European Championships (2009)

Favourite motto: Don't run before you can walk

Train like Cav – with caveats

Don't prioritise heat training: "An amateur athlete can't do everything, and if there were 100 things I could prescribe to an athlete to improve performance, heat training wouldn't be at the top of the list. It definitely works, but if you keep adding additional stresses on top of work and family life, then it will lead to taking extra days off. Keep your cool!"

Focus on regularity, not load: "If you've got a slightly easier training plan but it's consistent, then over 12 months you'll see bigger benefits."

Don't stagnate: "I see a lot of damage done by riders repeating the same training cycle and structure: a big ride on Saturday and Sunday; easy days on Tuesday and Thursday and rest the other days. That works for a while until you get bored and go backwards as you're not giving your body a different stimulus. Mix things up."

Don't forget intensity: "Every four weeks, you want to be including a macro cycle in which you train with greater intensity, before you go into an easier block. If you usually do six hours of training a week, in the fourth week, do eight or 10. Or instead of four sessions a week, do three but make one of them longer."

Replicate climbs: "Even if you live in a flat area, you can do torque efforts, sweetspot and FTP intervals at a lower cadence of 50rpm. Alternatively, find routes and training sessions on an indoor trainer that simulate climbing. Use technology to your advantage."

This article was first published as part of the 'Masterminds of Performance' series in the 16 July 2026 print edition of Cycling Weekly magazine – available to buy on the newsstand every Thursday (UK only) while digital versions are available on Apple News and Readly. Subscriptions through Magazine's Direct.

The phrase ‘Objet de vertu’ perfectly befits this Nicola Barra ‘Barralumin’ bicycle from 1954/55. This evocative term, used to describe an item prized for its artistic merit, fine craftsmanship, and rarity, reflects the relentless drive of Parisian constructeur Barra to push bicycle innovation to the extreme, both structurally and aesthetically.

Active from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, this aluminium frame builder par excellence coincided with a period when French club riders were obsessed with the art of randonneuring. While their British counterparts enjoyed jolly japes in the West Country on their heavy touring bikes, the French covered serious distances on 650b lightweights. This bike represents the pinnacle of ‘650b-ness’, built to conquer Paris-Brest-Paris, the Diagonales de France, and lengthy trips into the Alps and Pyrenees.

The aluminium frame is truly exquisite. According to most accounts, Barra employed a proprietary gas-welding (oxy-acetylene) technique to achieve his distinctive smooth weld seams. They’re starkly different from the scalloped TIG weld joins we’re so used to seeing on modern aluminium frames. Another hallmark of Barra's design is his preference for intricate tapered tube shapes, which alter their profile along their length—from vertical oval to round to horizontal oval.

“The frame looks like pewter in the flesh, it’s like a jewel”, says current owner Richard Hoddinott of vintage specialists The Velo Pages. “It’s such an unusual bike – light, beautiful, but so capable. It’s a statement bike, not many people would have been able to afford one back then.”

Hoddinott is quite right. The glorious frame, the ingenious bespoke components – just look at that rod-shift front derailer – and the pared down weight (7.65kg) came at a considerable cost. This was a real glamour bike, as at home among the fashionable Parisian boutiques of Avenue Montaigne as it was on the brutal Col de la Madeleine.

I've never quite got on board with people that film everyday social bike rides. It feels like an odd part of the social media and Strava age to show off fairly ordinary spins.

However, my confusion has turned more to discomfort in the age of Meta AI glasses. They’re already controversial – the gadget has already been banned by UK pub chain Wetherspoons, with women's rights campaigners also raising issues about their potential use for harassment.

I can understand why people might want to have a continuously-running camera to ward off or document bad driving, and I can also appreciate the desire to film iconic climbs or special events. But a casual Sunday spin? That seems off. When are you going to sit back and watch all four hours of your weekend club run?

This behaviour was mystifying to me when it was GoPros or Insta360s bolted onto people's handlebars, but with the advance of the Oakley Meta Vanguards, there has been a shift in the culture of filming.

The smart glasses, introduced last year, are the cycling version of Meta Glasses, one of the stories of the summer. These shades are more than just cameras, they function as headphones and sunglasses too, but it is the hands-free POV camera which has continued to make me feel uncomfortable. The fact that they cost £500 also makes me more than little uncomfortable at rampant consumerism, but that’s for another time.

The difference between these and the traditional cycling camera comes in its covert nature. If you weren't attuned with the latest in gadgets, or alerted by the wearer, then you might have no idea that the person you are riding with has the ability to film you at any point, without you even realising. Not only does it feel like we're being sold a product that until it existed, we had no need for, but one which has created a whole conversation around privacy and consent. This is bigger than cycling, concerns raised by campaign groups include harassment, invasion of privacy; taking someone's agency away with the gadget on your face.

Taking a photo on your camera or phone is one thing, the action can be spotted and avoided if you want, but you might just end up cycling in front of someone with a semi-secret camera built into their sunglasses, and you won't know until or unless you see the videos later on Strava.

That's not to suggest that cyclists wearing Oakley Meta Vanguards are doing so for nefarious reasons, I'm sure that the vast majority just enjoy the technology, like buying the latest things, and/or want to up their Strava kudos count by posting visual evidence of their ride. But I personally don't want to be unknowingly recorded while I'm riding my bike, I just want to focus on my pedalling and getting up the next hill; I doubt I’m alone in that.

Perhaps you've got a pair, and are unaware of the potential ethical questions that arise when filming others without letting them know beforehand. Think about it, next time you tell your glasses to film. Maybe I've grown grumpy at 31, but what's wrong with a normal pair of sunglasses? Take a photo if you want, but let me know if you're going to start filming.

This piece is part of The Leadout, the offering of newsletters from Cycling Weekly and Cyclingnews. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here.

If you want to get in touch with Adam, email adam.becket@futurenet.com.

When I ran into Clara Koppenburg a few months ago in Emporia, Kansas, she looked stronger and healthier than I had perhaps ever seen her.

After a split-second hesitation, I told her so. Commenting on someone’s body is always delicate territory, and particularly when that person has spoken publicly about struggling with an eating disorder. But the change in Koppenburg wasn’t just physical. She seemed happy, strong and at ease in a way we hadn't always seen before.

Luckily, it was an observation she was happy to hear, and surprisingly willing to address.

"I really made that change from a really skinny, kind of broken girl to a quite strong woman," the 31-year-old told me. "I think I still have some progress to do to really put more body weight into power. But I'm on a good way, and I'm happy with the change."

And mentally? I ventured.

"Oh, I’m doing a lot better," she assured with a broad smile.

Koppenburg spent a decade as a professional road racer, building a reputation as a talented climber and racing for teams such as Bigla, WNT-Rotor, Rally Cycling, EF-Oatly-Cannondale and, most recently, Cofidis. But last year she publicly revealed just how damaging the pursuit of performance, and particularly the pursuit of being lighter, had become.

As a climber on the road, she had spent years in a discipline where body weight gets tangled up with performance. In her public account of her eating disorder, she said that being regarded as a climber only pushed her further towards weight loss.

"I wasn’t healthy. I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t me," she wrote at the time. She also revealed that after six years without a period, it had finally returned. Recovery, she explained, had meant accepting fluctuations in weight, hormones and power-to-weight ratio. It also meant accepting that becoming healthier could, at least temporarily, make her feel as though she was moving backwards as an athlete.

In 2025, she got herself admitted to a clinic, and called on teams and the wider cycling industry not merely to acknowledge RED-S and eating disorders, but to give athletes the time and support required to recover.

Changing disciplines is no magic cure, nor does it erase the complicated relationship between food, body weight and performance that can develop over years in elite sport. But this season, she’s feeling strong. She walked away from road racing and is racing gravel for the Tudor Pro Cycling Gravel team.

"I just felt like I needed a new challenge, some new races," she told me when I asked about the switch. "And yeah, now I’m on gravel, and I’m so happy.

"It’s so much fun, the whole atmosphere, the racing. There are so many different things in the race happening, and you constantly have to be concentrated and adapt to every situation. It makes it super interesting. I love it."

There is another aspect of gravel that seems particularly significant for Koppenburg: in her experience so far, it shifts the focus towards strength, durability and the ability to keep producing power hour after hour.

"The gravel races, they are pretty long," she said. "You really need more resources. You can’t just always be on the limit with your body weight, I think. And it’s also a lot more powerful racing."

There are technical demands, too. On loose surfaces, she explained, a rider can’t simply jump out of the saddle every time more power is needed.

"You have to have seated power because you can’t just go out of saddle."

These days, Koppenburg wants to "put more body weight into power." Her focus is on getting faster by getting stronger, rather than lighter.

Her first Unbound Gravel offered a test of those demands. In the muddiest edition in recent memory, a true challenge for rider and equipment, Koppenburg finished inside the top 20. She then went on to score a top-10 at the Hegau Gravel Race and a third-place finish at The Majestics, both part of the UCI Gravel World Series.

She is expected to compete at the UCI Gravel World Championships in Nannup, Western Australia, later this autumn.

When I reviewed the original Enve Melee, my headline was: "You had me at fender mounts."

That probably wasn’t the sentence Enve expected to define its race bike, which was aerodynamic, responsive and raced at the Tour de France by TotalEnergies.

But gravel pro Alexey Vermeulen took it even further when he won the 2022 Belgian Waffle Ride San Diego on one, muddying the bike’s identity before it had even reached customers.

But those fender mounts pointed to something important: the Melee was a serious road racing bike, but it didn’t demand that every ride, or rider, be quite so serious. With 35mm tyre clearance and wet-weather practicality, it was remarkably easy to live with. Rode beautifully, too.

The Melee V2, unveiled today, is markedly different. The mounts are gone, official tyre clearance has shrunk to 33mm and the front end is lower. The frame is lighter and every millimetre seems to have been revisited in pursuit of speed.

Enve has made the Melee V2 pointier, sharper and more overtly race-focused. The Utah-based company says that is exactly the point.

Lately, the bike industry seems intent on trading its well-loved Swiss Army knives for surgeons’ scalpels (RIP Crux 4). But before we lament the loss of another beloved and versatile bike, here’s why the Melee V2 makes perfect sense for Enve, and why I’m stoked to test it once I get my chassis built up.

The original Melee had to do everything

When the first Melee arrived in 2022, it was Enve’s only production road bike beyond the made-to-order Custom Road.

"We were a little more conservative with it, and it kind of needed to be the road bike for everyone," Enve’s Neil Shirley told Cycling Weekly.

The Fray changed that calculation. Despite its more upright position, clearance for 40mm tyres, in-frame storage and fender mounts, it still feels very much like a performance road bike, only with more versatility. It is for riders who may no longer pin on a number every weekend but haven’t lost the urge to go fast. A bike that, in my opinion, most of us should be riding.

"For most people, including us, the Fray is probably the bike that we really should be on," Shirley agreed.

With the Fray now available to carry Enve’s all-road and real-world responsibilities, the Melee no longer needed to serve such a broad spectrum. However, it also created a bit of a problem for Enve as the three models on offer sat rather closely together. Now the range is clearer: the MOG is the gravel bike, the Fray is the fast, versatile all-road bike, and the Melee is the race bike.

"That [distinction] really allowed us the ability to take the Melee V2 more extreme in terms of the fit," Shirley said. "We have the full range of drop-bar bikes now. Let’s really sharpen this one."

And they left no stone unturned.

The TotalEnergies bike that arrived too late

Unfortunately, Enve has produced its most uncompromising race bike at a time when it finds itself without a top-tier team to race it.

Enve’s two-season relationship with TotalEnergies ended before the new bike was released, but the team’s influence is embedded in it, Enve says.

"We were halfway into our first season with TotalEnergies when the development process really began," Shirley said. "By the time we weren’t working with them anymore, that bike was done."

Development was driven by requests for a lower position, less weight and better aerodynamics without losing the original’s ride quality. I asked Enve directly whether this was the bike it wished it had been able to give TotalEnergies.

"One hundred percent," Shirley replied. "That’s really where so much of the development comes from."

Due to its agreement with UAE Team Emirates-XRG, Enve does not expect to outfit another top-tier road team with its frames in the foreseeable future.

UAE Team Emirates-XRG has exclusivity, focusing Enve’s racing development on components and wheels only.

The Melee V2 won’t be absent from competition, however. Enve continues to support a broad roster of athletes and smaller programmes across road, gravel, triathlon and mountain biking.

Faster by subtraction

The Melee V2 is a purebred racer. You can read our launch story for the details, but here are the key figures:

• Enve claims a 791g frame in a size 56, around 60g lighter than before, and says the complete system is 17 watts faster.
• Frame surface area is down a claimed 7.5 per cent.
• Enve says the two Melee frames are not meaningfully different in measured stiffness, although the original’s thicker, more mid-modulus laminate may filter slightly more road buzz. The company believes the Melee 2’s thinner seatpost and wheels help compensate.
• The head tube is slimmer and deeper, using smaller headset bearings similar to those we've previously seen on bikes such as the Specialized Venge.
• T47 has given way to a BSA bottom bracket.

Perhaps the most welcome change for long-time Enve users is a lighter, two-bolt saddle clamp replacing Enve’s current divisive design. Jake Pantone acknowledged that the existing system has been a "love-hate" feature for some customers and suggested the new hardware could eventually spread across the range.

"At some point, the answer is probably yes," he said. "There’s nothing currently being done with that at the moment, but it’s likely that we’ll be migrating away from that wedge design."

All in all, Enve says the Melee V2 feels "more pointed", "more racy" and "a little snappier" than the first Melee.

Those are Enve’s impressions, not mine. At least not yet. On paper and standing in my garage, however, the bike looks like a rocket ship.

The minimal finish is gorgeous, too, allowing the carbon construction rather than layers of paint and graphics to do the talking. It looks purposeful from every angle. I can already identify the weakest component in my eventual build: its rider. Me.

If the frameset shows how far Enve was willing to go, the cockpit demonstrates that no watt was considered too small to chase. The cockpit features thin, airfoil-shaped drops and ships with optional pads for added comfort. Meanwhile, exceptionally minimal "aero tape" is intended to save 1.5 watts over conventional bar tape. The frame even comes with aerodynamic, frame- and position-specific bottle cages.

Considering handlebar tape as an aerodynamic liability may be the clearest indication of the new Melee's priorities.

But what about us fans of the OG Melee?

It would be easy to frame the missing fender mounts and narrower tyre clearance as losses. I loved the original because its well-roundedness and thoughtful details added comfort and convenience rarely found on race bikes. It handled like a charm and was, if you will, a race bike for the people.

The new bike gives some of that breadth away. And yes, the Melee V2 may leave some fans of the original behind. But Enve hasn’t abandoned those riders; it has given them the Fray. And the Fray is by no means a consolation prize. As mentioned, it is arguably the better proposition for riders who don't pin on numbers. The Melee, meanwhile, can pursue all-out road-racing performance.

I won't prejudge a bike for being honest about its purpose. On looks and intent, the Melee V2 is exciting: focused, impressively light and unapologetic about the rider it wants.

I may miss the fender mounts (we’re nearing autumn, after all) but I’m also very keen to find out what Enve gained by leaving them behind.

In the wider public consciousness, Beryl Burton cuts a lonely figure in the pantheon of great cyclists of the 20^th Century; other riders who would wear that crown – Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Fausto Coppi, Gino Bartali et al. – are all male. This is a distortion, fuelled at best by misguided cultural conditioning, at worst, by misogyny.

Burton was exceptional, but she wasn’t the exception. Many women cyclists deserve recognition, few more than Eileen Sheridan. At 4ft 11in, the ‘mighty atom’, as she was affectionately known, dominated women's cycling during the 1940s and early ’50s, winning multiple national championships and breaking all 21 of the Women's Road Records Association records.

Among her numerous achievements, always ridden with her signature smile, setting a national record of 237.6 miles during the 1949 Yorkshire Cycling Federation 12-hour race, along with a 1954 LEJOG record of 2 days, 11 hours, 7 minutes, showcase her talent. Nevertheless, a Pathé newsreel belittled her accomplishments with: ‘No wonder she wins races, she has to, to get back in time to catch up with the housework.’

“Eileen was incredible,” says the current owner of her Mercian, Richard Hoddinott, of The Velo Pages. “Amazing riders, like Marguerite Wilson and Lillian Dredge, preceded her, but it was Eileen who kicked the door wide open for women’s cycling, silencing all the naysayers.”

This 1950 Mercian was the last machine she raced, alternating between a fixed-gear and a Sturmey-Archer hub as appropriate, before signing as a pro for Hercules Cycles in 1951. The bike clearly meant a lot to her (the ‘ES’ detailing on the stays is a delight) as she kept it, neutralising the livery due to sponsorship responsibilities. It was repurposed, with Dynamo lighting and a four-speed Simplex setup, so she could enjoy her first love – the simple pleasure of club runs.

This remarkable lady passed away in February 2023, at the age of 99.

Due to the vagaries of the weather, the transitional autumn season can be a tricky one to get right when it comes to your kit selection. Temperatures can still feel somewhat summery, while humidity can also be a factor. However, rain is increasingly a threat, and some days it feels distinctly like winter.

So what sort of kit should we be looking to wear in these conditions? Are there items we should definitely include in our wardrobe? And are there some that may be superfluous for many but whose specialist nature makes them worthy of attention for some?

Having spent three years riding for a UCI team and seven as a BC Elite rider, I'm no stranger to putting the miles in when the weather isn't playing ball. Here's my advice for kitting yourself up to ensure you never miss a ride just because it looks grim outside...

The basics

The foundation of any cycling kit is a really great quality cycling jersey and a pair of the best bib shorts. This should cover you from around 16˚C / 60˚F and upwards.

As the weather drops below this, adding some lightweight essentials can help keep you warmer. Arm warmers and leg warmers are useful here, given they can be stripped off and shoved in a pocket if you start cool and the ride heats up. A mesh base layer can also help maintain temperature when it gets cooler, but also when it gets warmer.

Since autumn often brings rain, a packable waterproof jacket is a smart addition. We lose body heat via evaporation of water off the skin, usually as sweat, but in the rain this accelerates the process, especially when travelling at speed; when it rains, it drops the effective temperature.

A long-sleeve showerproof jacket can reduce this cooling, but breathability can be an issue. This is where one of the best cycling vests, or gilets, helps: they keep your core warm while allowing greater breathability.

Starting a ride in the rain

Some days, we walk out the door straight into the wet. The key is to create a barrier against the rain, and the easiest way to do that is with a hardshell waterproof jacket. A general rule of thumb for waterproofs is a water column rating of 10,000mm. Fit and stretch also impact actual waterproofing, and sometimes lower-rated jackets can be just as waterproof, if not more, than higher-rated ones.

You also want a jacket that has a degree of breathability. In the PFAS era of ShakeDry jackets, this was easier to find, but the ban on PFAS products has made it harder to find a jacket that effectively balances keeping you dry without creating that dreaded 'boil in the bag' effect.

Since waterproofing and breathability are harder to find together, look for other features. A two-way zip lets you unzip from the base of the jacket to improve breathability without sacrificing protection as much. You can also find jackets with breathable panels around the armpits or sides, where rain is less likely to hit.

In addition to the jacket, overshoes and gloves are key. Waterproof overshoes and gloves keep the two areas with a higher concentration of nerves as dry and warm as possible.

Temperatures dropping below 15˚C / 60˚F

When it dips below 15˚C / 60˚F, we're likely to switch from short to long. Lightweight, long-sleeve jerseys and tights become the norm, as do base layers. Again, mesh layers work well here because they trap a layer of air, which can both insulate and cool depending on external temperatures.

As we drop below 10˚C / 50˚F, a thicker base layer is often ideal and still lets you get away with lightweight long sleeves. However, lightweight long-sleeve jerseys don’t offer weatherproofing, so a durable water repellent (DWR) coating gives you more flexibility in how you use them.

A good balance is a long-sleeve jersey/jacket with DWR that also has some breathability at the back, where weather like rain has less impact, while still allowing better cooling. As mentioned, a two-way zip further improves the functional usable temperature.

Navigating wintery weather

As temperatures drop, insulation is key. Fleece internal linings help trap body heat and prevent cold outside air from penetrating. Typically, this is 'jacket weather', where windproof and weatherproof outerwear is essential.

Overshoes and gloves also become heavier-duty at this point; rather than just blocking wind, they need to trap heat as well. Fleece lining is sometimes used on these items, but make sure the fit isn’t too tight, especially when choosing the best winter gloves. If there is no space between your fingertips and the glove, it is easier for cold to transfer through the fabric and into your hands. Air is a great insulator, so a layer of that between your fingers and the fabric helps keep them warmer.

You will also likely look for a base layer with neck protection to help keep your neck and airways from getting cooler. This can also reduce your risk of picking up upper respiratory infections.

How to dress for the harshest of conditions

The harshest conditions - freezing temperatures with biting winds and some bouts of cold rain - are when the elements try to thwart you, but getting through them leads to some epic tales. High levels of insulation are required to keep your core temperature from dropping, so you'll likely need heavily fleeced, insulated jackets and heavier-duty winter bib tights as well. Forgoing some flexibility and freedom of movement is well worthwhile, even doubling up with leg warmers under tights in some cases.

You can also add a waterproof layer to keep the elements out and the heat in. Meanwhile, a balaclava or snood covering your nose and mouth can significantly take the chill out of the air, while gloves can become so heavy-duty that, in some cases, they are fully waterproof and offer less dexterity.

The key essentials to get you through the AW period

The list of kit items you need to cover all bases in different weather conditions could be, potentially, a long one indeed. However, you can cover most of these areas with smart layering and some crossover use of items.

For milder autumn weather, you can get away with shorts and a jersey, plus some arm and leg warmers, perhaps a sleeveless mesh base layer, and then a gilet for when the temps drop to the lower teens.

As it gets cooler, bib tights and a long-sleeve jersey/jacket that features a two-way zip, some weatherproofing up front, and more breathability at the rear will work from around 5-15˚C / 41- 59°F, depending on how you layer. A long-sleeve mesh layer and the aforementioned vest or gilet will cover you across a good range of conditions. Meanwhile, a waterproof layer ensures you're protected if the weather turns wet. Lightweight gloves work well too, and rainproofing features reduce wind chill factors considerably.

Even when riding in lower temperatures, I still find the same jersey and gilet, paired with a heavier-duty base layer and snood, is enough. The add-ons? Leg warmers under tights for extra protection, and rainproof overshoes under the tights to keep rain out. A waterproof can work well as an extra wind layer at this point, as long as you keep moving. Where I would invest, though, is gloves, as cold hands can make any ride fall into disarray. Fleece-lined and weatherproofed is ideal.

The one thing I wouldn’t bother with is thermal socks. They can change the fit of your shoes, and once they get wet, they can get cold; extra pressure between your foot and shoes can make this worse. You are far better off investing in rugged overshoes to keep water out, as this will keep your feet at a good temperature.

We’ve most likely all been there: you’re following a strict diet in the pursuit of an improved power-to-weight ratio, but the evening after a ride, you find yourself raiding the cupboards or – worse – waking up hungry and basking in the glow of a nighttime fridge excursion.

As common as this experience is, it’s likely a symptom of poor nutritional timing, and it can have a bigger impact on performance, recovery, and body composition than many people realise.

Post-ride overeating typically happens because you didn't fuel adequately before or during the ride, or because you didn't fuel well right after the session. To understand why, we need to look at a few fundamentals.

When we cycle, we use energy. Power through the pedals is the work we produce, but heart rate tells us how hard we had to work internally to produce this. Most training devices and software will tell us the power and kilojoules, or calories, used during a session; heart rate helps give us an indication of what sources of fuel we are using to produce that energy. At lower intensities, we use a higher proportion of fats, and the higher the intensity gets, the more carbohydrates we use.

Even after an effort, we use more energy than normal as we recover, including after we’ve stopped riding altogether. Elements such as high heat, altitude increases, and fatigue can all increase the ratio of carbohydrates we use at a given relative intensity.

Many riders make mistakes because they are not aware of the volume of carbohydrates they should be consuming. They may also struggle to get the appropriate volume in, resulting in a debt that needs to be paid later on.

An ideal volume would be anywhere from 60 to 120 grams per hour depending upon intensity and nutritional conditioning; pro riders will train themselves to be able to intake on the higher end. That’s between 2 to 4 typical energy gels, or 3 to 6 small bananas. If it sounds like a lot, you’re probably underfueling your rides.

If you’ve been underfueling during rides for years, this might sound like a lot of food. If you’re heading out for a club ride with friends, you may wonder how you could get through this much food whilst still maintaining a sociable conversation. The answer is practice and planning: it’ll take time to train your gut to tolerate adequate volume during a ride, but you also need to find foods that work for you.

Recommended carb intake during the ride

Volumes are not based upon body weight intentionally, gut length does not change with height, a smaller rider putting out more watts will actually require more input.

The upper end of the high intensity bracket would require gut training.

Post-ride, a common guideline is 20-30g of protein, followed by 80-120g of carbs for longer or harder sessions, a 1:4 ratio of protein to carbs. That’s a five-egg omelette and 100-150g of dried white rice; a personal favourite for me was always three eggs, a tin of beans and three slabs of toast.

Whilst replacing the carbs hours later, over a pub lunch or large evening meal, may be more inviting, it won’t work. For those without insulin irregularities, sugars and simple carbohydrates consumed during exercise and directly after it are processed very differently compared to food consumed hours later.

If you consume 100g of sugar at rest, a good amount of this will be deposited as fat stores. If you consume this during exercise, it is prioritised as a fuel source for the work. If it is consumed afterwards, it is generally directed towards replenishing muscle glycogen stores.

Consuming the carbohydrates required during and after exercise ensures you have greater performance during the session, replenishes stores ahead of the next session, and avoids the calories input being directed towards fat stores.

A bonus is that if you fuel correctly, you should have far fewer cravings later on, which means you avoid large intakes of sugar or rich and processed foods, which have a reduced positive impact on training, and contribute to gains in body fat.

So even though refined and processed sugars get a bad rap in the media, when consumed at the correct time, for active athletes these simple sugars are required and highly beneficial. Eating an entire bag of sweets on the sofa at 10pm won’t be good, but during a hard session it will likely have a positive impact on performance and recovery, while reducing cravings later.

It’s about eating the right stuff, at the right time, for the right level of activity. I find many riders I work with are underfuelling until we address the problem, changing these habits tends to have a notable and positive impact on recovery, performance, post-session tiredness and mood in general.

This Champion Mondial, in ’80s scarlet Amstel Bier team livery, was ridden by the most flamboyant and storied Dutchman the pro peloton has ever seen. An absolute demon in the mountains, Gert-Jan Theunisse may not hold the crown as the most successful climber in the 1980s, but he was a fierce contender.

Career highlights include winning the 1988 Clásica de San Sebastián and taking home the maillot à pois rouges in the 1989 Tour de France, remembered as one of the greatest of all time thanks to the battle between Frenchman Laurent Fignon and American Greg Lemond.

Theunisse's achievement in Le Tour was all the sweeter for a remarkable Stage 17 win that saw him romp home in a solo breakaway that spanned 50km from the Croix de Fer to the summit of Alpe d’Huez.

If anything, his appearance was more striking than his Palmares. His long, flowing, fair hair and signature headbands earned him a variety of predictable nicknames, from Hiawatha to the Blonde Angel. Sadly, Theunisse’s later career was complicated by doping allegations, heart issues and injury.

“Gert’s two years with feeder team Amstel Bier, in ’82 and ’83, proved the springboard that set him on his way,” says current owner Richard Hoddinott of vintage specialists The Velo Pages, “and this Gazelle was integral to those first steps.

Gert relished team manager Herman Krott’s ‘everyman for himself’ approach as much as the exposure to international competition and the big mountains. Early successes, such as winning the Dutch National Championship, Military, were a true indicator of his future potential.”

This handsome bike was built by Gazelle’s ‘Special Racing Division’, a dedicated custom workshop within its Dieren factory, which produced high-performance bikes for elite riders.

The frame and forks are Reynolds 531, with a build typical of the period that includes full Campagnolo Super Record, Cinelli bar and stem, Unicantor saddle, Mavic GP4 rims and Christophe toe clips.

Ahead of Stage 4 of the 2026 Tour de France Femmes last month, riders encountered an addition to the familiar pre-time-trial ritual of bike measurements and equipment checks: officials were paying particular attention to their chests.

Several Women's WorldTour teams had reportedly complained that riders appeared to have greater chest volume in time trials than in road stages. The suspicion was that some competitors were using padding, ice or other material underneath their skinsuits to effectively create a "chest fairing" for an aerodynamic advantage.

The UCI regulations, specifically Article 1.3.032, state that clothing and accessories may not modify a rider's morphology and prohibit non-essential elements added to, placed beneath or integrated into clothing. The UCI's technical guidance for Article 1.3.032 also prohibits products or substances applied to the body or clothing to improve aerodynamics.

However, neither document establishes how much padding a sports bra may contain. They also do not provide a specific protocol for examining one, and the sudden bra checks drew a lot of critique as well as questions around the exam's invasiveness, bra structure, breast shape and size, and, of course, whether a padded bra can actually make a rider faster.

While initial chest fairing studies found drag reductions of up to 3.6 percent, new CFD modelling from AiRO suggests that sports-bra-sized marginal gains may be negligible. At least in AiRO's test, a push-up bra is more likely to lift expectations than speed.

What the studies say

Much of the understanding of chest fairings comes from a 2024 peer-reviewed paper by Bert Blocken, Fabio Malizia and Thijs van Druenen in the Journal of Wind Engineering and Industrial Aerodynamics.

The researchers used computational fluid dynamics, or CFD, to examine seven chest fairing configurations on a male cyclist in a time trial position. The simulations were then validated through wind-tunnel testing. Their best-performing configuration reduced drag by 3.6 percent, which is a potentially significant advantage in a race decided by fractions of a second.

However, not every fairing was beneficial. Some configurations increased drag, and the researchers concluded that a rider would need dedicated wind-tunnel tests or CFD simulations to determine whether a particular shape would provide an advantage. The study found that a chest fairing can be effective, though it did not conclude that additional chest volume is inherently faster.

The size of the fairing matters greatly. The study's largest drag reduction came from a substantial, purpose-built form modelled on the chest fairings used by some triathletes, far from the shape or padding amount of a conventional sports bra.

AiRO, a company that provides CFD-based aerodynamic modelling to bike fitters, has now tested a narrower question: whether comparatively small changes in chest volume can produce the same effect. That is, changes small enough to be hidden inside a bra.

What AiRO tested

AiRO created a digital female rider in a fixed cycling position and modelled three chest volumes: small, medium and large. The company tested each version with two helmets, the Specialized Evade and the Ekoi Pureaero, because aerodynamicist Ingmar Jungnickel argues that changes around the chest could affect airflow reaching the rider's head and equipment farther downstream.

Jungnickel told Cycling Weekly that the virtual athlete was based on a rider measuring 175cm (5'9") and weighing 60kg (132lbs).

With the Ekoi helmet, AiRO reported drag differences of −0.1%, +0.2% and +0.3% percent across the three chest configurations. Plus means more drag; minus means diminished drag. Jungnickel described the differences as "nothing at all," writing that "not one configuration produced a measurable gain."

With the Specialized Evade, all three chest configurations were approximately 2.2% slower than its reference, while changing from the smallest to the largest volume barely altered the result.

"Small chest volume changes, as they could be hidden in a sports bra, do not seem to make riders faster," Jungnickel concluded.

AiRO also modelled what it called a "proper fairing," akin to a water bottle stuffed down a jersey as has been seen by some male riders in the past. This model featured a rider with the Giro Aerohead and the Specialized Evade.

The drag reductions were −0.7% on the Giro Aerohead, −0.1% on the Specialized Evade.

"The best case is a possible small advantage that is within measurement uncertainty. That is with an object under the suit, on a male rider, in a full time trial position," AiRO concluded.

"Changing chest volume by the amount a padded sports bra can change it did nothing on either helmet, for either sign, at any of three sizes," AiRO concluded.

AiRO acknowledged the limitations to its findings. For one, the company tested only one rider model per sex, and Jungnickel said the effect could vary with "bust volume, torso length, shoulder width and how closed the rider’s position already is."

"A single athlete tells you the mechanism exists and roughly how big it is for that rider, but it doesn’t give a universal number," he said.

AiRO also used a parametric human model fitted to images rather than a 3D body scan. Jungnickel said that approach allowed the company to preserve the same underlying geometry between tests, avoiding variations caused by scanning artefacts.

That consistency may improve comparisons within AiRO’s test, but the analysis remains a company-authored demonstration rather than a peer-reviewed study. AiRO has not published the full solver settings, mesh-independence analysis or numerical uncertainty calculations that would allow outside researchers to evaluate its results in detail.

Even with those limitations, Jungnickel said the central finding was clear: "Bra stuffing is at least not clearly a benefit."

So what to believe?

Jungnickel argues that AiRO’s results do not necessarily contradict Blocken and his co-authors. The disagreement, in his view, lies in the interpretation of the data.

According to AiRO's reading of the Blocken paper, the three smallest fairings changed drag by +0.54, +0.39 and −0.68 percent. Under that convention, two made the rider marginally slower and one produced a small improvement. The widely reported 3.6-percent reduction came from a much larger, solid fairing measuring 313mm wide and 87mm tall.

Jungnickel argued that sub-one-percent effects may fall within the practical uncertainty of CFD, wind-tunnel or velodrome testing and may vary from rider to rider.

"At differences that small, most serious fit changes offer a larger benefit," he said.

The two analyses therefore point to a more nuanced conclusion: a large, carefully shaped fairing can reduce drag, but small changes in chest volume do not appear to provide a consistent or readily measurable advantage.

So, before you start stuffing socks into your sports bra, the evidence calls for restraint. A large, carefully shaped fairing can reduce drag, but modelling suggests that bra-sized changes offer no reliable shortcut to speed. It appears that for most cyclists, a better position and fit remain safer – and legal – places to find free watts.

"Being on the podium was a little bit sad, just seeing photographers and a few people," said Tadej Pogačar after stage three of this year's Tour de France. The subdued finish at Les Angles, the race having just crossed from Spain into France, proved that even for the sport's biggest champions, racing just isn't the same without the fans. As a precautionary response to nearby wildfires, French authorities had banned spectators from attending; while many risked prosecution to line the roadside, the Tour's usual thronging crowds were nowhere to be seen.

It was a bitter blow for Les Angles. The Pyrenean outpost had spent months preparing to host the finish, with hoardings, posters and infrastructure all in place. Local cafes and restaurants were stocked to the brim for their busiest day ever - only for the spectacle to fizzle out. The empty town recalled the lonely races of the Covid lockdowns, illustrating in stark relief the vital role of crowds. As Pogačar implied, take away the noise, colour and sheer human energy of cycling's roadside devotees, and the sport simply isn't the same.

At the same time, bike racing has an often fractious relationship with its followers. Riders are regularly forced to dodge projectiles of various, sometimes unsavoury, kinds. They must breathe in smoke from flares and suffer half-cut, over-eager cosplayers running dangerously close alongside them. They have been knocked off their bikes at high speed in the throes of peak exertion, and punches have been thrown in both directions.

Fans are undeniably the sport's lifeblood, but the frequent chaos they bring makes them an ever-present threat. This paradox poses the question: is cycling's greatest asset - unrestricted fan accessibility - also its biggest liability?

The cycling fan experience extends far beyond the racing itself. Spectators can mingle with riders and team bosses outside the team buses before and after a stage, and, if they're fit enough, even invade the pros' training arenas to ride alongside them on the open road. That isn't to say barriers don't exist-certain scenarios demand that riders and fans are protected from one another. Usually, though, they share the same space on the road. Unsurprisingly, this unrestricted access doesn't always end well, especially when alcohol is involved.

"Most fans are great," says Matej Mohorič of Bahrain Victorious. "It's really cool that they take the time to come out and cheer us on. I will do so myself, and show my kids, once I stop cycling. We'll go and see the Tour de France. The roads are our stadium, and it's probably the sport where you can get the closest to the big champions, so it's special in that regard."

It's not just at the road side when fans are getting too close to the riders

Both Jonas Vingegaard and Tadej Pogačar have made headlines this year following clashes with fans. Vingegaard was the first, involved in what was ultimately a rather humiliating incident. The Dane crashed on a descent in southern Spain after attempting to drop an amateur rider who had latched on to his wheel.

Though he avoided serious injury, his Visma-Lease a Bike team issued a statement urging fans to be mindful. "In general, as a team we would like to urge fans on bikes to always put safety first," read the missive. "For both your own and others' wellbeing, please allow riders to train and give them as much space and peace as possible."

Only two weeks later, Vingegaard's chief rival Tadej Pogačar had his own run-in with a fan, prompting him to take to social media. "If you find me in conversation with someone and you ask me for photo, I ask you to give me two minutes to finish talk," he wrote. "Do you wait two minutes or show me middle finger and take off angry? Long day ended with losing biggest fan."

While training incidents are an occupational hazard for world-famous riders, the most volatile flashpoints are usually crowded mountain passes. "You always have those few who take it a step too far and start to be a bit over the line," says Mohorič.

"Especially with the smoke, or sometimes by running next to the riders, or by just being surprised by the sheer force and speed we travel at. Sometimes they want to take a photo with their smartphone, and they turn their backs to us, and then it can get really dangerous."

Lotto Intermarché mechanic Rhune Clynen echoed Mohorič, even suggesting that smoke bombs and flares should be banned. "It has pros and cons," he said of the fans massing on the mountainsides. "For sure the ambience is a pro, but the risk of having an accident is also a possibility.

I think [the smoke] could be forbidden, because of the inhalation... and also the running with the riders." Given the unpredictability of the crowds, he admitted that teams can offer riders very little actionable advice. Ultimately, it comes down to common sense: "Just be careful with the crowds, and look in front of you, though it's not always easy."

Balancing act

Over the years, teams, riders and race organisers have repeatedly tried to discourage the dangerous behaviours Clynen highlights, though whether these efforts have had any real effect is debatable. While the number of spectators running alongside riders may have dipped, the experiences of Pogačar, Vingegaard and others demonstrate that unruly crowds are far from a thing of the past.

Roadside harassment continues to plague the peloton. Just ask Mathieu van der Poel, who has been pelted with beer, urine and water bottles, had a cap thrown into his wheels, and suffered a full lungful of vape smoke blown directly into his face all within the past few seasons.

Ultimately, managing fans at bike races is a balancing act between keeping riders safe and preserving the vibe of the occasion. Mohorič understands both sides of the equation, having raced to an empty house at the 2023 Tour de France. He finished third on a highly anticipated stage to the Puy de Dôme, which fans were barred from attending owing to logistical restrictions. It was an experience he called "pretty miserable". Even watching on TV, the spectacle lacked soul.

As Mohorič admits, the fan conundrum remains "quite a challenge, and it's become more of a topic in the last few years". "[Race organisers] are doing their best... on Mont Ventoux, they fenced off the top four or five kilometres, but then the fans just move further down the mountain." Despite the hazards fans sometimes cause, he acknowledges their vital role: "They remind you of why you're doing it - it's a crucial part of the race... This is why we do it - to inspire people and to put on a show."

His Puy de Dôme experience serves as a stark warning. The unparalleled accessibility cycling offers is a precious thing that risks becoming its biggest liability if abused - a golden goose we need to take care of. If the risk from fans endangering riders continues to increase, it may threaten to lock away the spectacle of bike racing for everyone.

When riders and fans collide: Five times when fans definitely got too close

The Eddy Merckx punch (1975)
This incident from more than 50 years ago remains one of the most notorious fans-gone-wrong moments. Merckx, gunning for his sixth Tour de France win in 1975, was punched by a roadside wrong'un on the Puy de Dôme. He lost the race lead the following day and never regained it.

Allez Opi-Omi (2021)
So read the sign held out by a roadside fan on stage one of the 2021 Tour de France. "Go Grandpa-Grandma" being the literal translation. So eager was she to have her message caught by the camera bikes, she apparently didn't spot the onrushing bunch, who ran her down. A huge crash ensued that took several riders out of the race. The fan became something of a pariah and was ultimately fined in court.

Laurent Jalabert cops it (1994)
This crash, which changed the course of a career, was caused by a police officer, no less. Just metres from the line, the gendarme stepped out of an alcove in the barriers with his camera raised, and into the path of a bunch sprint approaching at full speed. French rider Jalabert was the most seriously injured of those that came down, and the incident saw him change tack, becoming more of an all-rounder. He rarely participated in bunch sprints after that.

Lance Armstrong on Luz-Ardiden (2003)
When the strap of a fan's shoulder bag snared Armstrong's bars and brought him down on Luz-Ardiden, it looked as though it could have been the end of his already faltering challenge against rival Jan Ullrich. But the American only seemed to derive strength from the incident. Catching the front group, which had sportingly slowed, he attacked almost immediately to win the stage and extend his GC lead, which he held to Paris.

Chris Froome runs Mont Ventoux (2016)
One of the most memorable fan-related incidents in modern Tour history. Froome, wearing yellow, was reduced to running uphill after massing fans brought a race moto to an abrupt stop and Froome plus fellow GC hopes Richie Porte and Bauke Mollema crashed into it. His bike broken, no team car in sight and his yellow jersey disappearing up the road, Froome began running. Eventually, neutral service issued him with an ill-fitting bike, with which he made do until his own Team Sky car appeared with his own spare.

We've already showcased Ray Booty’s TT bike, a rare ‘RP’ Raleigh from 1955. This is another classic race-proven ‘RP’ machine with a remarkable provenance, but this time one built for the track.

In 1958, RP185 was the bike that Merseyside-born cycling legend Norman Sheil propelled to pursuit victory in both the World Championships and the British Empire and Commonwealth Games. He was no stranger to top-level track success, having claimed both titles before – the Commonwealth gold in 1954 and the Worlds in 1955.

As well as enjoying great success on the track and road – he competed in the 1960 Tour de France – Sheil achieved that rare feat of successfully transitioning from athlete to well-respected international coach. Initially British national team coach, he emigrated to North America to work with the national teams of the USA and Canada.

The Raleigh RP frames were genuinely exceptional. Crafted in small quantities by two master frame builders – Billy Blackamore and Ted Silverstone – these ‘works’ machines were exclusively reserved for top professionals. Only very occasionally would world-class amateurs such as Booty get their hands on one.

“This RP has flawless proportions,” says current owner Richard Hoddinott of vintage specialists The Velo Pages. “The spacing between the wheels, the down tube, and the seat tube is perfect.

“Despite being a pure track frame, the fork crown is drilled for a brake,” he continues. “Canadian track star Gordon Singleton, whom Norman later coached, told me it wasn’t unusual back then for the riders to take their track bikes out on the road for training. These North West-based athletes would often follow coach Eddie Soans’ moped along the Bickerstaffe course.”

The components mean business. The steel 48t Williams chainset has 165mm fluted cranks for track clearance, while the 32-spoke wheels, with their large flange Airlite hubs and Fiamme Sprint rims, were built to handle explosive bursts of power.

Walking around the MADE Bike Show in Portland last week, it was difficult to miss the 32-inch wheel. The emerging rim standard appeared on mountain bikes, bikepacking rigs and an increasingly convincing collection of gravel bikes.

There were purpose-built forks, carbon rims, various tyre options, production intentions and even a new TPU tube. What emerged as a collection of prototypes early in the season is beginning to resemble an actual ecosystem. But what I could not find was anything resembling a road bike built around the 32-inch platform.

The pitch for 32-inch wheels is usually that they roll over rough terrain with ease and cover lots of ground with significant momentum, at least in a straight line. This is because their larger radius meets obstacles at a shallower angle, reducing the disruption that can slow a bike down. Their greater rotational inertia helps resist changes in speed once the wheels are turning, but do take more effort to get up to speed.

The first benefit naturally belongs off-road. The second sounds tailor-made for riders who spend hours chasing aerodynamic and rolling-resistance gains. To me, that sounds a lot like triathletes.

And long-course triathlon has produced some of cycling’s wildest machines precisely because it sits outside the UCI’s tightly drawn equipment box. Think beam bikes, huge airfoil sections, unconventional hydration systems and adventurous cockpit arrangements.

When I pondered my thoughts out loud with a few builders at MADE who had already embraced 32-inch wheels, the first response was, admittedly, laughter. Then we went down the rabbit hole together, exploring the possibilities and limitations, lack of parts and potential use cases.

"This is a wonderful question," said Aaron Barcheck of Mosaic Cycles. "We were talking about this last week."

Road racing is a closed door, unless the UCI rewrites its rule

The UCI does not need to ban a 32-inch road wheel by name because the rim size already sits outside the limits of its current code. Article 1.3.018 caps a bicycle wheel at 700mm in overall diameter, including the tyre. A 32-inch wheel uses a 686mm bead-seat diameter, leaving only 14mm for both tyre radii combined. In other words, any usable tyre would push the complete wheel well beyond the limit.

That makes UCI road racing a closed door unless the rule changes. Any eventual wheel design would also need to satisfy the UCI’s approval requirements for road, track and cyclocross wheels.

Road racing is not the end-all of bicycle design, of course, particularly for independent framebuilders whose freedom to experiment is part of the appeal. But when a new rim standard is seeking broad adoption across the industry, access to road racing and the development budgets, exposure and perceived legitimacy that come with it often matter.

A main concern with the larger-wheel standard is that it creates significant geometry problems (more on that below), and many shorter riders may struggle to fit one properly.

Interestingly, UCI rules and regulations do not require every product to fit riders of every height. However, the governing body seeks to preserve safety, sporting fairness and access to competition equipment.

The fit problem

The UCI rules aside, for the industry to embrace 32-inch wheels as a genuine standard rather than a tall-rider niche, manufacturers would have to show that the platform works across a meaningful range of sizes.

Right now, the geometry compromises are difficult to ignore. Larger wheels tend to push the front end higher and the wheelbase longer while generating toe-overlap. The smaller the frame, the more significant those compromises become.

Barcheck was frank about the constraint: "It’s just going to be a long-wheelbase bike no matter what."

In creating his 32-inch gravel bike, Mosaic’s new GT-1 i55 32, Barcheck couldn't find a fork that suited the build, so he created his own. Sold under Mosaic’s new Zero Components name, the carbon fork has a deliberately short axle-to-crown measurement to suppress front-end height and an offset to preserve toe clearance.

However, this fork is built around a 2.2" tyre clearance, and a road version with, say, a 30mm tyre would need another purpose-built fork with the appropriate length and offset.

Brian Hall of Rare Earth Cycles cautioned against declaring the fit problem insoluble, however. He declared that he has seen a five-foot rider happily using a prototype 32-inch bike, while recognising that it was, indeed, a mountain bike.

Hall also described his award-winning MADE creation as an "aero drop-bar-shaped mountain bike," rather than a gravel bike, due to the fork offset and trail being closer to those of a rigid mountain bike than a traditional drop-bar bike.

The missing parts

Before anyone can test the road concept properly, someone has to make the parts.

Aaron Stinner of Stinner Frameworks said the current ecosystem of 32-inch parts stays true to its off-road origins. There are no suitable forks, little-to-no narrow tyres and the available 32-inch carbon rims generally have internal widths intended for wide tyres. A road project would therefore need a suitable rim and tyre before a builder could learn much from it.

"If I had a road tyre, I’d build one and try it," Stinner said plainly.

Barcheck arrived at the same conclusion. "You would need some road-specific rims," he said, noting that the products appearing now tend toward 28 or 30mm internal widths. "That’s not going to work for road."

Simply putting a narrow tyre into Mosaic’s existing fork and calling the result a road bike wouldn’t work either, he said, explaining that a smaller tyre would require "a really specific rake and offset of the fork." Depending on the frame, it might also need a yoke or another chainstay solution to control rear-centre length.

"Maybe we try an all-road next," Barcheck mused. It preserves some of the tyre volume and rough-surface benefit that justified the bigger wheel in the first place, while allowing builders to move incrementally toward road speed.

Would bigger actually be faster on asphalt?

The central unanswered question is whether there would be any real benefits of going bigger on pavement. On rough ground, the larger wheel’s shallower angle of attack is tangible: it meets rocks and holes less abruptly and can tackle broken terrain without losing as much momentum. Smooth asphalt removes much of that advantage. What remains is a hypothesis about rolling resistance and speed retention, but that’s met with extra material, aerodynamic exposure and rotational inertia.

Barcheck pointed out that a light 700c road wheel with a low moment of inertia will remain difficult to beat, especially when the road tilts upwards. The answer may be course-dependent, he said, just as a 32-inch gravel bike might suit the long, fast expanses of Unbound Gravel better than the steep climbing of Crusher in the Tushar.

Stinner’s experience was similarly specific. On an aggressive fire-road climb, the big wheel can roll over rocks that would trip up a smaller one. Take those obstacles away, however, and "you’re not going any faster uphill," he said. The longer wheelbase also changes the way a rider approaches tight switchbacks and technical descents. Stinner admitted that when riding a bike with 32-inch wheels, he had to relearn finding the right lines.

That suggests that a 32-inch road bike, if it ever emerges, would be a highly specialised machine for flat or gently rolling courses, sustained speed and relatively few accelerations. Which brings the conversation back to triathlon.

The Kona case

Triathlon had occurred to Barcheck, too. Its bikes are already "wild," he said, and long-course racing often resembles gravel in one important respect: riders spend long stretches alone, travelling in a mostly straight line. Toe overlap matters little, and a long wheelbase can be a feature rather than a fault when stability is the priority.

IRONMAN’s rules provide substantially more design freedom than the UCI’s and do not specify a maximum wheel diameter. They even allow the front and rear wheels to have different diameters unless an event director decides otherwise for safety reasons.

That does not make a 686mm BSD wheel automatically race-legal. Under the current rules, "non-traditional or unusual" bicycles or equipment require approval from the event-specific head referee before the race. The bike also needs to meet the rules governing overall bicycle dimensions, axle placement, braking and safety. But unlike in UCI road racing, the wheel diameter itself is not expressly disqualifying.

The biggest concern would be wind. A larger, deeper front wheel catches more of a crosswind, which could make the bike harder to steer and control.

Stinner said that he’s currently waiting on a deeper 32-inch rim prototype, in part to reduce spoke length, which would increase a wheel’s stiffness. He expects it to be interesting at speed but wants to know what happens when faced with side winds. Deep-section and disc wheels already become "huge sails," he said. Scale the front wheel up and the handling concerns increase.

Gravel first, road backwards

Historically, bicycle technology has migrated in the other direction: road creates the performance idea, all-road adds volume and gravel pushes it farther. Like the adoption of disc brakes, the 32-inch wheel may travel backwards. Mountain biking supplied the first tyres and rims, gravel gives them another use case, and custom builders use their freedom to solve the geometry one rider at a time.

All-road may be the next step. Triathlon could be the first road experiment. The UCI peloton would come last, if it comes at all.

At MADE, nobody could say that a 32-inch wheel is, in fact, faster. What the builders could say, almost unanimously, was that it feels fast enough to make them curious.

Stinner compared his first ride to an e-bike moment: "You get on the 32, and you’re like, ‘'Whoa, this thing wants to go'."

Barcheck sees all-road as a plausible next build. And Hall’s fully in love with the new wheel diameter. "I love it. I absolutely love it," he said. "I pretty much quit riding 29ers at this point."

So, is road next? Not any time soon. The industry needs to create more components. For that, it needs proof of the diameter’s benefits, geometries that aren’t limited to only the tallest of riders, and, above all, it needs demand.

In recent years, shorter crank lengths have been in the spotlight. Back in 2024, Tadej Pogačar switched to 165mm cranks, a change that coincided with a run of victories that has yet to cease. Perhaps in response, Jonas Vingegaard was spotted using 150mm cranks at various races in 2025, although not at every event. Now 170mm, and shorter, are commonplace, if not quite the rule.

So, is shorter better?

Well, as with most factors relating to individuals, it really depends. There is no single correct crank length for every rider, and here I’m going to look into why that is. I'll also delve into the purported benefits and potential drawbacks. But first off, let’s get a bit of the background science out of the way.

Power (watts) is made up of two components. There's angular velocity, measured in cadence, and force, which is the torque we produce. An example equation would be 300W at 80RPM requires 35.81Nm of force (Power/Cadence) x 9.5492968).

But an interesting factor regarding crank length is that, although it doesn’t change the cadence at which you pedal, it does change the speed at which your legs move. This is due to the circumference of the pedal revolution changing as you alter crank length. Shorter cranks actually slow the foot, as it travels a shorter distance to complete each pedal revolution.

This has an interesting side effect: more pedal force is required with shorter cranks to achieve the same torque at the spindle, due to the reduced lever length. This has been suggested as a reason for higher self-selected cadences with shorter cranks, so as to reduce the pedal force required, increase the angular velocity of the foot, and still achieve the same power.

So why would a WorldTour rider use cranks that mean more force is required at the pedals? There are several reasons why, some of which we will discuss later. But first, smaller cranks change how the foot and leg move, which can affect efficiency and psychology. Since the foot is moving more slowly, there is an argument that higher cadences become more efficient because the legs do not need to move as fast or as much. This drop in angular velocities at the joints can help make repeated accelerations at higher cadences more sustainable, as at higher power outputs, higher cadences can also be more efficient.

Indeed, part of the supposed reason for Tadej Pogačar switching to shorter cranks has been to allow for the rapid accelerations he produces to effectively fly away from the bunch en route to one of his signature solo victories. It becomes somewhat easier to ‘spin up’ the gear with a shorter crank, even if torque can be reduced. It used to be assumed that longer cranks meant a longer lever, which resulted in more watts, but with higher cadence at higher power outputs being more efficient and excessive torque application being a limiting factor for fatigue accumulation, shorter cranks make sense for elite riders.

With bikes such as the Factor One and its innovative take on bike geometry, there has been a clear shift in the WorldTour toward riders being positioned further forward over the bottom bracket, akin to a time-trial ‘lite’ fit. Shorter cranks can assist here as the hip angle does not get as closed off at the top of the pedal stroke, and can make pedalling and power production more efficient. This, in turn, can allow for a lower front-end position without impeding the pedal stroke, possibly creating a more aerodynamic position. So far, it's looking like the benefits of shorter cranks are endless.

But they are not without their flaws.

Firstly, from a performance perspective, they do have some downsides. Shorter cranks mean your legs do not extend as much at the end of the pedal stroke if saddle height remains the same. To counter this, you need to raise your saddle or get a lower-stack-height cleat and shoe options, which is not cheap. This, in turn, results in a larger frontal area, and I’ve seen wind-tunnel testing showing that shorter cranks and adjusting your position to accommodate the change in fit often add a small amount to the coefficient of drag. Raising the saddle also has a small impact on the centre of mass, raising it, which can marginally reduce stability when cornering. Visma - Lease A Bike addresses this by using Nimbl Shoes with four-bolt cleat mounting for Speedplay pedals, which results in a stack height of about 8.5mm vs 14.6mm for Shimano Dura-Ace pedals.

Shortening the cranks also reduces the total torque production possible. It's not a problem for the most part, but for sprinters, it has been found that shorter cranks can reduce peak power production.

We also have to consider that the majority of us are not professional road riders, spinning up climbs at 90-100RPM at 400+ watts. In addition to that, what is going to be most efficient for one rider is not necessarily going to be the most efficient for every rider.

An expert's view on crankarm length

To get more insight into this, I spoke with Phil Burt, an expert bike fitter who has worked with Team Sky/Ineos and British Cycling over the years.

His view on shorter crank arms is that there is very little downside, as long as riders adjust their bike fit to account for the changes shorter cranks make to hip and knee angles, as well as saddle height and setback.

“People who bought 165mm crank arms are not taking advantage of that, likely keeping their saddle height the same level and therefore compromising position and power. The benefit of short cranks is moving up and forwards, getting over the BB more without compromising knee angle. It loosens up the psoas muscle, and you don’t really pull up on the pedal angle anyway, which is what this muscle can help with, but you can limit stiffness with a wider hip angle.

The problem with really small cranks, such as 150mm, is that the bike ends up in quite a high position. Potentially 25mm higher than what many bikes are designed around.”

This is a very interesting point, as frames are designed around certain crank ideals, so the BB drop is designed to accommodate crank lengths of 170-175mm. Short cranks and the higher saddle will impact the centre of mass and handling.

“The big benefit with these shorter cranks is more inclusivity for fit for women and shorter-stature people. They are also better for people with biomechanical issues or injuries; especially as you age, it is more important to optimise fit as the optimal fit window shifts and gets smaller. Short cranks reduce impact on the hip and knee joints which just makes sense as you get older. It also reduces asymmetry, as you don’t have the extreme angles where imbalances are more prevalent. A good crank length rule of thumb is that 5mm shorter opens up the hip angle by 2-3%.

Negatives? It’s trendy, but it’s only a problem if you don’t address the changes needed when you switch to shorter cranks. You also need to ensure it will fit within your optimal fit window. The only real performance downsides are at 0-30RPM, then short cranks are not as good, so team sprint off the line, maybe super steep MTB, but not much, if any, impact on road performance.”

As a fun analogy for how shorter cranks have had positive performance gains right away, Phil shared this story about Bradley Wiggins before his Hour Record attempt.

“Back in 2015, we were looking to optimise the team pursuit squad. They were low and super aero with their thighs in their chest. We dropped them down to 165mm cranks across the board for aero and power, and it helped instantly. Bradley Wiggins was training for his Hour Record attempt, three weeks out, and came to talk with us. He changed from 177.5m down to 170mm, and was able to get a 30mm drop in front height and over 3% drop in CdA. The rest is history.”

Beyond performance

As Phil mentioned, one very important aspect of shorter cranks being more readily available is greater fit accommodations for a wider range of people. Cycling has traditionally been very male-focused, with all bikes coming with 172.5 or 175mm cranks. Fine for the average global male height 171cm. But the average global female height is 160cm, and you wouldn’t set up a bike fit for a 171cm person the same as for a 160cm person.

With the release of cranksets down to 150mm, SRAM has taken a great step towards greater fit inclusivity, be that for female riders, younger riders, or riders with conditions such as dwarfism. It may be coming off the back of a 175cm rider dabbling in short cranks for professional bike racing, but the wider implications of this release are highly positive. Perhaps just don’t switch to 150mm cranks on a whim, hoping it will make you climb as fast as Jonas Vingegaard. Instead, get a bike fit and select the correct crank length for your individual biomechanics and specific cycling goals.

As 31 elite women lined up on the start line of the 2026 Gravel Worlds race on 22 August, many multi-thousand-dollar carbon bikes with perfectly trued wheels and carefully selected tyres could be seen in the sea of steeds ready to take on the 150-mile course through the plains of Nebraska.

But looking carefully through the start line melee, one bike stood out from the rest. Professional triathlete Amanda Macuiba, 32, pushed off to tackle the 9,000 feet of climbing aboard a $500 Marin gravel bike that she'd purchased on Facebook Marketplace the previous week.

"I would be a liar if I said I wasn’t a little underprepared," Macuiba admits. "But I had faith that my body and my years of racing experience would get me through the race – even if it got a little ugly."

No bike? No problem.

Macuiba is no stranger to elite competition. She competed in collegiate running, and now races as a professional in the sport of triathlon with multiple podium finishes to her name in half- and full-distance Ironmans.

When Macuiba had the opportunity to pivot from racing Ironman Maryland in September to lining up as an elite at Gravel Worlds (the long-running Nebraskan gravel race not to be mistaken with the much-newer UCI Gravel World Championships), she readily took on this new challenge.

"I love how gravel biking has different focus points [than road racing]," Macuiba says. "It’s not just about how close you are to someone’s wheel; it’s also about navigating the terrain and handling technical sections…I find gravel to be fun and refreshing compared to road cycling."

While Macuiba's late entry into the elite wave at Gravel Worlds was accepted, she was facing two big challenges: she hadn’t done any gravel-specific training in months and, worse, no gravel bike to race on. She has a custom gravel bike in the works, but it wasn't going to be ready in time.

Some may have let this stop them from pursuing Gravel Worlds, but not Macuiba.

"I didn’t feel comfortable asking a friend to borrow a bike given the length and technical terrain of Worlds," Macuiba says. "So I turned to Facebook Marketplace, and the $500 Marin bike I ended up getting fit my budget and was close enough for easy pickup with less than a week to go for Worlds."

Macuiba adds with a laugh, "I refuse to call the bike a bad bike. I thought what better thing for [the bike] and I to bond over than both being a bit over our heads with Worlds."

With a bike now secured, Macuiba decided to rely on her years of aerobic endurance training, hoping it would translate to the 150 miles of dirt awaiting her in Lincoln.

The $500 Bike

• Brand: Marin Nicasio+
• Year: Unknown
• Size: 52
• Frame & fork material: Steel
• Tyres: 650b x 47mm (with Super Glue jammed into the cracks)
• Drivetrain: 1 x 9 speed Microshift mechanical

95 Miles and Lessons for A Lifetime

When the race got underway, Macuiba was pleased to keep up with the elite peloton for the first 10 miles, until the gravel-specific skills and tactics of the race came into play.

"I learned the harsh lesson that one bad corner will cost you the entire peloton," Macuiba says of her race experience. "But it also gave me so much respect for the other elite women. I tried to channel any humiliation I felt into absolute respect for the skills these elite women possess."

At mile 53, Macuiba crashed hard while attempting to corner at a high speed, planting the bike derailleur-side down into the dirt and rock. Despite Macuiba being physically OK, the bike was not.

Mechanics at the mile 54 aid station attempted to fix the bike’s shifting issues caused by the crash, but with little success. Macuiba had to manually push her shifters back into place after every click, and eventually, could only shift between two gears in the middle of her cassette.

"By mile 95, my knees were aching from grinding uphill at 50rpm and I was weary of spinning out on every downhill," Macuiba says. "I thought to myself, 'I can’t do this for 55 more miles.' Plus, I could have used more calories, and my body and mind were growing weary. I decided it wasn’t safe for me to try to continue and made the tough call to DNF."

Despite DNF’ing, Macuiba says she comes away from the race with a wealth of new information that she "couldn’t possibly" have learned without giving Worlds a go on her $500 steed.

"I took any feelings of embarrassment or imposter syndrome and told myself that physically, I can belong [in the elite field] if I work on my technical riding and get some better gear," Macuiba says. "As I waited for my teammate to pick me up [from the DNF point], I reminded myself that my elite application for Worlds was accepted for a reason."

"I would absolutely do this again"

Macuiba unflinchingly says she would do this entire experience again.

"I would absolutely do [Gravel Worlds] again," Macuiba says. "And when I get that finisher medal, no matter what place I’m in, I’m going to be really freaking stoked. I can’t wait to re-prepare myself for a big gravel race like this in the future."

Macuiba says that if she could impart any post-race wisdom to other cyclists, especially those new to the sport, it would be that "waiting for everything to be perfect will never be worth it."

"Waiting for the perfect day where everything aligns is unlikely to ever happen," Macuiba says. "Embracing the imperfect days will make you a better athlete mentally and physically – and I think that’s why we do sport at all."

Even if you feel twinges of embarrassment or nerves taking on a new challenge, Macuiba encourages cyclists of all abilities to push through those feelings and enjoy the new adventure.

"As I stood on the start line with these incredibly elite women and their really nice bikes, I did feel some embarrassment," Macuiba says. "But I thought, 'You’re already here, so just do your best,' and I ended up having such a cool experience that I would never have had if I waited for the perfect circumstances."

As for the $500 Facebook Marketplace bike? After it gets some TLC to recover from its battle wounds, Macuiba plans on keeping the bike and loaning it to family members so they can experience the joy of riding and trying something new and different, too.

"Steel will never die," Dario Pegoretti once famously declared.

The legendary Italian framebuilder was speaking about the material’s enduring quality at a time when carbon was rapidly taking over the bike industry. Nearly two decades later, while walking through the MADE bike show, Pegoretti may have been right – though not in the way he may have imagined.

Steel was everywhere at the Portland handmade bike show, as you’d perhaps expect, but what was more surprising was what builders were doing with it.

Steel in 2026 looks nothing like the skinny, round-tubed, heavy lugged, rim-brake bikes of old. Modern steel is lighter than ever and paired with 3D-printed titanium and carbon aero foils or custom-drawn to create a no-expense-spared climbing bike, or fully hand-formed into aerodynamic truss structures around 32-inch wheels.

At MADE, Big Block, Scarab and Rare Earth each approached steel from a very different direction, but all demonstrated that one of cycling’s oldest frame materials still has plenty of unexplored territory left.

Big Block 427: framebuilding for the CAD generation

Raleigh, North Carolina-based builder Dustin Simons showed a bike made from steel, yes, but also carbon and 3D-printed titanium, using each material where, in his view, its particular qualities served the bike best.

Simons is a self-proclaimed "lifelong grease monkey," yet when it comes to his bike designs, his process consists of a fair bit of computer time.

Much of his Big Block 427 show bike was conceived digitally, including complex junctions that can be 3D printed rather than painstakingly fabricated by hand. That makes it easier to create intricate interfaces, simplifies fixturing and allows Simons to easily adapt the same underlying design to different rider geometries.

The mixed-material approach makes for unique lines, welds where one wouldn't necessarily expect them and stands out in the bike's aerofoil-shaped carbon sleeve.

Rather than treating one material as inherently superior, the 427 is more of a pick-and-mix: steel where steel makes sense, carbon where carbon does, and printed titanium where conventional fabrication would be unnecessarily complicated.

"All materials are the sum of their tradeoffs," Simons explains. "I build with them all because I believe they all serve different purposes. We shouldn't have to give up a forward-looking design that takes advantage of all the ways modern bikes are beautiful and improved just because of the material it was made from."

There’s a practical benefit to all that digital work, too. By shifting some of the labour from the workshop into CAD, Schwell can keep the cost of a fully custom bike relatively grounded, which is Schwell's raison d'etre: to "build bikes people can actually afford."

In the rarefied world of handmade bicycles, "affordable" is, of course, relative. But at $3,200 for a frameset including custom geometry, custom seatpost mast, and custom paint, Big Block sits well below many of the five-figure dream machines displayed at the show. Schwell even paints the bikes himself.

Scarab Serena: steel, but make it premium

Where Big Block is rethinking how a steel bike is made, Scarab Cycles decided to tackle how the material is perceived.

"People sometimes think of steel as cheap," Scarab founder Santiago Toro told me.

His show bike, The Serena, is an exercise in proving otherwise.

The Serena is the most conventional-looking machine of the three steel bikes featured here with slender tubes, restrained proportions and a classic road silhouette that doesn’t immediately scream technological showcase. But beneath those clean lines lies an obsessive effort to create the ultimate steel climber's bike.

"Serena asks a question that extends beyond weight and stiffness: how should the ultimate climbing bicycle feel?" the brand's marketing material reads.

"The answer is both technical and somehow psychological. A good climbing bike is the result of variables that can be measured, and others that can only be felt."

Steel is the base of this project because, for one, it's all Scarab does, but also because of the material's "balance of compliance, spring-like return, precision, and durability."

Scarab worked with Columbus to develop an ultralight family of custom-drawn Spirit tubes specifically for the Serena, tuning diameters, wall thicknesses, tapers and shapes around the demands of the bike rather than simply stripping weight from an existing platform.

The tubes are paired with a custom-machined two-piece head tube, a T47 bottom bracket, 3D-printed stainless-steel dropouts, fully integrated cable routing and, of course, rider-specific geometry.

The complete bike Scarab brought to MADE is Toro’s own, labelled 0 of the 25 complete builds the brand will offer.

Designed as more than a frameset, Scarab developed complete configurations with climbing-oriented partners so that the gearing, wheels, cockpit, saddle, tyres, and contact points all contribute to the same "riding sensation".

The build includes a Campagnolo Super Record 13 with Ultra upgrade kit, a Darimo Nexum Drag cockpit and T2 seatpost, a Selle Italia SLR Racing Replica saddle, and Vittoria Corsa Pro 30mm tyres. Wheel choices include the 1,030 g Tune Yokto 3030, Campagnolo Hyperon Ultra, and Lightweight Meilenstein ART (as shown).

Estimated complete-bike weights range from approximately 6.95 kg to 7.16 kg, based on the published configurations and a size 56 prototype.

The price? $16,167 USD.

Even Toro himself admitted to feeling a tad nervous riding something this expensive. But buyers are, apparently, less apprehensive. Toro revealed that Scarab had already sold eight Serenas before the ordering window had even officially opened.

As a Colombian brand, Scarab Cycles is uniquely positioned for this climbing experiment. There's simply no escaping the mountains there, and the country is known for producing some of the sport’s finest climbers.

"Being a cyclist and a Colombian means one thing: you are constantly exposed to mountains. Climbing here is not optional. It is not something you specifically aim for, nor something you carefully prepare around. It simply becomes part of how life happens here," the brand muses. "Colombians do not live despite the mountains. We live within them, alongside them, adapting naturally to their gradients and conditions."

These gradients are replicated in Serena's paint, with silver fading into green, and touches of purple revealing themselves only as you moved around it. Sadly, my camera struggled to capture it. Some bikes are simply better seen in person.

Rare Earth Rare Berd: are those even tubes?

If Scarab's Serena challenges the assumptions about steel, then Brian Hall’s Rare Berd (Rare Earth Cycle)takes those assumptions and throws them out the window altogether.

"Most people look at this bike and say, ‘That’s really cool,’” Hall told me. “Then there’s 20% of the people that give me a barf emoji, so… yeah.”

Hall's 32-inch-wheeled machine was created in collaboration with Berd to showcase the wheel brand's newly launched Sparrow 50 Gold wheels. With the 32-inch aero wheels, Hall decided to design an aero steel frameset to match, steel fork included.

Hall describes it as "an aero drop-bar-shaped mountain bike," noting that the fork offset and trail numbers are more akin to a rigid mountain bike than a conventional gravel machine.

The finished bike looks as though it came from a carbon mould or a 3D printer. Instead, Hall painstakingly formed the entire thing by hand.

"For me it was an exercise in sort of artistic, sculptural shaping," he said. "The whole bike is American steel, so I hand-formed steel to be aerodynamic."

"It’s a skeleton with a skin on it, basically. A steel skin."

The top tube, chainstays and fork were shaped around an internal truss structure made from thin steel tubing. Hall then covered the truss skeleton with thin sheet steel to create the aerodynamic shapes.

The down tube and seat tube required a different bit of invention. Hall formed round steel tubing into aero profiles, taking some inspiration from the Specialized Tarmac SL8.

For being fully made of steel, the Rare Berd is surprisingly light: 22 pounds, ready to ride. That’s just under 10kg, complete with enormous 32 x 2.4" tyres.

Whether the Rare Berd performs as boldly as it looks remains an open question. Hall said that while the Berd wheels have been tested in the wind tunnel, the bike had not. He'd only finished it about a week and a half before the show. This also means that he'd spent barely any time in the bike's saddle, limiting his riding to the paved roads to keep the show bike "pristine".

But the 32-inch wheels themselves are anything but a novelty to him. He said he's already built several mountain and bikepacking bikes around the larger wheel size. And he is emphatic about the result.

"I love it. I absolutely love it," he said. "I pretty much quit riding 29ers at this point."

Both Rare Earth and Scrab Cycles received Builder's Choice awards at the show.

Julian Alaphilippe snakes across the road and skids his back wheel to a halt. He has just won the individual time trial at the 2019 Tour de France, and the people of Pau are in a frenzy. Not for 30 years have they seen a Frenchman win in the yellow jersey at the race. Alaphilippe, their golden prince, has not only kept hold of his overall lead – on a day he was meant to lose it – he’s grown it by 14 seconds.

The crowds cheer as if celebrating a cup final-winning goal. Alaphilippe springs out of his saddle and plants himself upright under the sun in the Place de Verdun. It looks for a moment as if he might bow. In the swell of excitement, and the outpouring of love around him, it feels as if he should. This is a once in a generation showman. The fans have witnessed a performance for the ages.

Seven years on, those same admirers might have fallen to their knees on hearing reports of Alaphilippe’s retirement on Thursday night. According to L’Équipe, the 34-year-old has decided to end his career with immediate effect. He still has a year left on his contract at Tudor Pro Cycling, but the news is that he has already crossed his last finish line.

“There’s nothing official, but don’t expect to see me again,” Alaphilippe had said at the summit of Alpe d’Huez, on the penultimate day of last month’s Tour – his final race.

There were no tears then, just a face wearied by 13 years as a pro. Having only committed to cycling after tossing a coin with becoming a drummer, he leaves the sport as a two-time world champion, six-time Tour de France stage winner, but most importantly, the darling of the French public, the goateed swashbuckler who showed that, win or lose, charm never goes away.

There’s a parallel universe somewhere in which Alaphilippe won that Tour de France in 2019. He wore the yellow jersey for 14 days, including in the time trial, and only surrendered his lead after times were taken prematurely on stage 19 due to a hailstorm and landslide, at a point when he was trailing Egan Bernal by two minutes on a climb. Might he have closed the gap on the downhill? He was probably the best descender in the race. But there was no bitterness later that evening. “I said whatever the result, I wouldn't have any regrets, and today I don't have any regrets. I have everything,” he said.

Alaphilippe went on to finish fifth in Paris that year, head held high as the man who helped the home fans believe. You’re not supposed to have favourites as a journalist, but that Tour instilled something in me, too. I was there in Pau when he won, and ever since, I am yet to hear a crowd’s roar pierce like that at a bike race.

It’s that Tour that will form a large part of the Frenchman's legacy, as well as the back-to-back rainbow jerseys that followed in 2020 and 2021. In those years, he was the best rider in the world; a versatile talent capable of winning Flèche Wallonne or Strade Bianche with a fierce kick, but also more tactical duels like Milan-San Remo and De Brabantse Pijl.

These were some of the 45 victories Alaphilippe collected throughout his career. It bears reminding that he was neither a dominant sprinter, time triallist, nor climber; instead, he had to outmanoeuvre his rivals, beating them each time with power and panache.

And still, sometimes he got it wrong. Over the years, he became a star of the Fédération Française de la Lose (FFL), a collective that celebrates its country’s sporting shortcomings. Alaphilippe – who the FFL warmly nicknamed 'Alain Philippe', and refer to simply as ‘Alain’ – made headlines twice: when he celebrated early at Liège-Bastogne-Liège in 2020, letting Primož Roglič dip under his outstretched arm and beat him; and on stage 15 of the 2025 Tour, when his celebration was late rather than premature, a fist in the air for what turned out to be third place.

“Like an idiot I went for the sprint,” he laughed afterwards in Carcassonne, blaming the confusion on a broken radio. “I have to see it in a funny way.”

That sense of humour only made Alaphilippe’s allure stronger. If Romain Bardet was the intellectual, Thibaut Pinot the dogged soul, then Alaphillipe was the playful sprite, the musketeer who sparred with his rivals, and then grinned cheekily to the onlookers.

To spread cheer during the Covid lockdowns, he posted a one-minute video of himself dancing around his living room dressed as the Easter Bunny. In 2018, he matched his green leader’s jersey with a pointed hat to make a Robin Hood costume when the Tour of Britain visited Nottinghamshire. The following year, during his two-week stint in yellow at the Tour, he became an online meme after he looked down the TV camera, smirked, and twitched his eyebrows, in the presence of French president Emmanuel Macron behind the podium gantry.

And then, of course, there were the heartfelt moments, the emotions that show us this is more than just bike racing. Alaphilippe cried as he dedicated his Tour stage win in 2020 to his late father, Jacques, who died two months before. It was from him that he had inherited his love of music, brought up as the son of an orchestra conductor, a man he honoured by taking the yellow jersey again.

Five years later, Alaphilippe had fans dancing to his tune at the GP de Québec, where he earned what now stands as his final career victory. “I’m here to try to win. I’m not here to make the show,” he said in his post-race interview. In the end, he did both.

As sudden as reports of his retirement may seem, it's fitting that Alaphilippe’s last hurrah came at the race that made his career. Last month, flanked by thousands of adoring cries in Montmartre on the final day of the Tour, he wafted his arms to gee up the crowds, then clapped along with their ovation.

“For the past few years, I’ve felt that I’m getting closer to the end,” he had said the day before. “As far as cycling goes, I’m not exactly young anymore. But in life, 34 is still young… All I really want is to hold my son in my arms.”

The time has now come for Alaphilippe to wave goodbye to the peloton. The hall of fame will welcome him as one of the greats. Farewell, Loulou, and thanks for the panache.

Visit any WorldTour race paddock, and you'll find it littered with radical-looking aero bikes. Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates XRG) has won prolifically using the Colnago Y1Rs, banishing the V5Rs lightweight bike to the team van. Perhaps most eye-catching is Factor's One bike, with its new take on geometry and wide forks that verged on UCI-illegal.

While many brands – Specialized with the Tarmac, Cannondale with the SuperSix Evo and Trek via the Madone – have dropped dedicated lightweight and aero models in favour of a 'one bike to rule them all' approach, elsewhere, it seems that aero bikes are here to stay. And they look weirder and more wonderful than ever.

Pogačar's dominance is such that he could probably ride pretty much any bike in the WorldTour and still win, while the Factor One has seldom been used by either the NSN Cycling team or Human Powered Health, with most riders instead opting for the Ostro VAM 2.

Are these latest aero bikes really offering the best solution for riders to be their fastest, or are they perhaps ‘not quite there yet’? If so, what refinements might come next?

Rider and bike, together as one

There is one annoying trend in the bike industry: vague, unclear testing or white papers. There are often quotes about the ‘watts saved’ versus another bike, be that a previous generation one from the brand or, quite commonly, ‘the leading competitor’.

Very often, details are limited: just the speed is given, maybe the yaw angle if we’re lucky. But it is often neglected which wheels were tested, tyres, handlebar width and geometry setup, or even if a rider was present on the frame for the test or not.

Our sister publication Cyclingnews has been testing bikes in the wind tunnel over the last few years. A common trend has been that, just because a bike alone shows itself to be fast, or even slow, with no rider present, it does not necessarily mean that it will maintain that relative position when a rider is added.

Some frames may perform badly without a rider, then be significantly faster with a rider present. Meanwhile, others test fast as a frame only, yet drop down the charts once a rider is onboard.

The reason for this is that a cyclist's legs are two large moving pistons that disrupt airflow and create more frontal area than the entire bike frame and wheels combined.

Add a great big torso on top of the bike, and total drag increases dramatically. This is why the performance differences between frames tend to get significantly closer with a rider present. Partly because the total drag percentage of the bike is so small when a rider is present, but also because some aerodynamic features of a bike can be rendered somewhat inept once you add legs on either side of it.

The industry has taken note of this, and some bikes are being designed and tested with a rider present. In developing the latest Specialized Tarmac SL9, for example, the engineers used a moving-legs mannequin as part of the design process.

We may be reaching a point where aerodynamic gains in bike design are slowing down – the low-hanging fruit has already been collected – but designing bike frames with riders in mind is where we will most likely see the next set of gains.

Shape shifting

There are a few other interesting design features that have become commonplace in cycling, which need to be considered when taking aerodynamics into account. First and foremost, the acceptance of wider tyres.

Previously, riders typically used 19-21mm tyres, whereas now 30mm tyres are commonplace, often measuring as wide as 32mm due to the wide rims they are fitted to. The wheel size, however, has remained consistent. These wide tyres marginally increase the height of the bike and the circumference of the wheel.

The introduction of shorter cranks has an impact, too. Short cranks, which open a rider's hip angle, require a higher saddle to achieve the same leg extension at the base of the pedal stroke. This again raises the COM and the frontal profile by a small amount and does increase drag.

Given that road frames have not changed significantly since tyres have gone from 19- to 32mm, and crank length from 175- to 165mm, there is clearly scope for aerodynamic frames to be designed with these factors in mind.

For example, a lower bottom bracket drop would account for shorter cranks, and I think it is likely a design path that frame manufacturers will pursue.

Track cycling leads the way

Track cycling leads the way in aerodynamic innovation, in part because, in individual efforts as well as small-team events like the Team Pursuit, aerodynamics accounts for most of the forces riders must overcome.

Factor, for example, takes several design cues from its track bike that won gold at Paris 2024 for Team Australia in the men’s team pursuit, and applies those to the Factor One.

The latest BMC time-trial bike, used by Stefan Küng and his Tudor Pro Cycling teammates and currently offered to the public in limited quantities, shares several design features with the Hope track bike used by Team GB.

This wide-fork, high-seatstay design is a perfect example of bikes being designed around riders. The new BMC Timemachine features high seatstays, directly contradicting the approach taken by most brands in their aero bikes. Seatstays dropped across the board when aero bikes first appeared on the scene; doing so reduces frontal area and frame-only drag. But when a rider is present, the difference is smaller.

This is where it gets interesting. BMC has not only raised the seatstays, but also deepened them and extended the aerofoil profile forwards. This, in theory, should result in a smoothing of the airflow off the back of the rider’s legs and decrease turbulent pressure drag behind.

We are also seeing more customized cockpits and handlebars solutions. This is not new in track or time trial events, but road setups are more tailored now. The latest Cervelo S5 uses a one-piece bar and stem, but what the pros are using features bespoke effective stem lengths, bar widths, and stem angles that are not readily available for the public to use, even if the overall design is the same.

Bikes designed for purpose

While track and time-trial bikes may influence road design, they're generally designed to travel at much higher, more consistent speeds. A design that is ‘fast’ at 60-70km/h (track speeds) might not be relatively as fast at 40-50km/h (road race speeds), let alone at WorldTour climbing speeds.

In the same way, riders use specific skinsuits for expected race-speed averages; frame designs suitable for track and time trial might not work as well for road racing, let alone for consumer frames.

How a bike actually rides also matters. Let’s take the radical Colnago Y1Rs and the more traditional Cervelo S5.

The Colnago is not quite as refined and direct in the front-end handling, while the rear compliance is not at the same level as the Cervelo S5. We’ve tested the S5, and it is genuinely a superbly balanced race bike, with stiffness and comfort where required. The design principles of the bike have remained similar in all its iterations going back over 10 years, but each model has been refined and optimised based on rider feedback.

Potentially, the reason the Factor One has not been used as much at the pro level is that, given its design choices, it lacks versatility.

Tech editor Aaron Borrill, who tested the Factor One, found it was an absolute rocket at higher speeds. But, several design elements and feedback I’ve heard suggest that it is not the most comfortable for long days in the saddle.

It’s also been suggested that it can be prone to variable wind directions experienced at lower speeds and when riding in a bunch. It’s a great piece of specialist design, and I applaud Factor for it. But being a revolutionary bike, it will likely need some refinements to find that balance between out-and-out aero and a bike that offers all-day compliance, comfort, and confidence.

The weight factor

Aero frame design can be held back by our obsessions around weight.

We’ve seen with the new Giant Propel, Merida Reacto, and Trek and Specialized converging on a do-it-all aero lightweight bike that some manufacturers are still chasing low weight over total aero efficiency. This does result in a somewhat compromised aero bike, but one that can hit the 6.8kg UCI weight limit, or even drop below it for consumers.

The aero bikes, even if heavier, are ‘faster’, with the caveat that speed remains consistent. Even over longer climbs with some accelerations, a 500g weight difference does not hinder the aero bike, especially at the WorldTour level. But there is a tangible difference between a bike that is 500g lighter vs a frame that is five watts less draggy. Psychologically, we can feel the weight difference, but not the watt difference.

Personally, I can also attest that a lightweight bike is more ‘fun’ to ride. It is lively, accelerates perceptively faster, and feels nimble and effortless.

I used to train on my TT bike and do 40km/h endurance rides, but it felt sluggish to accelerate, climb, and descend, even though it was undoubtedly faster. I can’t feel the difference between riding at 30- or 32km/h, but removing a bottle from my bike makes it ‘feel’ better to ride, which in my mind has a psychological impact.

The final word

Even though we are seeing some wild and wacky aero bike designs, in my opinion, they are not going far enough, given how technology and equipment choices have advanced.

We are starting to see more technology from track cycling make its way into bike design, as are rider- and frame-engineered solutions. But larger tyres and shorter cranks accommodating new frame designs might be the most interesting direction that frame design will likely travel.

Of course, this needs to be balanced with the other factors that contribute to a ‘good’ bike. There is a good chance that the next lot of revolutionary aero bikes will be refinements of what we are seeing now, with features that improve ride quality, not just wind-tunnel performance numbers.

But there will still be the ever-present limitation of weight, where riders are unwilling to sacrifice the tangible, perceptible difference of a lighter bike, versus the less perceptible to humans yet clearly genuine advantage of a less draggy bike.

This morning, I ascended a two-mile climb on my favourite 20-mile route. My heart rate peaked at 159bpm – just over three times its resting rate.

I was riding an electric bike, using a moderate power setting; not long ago, I’d have completed the route in full-power mode with a similar heart rate. Later, I nipped to Asda for some groceries, adding to my riding today.

Though I have been riding some sort of bike or e-bike for almost all my adult life, this year something bit me. I’ve upped my mileage from around 150 miles a year to 800 in the last six months; a third of this has been popping to the shops. Over that period, my Garmin smartwatch has recorded my resting heart rate falling from 61 to 51bpm. I have also lost 5kg, and my shrinking waistline means I increasingly need a new wardrobe.

Many inspirational writers say that they get up at 5:30 to work out as part of their journey to corporate success. For my part, a week after moving in with my wife in Weymouth (Dorset, UK) in November 2024, I found that I needed exercise to be easier to get along with. Initially I started going for a walk at 6am to prolong the marriage – a far more valuable result than any corporate success. However, more recently, the bike has taken over.

Nipping to the shop

1,100 miles of morning walks later, in late April this year, I found a way to secure my bike so it is as easy to use as getting in my car. This seems to have unleashed my riding in a big way. The supermarket Asda is 1.5 miles from me – a 10-minute ride down a shared-use cycling and walking path (the Rodwell Trail), that is just as quick as getting in the car and sitting in a traffic jam.

Ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games, my local Weymouth and Portland council created a fantastic cycling network around the town. As a result, around a third of my riding hasn’t been about marital harmony but instead getting a couple of days’ worth of groceries or nipping to town. At around 12p per mile in petrol, those avoided journeys would have cost approximately £32 in fuel. Charging the bike costs roughly 12p for every 60 miles, bringing the net saving to about £31.50 (just over $42 for our US readers).

A capable tank of a bike

Living in rural Dorset (Southwest England), with plentiful off-road opportunities including the beautiful Wessex Ridgeway Trail, I particularly liked the idea of a trekking e-bike.

I went for a Giant Talon E+ EX 29er that has a 250W Yamaha crank motor with 50Nm of torque, full mudguards and a rear pannier rack for around £2,500 (around $3,400). Honestly, though I sometimes used to brag I had it imported from Germany, it’s more like saying the same about a VW Golf rather than a Bugatti Veyron.

Over time, I replaced the saddle with a very comfortable one and swapped the coil-sprung fork for an air fork. Together, they have made off-road riding considerably more comfortable. I also use Maxxis Minion tyres for those moments when I need additional grip in thick mud.

Fitness measures

Though not clinical-grade measuring tools, the best smartwatches can give a rough indication of exercise intensity. My Garmin awards one intensity minute when my heart rate exceeds roughly 100bpm and two for each minute above 125bpm. These thresholds are personal to my device and settings. I aim for 70 intensity minutes a day, giving me a simple way to measure how hard I’m working rather than merely how far I’m riding.

Where I live now, I have miles of relatively safe and flat riding routes, and my morning blast is typically 7 miles with a modest climb midway. This is one of the keys to effective training – you push yourself a little harder after a period of comfort. When I’m feeling particularly hateful of my legs, I’ll do a nasty steep climb as part of the morning blast. That has brought me to a level of fitness where a 30-40-mile Saturday morning ride is now within reach.

From marital harmony to prosaic shopping trips, the bike has more than justified itself in my life. Though I still need the car, it has significantly reduced how much I use it, and in turn that has given me a new lease of life in terms of health, weight loss and general fitness.

Can you really get fit on an e-bike?

Electric assistance generally reduces the effort required compared with riding an unassisted bike, but that doesn’t mean e-cycling provides little exercise.

A 2022 meta-analysis of 14 studies found that e-cycling typically produced physiological responses equivalent to moderate-intensity physical activity. Although the responses were lower than during conventional cycling, they were generally higher than when walking.

Moderate exercise is not an upper limit. The intensity depends on the terrain, assistance setting and how hard the rider pedals. I use my e-bike as a tool for having more fun while exercising hard: on my latest Ridgeway climb, using assistance level 2/5, my heart rate peaked at 159bpm.

What Makes An E-Bike Road Legal?

In the EU and UK, an electrically assisted pedal cycle must have pedals capable of propelling it and a motor with a maximum continuous rated power of 250W. Electrical assistance must cut out at 15.5mph, although the rider can continue faster under leg power. Walk-assist throttles are permitted up to 6km/h.

Confusion persists even among police. West Midlands Police recently admitted that flawed testing led officers to seize and destroy a road-legal £6,500 cargo bike. The force dropped the case, apologised and agreed to pay compensation.

US regulations vary by state. Most use a three-class system: Classes 1 and 2 provide assistance up to 20mph, while Class 3 pedal-assist e-bikes can assist up to 28mph. Access to roads, cycle lanes and trails differs between states.

For decades, cycling has measured success much like every other professional sport: bigger broadcasts mean bigger audiences, bigger audiences attract bigger sponsors and, ultimately, a healthier sport.

The Tour de France draws millions of television viewers. Paris-Roubaix lines its cobbled sectors with spectators six deep. In track cycling and cyclocross, fans even pay to get through the gates.

Gravel has never looked like that.

At Unbound, the discipline’s biggest race, thousands travel across states (and increasingly continents) to be there. Yet remarkably few come simply to spectate. Most are racing, supporting a friend or family member, working for a brand, volunteering at an aid station or imagining themselves riding the same roads one day – should the entry lottery be in their favour. The line between participant and fan is almost impossible to separate.

And yet the professional side of gravel is growing quickly. Riders can make a legitimate living from the discipline, marquee events require entry lotteries, and organisers are increasingly looking to invest in livestreams and race coverage.

That evolution will be on display again this weekend in Lincoln, Nebraska, at (the unofficial but original) Gravel Worlds. The event will livestream its elite racing as professionals tackle roughly 150 miles of Nebraska gravel. Uniquely, the cameras will continue running till the very last amateur crosses the line, too.

Because in many ways, gravel has more in common with a marathon running event than the Tour de France. No one judges the health of a marathon by television ratings. The world’s biggest marathons are successful because hundreds of thousands of people want to take part year after year after year. Broadcasts exist, but participation is the engine.

Could the same be true for gravel?

For Gravel Worlds' Lead Promoter, Jason Strohbehn, the hierarchy is clear.

"The success of gravel revolves around the success of the 99%, not the pros. Our event is fully lifted by the 99%. Because of the 99%, we're able to get sponsors that want to cover the pro race."

In road cycling, the professional race is the product, and spectators are the audience. In gravel, the participants are the audience, the customer base and much of the economic engine all at once.

Do people really want to watch a 200-mile race live?

The numbers suggest they do.

In 2025, the Life Time Grand Prix generated 3.6 million YouTube views, more than 145,000 event attendees and 25.2 million social media impressions.

Livestreams of Unbound, Leadville and Big Sugar averaged almost 200,000 views in their first 96 hours online, while Unbound alone attracted more than 337,000. Peak concurrent viewership across the broadcasts reached 17,242.

Those figures may not rival the Tour de France, but they are substantial for a discipline whose professional ecosystem barely existed a few years ago.

Gravel Worlds has seen a similar appetite. The event began investing seriously in livestreaming two years ago and, according to Strohbehn, has yet to spend money promoting those broadcasts. Viewers have come largely through riders and followers sharing the streams themselves.

"Literally people, before the stream starts or as it starts, are sharing it on their social media and [that's how we're] getting views," he says. "For me, that means there are a lot of people very interested, very organically."

Last year’s broadcast reached viewers in 51 countries. South Africa made the event’s top-ten markets, something Strohbehn suspects has everything to do with South African off-road powerhouse Matt Beers.

But while gravel’s audience may be sizeable, it does not resemble a conventional sports fanbase, and shouldn't be treated as such. Unlike the Tour de France viewers, gravel watchers are past, current or future participants of the event they're watching.

Julie Dunkle is a good example. The 59-year-old from Encinitas, California, didn’t discover gravel by watching it or reading about it. She raced first.

"I got into gravel through racing and riding first, and the content followed naturally," she says. "Once I started racing in 2023, I wanted to better understand the scene – the key athletes, the big events, the tactics – so I began consuming more gravel content."

Participation changed what watching meant.

"Being a participant makes the viewing experience more engaging because you understand how hard the courses are, what the terrain feels like, and what the race dynamics actually mean," she says.

Her entry point was social media and podcasts rather than television. Today she also watches livestreams of the biggest races and follows particular riders, drawn more to personalities and racing styles than team allegiances.

"I tend to follow riders with strong personalities or interesting racing styles, not just results."

Oregonian Tucker White, 34, followed a similar path. He was introduced to gravel by his father and took part in gravel grinder events long before paying much attention to professional racing.

When he did start to consume content, it was the gear side of things that drew him in.

"As a tech and product nerd I am always keeping a keen eye to what is going on in the pro racing ranks when it comes to innovation," he says. "Because gravel has historically been significantly less regulated than road, it is always interesting to see how different riders and teams may approach the same event from a different perspective when it comes to bike setup, or how that setup varies by parcours, weather, sponsor obligations, and so on"

Now fully sucked into gravel, White says he tries "to watch or follow as many races as I can, the big ones being Lifetime Grand Prix, Gravel Earth Series and gravel world champs. It’ll be interesting to see how things continue to change with more race teams investing in gravel."

Dunkle and White may be just two individuals, but their paths are strikingly similar. Neither began as a spectator who later decided to try gravel. They rode first. Riding gave them a reason to care about the athletes, tactics, technology and stories surrounding it.

The fan emerged from the participant. And both want more coverage.

Dunkle would like stronger season-long narratives, better live data, more pre- and post-race analysis and more consistent coverage of the women’s field. White wants races that are easier to find and commentators capable of explaining what viewers are seeing.

Gravel’s participatory audience is not an argument against investing in media, but rather, an argument for thinking differently about who that media is for and what they're looking for.

Gravel Worlds has made accessibility central to its coverage, distributing it for free through YouTube and social media. A partnership with the active lifestyle media company Outside also put the race on the cycling website Velo without a paywall, and onto platforms including Roku and Samsung TV.

But the most revealing part of its broadcast may have little to do with the professional race at all.

Sofia Gibson, the Assistant Lead Promoter and Outreach Coordinator at Gravel Worlds, says one priority when introducing live coverage was making sure it served the rest of the field, too.

“We really care about the 99% of participants,” she says. That is why Gravel Worlds also created a finish-line livestream: friends and family can estimate when their rider will arrive, tune in and watch them cross the line. Thousands do.

It is a small detail, but perhaps the clearest illustration of what makes gravel fandom different. The professional race creates stories, heroes and spectacle. But the heart of gravel still sits much deeper in the field.

That may be where gravel’s media opportunity lies: not in building a vast audience of viewers at home, but in serving the participants who already sustain the sport.

The Tour de France needs spectators. Gravel needs participants. Increasingly, when it comes to gravel, they can be the same people.

I'm time-crunched, how much training is enough when I'm fitting it around work and family?

Coaching amateur athletes as well as pros, it’s a question I hear often. Hobby riders see their friends and riding buddies racking up more hours than they have available, and end up asking: just how much should I be riding to get fitter?

Getting fitter is about generating stress and resting appropriately.

Stress comes through increasing volume or intensity; it can be tracked through measures such as Training Stress Score (TSS), which uses data from each ride to determine how much load the session has put on the body. If you use Strava, you’ll see this represented as ‘Relative Effort’. As we build up the stress, we provide the training stimulus for our bodies to become fitter.

However, without adequate rest, our body does not enter a state in which it starts to adapt to the training stress and generate improvements in fitness over time. Balance is essential; without it, we leave ourselves open to issues such as dysfunctional overreaching and overtraining syndrome, the latter of which can take months to recover from.

Amateur athletes also need to consider the sum of all stresses. Higher training load adds to stress, as does looking after a young child, having a stressful job, suffering from poor sleep, or inadequate fueling for sessions and recovery.

When speaking with riders I coach, the first thing I ask them when we start working together is how much time they realistically have to dedicate to training, while leaving enough time for work, family, life, and rest. It’s vital we correctly gauge the sum of all stresses and availability to both train and rest, for the work put in to be effective.

This then leads us on to the next component of training, which is the intensity distribution. You may have heard of polarized training and the 80/20 concept. This relates to the theory that 80% of time should be spent training at low intensities, and 20% at higher intensities. Professionals – who have more time to train – might work with a ratio closer to 90/10, fluctuating depending on the time of the season and goals. For those with less time, however, it can be better to spend more time at higher intensities, as you can generate a greater training stress across a shorter amount of time.

Real life examples

Andy took a look at the training volume carried out by some of his coached athletes, the volume and intensity split looks very different...

ATHLETE 1 – UCI Continental rider

• Hours trained: 18-24
• Sessions completed: 10 (x6 bike, x2 S&C, x2 heat session)
• Intensity split: 81/19 in favour of below Lactate Threshold 1/lower intensity

ATHLETE 2 – Medical shift worker, expecting a baby

• Hours trained: 6-8
• Sessions completed: 6 (x5 bike x1 S&C)
• Intensity split: 66/34 in favour of below Lactate Threshold 1/lower intensity

A good rule of thumb that I apply with my coached riders is to do between two to three sessions that include higher-intensity efforts (above 8/10 on the RPE scale or 80% of threshold) a week, making sure that none of them fall on consecutive days. For the rest of the time, it is ideal to include longer-duration endurance rides. By this, I mean sessions that are around 6 or 7/10 in effort, or 60-70% of threshold power, and ideally at least 2 hours long.

The duration of those longer rides is important as it’s at this point that muscle glycogen stores become depleted and we generate more of our fat-burning capacity, even with consumption of appropriate carbohydrates during the session. This in turn helps drive certain aerobic fitness elements which help us produce more power over longer durations of time or find longer rides easier.

In terms of the number of hours you should be aiming to target, this unfortunately depends on your specific circumstances. Plus, the more experienced you are or the more you train, the greater the training stress is required to see greater training gains.

If you can manage two to three 45-60 minute intense sessions a week, that is a good starting point. If you add to that, recovery rides or endurance rides are optimal, with the latter being at least two hours. If you have the choice between two 90min endurance rides at the weekend, and one three hour session, opt for the three hour session to generate the most aerobic training gains. But if 90 minutes is your maximum, it is better than nothing.

Ultimately, the optimum volume for you is individual, and quality beats quantity; three to seven hours of structured training will see you make greater gains than seven to ten hours of random efforts. Just remember, you do need rest; your work, family life, sleep and nutrition all play a role in your ability to recover.

This year's Tour de France was the hottest on record, with temperatures close to 40ºC for many hours of several stages. At the roadside, fans placed newspapers on their heads as ad hoc shelter, while cold drink were more elusive, and more craved, than a Tadej Pogačar autograph. Even so, the 184 riders who started the race in temperatures of 34°C in Barcelona seemed largely unaffected. And that’s not just thanks to the ice socks and slush puppies that they were fed on a daily basis – it was thanks to their preparation.

Heat training has become an indispensable part of a rider’s schedule, particularly in the last five years. Now, alongside 25-hour training weeks and leg-sapping efforts to get into Tour de France shape, riders complete hour-long indoor training sessions dressed in winter gear, with the aim of getting as hot and bothered as possible. Meanwhile, trips to the gym now include an obligatory 30-minute stay in the sauna.

These sessions are designed to help riders adapt to racing in the heat, particularly sweltering Grand Tours – yet not just to survive but to actually perform better. Studies over the past 15 years have consistently shown that both active and passive heat training have a positive effect on a rider’s performance.

“When you do heat training, you increase blood plasma volume – essentially, you dilute the blood,” explains Tim Podlogar, a lecturer in exercise physiology at the University of Exeter and a staff member of the Tudor Pro Cycling team. “This reduces the haematocrit – the percentage of blood volume made up of red blood cells – which serves as a trigger for the body to produce more of them. Research has shown that over a few weeks it can increase red blood cells in the same way as EPO or spending time at altitude.”

Crucially, these physiological effects are not reserved exclusively for WorldTour professionals. Amateur riders looking to conquer a summer sportive or improve their local time trial times can reap the exact same blood-boosting benefits from a few targeted, sweaty turbo sessions. If that feels like a step too far, then pity the pros. Training indoors in a boiler suit without a fan might seem like a grim prospect, but it’s a sacrifice that riders have to make nowadays if they want to be competitive in the world’s biggest race.

“Like with any training, you’re getting better no matter what, but if you don’t do heat training then you do definitely notice it,” says Australian climber Chris Harper, who is riding at the Tour for Pinarello Q36.5. “If you haven’t spent the time doing it then when you get into a race you feel underprepared. The benefits are the same as going to altitude but you can do it from home.”

The history of heat training

Climate change might be giving us more extreme temperatures – and the hot weather affecting Europe this summer has already broken several records – but training and racing in hot weather isn’t new. France in July is hot – and that’s when the race has been held since its first edition in 1903. What is relatively new is the Tour’s participants realising that they stand to gain from specifically training in the heat. Maybe they’ve been a little slow on the uptake, as Podlogar explains that the science isn’t novel: “The history of heat acclimatisation improving exercising performance in the heat dates back to the early 19th century, when people were sent to work in hot climates. After a few days of exposure to hot environments they became better accustomed to work in the heat.” This was especially true in the American Civil War of the 1860s, where heat casualties were mostly limited to new recruits, with veterans faring much better under the summer strain.

Yet for cyclists, training for warmer climes didn’t become popular until the mid-2010s, and it took a few more years for it to become ubiquitous. “A study in 2010 showed that heat acclimatisation improved exercise performance in both cool and hot conditions, and teams began using it,” Podlogar says. That study, by Santiago Lorenzo of the University of Oregon, USA, showed a performance improvement of 5% in cooler environments after just 10 days of heat acclimatisation.

Ahead of the Tour de France, and before other races in warmer climes, coaches now incorporate heat training into a rider’s schedule at least twice a week. “Scientific evidence is clear that to include heat acclimatisation, an athlete needs a minimum of five to nine sessions to get the benefits,” Podlogar says. “Men need at least five days of exposure, and women nine days.” Heat training also forms part of a rider’s schedule in the latter part of an altitude camp.

“I normally do it in December before going to the Tour Down Under, as you have the double benefit of coming from a cold European winter into a warmer climate, and I find that it’s a really great tool to get in shape in the winter,” says Jayco-AlUla’s Swiss rider Mauro Schmid. “I also try to do it a little bit in the summer as I can really achieve some great results with heat training.”

How to heat train safely

The methods of heat training are not complicated. The most common involves dressing up in winter gear or a one-piece impermeable suit such as painters overalls and pedalling on the turbo or rollers for around an hour at Zone 2. The key is not to stress the body further with high-intensity effort. The principal aim is to gradually raise the core body temperature to between 38.5°C and 39.5°C. Any hotter and the effects are counterproductive.

“You don’t just want to make the surroundings hot, but also humid, so that you can’t easily lose the heat,” says Puck Alkemade, the lead physiology researcher of Core, whose real-time core body temperature sensor is used by the majority of Tour de France teams. “If you’re exercising in a full-body suit, you are creating a micro-climate around you, from which the heat and sweat you produce cannot escape. This warms you up quicker, makes your body work even harder to keep sweating, and this causes the adaptation.”

Schmid admits that “it can be quite hard mentally on the rollers when it’s nice outside” but he trains regularly indoors all in the name of heat adaptation. Over the years, the 26-year-old has learned the best methods. “I think a lot of people go a bit too hard – it shouldn’t be super uncomfortable and you need to be careful that your heart rate doesn’t go too high,” he says. “I’m a believer in not overdoing it and I’d rather do a few more sessions without really pushing myself to the absolute limit, rather than doing fewer sessions but destroying myself.”

If you don’t fancy getting exceptionally sweaty on the turbo, an alternative is the passive approach: sitting in a hot bath or a sauna for 30-40 minutes. Again, the goal is targeting an elevated core temperature, being careful not to exceed 40°C.

In the bath, you won’t notice it, but you’ll be sweating buckets. Up to two litres of sweat loss over an hour is not uncommon. “As you become heat-adapted, you start to sweat earlier and produce more sweat, meaning your core temperature doesn’t rise as quickly during exercise than it otherwise would,” Podlogar explains.

Most riders opt for a hybrid approach, getting hot on the turbo, then having a hot bath. But which works best? “The science is not completely sure on this yet,” Podlogar says. “What seems fundamental is that you need to have a high core body temperature coupled with a high skin temperature, which together increase the sweat rate and acclimatise you to the heat.” Is simply riding outside in warm weather not good enough? “No – because no matter how hot it is, there’s still so much airflow around you, cooling you down,” Podlogar says. “Indoors, you can really control the environment.”

The role of the Core sensor

Core claims that two-thirds of the Tour peloton are wearing their Core sensor, either through official team partnerships or private agreements. Before the sensor, the only other way to measure the body’s core temperature was via a rectal thermometer – and that’s not viable while riding a bike.

Core’s non-invasive sensor sits on a chest band that pairs with a heart rate sensor. It estimates the body’s real-time core temperature from a calculation that takes into account skin temperature and heart rate. The company claims “medical-grade accuracy”, whereas a comprehensive scientific review of the sensor in 2021 reported that, compared to a rectal thermometer, the Core sensor is “acceptably reliable” albeit often underestimating core temperature by up to 0.3°C. More recent studies have supported these findings.

The Core sensor remains the thermometer of choice for the pro peloton – and there’s one key reason. “Sometimes how you feel doesn’t match with how hot you actually are,” says Alkemade. “The Core sensor is objective, and it tells you whether you’re overheating or not. This gives you a better understanding of how to hydrate and fuel, which is especially important for pro riders.” In other words, the sensor helps them to optimise their adaptations from heat training.

“You cannot always trust technology to the maximum, but the Core sensor is a good tool and I use it to watch my core temperature and to figure out where my limit is,” Schmid says. “When my temperature gets really high I stop earlier. It’s especially useful in racing as if you see you have a super-high temperature you need to be careful about pulling and not overdoing it. With a high core temperature it’s not a good idea to attack with 40km to go, for example, so it’s a good reminder to save the legs a little bit because sometimes you cannot feel that you’re overheating.”

Making heat training individualised

As Podlogar highlights, science’s understanding of how to maximise the benefits of heat training is incomplete. A decade from now, Tour riders will no doubt be using more advanced, precise methods. Heat training, though near-universally adopted, is still in its relative infancy. “In literature we say that we should aim for a core temperature of 38.5°C during heat training, but we don’t actually know if this is the optimal temperature for everyone,” Alkemade admits.

The future points towards a more individualised approach. “A rider might respond in a totally different way from one heat training session to another due to fatigue, a lack of sleep or for many other reasons,” Alkemade says. “It’s therefore hard to predict their response, and that’s where individual monitoring becomes more important.”

Podlogar, who co-authored that 2021 review into the Core sensor’s accuracy, is more interested in “really understanding what’s driving these adaptations – is it the skin or the core temperature? And how can we optimise the load of heat adaptation?” He’s also curious to find out which method, passive or active, is more beneficial, and how best to heat-train while at altitude. “There’s still lots we’re unsure of but it’s very clear that heat training does help,” he says. “What we do know is that you can’t win races in the summer without first doing some proper heat training.”

HEAT TRAINING IN NUMBERS

38.5-39.5°C The optimal core body temperature riders aim to reach while heat training.

5% The potential boost in cycling performance after just 10 days of heat acclimatisation.

5-9 The minimum number of heat exposure sessions required to trigger meaningful adaptations.

2L The amount of sweat a rider can lose during a single, hour-long heat training session.

>40ºC The danger zone that core temperature must not stray into.

TRY AT HOME WITH CAUTION

Be warned, heat training places extreme stress on the body and carries a risk of heat exhaustion or heatstroke. Pro riders perform these sessions under expert supervision using real-time core temperature monitors. Attempting this at home without accurate temperature tracking or medical clearance can be dangerous. Approach heat training with caution: ensure you are pre-hydrated with electrolytes, and stop immediately if you feel dizzy, nauseous, or faint. Never attempt to push through the warning signs of overheating.

This feature was originally published in the 9 July 2026 print edition of Cycling Weekly magazine – available to buy on the newsstand every Thursday (UK only). Digital versions are available on Apple News and Readly. Subscriptions through Magazines Direct.

Uncharacteristically losing his cool, Jonas Vingegaard gestured angrily at a television motorbike to move along and leave him alone. A late incident on stage five of this year's Tour de France, had left the two-time champion scrabbling for a bike change, and his desire to avoid the camera’s gaze while drafting cars back to the peloton was understandable. But that flash of frustration served as a reminder that motorcycles have become an enveloping swarm around the Tour de France peloton.

There are as many as 100 motos on the road on each stage – an armada that has expanded to feed the demand for multi-angle live broadcasting, with around 45 camera bikes, and at least as many police escort and support motos. Conflict is inevitable. While they haven’t caused any major controversies so far in this year’s race, this sheer number of motos presents hazards, influences aerodynamics – and you wouldn’t bet against such incidents cropping up in the days to come.

“It would be nice not to worry about it, but it’s a big problem, for sure,” said Lidl-Trek’s Toms Skujiņš.

The issue at hand is almost as old as bike racing itself, but it has become increasingly pronounced in recent years: TV motorbikes getting too close to riders and creating a slipstream effect that has a real, sometimes even decisive, influence on the racing.

This is no occasional problem: it happens on each and every stage of the Tour de France, multiple times. Camera bikes frequently hover just in front of a breakaway, a solo attacker or the peloton. The benefit cannot be overstated: the effect is big enough to alter the outcome of the race.

A 2020 study by engineering professor Bert Blocken of Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, found that a motorbike sitting 10m ahead of a cyclist – and they are often much closer – reduces drag by 23%. This translates to an 8.9% speed increase, or a saving of 5.4 seconds per kilometre – 4kph of free speed at 54kph. Anyone benefitting from this effect is therefore much, much harder to catch. Conversely, if the peloton is the beneficiary, they are able to close the gap to the tête de la course much more easily.

Cycling Weekly contacted the UCI about this issue, but in response it referred us only to its rulebook – in which it is stated that a motorcycle “must operate from three-quarters in front of riders and must position itself on the opposite side of the wind in order not to provide a draft… nor allow riders to benefit from their slipstream.”

The rulebook emphasises that the motorcyclists “must carry out their work without disturbing the proper functioning of the race.” The vagueness is the problem here: how close is too close when it’s not specified in the rules?

It is generally accepted that a moto shouldn’t be within 10m of the racing, but it’s an unwritten rule – and it’s frequently ignored. Too often, as we’ve seen in this Tour de France, a motorbike loiters too close to riders, providing a pronounced aerodynamic benefit – as big a boost as a brisk tailwind. Following a motorbike at a distance of five metres, a rider’s speed increases by 15 seconds per kilometre. It’s a major advantage.

The aforementioned study from Blocken et al proved that even at greater distances there is a slipstream effect. At 30m, the following riders gain 2.7 seconds per kilometre, while at 50m it’s 1.6 seconds. A similar study by the same author, published three years later, determined that the effect of camera bikes can be even greater than that of cars. “A motorcycle with two persons sitting upright is a less aerodynamic object than [a] car. This leads to a larger benefit for the cyclist behind the motorcycle,” the report concluded.

Multiple variables affect how much influence a motorcycle has on a following cyclist, not least the road’s gradient, the speed, and the direction of the wind. But the summary of Blocken’s 2020 report stated: “The common concern in the cycling community that drafting behind motorcycles can influence the outcome of races is correct.” Riders at the Tour wholeheartedly agree.

NSN’s George Bennett, riding his sixth Tour, describes the feeling of being in a moto’s draft. “You don’t really feel it, as you’re still pedalling fast and pushing the same power, but you do notice that you’re going really fast,” he says. “You’ve also got to remember that one or two kilometres per hour faster is huge – it’s such a big margin. Suddenly gaining 10 watts is quite a big difference. In a sport of millimetres, all of these small things make a big difference.”

In Bennett’s view, it’s an issue that tends to favour the breakaways more than those fighting for overall victory at the end of a stage, but still has a significant effect on the race. “There are examples where it’s really bad,” he says, “[including] some obvious cases in the Giro d’Italia where the peloton were pulling death turns and not getting anywhere. And at the Tour de Romandie, life at the back of the peloton wasn’t fun.”

Like others we spoke to for this feature, Bennett points to Italian races as the worst offenders. “I’m sure this will be a hot topic this Tour,” adds the New Zealander. “But it’s not a new topic – it’s been around forever.”

Complaints from the peloton about the proximity of motorbikes have become increasingly common in recent years, but Bennett admits it works both ways: riders go out of their way to capitalise on the slipstream. “You want to be the guy who attacks first because you know you’re going to get a draft from the bike,” he says. “I’ve benefitted hugely from motorbikes myself.”

He is unequivocal about where the responsibility lies. “It’s definitely not at all on the riders – you’d be an idiot to move out of their draft – it’s on the motorbikes. I even know stories of Belgian ex-team-mates who have talked to motorbike drivers and made friends with them because it can really affect the race.”

What, then, is the solution? Some have suggested equipping motorbikes with lasers to project a ‘distance bubble’ on the road, while others have called for more side-on filming (though Blocken notes this would still provide an aerodynamic effect). The use of drones – as seen at Milan-San Remo and in numerous cyclo-cross races – has also been proposed. However, the most popular idea is enforcing a minimum distance rule of 25m. Blocken points out that the challenge is to ensure the camera motos can still do their job effectively. “From 100m away, on a winding road, the camera won’t see the rider.”

So what does he think should be done? “The best that can be done, while we’re waiting for drones to become practical, which could be decades, is setting some minimum distance rules. The cameras nowadays are highly advanced and they can record high quality footage 30-40m away.” One even simpler solution from Blocken is to reduce the number of motorcycles allowed in front of the racing. “We often see multiple motorcycles together in front of a group,” he says. “At most there should only be one motorcycle.”

When Blocken first published a study into the advantage motorbikes provide to following riders in 2017, the UCI was initially dismissive of his work. “The UCI technical director said it’s just a load of nonsense,” he recalls. Since then, the governing body has been more open to working with Blocken, and in 2023 it extended the minimum distance a following team car must remain behind a rider in a time trial from 10m to 25m. Blocken doubts this rule is enforced, and no such action has been taken in road races.

Even if the UCI eventually introduces new measures, Skujiņš warns that the real challenge will lie in enforcement. “A lot of the times we tell the race commissaires that the moto is too close. It might go away for five minutes, but then it’s back five minutes later,” the Latvian says. “We also need to educate the drivers and cameramen that they can’t sit close to the rider.” It’s an issue guaranteed to rear its head repeatedly at this year’s Tour – and one that shows no signs of being resolved any time soon.

Summers are getting hotter, and with that, it's getting more important for riders to look at skin protection - both in terms of sun cream and UV-protective kit, as incidences of skin cancer and melanoma are increasing all around the world. With average temperatures and days of sunshine reaching record highs, should we really be heading out for long rides without giving our skin a thought?

While cyclists in the northern hemisphere are super-keen to get into short-sleeved jerseys and shorts after grinding out a long and cold winter period, is it time to switch to lightweight, long-sleeve, UV-protective garment alternatives instead?

What is skin cancer?

There are two kinds of skin cancer: melanoma, which is faster-acting and more serious, and non-melanoma, which is slower-acting and more easily treatable. Both are serious concerns and require medical attention. They occur as UV radiation from the sun penetrates our skin and damages the DNA in the skin cells, which, over time, can develop into skin cancer. The higher the UV exposure, such as extended periods sunbathing, sun beds, or living nearer the equator, the more likely you are to develop skin cancer.

According to the cancer charity Macmillan, individual risk factors are blonde/red hair, fairer skin or freckles, and green or blue eyes. People of colour have less risk of developing skin cancer due to more melanin being produced in the skin, but areas such as the palms of the hands and soles of the feet are risk factors, and prolonged exposure to UV rays will still cause damage.

There are two kinds of UV: UV A and UV B. UV B is short-wave and causes more surface damage, such as burning and DNA damage, while UV A is long-wave, penetrates deeper, and has a greater impact on aging skin.

Why does this matter to cyclists?

If you cycle in shorts and a short-sleeved jersey, you are exposing your head, arms, hands, and legs to UV radiation. These are common locations for skin cancer development. Cancer Research UK found that between 2018 and 2021, more than a third of melanomas diagnosed in women were on the leg (hip to feet). In men, 40% were diagnosed on the torso. Reasons for this were suggested as men being more likely to remove shirts in the summer, and women wearing shorter skirts or shorts.

Additionally, a research paper published in 2026 by T J Scott et al, found that between 1990 and 2023, the mean length of the summer period has increased by 5-7 days in both hemispheres, but more so in the northern hemisphere. This is also paired with more days of sun and an increase in temperatures, which comes with an increase in UV radiation.

As cyclists, summer and sun normally mean arms and legs come out, which are both areas that can be affected by skin cancer and UV damage. Which really begs the question: why aren’t more cyclists keeping long sleeves on in the summer?

Why would I wear long-sleeved kit in the summer?

For many cyclists, a long-sleeved jersey is typically a thermal fleece-lined offering designed for autumn and winter riding. But there has been an ever-growing trend, in part pushed by mainland European and Asian markets, for lightweight, summer-focused long-sleeved garments that provide greater UV protection.

A good example is MAAP’s Aeon Jersey. This comes in both long- and short-sleeve variants, and both are UV protective to 15 UPF (Ultraviolet Protection Factor). UPF is the protective rating for clothing, which blocks UV A and UV B, while SPF (Sun Protection Factor) protects against UV B, burning rays, and is the rating for suncream. As a general guideline, UPF refers to the percentage of UV that penetrates, so UPF 50 means only 1/50th or two per cent of UV rays penetrate. SPF rating refers to the amount of time you are protected from sun damage in minutes, times the rating. So if you’d require 10 minutes of sun to burn, SPF 15 gives you 150 minutes of protection; this doesn't account for moisture, sweat, or salt but provides a useful indication. Meanwhile, UPF is a constant, and the protection does not wane over time.

The Aeon jersey comprises Polartec Delta fabric, which is highly breathable and exceptional at moisture wicking. Indeed, the temperature range for the long-sleeve jersey suggested by MAAP is 18-35˚C, so definitely the warmest of summer weather we can expect in the UK, and the upper end of what tends to be tolerable for most. Having tested the long-sleeve jersey on some more tropical summery days, it does a very good job of wicking moisture away while keeping me cool.

Other similar options include the Pas Normal Studios Essential Light LS, Assos Mille GT LS, and Castelli Coretto LS; all are lightweight long-sleeve jerseys that aim to protect against UV damage.

For the legs, the Rapha Pro Team Lightweight Bib tights offer full-length bib-tight protection, but the material is thinner and has no fleece or thermal properties. Both the Velocio Luxe bibs and the Ornot lightweight bibs serve a similar purpose.

The big benefit here, of course, is that UV exposure to the skin is greatly reduced, so the incidence of UV-related damage should be lower, and the risk of skin cancer should be reduced as a result. Yes, these garments are a touch warmer by comparison, especially on more humid days, but I'd argue the potential long-term safety benefits far exceed the slight increase in discomfort.

What about sun cream?

Of course, another way to protect against sun damage is by using sun cream. Normally, these are at least SPF 30, but it is generally recommended to use SPF 50 in Europe. SPF 100 is not uncommon nearer the equator, though. Sun creams do protect well against UV damage, better than most jerseys in fact.

But there is a problem.

Sun creams are generally tested in an environment where there is not as much sweating. When cycling in high summer, this is usually not the case. It's also recommended to reapply them every 90 minutes or so, although some of the best cycling sunscreens do offer a longer window of protection. Although you can get small sun cream bottles or sprays, I have rarely seen any cyclist stop mid-ride to reapply suncream. That 90 minutes recommendation is also generous if you end up sweating heavily. Additionally, salt crystals on the skin left as residue from sweat and evaporative cooling can increase the damage caused by UV to the skin.

As previously mentioned, suncream becomes less effective over time. In contrast, a UPF-rated piece of clothing maintains its UV-blocking capabilities for the entire duration of a ride.

The bottom line

If you are riding in sunnier conditions, to best protect your skin against UV damage and reduce the risk of developing skin cancer, you should wear long-sleeved, UV-protective cycling garments. A lot of brands now offer long-sleeved jerseys and tights that feature lighter, more breathable, moisture-wicking materials designed to keep you pretty much as cool and comfortable as a short-sleeved variant. You can also buy UV Screens from various brands, which are lightweight arm and leg warmers that generally offer UPF 50 protection.

You should also apply sun cream to areas of high UV exposure as well as to any visible scars and the back of your neck, ears, and nose. If you’re planning a long day in the saddle, take sun cream with you to reapply.

For those with finer hair or less hair on the top of their head, wear a lightweight cap. All those helmet vents will let sunlight in and cause both an interesting-looking tan as well as damage to the skin.

It’s just after midday in the river-banked commune of La Voulte-sur-Rhône, and Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney is daring to believe. “I’m not going to lie,” she begins, speaking to a TV crew at the start of stage seven of the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, “the dream of mine is to win at the top of the climb. Mont Ventoux is so iconic that it would be a career-defining moment.”

It seems like a bold statement. Niewiadoma-Phinney, remember, has not made a habit of winning races; until Friday, she had never won a stage of a Grand Tour, and had only collected three victories in seven years. A win on Mont Ventoux? She’s more likely to lose time to her GC rivals, some scoff at the thought. But they’re fools for underestimating a former Tour champion.

You see, Niewiadoma-Phinney has done her homework. She’s reconned the climb three times, familiarised herself with all of its 16km of tarmac, and though she doesn’t tell the interviewer, she’s got an audacious plan: attack with 11km to go, and solo away.

If all the right notes are played in time, she’ll soar from third to first overall, and end the day in the yellow jersey.

Fast forward five hours. Niewiadoma-Phinney is lying on a concrete slab under the red-tipped transmitter tower at the summit of Mont Ventoux. She kisses her fingers and crosses her chest. She then sits up, and beams with a big, toothy smile.

A member of the race organisation is waiting beside her to take her to the podium, built on top of the coarse limestone gravel. The Canyon-Sram rider started the day trailing yellow by a minute and 17 seconds. Not only has she won the stage, but she now leads by 15 seconds. Here’s how she did it.

“Kasia is, you know her, a little bit all or nothing,” Rolf Aldag, Canyon-Sram director of sport, tells Cycling Weekly outside his team bus. It’s an attitude that has seen his rider come agonisingly close to victories (like her third place on stage five), but also makes her easy to bring on board with a plan. Canyon-Sram's big Tour de France plot was hatched last November; in a presentation to the team, they declared they were coming to win.

“There was no other logic,” says Aldag. “If you have a former winner, someone who’s always been on the podium, you can’t go there and say, ‘Let’s see what happens. Maybe fifth is a good place.’”

The race started well. Seventh on day one, Niewiadoma-Phinney kept pace with GC favourites Demi Vollering (FDJ United-Suez), Pauline Ferrand-Prévot (Visma-Lease a Bike) and Marlen Reusser (Movistar) on days two and three and then, amazingly, put in a career-best time trial performance on day four to stay within contention. Bolstered by the performance, Aldag began to sketch out a blueprint.

“[Newiadoma-Phinney and I] just randomly met at breakfast. Nobody was there. And I was like, ‘Well, what do you think? What is your self-belief? Where can we support? Do you trust yourself?’” he recalls.

On Ventoux, there was one clear option: “If we wanted to go for yellow, we couldn’t wait until they attacked. We needed to get out of the forest alone, with a decent gap… It was exactly as planned.”

At the foot of the climb, Niewiadoma-Phinney looked to her right and spotted her parents, who had come to surprise her. “I could see my dad crying,” she said, “and I thought I just needed to make them proud.”

It was only a few kilometres later that she made her winning move. It came just inside 10km to go, a counter to an acceleration by Vollering, that saw Niewiadoma-Phinney peel to the left, kick ahead, and immediately draw out a 10-second lead.

Vollering and Reusser looked at each other, but neither closed the gap. Within 2km, it grew to almost a minute. “They were playing games,” Aldag smiles. “That was exactly what we were hoping for.”

Niewiadoma-Phinney, too, had it all worked out. "My big idea was to make it to Chalet [Reynard] with 6km to go on my own, because I knew with the wind we had today, if someone was chasing behind they would try to stay on the wheel as much as possible,” she later revealed.

“Once I made it to Chalet, there was a lot of headwind, but I knew in the back they would just play the game.”

At that same point, a motorbike passed her and flashed her the time gap on a chalkboard. It showed she was closing in on taking the yellow jersey. She kicked out of the saddle, dropped back down low, and ploughed on through the lunar expanse.

“From the recon, I knew that the more speed you take into the corners, the more you get out of them, so I just tried to keep the momentum going,” she said.

Her team-mates shouted encouragement into their radios, hoping to do the same. “I really had no doubt that she would win it,” Antonia Niedermaier said post-stage. “I told her, ‘Kasia, you’re the strongest. I believe in you. You’re the queen.’”

Riding shotgun in the follow car, Aldag was also feeling confident. “We’re nearly at 2,000m. I think Kasia is super efficient here, and it’s day seven of the race. This is something you cannot forget,” he says. “Same day, same race, but on stage two would probably be a different outcome. But she’s so fatigue-resistant.”

Polka dot flags lapped against the snow marker posts that lead to the summit. By the finish line, fans teetered on their feet, blown by the gusts that traced down the final straight. Their eyes gazed back across mountain, and suddenly Niewiadoma-Phinney appeared, alone in the distance, charging around the final corner.

Vollering and Reusser chased behind, but the gap was too big. By the time they passed under the gantry, Niewiadoma-Phinney was already strewn out beyond it on the ground.

Niedermaier, sixth across the line, was the first to congratulate her. “You’re the queen,” she told her team leader, this time to her face, as the pair sat cross-legged and hugged.

Niewiadoma-Phinney laughed between gasps for air. “I said winning here would be a career-defining moment,” she recalled. “I feel like I can retire now.”

That retirement, however, will have to wait a few more days at least. Now back in the yellow jersey she took home in 2024, Niewiadoma-Phinney has two stages left to race, and a 15-second lead to defend. “I definitely expect a massive fight for everything,” she says. “Bonus seconds, basically everything. The gap is so small.”

Fortunately, she knows what it takes. Two years ago, when she won the Tour, she did so by just four seconds – the smallest winning margin in the history of both the men's and women's races. This year's finale could be even closer.

“Nice is going to be a big, big battle,” says Aldag, looking ahead to the weekend. “I would have loved to have 40 seconds, not 15, but it is what it is and we deal with it... It's all in to try and win the Tour.”

While top-tier models might set you back five figures, it's perfectly possible to get a great entry-level road bike – with an aluminum frame and disc brakes – for under £1,000/$1,500. Nobody needs to spend hours restoring an aged steel-frame machine to enjoy cycling on a budget. However, there's a lot to be said for the personal satisfaction that comes from breathing new life into something old.

That's why I chose to restore this Ribble – but how long did it take me, and how much did it cost? Finally, was it worth it? Let's dive in...

Winning the eBay bidding war

I decided to buy this particular bike because it was made from Columbus SLX tubes (with internal helicoidal spine ridges to improve stiffness, if you believe the marketing), so for a steel-frame bike it’s relatively light.

The full Shimano 600 Tricolor groupset was a big plus, and the frame is fully chromed, which means that it’s about as weather and corrosion resistant as a steel bike can be.

Checking an older steel frame for rust is essential, particularly around the bottom bracket, the seat clamp and the headset, not to mention the chain and seat stays. The steerer tube and fork crown are also crucial inspection items.

Having won the eBay bidding war (a minor skirmish, really) for just £199 ($270 for our US readers), I collected the Ribble from Greenwich, which is less than 10 miles away from home. Since Columbus SLX frames alone sell for upwards of £150 (it’s worth getting a general sense of prices before buying your bike), it was a no-brainer. I would have paid the extra £50 or so for courier delivery even if the bike was further away – it can be a worthwhile expense if you find your unicorn.

All used bikes need some TLC to get them running smoothly, and the base condition of the bike dictates just how much time, money and effort you’ll have to put in. This generally works on a sliding scale, with bikes in good condition sporting the highest price tags, and the real dogs being offered for a song.

The Ribble, it turns out, was closer to needing daily walks and regular flea treatments than I’d hoped. But I still got away with spending just less than £370 ($500) for a mechanically sound and delightfully rideable piece of dead sexy British cycling history.

Here's how I did it.

The component search

From careful scrutiny of the eBay photos, I fully expected to replace the tyres (cracked and worn and 23 mm), the saddle (tattered and torn), the bar tape (ditto), the chain (very evident wear), the gear and brake cables and housings (as a matter of course), the brake pads (safety first) and the pedals (I ride Shimano SPD pedals on all my bikes for convenience).

But with older bikes, you often don’t know what you have until you take it all apart, so after a few ‘before’ photos I put my Allen keys and socket set to good use. Once I had all the bits laid out, it was clear that I’d soon be forking out for even more replacement parts.

The lower saddle clamp was inexplicably split in two, the inner chainring teeth were worn to resemble shark fins, and the front brake caliper had corroded into position and refused to respond to my rigorous degreasing and lubrication. The headset was in terrible condition, with multiple grooves worn into the lower cup.

The geometry was spot on for me personally. With a 54cm top tube despite being a 56cm bike, the frame was clearly made in heaven for my slightly off-kilter body dimensions (long legs, short torso). However, the 110mm stem proved to be a touch long, and the gorgeous Cinelli handlebar was too wide for me at 44cm. Perhaps the nastiest surprise was the cracked rear derailleur parallelogram.

In this world of instant gratification, there’s something deeply satisfying about hunting for bike parts that are often no longer in production. Rather than simply clicking online or swiping your bank card at your LBS, you have to trawl the online classified sites and forums to find the specific hens’ teeth you’re looking for. And when you find the right component at the right price, the thrill is real.

So, I subjected my eyes to more blue light from my laptop screen than is strictly healthy and, lo, I found all the bits and pieces that I needed, with the proviso that I wasn’t being overly pedantic about maintaining the original component specs.

The basics, like gear and brake cables and housings, bar tape, chain, ball bearings, and bottle cage I quickly bought new. The other bits took a bit more work, with the 39T chainring and Shimano 600 Tricolor brake calipers (with new brake pads, no less) eventually coming from eBay, the front tyre and Shimano SPD pedals after patient Gumtree searches, and the rear tyre from Freecycle (a Continental GP5000 S TR for free).

A near-mint Shimano 600 headset and rear derailleur (both for more than I was hoping to pay) came from kindred eBay users, while Golden Age Cycles – a great resource for vintage restorations – provided me with the 90 mm quill stem.

The three non-original replacements comprised a System EX seatpost from Tredz, a Fabric Radius saddle (it keeps my bum happy) from Merlin Cycles, and a handlebar from Temple Cycles, one of the only companies currently selling compact bars with a 25.4mm clamp diameter.

These purchases pushed my restoration spend up to £242.68, over and above the bike's purchase price. But I recouped a few quid for the sale of the Cinelli A1 110 mm stem, the Shimano 105 pedals, the Turbo saddle, the Shimano 600 Tricolor seatpost (even with the broken lower clamp) and the Cinelli handlebar (no surprises there). All of this netted £72, bringing the total bike and restoration cost to £369.68.

Of course, I managed to keep the total cost low because I did all the work myself. If the restoration was left to your LBS, you’d be paying anywhere between £200 and £300 for a full strip, clean and rebuild, not taking into account the additional replacement cost of the component parts. But if you have a decent set of Allen keys and a shifting spanner, you can do the bulk of the restoration work yourself, like replacing brake and gear cables and housings, fitting a new chain, installing derailleurs, setting up brake calipers, inserting the stem and handlebars, and wrapping bar tape.

The trickier jobs that require specialised tools aren’t far out of reach either, and I’d argue that they’re worth the investment even in the short run. Buying the relevant cone wrenches for around £15 and learning how to service a wheel hub has paid for itself many times over (a hub service at your LBS will likely cost around £20 per wheel). Servicing a headset and bottom bracket follows the same simple principles as servicing a wheel hub and will comfortably save you £50. Truing the wheels accounts for another £30 saving.

YouTube is a wonderful resource (RJ the Bike Guy and Sheldon Brown are two of my favourites), and you can rest assured that any issue you come across while restoring a bike has already been experienced by someone somewhere, and there’s an online tutorial, blog post or forum thread for fixing it. If there is a better way to learn about the basics of bicycle maintenance, I haven’t found it yet. Also, steel-frame bikes are slightly more forgiving for the home mechanic than the exacting tolerances and torques required by carbon frames. So, if you can do it yourself, do it!

Grunt and labour

More than just a wondrous mechanical learning curve (you have to take something apart to understand how it works), a lot of restoration work is simply about grunt labour. When a frame and components haven’t been cleaned for years, all sorts of gunk builds up in the nooks and crannies. And it’s the assiduous application of elbow grease – and toothbrushes, toothpicks, pipe cleaners, ear buds, wash cloths and miscellaneous cleaning fluids – that peels back the years of abuse to reveal the glory of former years.

When a thorough cleaning doesn’t quite cut the mustard and the paintwork needs more focused attention, you have a handful of options. I decided to leave the Ribble as is, patina and all (as the enthusiasts would have it), but the careful application of colour-matched Humbrol model paint or even nail polish is a surprisingly effective way to touch up an otherwise-good-enough paintjob.

You can, of course, respray a frame that is simply too far gone. Rattle cans are a cheap option that can provide a decent finish if you remember the golden rule – painting is 90 per cent surface preparation. A step up from this is Spray. Bike, a paint developed specifically for respraying bicycles (the clue’s in the name). Touted as a non-drip alternative for amateur users, you can manage a full single-colour respray for under £50, including primer, base coat and lacquer finish.

If you’d prefer a professional to handle the job, the prices ramp up quickly, with a single-colour frame and fork spray starting around £350 if you provide the painter with a stripped and prepped frame. Frame prep, multiple colours, masking, decals and logos quickly push you towards (and even over) the £1,000 mark, so you’ll be reserving this treatment for high-value bikes.

The bit money can't buy

When you buy a bike off the peg, it takes a while before it really feels like yours. But restoring your own bike makes it very much yours because you’ve painstakingly brought it back to life. And you can be assured that yours will more than likely be the only one of its kind out there.

There’s something wonderfully elegant about the slim tubes of an old steel-frame road bike, not to mention classic aesthetics punctuated by ornately filed lugs, smooth fillet brazing, chromed stays/forks, intricate pantographing and myriad other details handcrafted in steel.

Riding a steel-frame bike from previous generations really makes you stand out in the sea of ubiquitous carbon and aluminium, and it’s seldom that I don’t receive a compliment when out riding one of my gleaming restorations.

The Tour de l'Avenir has twice foretold the future of Colombian cycling. In 1980, Alfonso Flórez's victory signalled the arrival of Latin American riders in Europe, paving the way for pioneers such as Luis Herrera and Fabio Parra to deliver Colombia's first successes in the Grand Tours. After that, though, there followed two decades of relative obscurity. Then, in 2010, Nairo Quintana won the same under-23 race and triggered a second Colombian boom in the World Tour. Alongside Quintana - nicknamed 'The Condor' - riders such as Rigoberto Urán, Esteban Chaves, Jarlinson Pantano, Darwin Atapuma and Sergio Luis Henao formed what became known as Colombia's "golden generation". Between them, they won the Giro d'Italia, the Vuelta a España, Il Lombardia, Paris-Nice, Tirreno-Adriatico, the Tour de Romandie, Volta a Catalunya and the Tour de Suisse, collecting dozens of stage wins and podium finishes across the World Tour.

In 2017 Egan Bernal became Colombia's sixth winner of the Tour de l'Avenir, and two years later he made history by becoming the country's first winner of the Tour de France – aged just 22, making him, at that point, the youngest winner since 1909. Bernal went on to win the Giro d'Italia in 2021. Yet those triumphs also marked the beginning of a decline that now feels set in, especially now that Quintana, the defining rider of his generation, has announced he will retire at the end of this year. In 2026, Colombia has just 11 active riders in the World Tour, down from a peak of 22 in 2021 – and at the 2026 Tour de France none of them won a stage, let alone a classification jersey.

From a great height

From his home in Medellín, Luis Fernando Saldarriaga speaks with equal parts pride and melancholy when he reflects on that era. As head coach of Colombia es Pasión, the development project that gathered the nation's brightest prospects in the 2000s, he believes such success will not return any time soon. "Today there is no serious project focused on producing new riders," he says. "Domestic teams race only for Colombia, not for Europe. Coaches are not thinking about what modern cycling demands: tactics, strategy, nutrition, cognitive development. What's missing is a structure and a method capable of building a long-term process."

Back in the 1980s, when Colombian riders claimed their first Grand Tour stages, Saldarriaga would wake before dawn to follow radio broadcasts from Europe. He remembers the flaws that limited those pioneers: weak teamwork, time losses on flat stages, crashes on cobbles, poor positioning in crosswinds. "Herrera and Parra were brilliant climbers," he says, "but they had weaknesses."

Saldarriaga had become one of Colombia's leading coaches by the early 2000s, securing public and private backing for Colombia es Pasión. The programme was designed around sports science and talent identification. "We created a system for detecting, selecting and developing talent," he explains. "We used ergometry, VO2 testing, biomechanics, aerodynamics, psychology and nutrition. Everything was scientific."

British cycling writer Matt Rendell, author of Colombia es Pasión, believes the project achieved something equally important: protecting riders from doping. "The philosophy was to develop riders slowly and systematically," Rendell says. "They wanted to deliver cyclists to the World Tour who already understood positioning, racecraft and how to behave in the biggest races." Doping, however, has remained a persistent shadow over Colombian cycling. Every year, the country features on lists published by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Lina Bonilla, one of the few women covering Colombian cycling, says she was shocked by how normalised the issue appeared when she entered the sport six years ago. "At local level, doping is barely pursued [by the authorities]," she says. "There's a pact of silence. Journalists who investigate it are threatened. There is intimidation and collusion to keep these stories hidden." According to Bonilla, many riders treat doping as routine. "Then they move to Europe and discover that the controls are exhaustive. There, those practices are impossible."

The aim was never immediate success. "The objective was transcendence," Saldarriaga says, hinting at a sense of mission driven by one of the nation's chief sporting passions. He spent endless hours driving behind promising young riders during training, identifying technical flaws and correcting them in real time. Beyond his own expectations, he also carried the hopes of an entire country, where cycling has long served as both a national obsession and a rare source of joy amid decades of violence and instability. The results eventually came. Nearly all the riders developed within the programme reached Europe and built long professional careers. Saldarriaga led Colombia es Pasión from 2006 until 2010, the year Quintana won the Tour de l'Avenir.

Stagnation sets in

As the sport evolved, Colombian results began to fade. The stars of the golden generation simply grew older, while younger rivals in Europe emerged better prepared for modern racing. Bernal was the last Colombian to stand on a Grand Tour podium, five years ago. Since then, no new wave has arrived. "The good news is the talent still exists," Saldarriaga says. "The bad news is there's no structure or school. There are only isolated initiatives. Sometimes riders reach Europe, but they lack maturity and process. They become depressed and come home because they were never properly formed." In his view, the Colombian Cycling Federation lacks a coherent development model covering every stage of progression, from youth participation to elite performance. "There is no strong technical department capable of recognising that the sport has changed and that our model must become more analytical," he says.

Funding has also evaporated. In the 1980s, both the Colombian state and major companies invested heavily in cycling, backing teams such as Café de Colombia, Pilas Varta and Postobón in the European peloton. Economic crises eventually ended that support. Today, Colombian coffee survives merely as a small logo among the sponsors of Netcompany Ineos.

Ernesto Lucena, Colombia's sports minister from 2018 to 2021 and an avid amateur cyclist himself, believes the current crisis stems largely from the absence of long-term public policy. "Sport in this country has always been political," he says. "We've had four sports ministers in four years. That makes sustained projects impossible. There is no unified policy. The ministry doesn't even support cycling teams anymore." The budget cuts are stark. Over the past two years alone, the ministry's funding has dropped from 1.3 trillion pesos (£260 million) to just 312 billion pesos (£62.5 million). There were two main reasons: the economy failed to grow at the pace the government had anticipated, while congress rejected a financing bill promoted by the executive branch. The result was a widening fiscal deficit, prompting the national government to introduce sweeping cuts across sectors such as culture, sport and recreation – not so different from the austerity cuts implemented from 2010-2020 in Britain.

There is also the issue of age and development. Modern cycling now rewards teenagers. Riders such as Paul Seixas are already competing internationally before turning 20, having spent years within Continental development structures. Colombia, by contrast, still struggles to expose its young riders to European racing early enough. Bonilla paints a bleak picture of the grassroots scene. "There is no structure in youth racing," she says. "A 15-year-old rider survives through family support and odd jobs, often without proper nutrition, equipment, technology or even a decent bike. Meanwhile, a teenager in France or Belgium already has a huge advantage."

Elsewhere in Latin America, however, progress is being made. Saldarriaga has worked in both Ecuador and Mexico, where he first met a teenage Isaac del Toro several years ago. "They are doing things properly," he says. "Their riders live in Europe year-round. That's why we see [Ecuadorians] Jhonatan Narváez, Richard Carapaz and others achieving results." His diagnosis for Colombia is bleak. "We were neither active nor creative enough to adapt our model. The process needed renewal, but it never came. Now we are in a hole, and it will last for a long time."

The European advantage

Modern cycling is unforgiving. Rendell notes that World Tour teams no longer function as finishing schools. "Riders are not going there to learn anymore," he says. "They are expected to contribute immediately. Colombia lacks the structures and staff needed to educate riders properly before they reach the top teams. The talent exists, but the formation does not."

Diego Pescador is one of those rare talents. Before even turning 20, he had already earned a contract with Movistar. Now based in Spain for most of the year, the 21-year-old Colombian has experienced first-hand the gulf separating European cycling from the scene back home. "The difference is enormous," says Pescador. "In Europe, speed records are being broken on all kinds of stages. There are new training methods, far more technology, and better nutrition – and that's the foundation of success." The gap extends beyond training alone. Equipment, too, is on another level: the kit, the bikes, the shoes. "Even the socks can make a difference that helps you win," he says. Yet for Pescador, the biggest contrast lies in the professionalism of the system itself. "In Europe, everything is more structured. Every part of the process is looked after, and there's much more investment. Colombian cycling needs more companies willing to support the sport, and more opportunities for riders to race in Europe. The future is here."

During Colombia's glory years, success created a virtuous cycle. Young riders saw Bernal, Quintana and Chaves as proof that cycling could offer social mobility and international opportunity. Now, the opposite may happen. Without visible role models, aspiring riders may turn elsewhere. The old mythology of the "escarabajo" or beetle – a nickname that grew out of Colombia's reputation for producing small but relentless climbers – brings to mind riders floating through Alpine ascents on lungs forged at altitude. But this is no longer proving enough to win modern races. Significantly, the most recent Latin American winner of the Tour de l'Avenir was not Colombian but Mexican: Isaac del Toro in 2023. The last Colombian victor was Bernal in 2017, nearly a decade ago. Since surviving his life-threatening training crash in 2022, Bernal has yet to show signs that he can return to Grand Tour-winning level. Nor does it appear likely that another Colombian will win the Tour de l'Avenir soon. Once again, the race that predicts the future seems to be offering a dispiriting diagnosis of Colombian cycling.

Lucena sees little hope of major institutional support returning soon. "The next government will simply try to survive with whatever budget remains," he says. Still, he retains faith in Colombian talent. Together with Quintana, he is now planning projects aimed at identifying and supporting young riders capable of competing in Europe. Somewhere high in the Andes, perhaps, the next great Colombian climber is already riding – waiting for the structural changes that might finally allow him to fly.

The rise and fall

Between 2014 and 2021, Colombian cyclists lit up the World Tour, claiming four Grand Tour titles and countless stages. Here are the crowning achievements of this high-flying generation:

2014: Nairo Quintana secures Colombia's first-ever overall victory at the Giro d'Italia.

2016: Quintana adds the Vuelta a España to his palmarès, while Esteban Chaves makes history by winning Il Lombardia.

2017: Sprint sensation Fernando Gaviria dominates the Giro d'Italia, taking an four stage wins.

2019: Egan Bernal, at just 22, becomes the first Colombian - and the first Latin American rider-to win the Tour de France overall classification.

2021: Bernal cements his Grand Tour legacy by taking the overall title at the Giro d'Italia.

2022-2026: Bernal's horrific 2022 training crash, coupled with extended absences, controversies and suspensions for veterans like Quintana and Miguel Ángel López, leaves a void at the top. Colombian talent remains in the World Tour, but the glory days have passed.

This feature was originally published in the 4 June 2026 print edition of Cycling Weekly magazine – available to buy on the newsstand every Thursday (UK only). Digital versions are available on Apple News and Readly. Subscriptions through Magazines Direct.

Mckenzie Sampson’s daughter was two or three when he was developing Harmonic Riff, his first kit for the Canyon-SRAM women’s WorldTour team.

She would sit on his lap while he worked and play with the colours. When the first fabric swatches arrived, she would wrap them around her shoulders like a cape and run through the house. Later, the team sent her an extra-extra-small jersey, which she wore while they watched the races together.

"That’s my team, that’s my team," she would say whenever Canyon-SRAM appeared on the screen.

For Sampson, the moment became a grounding point through the late nights and endless revisions.

"This is what I'm designing for," Sampson says. "Seeing that [jersey] on her and her excitement…it's so powerful to have."

To the viewer, a cycling kit flashing by at 50 kilometres an hour can register as little more than colour, logos and a quick means of identifying one team from another. To Sampson, an apparel designer who has spent 17 years designing kits, a good jersey should do far more.

It should tell a story.

At this year’s Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, the Canyon-SRAM story is being told in white, pink, blue, orange and green. The team’s switch-out kit takes Sampson’s Luminous design—a graphic inspired by light refracting through coloured glass—and places it on a bright white base, with a “We Femmes” wordmark stretched across the chest, back and sleeves.

The design carries two stories at once.

The first is a decade of Canyon-SRAM, which entered the peloton in 2016 as a women’s programme in its own right rather than an extension of a men’s team. The second looks beyond the professional peloton. We Femmes is built around a global invitation: those who already ride should bring along a woman who does not. It's Canyon's promise to bring at least 1,000 women a year to free rides and events over the next decade.

On the jersey, with its bold colours and font, that phrase feels more like a statement: we, women, belong here.

Sampson is quick to point out that the Tour-specific wordmark isn't his design, but he does very much approve of its attitude.

"The wordmark wasn’t actually done by me, but I kind of dig it," he says. "It’s a little punk rock, and women’s cycling is a little punk rock, you know?"

A story, built in layers

The white switchout kit has had little trouble being seen. After six stages, Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney sits third overall, 1:17 behind yellow jersey Marlen Reusser (Movistar). The 2024 champion is chasing a fifth consecutive podium and a second overall title.

Asked whether he is biased because he designed the kit she wears, Sampson laughed.

"I’m going to say yes, definitely," he says. "But I think it’s a mix of her as a rider, her as a person, and she’s an incredible style icon of cycling."

Long before a kit reaches a rider’s shoulders, however, it has to survive a much slower and less glamorous process: trend research, story concepts and discarded designs; technical fabrics and print tests; sponsor requirements and rider fittings; and the awkward geometry of turning a flat graphic into something that works both standing still and moving at race speed.

To that end, Sampson considers himself a product designer first. His primary experience is in performance clothing; the graphics often arrive near the end, “the last little bit” that turns a functioning garment into something people notice.

These days, riders at the highest level receive garments that were specifically tailored to them, rather than the more generic sizes available to consumers.

It is an easily overlooked but significant marker of just how far women’s cycling has professionalised. But for the designer, that creates another challenge: the artwork must remain coherent even as the cut and proportions change from one rider to another.

And the jersey is only one piece. Between racewear, helmets, accessories and off-the-bike clothing, Sampson says a complete collection can contain as many as 65 individual pieces.

The process starts with the team: its riders, their energy and the limits imposed by sponsors and brand colours.

"I've been really fortunate to be a part of some of the most interesting teams, I think, within Specialized and with Canyon," Sampson says. "The teams themselves have really been the key factors in allowing those designs to come forth. Canyon specifically has been an interesting point where [the design] just needs to be bright and bold and powerful and have a certain level of energy that the riders emit."

A cyclist himself, Sampson understands how a kit should fit and move. His inspiration, though, comes from far beyond road racing. He grew up around skateboarding, snowboarding and wakeboarding, then designed kits for his University of Oregon team before landing roles at Adidas and Specialized. His later work includes Boels-Dolmans, Pete Stetina, Canyon's off-road programmes and Canyon-SRAM.

His inspirations might come from fashion forecasting, skate and snowboard graphics as well as the world around him. He gathers textures, colour treatments and visual elements, then begins building in layers: gradients, graphic elements, branding and the story intended to hold it all together.

A team might settle on a concept in three or four attempts, or run through 10, 20 or even 100. Sampson filters them to two or three options, presented from "mild to wild."

Luminous began with coloured light refracting through the stained glass of a Gaudí cathedral in Spain. Harmonic Riff began with music, translating sound, rhythm and vibration into undulating gradients.

"I like to build a story around the design,” Sampson says, giving it “a little more meaning and a little more depth than just being cool for cool’s sake. The more depth and story and meaning you can put behind your design, the better."

The white Tour kit was a hit from the start. It was designed first and impressed when the initial swatches were printed, but the darker blue-purple version felt like a stronger option for year-round.

"There was something unique about the darker blue kit that just felt interesting and powerful and like a really strong starting point," Sampson says.

White was saved for the Tour, where its lighter base also serves a practical purpose in the summer heat.

"Keeping the riders cool is always a huge factor," Sampson says. "It’s not just the meshes, but also the colours included."

Canyon-SRAM’s kits have historically been a fan favourite, and Sampson says he loves seeing the kits out in the wild. But he also knows they can be divisive.

“Graphics in general are polarising,” he said. “Whether you love them or hate them, they’re always going to be polarising.”

The final result is never the designer’s decision alone. Teams, sponsors, manufacturers, materials and performance requirements all have an impact. As Sampson put it, laughing: "If the design sucks, it’s probably not always the designer’s fault."

A couple of years ago, Archie Atkinson sent an email to one of his old school teachers. He wanted her to know she had inspired him, but not in the way she might have hoped. "This teacher told me that cycling would never get me anywhere in life and that I should focus on my education," he recalls.

Atkinson, 17 at the time, took it as an ultimatum: it was either cycling or school. He made his decision straight away. "I told her, 'I appreciate your feedback', and I never went back to school again," he says. It was the last the teacher heard from him – until the email.

Atkinson sent the update just as he was about to travel to Paris for the 2024 Paralympics. It read: "Just to let you know, I'm going to the Paralympics. Cycling will get me somewhere in life, and if you ever say that to a kid again, I'll be having words."

He received no reply. "Maybe she didn't see it," he says with a shrug. "Might have gone to her spam."

We're speaking in February at the British Track Championships in Manchester. There's a break in the action, and Atkinson and I have retired to sofas inside an empty hospitality cabin at the top of the velodrome banking. He's wearing the fruits of his recent successes: white bib shorts with rainbow world champion piping, and a national champion's jersey – the first of two titles he'll win over the weekend.

When Atkinson left school at 17, his parents agreed he had until he was 21 to "make it" in cycling; otherwise, he would have to pursue something else. He's now 22 years old, a birthday he celebrated as a three-time world champion, a world record holder in the individual pursuit, and a Paralympic silver medallist. "I only frame gold medals," he says, pulling his Paralympic silver out of an off-white sock for his photoshoot.

The medal is chipped at the bottom because "some French kid dropped it", he explains. There's a cheekiness to Atkinson, but also, as his email to his teacher showed, a deep sensitivity and determination.

They're qualities that have earned him a place on Great Britain's para-team, and drive him towards his overarching goal, a dream that, if realised, would be history-making: Atkinson wants to be the first para-cyclist to join a men's World Tour road squad.

To date, only a handful of para-cyclists have ever ridden in professional road races. Dame Sarah Storey, Britain's most decorated Paralympian, competed in women's WorldTour events in 2016, but no male rider has reached cycling's top tier, let alone signed for one of its teams. Atkinson wonders whether that's due to prejudice or the underestimating of para-riders' abilities.

"Will Bjergfelt, one of my GB team-mates, rode the Tour of Britain [in 2021]," he remembers. "Seeing that, just coming into para-sport, I thought, 'OK, if he can go to the Tour of Britain, what more can I do? What are the boundaries?' From then, I was like, 'I'm going to be the first WorldTour rider.' Why not be the first one? Someone has to be."

Brought up in the suburbs of Manchester, Atkinson was 10 years old when he was told he had autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It was around that time, too, that he was introduced to track cycling, remarkably by Olympic great Sir Chris Hoy in a one-to-one session set up by Atkinson's father, Matthew, a long-time employee at Evans Cycles.

"It's a wild thing to have," the 21-year-old says of that Hoy masterclass. It left him with vivid dreams of becoming a cyclist himself.

When Atkinson was 16, he was diagnosed with cerebral palsy. His condition means he rides under a C4 para-cycling classification, the second-least severe on the C1-5 scale, indicating his impairment is deemed to be 'mild'. "As a kid, I had to work a lot on my balance and coordination," he says, but he never wanted to be treated differently. He went to a mainstream school, where he was a "mischievous" student, often distracted and sent out of class. "I didn't get much help around my ADHD," he says. "I'd much rather have been out on my bike."

So that's what he decided to do when school went online during the Covid lockdowns; Atkinson would put his phone in his jersey pocket, plug in his headphones, and join the class Zoom call from his jaunt around the lanes. "If they asked why my camera was off, I'd say my computer doesn't work," he laughs.

Atkinson had big ambitions but few plans when he left school. With no coach, he sat at home watching YouTube videos on how to train, and copied pro riders' workouts from their Strava files.

It seemed to work: the following year, his power tests caught the attention of British Cycling, who offered him a guest spot on the para-track team for the 2023 Glasgow World Championships. He went on to shock everyone, including himself, by winning the scratch race at the age of 19.

That result is the one he's still proudest of today. It's also his most poignant, dedicated to his friend, American cyclist Magnus White, who was killed by a car driver just a week before. White remains vividly present to Atkinson. When things get tough, he looks down at the 'Ride For Magnus' sticker on his bike frame, and faithfully powers on.

"There have been many cyclists who have passed away, but when it's one of your close friends, it makes me think I can't miss training sessions. He'd want me to do them," he says.

Atkinson joined the GB squad full-time in 2024. Since then, his mantra has been simple: if I want to become a WorldTour pro, I need to train like one. "Our racing is getting faster, especially in the lower impaired categories; it's becoming more like the AB [able-bodied] side, where the gears are bigger and more watts are needed," he says.

"If you train like a WorldTour rider, and you're able to absorb that training and use it, you may as well." For Atkinson, that means 300km-plus weeks, and camps abroad to Calpe, Spain, where he spent most of last winter.

He lives like a pro, too; his Instagram page is a patchwork of photos of Specialized bikes (he has a personal sponsorship deal with the brand), alongside riding shots with pro cyclist friends. "When I first meet them, I don't tell them I'm a para-rider," he smiles.

"Then I end up telling them, and they normally use a bad word because they're quite impressed. I think there's a weird respect around it; they're like, 'Fair play. You're overcoming adversity, you're overcoming a disability that hinders your cycling, and you're not letting it stop you.'"

Far from it, in fact. Atkinson tells me his power numbers are growing every year, so naturally I enquire as to his current FTP. "Undisclosed," he replies. "I can't tell you that."

A ballpark figure, then? "It's between zero and 450 watts," he smirks, and I accept defeat, but not before asking if he thinks it's high enough to land him a World Tour contract. "It's getting there," Atkinson responds. "I've spoken to team bosses over Instagram or over coffee in Spain, and they seem interested. It just takes one person to truly believe in it... But so far, no luck."

Two months after our meeting, Atkinson had a breakthrough. Two breakthroughs, actually; he won his first UCI Para Road World Cup time trial title in Belgium, averaging almost 50kph (31mph), and the following week, did the same in Italy, this time going closer to 53kph.

The victories remind me of a story he told me of "caning it" down a Manchester high street on his time trial bike – a commute that earned him an admonishing lecture from his coaches. But the hard work is clearly paying off.

Atkinson’s results show he’s getting stronger, each medal a bargaining chip to take to the table with teams. He wonders if he’s being overlooked because of ill-informed preconceptions. “I think a lot of them [team managers] don’t understand the para-world,” he says. “You say you’re a para-cyclist, they look at your legs and say, ‘Oh, you’re not missing a leg.’”

That's why he's trying to break the stigma. "If I'm not the first [male para-cyclist on a pro team], but I can help a new rider or a kid coming through who's powerful and strong enough to make it, because I've made it into a big thing, I'm happy," he says, and it's clear he means it.

After all, to the teacher who told him cycling would never get him anywhere, Atkinson's career already stands as an emphatic rebuttal. Whether she ever replies to his email, or whether a WorldTour team eventually does, cannot take that away from him.

This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 4 June 2026. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.

Pauline Ferrand-Prévot suffered a major setback to her Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift title defence yesterday in a time trial that saw her lose over two minutes to Marlen Reusser, and the difference between the two riders could not have been starker. Whereas Reusser had a position on the bike that looked sleek with every component of the bike, her kit, and helmet dialled in to produce a bullet-like shape, Ferrand-Prévot looked a very different rider altogether.

The most prevalent aspect of her setup that just didn’t look right was the large Giro Aerohead II helmet that she was wearing. It was wider than her shoulders, and her position on the bike meant that it stuck out above her back when looking at her from the camera motorbike behind’s view.

In my experience as an Aerodynamics Consultant at Venturi Dynamics, I would confidently say that this was almost certainly not the optimal helmet shape for Ferrand-Prévot's preferred position on the bike.

The French rider, who finished 34th on the day, hadn't raced a time trial in over five years. Asked ahead of the race if she felt she was starting from zero in her time trial preparation, she laughed that it was more “minus 10 – [but] I did my homework quite well”. A rider we expect to fly when the race hits the mountains, Visma-Lease a Bike's GC contender has to adapt her TT position around two major surgeries she had to treat iliac artery endofibrosis, admitting herself, “it wasn’t the prettiest sight, it wasn’t the fastest for everyone else in the peloton, but it was the fastest for me.”

The Giro Aerohead II has proved phenomenally fast on plenty of riders. So, why might one of the best time trial helmets work for one rider, but not for another?

Over the last few years in professional cycling, aero optimisation has taken centre stage. With the head and shoulders of a rider pivotal to drag reduction, most obvious in this aero pursuit is the influx of different helmet designs, especially in the time trial market.

The POC Tempor may have started the trend back in 2012 at the Olympics, but it really took hold once Giro updated the Giro Aerohead II with its huge, bulbous, elongated design. But there is an interesting dilemma with these helmets: their performance can be very position-dependent. This even occurs within the aero road helmet market, but not quite to the same extent.

An interesting side note is that both the Lidl-Trek men and women’s teams, and FDJ men’s team, allow riders to use whatever time trial helmet they want. This is because helmets can be very individual to the rider in how they perform. I heard from one WorldTour rider that when a new TT helmet was released, they had to continue using the old one because the new one performed far worse for them, specifically.

But how can we account for this, and how can we ensure we get the right helmet for us?

How these new TT helmets work

A prevalent theme with recently released TT helmets is the huge flared designs on both sides of the helmets, and, in conjunction with that, the large flared visors. The Giro Aerohead II, the latest unreleased POC TT helmet used by EF Education-EasyPost and Oatley teams, Rudy Project Wingdream, Abus TimeShifter, and Ekoi Pure Aero, for example, all have a large flared-out design.

The predominant reason for this is that the optimal time trial position situates the head lower down, often slightly below the line of the back. In this position, the shoulders are a large barrier to the oncoming air and a large contributor to the total drag generated by the body, some 80% of the total drag equation in a time trial position.

What this requires is that the helmet features an outward flare to smooth the junction between the head and the shoulders of the rider, providing a more arrow-like profile rather than the bulky, blunt shift from neck to shoulder. In conjunction with this, the visors are often enlarged, either to close the gap between the rider’s arm and the helmet, or to create a turbulent flow of air that works for some rider positions. Think of the new Kask Mistral Pro visor as used by Filippo Ganna, but not all the riders on the Netcompany-Ineos team.

But that leads us to the next issue: some helmets work well with certain positions, and not with others. Often, these TT helmets are designed around a key rider associated with the sponsored team or the rider themselves. The Specialized TT5, for example, was designed in conjunction with Remco Evenepoel, while the Giro Aerohead II was designed in part for Jonas Vingegaard and Wout van Aert. However, speaking with a WorldTour rider, they divulged that when a new TT helmet was released, aero testing confirmed that the previous version of the helmet was significantly faster on them than the new version.

Scott found a way to combat this, with its latest Split TT helmet featuring a modular design wherein the tail of the helmet can be switched between a wider tail fairing and a narrower one depending on the rider's shape and how they hold their head. This was previously done with the Giro Selector TT helmet. Having two different designs gives scope to have one helmet with two different settings that can be faster across a broader range of rider positions.

Lidl-Trek takes this a step further by not having a time trial helmet from helmet sponsor Trek. Instead, the team uses a mix of different brands, selected after hours of wind tunnel testing with riders to find the helmet that will be fastest on them. This is the best approach, but sponsor commitments limit most teams in this regard.

What you can do to ensure that you go for the correct helmet

It's likely that, if you're reading this, your own helmet choice is not determined by sponsor commitment. Happily, this will leave you spoilt for choice when it comes to TT helmet shopping; but how do you choose the right shape for you?

A good general rule of thumb is that if you have a more upright position on the TT bike where your head extends above your back, you want a narrower-profiled helmet that won’t add to the surface area, with a tail that can fit as flush against your back as possible. Often this means wearing the helmet so that, when off the bike, you are not looking through the visor, and the helmet is rotated rearwards. However, when in the TT position, you are looking up through the visor.

If you move your head around a lot, or end up looking down, then a stubby profiled TT helmet is going to be the best option. The original Giro Aerohead, for example, or the old Kask Bambino cater for this sort of position, as does the POC Procen.

If, however, you are able to keep your back more horizontal with your head tucked, or aptly named ‘turtled’, then the spate of new wider-bodied TT helmets may work well. However, if possible, you want to measure the width of your shoulders along with the width of the TT helmet to ensure that, especially for narrower riders, it will not be too wide when worn.

Even then, the speed at which you race will also impact which helmet is fastest, but specific testing is required to determine this. Either wind tunnel or velodrome testing, using software such as MyWindSock, to the Chung Method.

Considerations for road helmets

There is still a consideration when it comes to road helmets, although the differences are not quite as extreme.

To an extent, the same principles apply: for a more upright head position, a narrow-profiled, shorter-tailed helmet will generally be faster. But when riders are better able to stay in a flatter-backed breakaway style position, road helmets with extended tails such as the Trek Ballista can perform better. Additionally, the shape of that helmet channels the air across the back, but is often less effective when worn in a more upright position, or if riders drop their heads down more. The Giro Eclipse Pro, for example, excluded a longer tail because aerodynamically it was found not to make a large difference in the optimal position, but the short tail design was faster across a far wider array of head positions.

Mankind's gravitational pull towards mountain ranges – for recreation, at least – is a relatively recent phenomenon. Before Horace-Bénédict de Saussure's expedition to Mont Blanc in 1786, mountains were largely regarded as places of danger. People ventured onto them only when necessity demanded it: to hunt, wage war or keep watch over the land.

Nowadays, we positively throw ourselves at them. Every year, hikers, runners, skiers, rock climbers and, of course, cyclists are drawn to the mountains in their thousands. We cyclists, in particular, love nothing more than squaring up to a sky-bound ribbon of tarmac and letting rip.

Why? I believe the answer is twofold. Firstly, riding up a mountain pass is arguably the most satisfying experience it's possible to have on two wheels. Climbing a mountain is pain and pleasure in equal measure; purgatory and heaven rolled into one.

Secondly – and I think this is where the real attraction lies – mountains are places of unparalleled beauty. More than that, they have an uncanny ability to remind us where we fit in the grand scheme of things. Stand in the foothills of a great mountain range, watching the Earth's crust buckle into towering peaks, and it doesn't take long to think, "Oh yeah... I'm actually not that important after all." It's good to be humbled. It tends to make you less of an idiot.

Which is why Dan Baines, my colleague at Cycling Weekly, and I headed for Corsica – the most mountainous island in the Mediterranean – in the hope of becoming less idiotic.

Summit searching

It wasn't until we'd landed in Corsica and driven across the island to our accommodation that we realised just how mountainous it really was. This little French island is the very definition of dramatic, so much so I was left lost for words. I turned to Dan and simply offered him a selection of expletives; he concurred.

Yes, the landscape in Corsica is otherworldly and the climbs, well, they just didn’t know when to stop. Between us we've ridden most of the great passes of the Alps and the Pyrenees, yet there was something different about the roads here.

More by luck than design, we discovered the following morning that our accommodation sat at the foot of what Strava's heatmap suggested was one of the island's most popular climbs: the Col de la Vergio. At 32.9 kilometres long, the climb accumulates 1,496 metres of vertical ascent, averaging 4.4%.

Naturally, we decided to ride up it, at speed. A two-up time trial was in order.

We were very much ‘all the gear’; I was rocking a Team UAE issue Colnago V5RS with all the bells, whistles and weight-saving measures that make absolutely no difference to a chap who is partial to a pint and pork pie. Dan was astride an aero Factor Monza, specced for pure speed. I hoped my lightweight climbing machine would close the gap between our power-to-weight ratios; Dan’s Functional Threshold Power (FTP) was around 4.2 w/kg at the time, whilst mine was 3.9. However, I could hold 350 watts for an hour, to his 320. Regardless of who was stronger or more built to climb, I knew this was going to hurt.

The road that just kept going up

We set off on shallow slopes, with my fresh legs setting a 300-watt pace out of the small town of Porto.

“Did you see that?” Dan asked, looking a little concerned.

“No, I was too busy looking at my power meter,” I unashamedly replied.

“It said we have 33 kilometres to the summit.”

You guessed it, we hadn't researched the stats before we set off – perhaps our goal of reduced idiocy required more work than the climb could offer. Yet, before I’d had the time to compute just how decimated our quads would be at the top, Dan rode through for a turn, maintaining that same high-tempo effort. Death or glory. The race to the top of the Col de la Vergio was on.

The early kilometres of the mountain aren’t without their charm. After 5km you’re high enough that Porto is a sea-bordered speck enveloped by skyscraping granite crags. But the real beauty of this climb reveals itself after around 10 kilometres.

We’d been riding through-and-off for around 40 minutes, keeping the chain tight and the concentration levels high. But rounding a tight corner through a corridor of red granite walls, we seemingly rode through a portal and onto another planet. A naturally formed colosseum of a biblical scale presented itself: the road – which was now a kind of mantel piece, built into the side of the sheer granite mountain face – provided a sweeping arc, and looking across its unending forested expanse made me feel, well… irrelevant.

Who cares about time trialling to the top? Who cares about 300 pathetic watts? Evidently we did.

A glance back from Dan confirmed that he’d acknowledged what we were riding through. I replied with a fresh selection of rasped expletives. The race to the top continued.

Cyclists often talk about purgatorial ascents – the ones on which you seem to live an entire lifetime. Just when you think you're about to crest the summit, bam, the road kicks up again and you're back at the coal face, asking your legs to deliver more than could ever be reasonably expected of a pair of limbs. The Col de Vergio is one of those climbs.

The road surface smoothed out as we approached the small village of Evisa. Glass-like tarmac means speed and we sliced through the little settlement replete with quaint cafes spilling out onto the pavements. I was pacing us – a rare turn on the front – and I looked back at Dan as we rode studiously past a glacerie. The temperature was still in the mid-20s despite the fact we’d reached and breached 1,200 metres – an ice cream would’ve hit the spot.

But no, we’d come this far at pace, to stop now would be a brazen act of surrender. Pralines and pistachio would have to wait.

Leaving Eviso, the road – which up to now had been open and exposed – disappeared under dense canopy cover. We rode through pine and fir: families of wildboar snurgled, rock lizards sprinted along drainage gulleys, a whip snake skimmed across the tarmac, cow bells rung deep within the wood. We barely looked up for our work.

It had been an hour and 45 minutes since we left Porto and the big push to the summit was on. Sensing the end was in sight, Dan added a few watts. I clung to his back wheel like a limpet, determined that we’d reach the top in unison, determined to share the glory of dispatching this mammoth ascent.

Three hundred watts; three-twenty; three-thirty; must hold on. And then, there it was: the summit of the Col de Vergio. We rolled over the crest and brought our bikes to a standstill.

“That was a bit long, wasn’t it?,” I said

“I think it’s the longest climb I’ve ever ridden,” he replied.

As it turned out, what we’d ridden was the longest continuous climb in France, if you discount the 36.3km Val Thorens, which cheats with a descent between kilometres 11 and 14.

What was left was the rather splendid task of riding back down.

The outing amounted to little more than 45 miles, yet it was a very strong contender for the finest day's riding I've ever experienced. The Col de Vergio isn’t the steepest climb, and it’s certainly not the highest. But its unrelenting nature and ethereal scenery provided a unique kind of dreamy discomfort.

Corsica had been sitting patiently in the Mediterranean waiting for our wheels. And now it’s been discovered I’m going to struggle to see a cycling destination beyond it. I’m not sure it’s made me any less of an idiot but it reminded me exactly why I ride bicycles.

“Do better for female cyclists,” says Olivia Moore in a video that appears on my Instagram feed, a well-earned medal hanging proudly around her neck.

She isn’t criticising the route, the atmosphere or the volunteers at the Mallorca 312 gran fondo. In fact, she describes it as “an epic day”. Her frustrations lie elsewhere: the toilets.

According to Moore, there were too few toilet facilities at both the start line and the first feed station. She says the first stop had just four portaloos – catering for the 8,500 participants taking part in the mass-participation endurance event – three of which were out of use.

Unsurprisingly, she says, the queue for the remaining toilet – ironically labelled “male-only” – was “ridiculous”, leaving her waiting for 45 minutes. Moore says the queue meant she “missed the time cut off to do the 225 [km] route”, leaving her feeling “super disappointed” and “a little bit robbed” after putting in the training for the annual gran fondo which sees riders cover up to 312 kilometres around the Spanish island. The organisers of the Mallorca 312 did not respond when Cycling Weekly reached out for comment.

Moore wasn't alone. Nearly 380 comments beneath the video echo her frustrations, with riders sharing similar experiences at the same event and others across the cycling calendar. They describe lengthy toilet queues, jerseys labelled as ‘unisex’ that simply don't fit women well, and a broader feeling of being an afterthought.

Toilets may be the talking point of this particular sportive, but the issue runs much deeper. Across the sport, women raise concerns about everything from facilities and event logistics to representation, safety and inclusivity. If organisers want to attract more women to their events, are they doing enough to make them feel welcome?

The stats speak for themselves

Running has shown what's possible. In recent years, race organisers have improved the female experience through practical changes, inclusive policies and community-led initiatives, helping to drive a surge in women's participation.

Participation data reflects that progress, with younger runners approaching gender parity on race start lines. The London Marathon lists its 2026 gender split with 44% female registrations. A 26.2-mile run is perhaps a closer comparison to grand fondos and epic sportives than the 5km ParkRun events held across the UK every Saturday, but interestingly, the split there is similar, with ParkRun’s organisation stating a 44% female competitor count in 2019 alongside a 53% female registration figure.

Cycling sportives – timed mass-participation events, some more competitive than others – still attract relatively few women. Around one third of riders at L'Étape du Tour de France Femmes 2025 were women, compared with around 15% at Maratona Dles Dolomites 2026.

Amber Keegan, writer and founder of Athlete Interactions, recalls entering a Band of Climbers Peak District cycling event that publicly stated its ambition to increase female participation to 25%, a goal she says was later dropped without explanation. “There's no shame in trying and failing to improve the gender balance,” Keegan told us, “but silently backing away from your commitment felt pretty pants.”

Founder Stuart Hall says the ambition remains, with 25% a “stretch target” en route to an end goal of a 50/50 split for its Toughest 100 event. “After seeing how few women took part in 2023 [five out of 150 participants], we worked hard to encourage more women to take part in 2024, which you can see by the fact we had 12% female entries,” Hall says. “We set a target of 25% for female entries. This was exactly that, a target, which we did miss, but I think the fact we worked hard to speak to female cycling groups, influencers, communities, showed by the fact we had 12% female entries.”

Maximilian Wussler, founder of Red On Sports, organisers of The Gralloch gravel event – which features competitive racers as well as more relaxed sportives – has seen the contrast first-hand since launching the combined running and cycling event 'explorr Festival'.

“Since we expanded into running events, we’re seeing a roughly 50/50 split, and we’ve done nothing different on the marketing side,” he says. “Running is still fairly new to us, but our sense is that a lot of the gap is structural rather than about how you market it. Running seems to carry fewer of the barriers cycling does, and it has a much deeper, more established base of women taking part already. Gravel is catching up, but even after the real progress of the last few years, the best case is still around 20% women.”

So, what can cycling learn from running to ensure more women not only sign up, but return year after year?

Why do women still feel overlooked?

It's rarely just one issue that makes female cyclists feel overlooked. Like any great sportive, the overall experience is shaped by countless small details, from the moment entries open to the moment riders cross the finish line.

“Women are biologically different,” says Sophie Power, founder of sheRACES. “We have periods; we have pregnancy,” she notes, citing pregnancy deferral policies as a key driver for change. “But we're sociologically different as well, and that is the point that I think races don't take into account.

“From the age of five, girls don't think they're as good at sports as boys, so when races describe their events as the biggest, the baddest and toughest, that actually puts us [women] off.”

That does not mean women aren’t drawn to challenge goals. Many females are motivated by testing their limits. Rather, Powers’ point is that the way events frame difficulty can influence who feels confident enough to enter in the first place.

Samantha Varley, head of product and operations at Sportive Breaks UK, says increasing female participation won't be solved overnight.

“There are numerous barriers that can influence whether women feel able, supported and confident enough to take part in cycling events,” she says. “Addressing these challenges requires a shift from a one-size-fits-all approach.”

What does change look like in practice?

Attracting more women isn't simply about reserving places for them at the start line. “You've still got to make your event something that women want to race,” Power says.

She believes many of the changes are simple. SheRACES outlines nine commitments that she says every race should adopt as standard. “There's basically no excuse if you don't,” she adds.

The commitments include using diverse marketing imagery, introducing pregnancy deferral policies, giving women equal prominence in event communications, adopting a zero-tolerance approach to unacceptable behaviour and actively seeking participant feedback after race day.

For many women, deciding whether to enter begins long before race day. The images, language and information on an event website all influence whether riders feel an event is for them.

“If I see pictures of all white, skinny men, I don't think that race is for me,” says Power. “We want to see a diverse range of imagery of all types of bodies.”

SheRACES nine key commitments

• Show a diversity of athletes in marketing imagery.
• Ensure all prizes and rewards for women are of at least of equal value to those for men. This includes prize money, number of categories and a choice of female fit or unisex t-shirt.
• Review toilet and changing facilities to ensure they are sufficient and well communicated. Having period products available at start and finish lines, and where possible on course.
• Ensure the women’s race is given equal prominence in celebrations, social media posts, interviews and other communications.
• Allow women who fall pregnant before the race to transfer their place to a future event within two years (for non-ballot races, refunds or athlete transfers are also permissible).
• Communicate and enforce a no-tolerance policy for harassment of any kind (to include runners, all event volunteers and staff).
• Actively seek feedback from participants after each race and making best efforts to make changes to support them better.
• Make these commitments easy to find on my website or in participant information.
• Review compliance with the guidelines on a regular basis (annually as a minimum).

Varley also believes organisers need to think about how they present the challenge itself.

“Men frequently sign up first and worry about fitness later; women tend to be more cautious,” she says. “Strict event time cut-offs create a major fear factor, causing capable women to self-select out due to worry over their pacing.”

Alex Miller, founder of Lawless Coaching, supports this. She’s found that more women hesitate to enter events, not due to lack of fitness but because they don’t see themselves as competitive or fit enough compared to male participants.

“Mothers are also often concerned that they cannot prioritise training enough to be competitive,” Miller adds. “In recent years I've seen a huge shift in the amount of support for both women and beginners in these sports, groups and clubs running women-only and beginner-focused sessions supporting a first step into the sport.”

Varley also suggests showcasing average finish times alongside training advice and promotional imagery featuring riders of different abilities to reassure more women that they can do it.

Another important change is pregnancy deferral policies. “If a woman's going to have a baby, she shouldn't be penalised for that,” says Power. “Even having that in place just lets women know, even if they don't want to use it.”

Clear event day logistics can be just as influential. Keegan points to this year's Maratona Dles Dolomites as an event that helped put her mind at ease.

“The 138km sportive had six toilet and mechanical stops en route,” she says. “That was such a massive reassurance.”

Power believes organisers shouldn't underestimate the importance of communicating those details in advance. “Be clear that there are toilets – where are they and where are the stops?” she says. “Logistics are really important to women to feel confident that they could take this on.”

With sportives and gran fondos attracting large numbers of cyclists who will have varying attitudes towards group riding etiquette, event day culture matters too.

Power states that organisers should have clear codes of conduct, making it obvious what behaviour is and isn't acceptable, while giving riders assurance that any incidents reported will be acted upon.

Founder of women's cycling clothing brand, Luca, Luca Kuhn noticed a clear difference between events. “Riding was much friendlier at the Maratona compared to Mallorca 312, where people were overtaking left, right and centre,” she says. “It was really intimidating.”

The impact of these changes is already being seen. Etape Caledonia, highlighted repeatedly by women in response to the Instagram video, partnered with Women in Tri to encourage more women onto the start line. Female registrations increased tenfold, the event's 40-mile route achieved gender parity, and one in three female participants was riding their first sportive.

Moore, in her Instagram video, still described her sportive as “an epic day”. She simply wanted the experience around it to match. If cycling wants more women collecting medals around their necks, success won't be defined by one big change, but by getting the small details right.

The speed bump came out of nowhere. Barrelling at 60kph towards the one-kilometre-to-go banner on stage two of the Tour de Suisse, Urška Žigart was feeling confident. She darted out of a chase group, kicked ahead, and began closing the gap to a tearaway rider. The next moment, her body hit the ground like a rag doll.

“I have an image in my head where my bike is flying to one side and I’m flying to the other,” she tells Cycling Weekly. “But the next things are very blurry.”

The diagnosis could have been so much worse. Unconscious along the finishing straight, Žigart was rushed to hospital in Locarno, where the doctors diagnosed her with a broken jaw.

Just six weeks on, however, she’s racing at the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, crowning a remarkable six-week recovery. “Remarkable?” she smiles, and tries to play it down. “I don’t know about that.” She then takes us back to the beginning.

“The last thing I remember [from before the crash] is, because the men raced after us, Tadej [Pogačar, my partner] and his UAE team bus was going to the parking on the left side of the road, so I moved to the left side of the group and I was waving to the bus.

“I remember the last person I saw was their soigneur waving back at me. I saw there was one girl in front, and I was thinking, ‘Ok, we’re not supposed to be pulling or attacking or whatever, but just let me close this gap and we can roll to the finish.’”

Then came the speed bump, which jolted Žigart through the air.

The 29-year-old's sports director, Jolien D’Hoore, was at the scene within minutes. “I’ve never seen something like this in my life,” she says. “She was unconscious for a few minutes. As soon as I saw that, I started running back to the team car, and then the other DS came to Urška. It was really scary – something I will never forget.”

Due to the simple nature of the fracture, Žigart was fortunate to not require surgery. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t in pain, though. “They gave me quite a lot of medication to keep me from moving,” the Slovenian says. “I was trying to show them I was in pain by sticking my fingers inside my mouth.

“But I have to say that, after that, I bounced back really quickly. Of course, we did a lot of concussion tests, we started slowly, but I had no symptoms, other than a small fracture at the mandibular joint.”

In the days after the crash, Žigart flew to Belgium to see a doctor, who checked her jaw was correctly aligned. Everything seemed stable, so she was given the green light to begin training again, at first on the turbo trainer at home. “Then I started pushing the doctor to let me go outside slowly, and it was up from there,” she says.

Eleven days passed before Žigart’s wheels touched the tarmac again. She began with an easy ride – “it was all very touch and go; I wasn’t sure how a speed bump or a little hole in the road was going to move my jaw” – but everything went smoothly. All of a sudden, racing the Tour de France looked like a possibility again.

At the start of July, Žigart flew to Tignes to join her team-mates at their pre-Tour altitude camp. The team chefs chopped up her food so she didn’t have to chew it very much. Out on the road, not only was she able to keep up, but with the determination to restore her fitness before the Grand Départ in Switzerland, she ended up finding some of her best form.

“Her shape is incredible,” says D’Hoore. “She’s really at full capacity. I would say she’s even better than in Suisse. Also her morale and everything, she’s really good. She’s here in a support role for Kim [Le Court-Pienaar], and she enjoys it so much. There’s no pressure on her. She will be there on the climbs, and that’s what she likes the most.

“In the end, I think she was very lucky. I think she had a guardian angel with her.”

Žigart agrees. On the eve of the race, she shared a long Instagram post saying she had “an angel looking out for me from above”. She’s now back on solid foods, pain free, and enjoying the carnival of the Tour – her third Grand Tour of the season.

“Now it’s six weeks, they say it’s as stable as it’s going to get, so it’s safe to race,” she says. “The body is an amazing thing.”

Marion Rousse has worn almost every hat in the cycling world. Born in northern France, she learnt to ride at the Roubaix Velodrome and went on to become national road champion in 2012. Three years later, however, at age 24 and earning no income from the sport – she was working part-time at a town hall to make ends meet – she retired from racing to pursue a career in media.

Today, Rousse is one of the most recognisable and influential figures in the sport. She’s the voice of cycling on France’s national broadcaster, France Télévisions, and directs the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, having spearheaded the race's highly anticipated revival since taking the reins in 2021.

“I was always sure of one thing with this race,” she said after the first edition in 2022. “Creating a women’s Tour de France wasn’t a gift that we were giving to women’s cycling. They simply deserve it and you see the proof each day.”

Ahead of this year's race, we sat down with Rousse for a Q&A.

How did you get into cycling?

I started when I was six years old. I come from a cycling family: my dad was a high-level amateur cyclist and my cousins, Laurent and David Lefèvre, were pros. As a little girl, I had a lot of energy, and I was bored of cheering on my dad from the side of the road. So I told my parents I wanted to ride myself. Initially, they weren’t on board because they said it was really hard for boys and would be even harder for a girl. They also said I was too young. My mum ended up taking me secretly to sign up.

You went on to turn pro. What has been the proudest moment of your career?

I had some amazing moments in my career, even if it was in a different era of women’s cycling, when we weren’t paid. Winning the French national road title [in 2012] in my home region in front of my family was nice. For me, sport is the best school for life: it teaches you about discipline and pushing your limits. My time as a pro helped me get where I am today in my career.

Why did you decide to retire from racing at 24?

Because I wasn’t paid. After I became French champion, Eurosport asked me if I wanted to try commentating on bike races. I did that for two years, but I got the feeling I wasn’t giving 100% in either of the two roles. At that time, I didn’t see the future of women’s cycling evolving so quickly, and since I wasn’t paid, I figured commentary gave me a good opportunity to stay in the industry I loved while also receiving a salary.

In 2021, you became the director of the Tour de France Femmes. How did that come about?

I’d heard on the grapevine that they were bringing back a women’s Tour de France. Then, one day, [men’s race director] Christian Prudhomme called me and said, “We’re going to start the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. We need someone to organise it, and we want it to be you. We don’t have any other names. Take some time to think about it.”

Of course, when someone gives you an opportunity like that, you don’t have any other choice than to accept. I knew that the evolution of women’s cycling would come through the Tour de France; it was the only race that could get us recognised by the masses, bring in big audiences, and attract sponsors. I told Christian, “OK, let’s do it.”

Did you have any doubts about taking on the role?

Not really. Obviously it’s a huge role, but I knew that with ASO behind it, it would be run by experts. I also already had experience that I knew would help me in the role: as a former high-level sportsperson who knew and had lived through the past struggle of women’s cycling, I was probably more able to make the right decisions at the right moments than a man who had never been part of women’s cycling. I also had my media hat, and in the first few years, the race needed someone who was known to the public. It was all quite natural.

You also have your family life with Julian Alaphilippe, son Nino – and of course your dog Eliott. How do you find juggling everything?

It’s a unique lifestyle, and Nino’s arrival shook up a lot of things – the arrival of a baby for anyone is a big thing. We had to find a balance. Being able to count on my parents helps me a lot with fitting in all my work trips. I’m very lucky to have a little boy, five years old now, who is happy and understands the situation. And Eliott’s great – he’s so sociable, I don’t even know if he knows I’m his owner. He just adores everyone.

Has the rapid growth of the Tour de France Femmes surprised you?

The fact it’s been this fast, yes. I was confident, because I trusted ASO and I knew that if they put the resources in to make it work, it would be a success. Last year, Christian Prudhomme was with me at the race – we did a few stages in the car together – and he said, “Marion, I no longer see the difference [between the men’s and women’s Tours] in the number of people at the side of the roads.” Our big hope was that people would no longer see a men’s Tour and a women’s Tour, but rather the Tour de France.

Do you feel pressure to grow the race every year?

No, but we put pressure on ourselves to come up with an exciting route and meet the high standards of the Tour de France. It needs to be prestigious. The hardest gamble for us was making women’s cycling a household topic for people, even though they didn’t really get to see women’s racing on TV.

In the first edition, I went to speak to the wider public, and they struggled to name a single rider. Now I’m really happy because everyone knows the riders; you see signs at the side of the road, and journalists talk about end-of-season transfers. We’ve really overcome an obstacle and now people don’t watch because it’s men’s or women’s cycling, they watch for the performances.

How do you respond to people who say the race should be three weeks long?

You’ve really got to put the race in its context: barely five years before [the race began], there were hardly any riders in the peloton who were paid. That’s very recent. The Tour de France Femmes is there to accompany the evolution of women’s cycling, and we can’t evolve quicker than women’s cycling itself. If we do, it’ll implode.

There was a Tour de France Femmes before us, the Grand Boucle Féminine, and it disappeared. It would be a catastrophe if, in eight years, we have to say, “It doesn’t work, we grew too quickly, and it’s all imploded.” Yes, it’s evolving quickly, but we’re not at the same stature as the men’s peloton yet. We also shouldn’t put any barriers in our way, and one day there might be more stages, but we won’t go from nine days to 21 overnight. It will need to be done little by little.

The rider union The Cyclists’ Alliance stated in May that women’s cycling is in danger and “built on fragile foundations”. What’s your sense of the health of the sport?

Bad. We talk a lot about women’s cycling, but it’s the same outlook on the men’s side, too. At the top of the pyramid, you have the men’s and women’s Tours, which are very solid and attract the best riders because we have the resources to organise at this level. But it’s becoming difficult to organise bike races. At many levels, races are made possible by volunteers, and everything is expensive. The bottom of the pyramid is really fragile.

What have been the defining moments of the first four editions of the Tour de France Femmes for you?

There have been many. We’ve been very lucky. We’ve had four different winners and that’s great. One of my favourite Tour de France Femmes memories was giving the start on the Champs-Élysées [in 2022]. I popped out the roof of the car, turned around, saw the peloton with the road behind them, and knew it was a big moment for women’s cycling.

Then there were the four seconds that separated Kasia Niewiadoma and Demi Vollering at the summit of Alpe d’Huez [in 2024]. That was a crazy scenario. And Pauline [Ferrand-Prévot]’s victory last year, the first Frenchwoman to win the yellow jersey. The number of people who came out to cheer her on at the roadside, the TV audiences we had on France Télévisions – we peaked at eight million viewers, the second highest that year, including the men’s race [the first was the Paris stage in Montmartre] – it’s incredible. Pauline and I started around the same time and I know her well, so it was a nice quirk of fate.

What does it mean to have a French winner? Have you noticed more home interest in the race?

Oh yes. We’ve waited so long to see a French man or woman take the yellow jersey again, and now it’s been done. It brought together an enormous amount of people. Pauline already had a big fan base, with lots of people behind her, especially after [winning mountain bike gold at] the Paris Olympics. For the development of women’s cycling, it was a steal to have her return to the road.

Do you think Ferrand-Prévot will be the first person to win the race twice?

I hope so for her. People have been questioning Pauline’s form a lot this year, saying she’s not as strong as last year, but I think she’s on the same trajectory – I’m not too worried for her. She has this ability to fix an objective in the year, and arrive 100% ready. She’ll be very strong. That said, it’s true that Vollering has taken a step up. I think the level has improved since last year. You’ve also got riders like [Vuelta Femenina winner] Paula Blasi, who will be interesting to follow, and Marlen Reusser, with the time trial. I think it will be a bit closer than last year, but I still believe in Pauline.

Quickfire round

What was your first bike? It was a black Alan road bike with downtube shifters.

Who was your childhood cycling hero? When I was really young, I loved Erik Zabel. Then when I grew up a bit I was a Tom Boonen fan.

What’s your favourite place to ride? Now, with my lower level, I like going to Calpe [in Spain]. It’s a bit hilly, but you don’t have to climb mountains. The south of France and the Alps are also great.

Your favourite Monument? Paris-Roubaix.

Your favourite type of stage: mountains, sprint or breakaway? Not sprints, especially when I commentate on them for seven hours and nothing happens! High-mountain stages are always great. But as a commentator, you’re always less disappointed with the Classics-y stages, where there’s a fight from the beginning, compared to the high mountains. With those, you know you’re going to have a good afternoon in front of the TV.

Your favourite mountain in France? I love Mont Ventoux. I’ve climbed it five times.

Your favourite sport after cycling? I really like following biathlon and athletics. But especially biathlon, because it’s in the winter and there’s no cycling to watch.

Who’s the next star of women’s cycling? Célia Gery.

What do you do to relax? I go through real on-off periods, so when I’m at home, I’m a real mother hen. I love going for walks or to restaurants with my son.

This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 30 July 2026. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.

Cyclists are always chasing personal bests. Can you eke out a faster climb? Can you push a bit more power? Or can you beat your mate to the town sign?

For Charles Hall, who finished as the fastest amateur rider on the brutal 200km Icelandic gravel race The Rift last weekend, his PB was something else entirely. “The event was sponsored by a hot dog factory, so it was essentially just endless hot dogs [at the finish]. So, I said hello to nine hot dogs,” he explains confirming he’s never eaten that many in one sitting before. “I think that's got to be near an entire jar of hot dogs.”

“I don't really think sports nutritionists around the world would advise it for recovery fuel. But, I think my body was craving something and it saw that and it thought that's what I needed,” he says.

Hall, who has a full time job working in a market research firm, wasn’t even meant to be in Iceland that weekend, let alone trying to refuel from burning 7,000 calories in seven hours.

“The Rift were running a competition on Instagram. It was very much, comment, share, put something on your story for a chance to get in… I was like, no one ever wins them, but I thought, you know what, why not?”

But Hall, who rides for Rule 28 Factory Racing, did win. With just three weeks to go he had to book a flight to Iceland. But all the accommodation in and around the start town of Hvolsvöllur, home to just over 1,000 people, was booked, so in less than ideal race preparation he’d sleep in a tent.

Luckily for Hall he had been due to be in Essex for the ACME Grand West audax which takes them from Essex to the Welsh coast and so already had the day booked off work. “I left work on the Thursday evening, arrived there basically midnight, pitched the tent, and then just kind of went from there. It was all quite a whirlwind of a weekend,” he recalled.

Hall wasn’t totally unprepared. He tries to get at least two hours riding in each day, mostly on his way to and from work, and four hours a day at the weekend. But his hopes weren’t high.

“Obviously, I go into each race thinking you've got to give it your all, especially when you spend so much money and time to go away. But I was feeling a bit rough. So I called my parents, and my girlfriend was like, you know what? It's such pretty scenery. I'll just [take my] time and enjoy what's around me."

“But as soon as I got in the bunch amongst the other riders, riding shoulder-to-shoulder against some of the pros you can't. I just thought I'd see how long I can hold on to the front group.”

Contributing turns alongside a group of pros he recognised from their social media profiles Hall lasted much longer than he expected, only dropping from the front group 130km into the 200km race. “I surprised myself quite a lot. My normalized power for the first two hours, was over 350 watts. I set an average power for 20 minutes near 370 watts,” he says.

By the time he dropped back, the race had climbed most of its 2,600m of ascent up onto the plains of the Fjallabak Nature Reserve and was descending slowly back towards the start. “I was kind of in no man's land, like the next 70km. I was constantly looking over my shoulder, not really knowing where anybody was,” he recalls. “Occasionally, a rider would pass through, but they were an elite rider, not an age group rider. So, the last bit was quite tense.”

The terrain was also starting to take its toll. “The terrain itself was by far the hardest terrain I've ever ridden. I train in around Richmond Park, so it's fairly champagne gravel in Richmond Park, so this was very much just like a surreal experience.

“It was quite open farm roads not like the fire roads that you would get up in [gravel race] The Gralloch in Scotland, no tricky single track, just hard terrain. Also, you had to constantly look out for big hard volcanic rocks because they were very much hiding in the soil. There would just be flat gravel, and suddenly a massive rock,” he says. “At the end, my hands were just covered with blisters from the constant vibrations.”

Having wrapped up an impressive result, he was also 22^nd among the pro riders, it was time for a quick beer, nine hotdogs and packing his stuff up ready for an early morning flight back to the UK ready for a hero’s welcome in the office the next day.

“In the Monday morning meeting they ask, ‘How's everybody's weekend? What did people get up to?’ I said, ‘I went to Iceland and won a bike race’," he recalls. "They said, ‘Oh, nice. That's interesting.’ And then the conversation moves on.”

Mixing an electrolyte drink had become a firm part of my morning routine. The moment I was downstairs, I’d be reaching for a snazzily branded sachet. It didn’t matter what workout I had planned – I’d always find an excuse to accessorise my water. I must have tried every brand and flavour on the market, easily attracted by slick packaging and a novel taste, rarely glancing at the actual ingredients. But then I began to ponder the extra sodium I was consuming, which ranged from 300mg per sachet to a massive 1,000mg hit.

That 1,000mg is a whole gram of pure sodium – which is where the maths gets alarming. Because salt is only about 40% sodium, you have to multiply any sodium figure by 2.5 to find the true salt equivalent. Suddenly, that 1g of sodium becomes 2.5g of salt. Drinking just two of those heavy duty sachets meant I was downing 5g of salt – dangerously close to the NHS daily maximum of 6g, before I’d even eaten a meal. While sodium is the main electrolyte lost in sweat, these numbers made me question my habit. Was this actually supporting my training and health, or was I just heavily salting my water to make it more interesting?

That question led me to look at salt intake more broadly. A recent study by the British Heart Foundation found that the average Brit consumes the equivalent salt found in 155 packets of crisps each week – around 8.4g per day, roughly 40% more than the advised limit. Consuming too much salt carries risks – but more on that later. First, where do electrolytes fit into that picture? Do we really need them day to day, or are they better reserved for very long rides in hot weather?

What are electrolytes?

Electrolytes – sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium – are essential minerals the body needs to function properly. They play vital roles in maintaining fluid balance, transmitting nerve signals, enabling muscle contractions, and balancing blood pH. When we exercise, the body cools itself by sweating, and because sweat is derived from your blood plasma and extracellular fluid, it contains dissolved minerals – predominantly sodium. But to what extent do we need to replace the electrolytes we sweat out?

As a sports nutritionist for Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, Will Girling works with riders tackling the world’s biggest races, including the Tour de France, where carefully managing fluid and sodium losses over long, hot stages is critical. Failing to replace such losses could cause serious problems. “At its most extreme,” said Girling, “that could include hyponatraemia [low blood sodium levels, below the normal range of around 135-145 mmol/L]. More commonly, you might experience dehydration, headaches, nausea and a reduced ability to exercise.” But what about for recreational cyclists – do we need to take similar precautions?

Electrolytes don’t directly hydrate you, but they help your body retain and use the fluid you drink more effectively. This distinction is widely misunderstood, reckons Dr Lewis James from Loughborough University. “People mistakenly think that by having an electrolyte product, they’re getting better hydration, so they don’t focus on the thing that matters most – fluid intake,” he said. “The electrolyte content won’t magically make them more hydrated, not unless they are also drinking the correct amount of water they need.”

According to the experts, electrolyte use is considered most useful during sustained exercise lasting longer than 60 minutes, in hot environments, or for individuals who consistently lose relatively high amounts of sodium in their sweat, often indicated by signs such as white salt marks on clothing or sweat that stings the eyes.

Electrolytes drive hydration through a process called osmosis. In simple terms, water naturally moves toward areas with a higher concentration of sodium to balance things out. Because water always follows sodium, higher sodium levels essentially prompt the body to ‘hold on’ to more fluid. “Electrolytes assist water absorption and retention, so anything you drink can contribute more readily to the body water pool if electrolytes are present,” explained Professor Stuart Galloway from the University of Stirling.

Much of the time, we replenish electrolytes naturally through the foods we eat day to day: sodium from salt, potassium from bananas and potatoes, and magnesium from nuts, seeds, and leafy greens. During prolonged or very intense exercise, however, particularly in hot conditions, supplementation can offer a convenient way to replace what’s lost through sweat.

What’s inside the sachets?

Brands selling electrolytes are becoming increasingly visible, with the global electrolyte powder market alone expected to exceed $700m (£530m) within the next four years. Ingredient lists vary significantly between brands, but sodium is usually the primary ingredient, alongside potassium, magnesium and calcium. Many products also go beyond basic electrolytes. Some include carbohydrates to provide a quick energy source, while others also contain caffeine, amino acids, or “performance blends” designed to boost alertness or gut health. Flavourings, sweeteners such as stevia or sucralose, and anti-caking agents are also commonly used to improve taste and shelf stability.

The language used to market these products makes big, often vague promises. Some brands position electrolytes as an everyday essential, even those with up to 1,000mg of sodium, claiming benefits such as improved energy, enhanced performance, sharper focus and reduced fatigue. As a result, the lines between evidence-based sports nutrition and more questionable “wellness” fads have become increasingly blurred.

DIY it at home

Want to ditch the expensive sports drinks? Dr Carrie Ruxton’s DIY alternative takes seconds to mix and costs mere pennies.

To make 500ml, mix the following ingredients:

• 150–200ml 100% orange juice
• 300–350ml water
• 1 sachet of oral rehydration salts (like Dioralyte or a generic supermarket brand) for hot weather or sweat- heavy sessions.
• Want an even cheaper fix? Swapping the sachet for a single gram of standard table salt provides about 400mg of sodium for next to nothing.

Do we need them, and if so, when?

With electrolyte powders and tablets now regular fixtures in the supermarket, it would be easy to assume they’re an essential part of every rider’s training routine. But for most cyclists, the reality is more nuanced. “There’s salt everywhere in all of our diets,” James said. “Most of us get a lot more than we need on a daily basis, so I would question whether it’s needed for someone who is recreationally active and mainly exercising for health purposes or enjoyment.”

Girling echoed this view, adding that for exercise lasting less than two hours, hydrating beforehand and drinking to thirst during is generally sufficient, unless conditions are very hot or sweat sodium losses are unusually high. In these situations, consuming an electrolyte drink before exercise may help support fluid balance from the outset. “If exercise is prolonged – over two hours – you probably want to be considering it [electrolytes],” Girling added, recommending cyclists also check the sodium content of their gels and carbohydrate drinks.

However, many factors influence electrolyte requirements. Galloway points out that there’s no one-size fits-all approach. “It depends on how long the ride is going to be, what the conditions are like, what else the rider might be eating or drinking during that ride, and individual differences,” he said. The demands of a steady cafe ride in spring are very different from those of a four-hour ride or race at the height of summer. For James, the conversation changes when riders are training at a high level, completing multiple sessions a day, or preparing for events in hot environments. In these situations, sodium losses through sweat may exceed dietary intake, potentially affecting both performance and recovery.

For recreational cyclists, electrolyte supplementation becomes useful during back-to-back training days in hot weather or on longer, more demanding sessions where sweat losses are higher. The estimated average sweat sodium loss is between 800 and 950mg per litre of sweat, although this varies considerably between individuals owing to genetics and heat adaptation, with reported values ranging from around 200mg to 2,000mg per litre. While sweat sodium tests are available at a cost, most sports nutritionists consider them an unnecessary expense for everyday riders. Instead, simple observation is usually enough: riders who notice white marks on their kit after a ride correctly infer that they have lost significant amounts of sodium.

Sodium is the primary electrolyte lost in sweat, so that should be the main focus. James explained that, while other electrolytes (potassium, magnesium, and calcium) are essential for normal bodily function, there is limited evidence that supplementing them during exercise provides additional benefits. The consensus among the experts we consulted was that hydration strategies can be simple and cheap. The body doesn’t distinguish the sodium in table salt from the sodium in a supplement. “One gram of salt contains around 400mg of sodium,” Girling pointed out, suggesting that you don’t necessarily need to spend money on sachets and tablets.

Across the board, the experts suggested that performance generally begins to decline once dehydration exceeds 2% of body weight, meaning mild dehydration during shorter or lower-intensity rides is usually well tolerated by the body. “As you go beyond 2% dehydration, you may begin to experience brain fog, lose concentration, feel greater fatigue and you’ll start to heat up, as you’ve less fluid to keep your temperature down,” said Dr Carrie Ruxton, dietitian and co founder of Salt St Andrews gym.

To estimate your own fluid losses, weigh yourself before and after a ride. As a guide, a 70kg rider who loses 2% of their body weight, or 1.4kg, during a ride will have lost around 1.4 litres of fluid. How quickly you reach this level of dehydration depends on your sweat rate, which varies depending on temperature, intensity, and individual physiology.

Can you have too many electrolytes?

Supplementing with electrolytes may be useful for riders covering long distances in very warm weather, but if you’re regularly emptying sachets into your water, can you have too much of a good thing? “It will all come down to salt balance over the day,” James said. “If they’re consuming too much salt, then there could be negative effects.” One of the biggest concerns around electrolyte products is excessive sodium intake. Too much salt over time has been linked to high blood pressure, a major risk factor for cardiovascular disease. For those who already have high blood pressure, Ruxton stressed the importance of monitoring the combined sodium intake from food or supplements.

The experts consulted all agreed that healthy, active individuals are unlikely to run into problems from occasional electrolyte use around training. “Generally, if you’re young and active anyway, with a healthy balanced diet, your body is good at sorting out how much salt and how much other electrolytes it needs,” said Galloway. “We excrete the excess and retain what we need.” More immediate issues tend to come from overuse during exercise. According to Girling, excessively concentrated drinks can contribute to gastrointestinal distress and may even slow carbohydrate absorption, potentially impacting performance. Higher sodium intake can also lead to short-term fluid retention, showing up as slight weight fluctuations or a bloated feeling after use. “That’s only important if you’re doing an activity or racing where it’s important not to gain weight the next day,” Girling said. Ultimately, electrolytes are best viewed as a tool rather than a daily necessity – useful in the right conditions, but otherwise pointless. As Ruxton pointed out, electrolytes should be treated similarly to energy gels – used strategically. “It’s about using these things in a planned way and doing the planning when you’re training,” she said.

Instead of reaching for an electrolyte sachet first thing in the morning, I’ll be taking a more mindful approach. For most of us, especially those training in cooler climates like the UK, electrolyte supplements aren’t a daily necessity. They have their place – particularly during longer rides, in the heat, or when sweat losses are high – but otherwise, most of us are likely to maintain electrolyte balance through our normal diet. Since writing this article, I’ve already kicked my electrolyte habit, and instead I’m paying closer attention to the amount of salt in my diet, which thankfully appears to be relatively low. For now, the sachets will stay in the cupboard – until I really need them.

How much should we aim to consume?

Lisa Charlebois spoke to a range of experts in search of a baseline intake suggestion.

Dr. Cristhian Montenegro – PhD in human bioenergetics, with a focus on cardiovascular and muscle physiology – argues the baseline sodium question is more nuanced than nutrition labels suggest.

"Sodium for cyclists during exercise is tied to the amount of water they are looking to retain or replace," he says. “Sodium and carbohydrates like glucose and sucrose all help with the retention of water, so the amount of sodium supplementation will not only depend on water intake but also the total other water-retaining sugars in drink mix or gels. In short, up to 500mg is a good baseline range if you’re drinking one 500ml bottle per hour.

"Generally, 500 to 1,000mg of sodium per hour is justified for performance-oriented hard efforts, as long as it is ingested correctly and for the right reasons, essentially with water, for water replenishment," he says. "If it is hot and an athlete is working hard and generating metabolic heat, total sodium consumption may be even higher."

However, he draws a sharp line between the elite athletes and the everyday rider. "As with most things marketed using professional athletes, us ‘mere mortals’ will get by with much less, especially on moderate intensity rides."

Andrea Rumschlag, a Registered and Licensed Dietitian, cites the general guideline of 300 to 600mg per hour. "I always like to remind athletes (or any consumer for that matter) to consider who is selling you something," she says. "Higher levels of sodium are typically needed for moderately intense activity exceeding two to eight or more hours. Otherwise, the average sweater doing one to two hours may be just fine with a sports drink, water, and a salty snack post-ride."

Frank Overton, founder of FasCat Coaching, with a Masters in Physiology and a USA Cycling Level 1 accreditation, puts it plainly: "Sodium loss varies wildly between people, roughly anywhere from 100 to 2,000mg per hour. That's why a one-size-fits-all 1,000mg product is ideal for some riders and overkill for others. The answer is genuinely individual."

The general consensus was that, for rides under two hours in cool conditions, water and food will work well. Rides from two to four hours, electrolytes in the 300 to 500mg range are reasonable. For rides over four hours, in heat, or for known heavy sweaters, higher sodium supplementation may be genuinely beneficial.

Sweat tests are available for those who really want to know if they’re losing more or less sodium than the average rider through sweat. Lindsey Hunt, MSc, PhD and Senior Sports Scientist at Precision Hydration, which offers the testing and tailored electrolyte drinks, told us: “Sweat rate you can train and measure. But how much sodium you lose in that sweat is largely down to your genes, and it barely shifts with fitness or acclimatisation. We see people losing anywhere from around 200mg of sodium per litre of sweat to over 2,000mg — that's a tenfold difference between two riders who look identical on paper. So if you're a salty sweater doing long, hot rides, generic advice can leave you a long way short without you ever knowing why.”

In October 2024, I discovered a stack of old copies of The Bicycle from the 1930s, tucked away in my father's wardrobe. They had belonged to my great-uncle, Bill Mills, who founded the magazine 90 years ago. Intrigued, I began piecing together his life. In the course of my research, a chance exchange with cycling historian Feargal McKay revealed that, in 1947, Bill had organised an Anglo-French stage race. The first race to cross the English Channel and the first backed by a national newspaper, it was designed to pull British cycling out of the post-war gloom ahead of the 1948 London Olympics. A radical plan, then - so why had I never heard of it?

The race, like Bill himself, has been all but forgotten. By coincidence, or something stranger, I had cycled a route similar to the race, albeit in reverse, shortly before discovering Bill's magazines. The chain of serendipities seemed to beckon to me to uncover the story behind the lost race that could have changed the course of British cycling.

Continental aspiration

By 1947, Bill was already a significant figure in British cycling. He had been devoted to the sport since boyhood, and as a young rider living in Brighton, he frequently travelled to France to watch European races. In his own racing, he rose through the club ranks to become one of Britain's leading time triallists. But it was mass-start racing that captured his heart.

After riding professionally with Swiss Hour record-holder Oscar Egg's team and crashing heavily in the 1932 Rome World Championships, Bill returned to England with a Continental vision for mass-start racing - and a taste for Italian gelati and red wine. Together with the forceful Vic Jenner, his GB team-mate in Rome, he organised closed circuit events at Brooklands, which soon became popular, proving that time trials were not the only way to race. A few years later, in 1936, Bill drew on his experience working for the News Chronicle to launch The Bicycle. Bold in his patriotic vision, he strove to shake up British cycling and keep pace with our European rivals.

Home Olympics ahead

Life in post-war Britain was bleak, defined by rationing, austerity and social upheaval. Out of the rubble and financial ruin, the 1948 Olympic bid aimed to restore national morale and international standing. Yet when London won the bid, the established cycling nations were alarmed. Britain was an eccentric outlier where mass-start racing was banned and instead riders raced against the clock in secret at dawn, cloaked in alpaca coats. There were doubts about whether the country could successfully stage an Olympic cycling event.

Bill was more optimistic: he believed British riders could be made Olympics-ready, provided they were exposed to European-style racing. He came up with an ingenious plan: a three-day Anglo-French cycling match. Stages one and two would be run under French mass-start rules, and stage three would be a traditional British time trial. Each nation would enjoy a home advantage.

By this time, Bill was working for the News Chronicle, and after much persuading, his bosses agreed to sponsor his race as part of Britain's Olympic campaign, stumping up £2,000 (roughly £95,000 today). Organisational support came from Bill's long-term friend and renowned French cycling journalist Jean Leulliot. Only one hurdle remained: securing approval from Britain's divided cycling authorities.

The go-ahead at last

World War Two might have ended, but a civil war was being fought between cycling's governing bodies over mass-start racing. The National Cyclists' Union (NCU) backed Bill's event without hesitation, nailing its colours to the mast with the slogan, "Not a single Olympic cycling title must leave this country." But because the race included a time trial, it also needed approval from the Road Time Trials Council (RTTC), which saw only danger and demanded full compliance with its regulations, including keeping races secret. The result was farcical: newspapers across the world would publish the race details, yet the News Chronicle would not be permitted to do so until the race had finished. With its back to the wall, the paper withdrew its sponsorship.

Bill responded in his usual outspoken style, publishing an article in The Bicycle that denounced the RTTC's decision as a monumental obstruction to Olympic progress and a blow to Britain's international standing. Matters escalated when Percy Stallard's rebel group, the British League of Racing Cyclists, announced News of the World backing for its Brighton to Glasgow race. Suddenly the establishment risked losing control altogether. Afraid of losing face, the NCU appealed to the UCI, which overruled the RTTC and issued an international permit. In March 1947, Bill triumphantly announced that the race was back on.

He pressed on with arranging trains, boats, customs clearance, police escorts, meals and hotels, chores made even more onerous by post-war scarcities. The race was christened the 'News Chronicle, Paris to London Anglo-French Road Race'. Teams were selected and dates fixed for the Whitsun weekend, 24-26 May 1947. Continental cycling was coming to Britain.

Heroic home victory

Under blue skies and a blazing sun, 30 slick, well-equipped French riders rolled up beside Le Bourget airfield, 10km north of Paris. The comparatively shambolic British team looked on uneasily, eyeing up their rivals' CO2 inflators, derailleur gears and gleaming alloy fittings. The playing field was far from level.

Britain's race got off to a disastrous start. Bill observed loose gear levers, broken cables, burst tyres, a snapped saddle and riders swapping machines mid-race. The lack of British teamwork was, in Bill's words, "almost laughable". Yet there was a flash of promise. Britain's Ernie Clements somehow reached the Lens track first, only to skid on loose concrete and surrender the stage to France's Dominique Forlini. Even so, two Britons made the top 10. One was George Fleming.

Overnight in Lens, a miracle took place: the British learned to ride as a unit. On cobbles early in the stage, under relentless heat, they attacked. The French, divided by interclub loyalties, refused to work together. Sensing disorder, the British seized the initiative and forced a break, with only one Frenchman able to respond. Seventeen miles from Calais, Fleming made a solo breakaway.

Watching the Briton attack into a headwind, the French journalists scoffed at his chances. They were soon eating their words. Bill clocked Fleming at 22.4mph as the gap extended beyond two minutes. Rushing onto the finish, he reported the moment a solitary figure appeared: "Is it Fleming? Of course it is! Desperately tired, he comes up to the finishing line. His head hangs; he cannot raise it even for a smile." "How was it, George?" Bill asked. "The last few miles were a bit hard," came the reply.

Back on English roads for the final stage TT, Fleming's strength against the clock proved decisive. At Herne Hill Velodrome, before a crowd of 10,000, he was declared the overall winner. For the first time in history, the British public watched one of their own triumph in an international cycling race and on home soil too.

Great expectations

For Bill, it felt like a beginning. Cycling was no longer dismissed by the national press as a moribund, irrelevant sport. British riders had entered the international picture, and he hoped the race had set a precedent. Buoyed by the headlines and profit, the News Chronicle handed Bill an increased budget of £3,000 for a sequel. "Ask for more if you think it necessary," they told him, "we want an even bigger and better race." Bill planned to widen the international field, creating an annual pre-Olympics showdown. It looked set to become a regular fixture, a world-class race linking France and Britain in a sporting partnership par excellence.

The governing bodies' truce proved short-lived, however. Jenner, formerly Bill's ally, had grown sceptical of mass-start racing and now, taking the RTTC's side, was locked in a dispute with the News Chronicle's promoter. He insisted on a traditional early start, for safety's sake. What had worked in practice was now overruled by bureaucracy and obstinacy.

Jenner revived a 1939 agreement that stripped the NCU of its right to object in defence of an Ilam start. The UCI could not bail them out this time. A meeting was called in the hope of compromise. An hour later, Bill received a memo from the News Chronicle: "Scrub Paris-London. It's all off." There was no alternative sponsor waiting in the wings and no organising body capable of stepping in. The race would never be repeated.

For Bill, the failure to reach an agreement was yet another example of egos and internal bickering holding back the sport. Fleming shared his frustration in an open letter published in The Bicycle on 14 April 1948, arguing that Paris-London had taught Britain more about road racing than had any domestic event before or since. Without races like it, he warned, Britain would never produce world or Olympic road champions.

Enduring legacy

Fleming was proved right. Britain won no individual road cycling medal at the 1948 Olympics. The ultimate verdict came from the results: Olympic gold was won by France's José Beyaert, who had placed third in Paris-London the year before. Britain's first post-war Olympic gold in road cycling would not come until Nicole Cooke's victory in Beijing, 60 years later. The governing bodies' bickering would continue until the British Cycling Federation was formed in 1959, delaying British riders' progress in elite road races by decades. Had Paris-London survived beyond 1947, it might have transformed British cycling's trajectory. Bill had understood what the sport needed to flourish in Britain, an established annual international stage race to rally national ambition, to learn from, and against which to measure.

In 1965, Bill approached the Daily Mail (then owner of the News Chronicle) to ask whether it was interested in reviving the race. He received no reply. On 2 April, 1965, Bill took his own life. He was 58. The weekend before his death, he had written his final article, about his dream of a Paris-London return; it was published posthumously on 17 April, 1965 in this magazine. The circumstances of Bill's death are not fully known to our family, but we do know that cycling had given him his purpose, and he had fought for its future to the detriment of his health and second marriage. It narrowed his world, and eventually the vision that had sustained him no longer held.

Paris-London left its mark, and so had Bill. It was a race that mattered, and a moment when Britain showed it could be a credible cycling nation. Its success prompted other national newspapers to seek cycling races to sponsor, eventually leading to the Daily Express's backing of the Tour of Britain in 1951. I will ride London-Paris again this summer, this time carrying with me the full story behind my great-uncle's creation and what it meant to him. And when the men's and women's Tour de France cross the Channel next summer, it will feel to me as though the spirit of Bill's race has finally returned.

THE PATH TO OLYMPIC ROAD RACE GOLD

Despite massed start road racing in the UK being in its infancy, Bill Mills's dream was for Great Britain to win Olympic gold at the 1948 London Olympics. In the end it would take another 60 years to achieve that goal on the road. Here are the major events along the way:

1942 First massed start race - Percy Stallard runs rebel Llangollen to Wolverhampton road race

1947 Paris-London - Bill Mills's race proves Britain has an appetite for major cycling events

1948 London Olympics - silver medal in the team road race

1951 Tour of Britain - the first major domestic stage race begins

1955 Tour de France - British team competes for the first time

1958 Tour stage win - Brian Robinson becomes first Briton to win a Tour stage

1959 Formation of the BCF - BLRC and NCU unify and form the British Cycling Federation

1965 Road world champion - Tom Simpson becomes Britain's first world champion on the road

1974 Tour's first UK visit - stage two of the Tour de France takes place on Plympton by-pass

1996 Lottery funding lands - the BCF is one of many British sports to receive major financial backing thanks to the National Lottery

2008 Olympic road race gold - Nicole Cooke secures the long-awaited victory in Beijing

This feature was originally published in the 21 May 2026 print edition of Cycling Weekly magazine – available to buy on the newsstand every Thursday (UK only). Digital versions are available on Apple News and Readly. Subscriptions through Magazines Direct.

After years of speculation, I can finally provide a definitive answer to one of humanity's oldest questions: bears do indeed shit in the woods.

I was – against my better judgement – alone under dense canopy cover in the Carpathian Mountains, just south of the city of Brasov in Romania. The range yawns some 1,500 kilometres across Eastern Europe – from Ukraine to Czechia – and is home to Europe’s highest density of brown bears, wolves and lynx.

Brasov is known, quite alarmingly, as the City of Bears.

“Avoid the parks after dark,” our taxi driver told us during the journey from the airport to the AirBnB. “Bears will come down from the mountains to look for a late supper, and if you take them by surprise, well…,” he let the sentence hang. We got the gist.

Brown bears – Ursus arctos, if you're feeling Latin – sit just one rung below grizzlies on the ladder of things you really don't want to annoy. If you ever see one, it ideally wants to be through a very powerful pair of binoculars or from the safety of an armoured vehicle.

Yet here I was, on a bicycle. Never mind bears shitting in the woods, I was absolutely bricking it.

Just a month before our visit, a motorcyclist had been wrenched from his bike and dragged into a ravine by the side of one of the major roads on the way out of the city. Sadly, he did not emerge with a pulse. However, he had made a mistake that causes the most bear-related human fatalities – he had tried to feed them. Unfortunately, though, they forewent the appetiser and moved straight on to the main course.

Read more: Into the wild: What to know and pack when venturing into remote locations

I’d been given a thorough briefing by two separate parties before venturing into the bear-infested wilderness. Firstly, the bike rental shop owner was keen that under no circumstances should I attempt to get a selfie with a brown bear. This advice seemed fairly obvious to me, as I imagined – phone in hand – pleading with a grizzly friend, “if you could refrain from trying to eat my head for a moment please, you’re not quite in focus.”

But a number of Darwin awards have been dished out to people doing just this.

"Romania's forests have capacity for around 3,000 to 4,000 bears," Marius from Cycle Explore told me. "We think there are now more than 12,000. Attacks do happen, but they're usually because people try to feed them. They can turn very quickly."

I had absolutely no intention of sharing a sachet of SiS Beta Fuel with a 400-kilogramme killing machine, so I asked a more pertinent question.

"How can I – feeding and selfies aside – avoid being chased down a mountain and relieved of my limbs?"

“Make a lot of noise, particularly when rounding sharp corners,” Marius instructed. “Coming between a mother and her cubs will always end badly, so announcing your presence is key.”

I climbed into the Carpathians, then, letting rip a suitably loud rendition of ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’, yet still every single crack or snap in the forest provoked another wave of anxiety.

Why, then, was I doing this? I’m very much of the opinion that visiting a different country and not turning a pedal in it is tantamount to treason. I was here with mates, who were not cyclists; the Hammer Horror fans were instead visiting Bran Castle, home briefly to Vlad the Impaler who inspired Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

I told them that while they were taking pictures of fictitious fangs, to spare me a thought while I rode amid real ones.

I’d just finished Lauper’s 80s anthem when my front tyre stopped dead before, slewing slideways violently. It felt like I’d just ridden into a swamp. I looked down to find that my tyre had become acquainted with a gargantuan pile of matter. Inspecting the gloop, I saw that it contained berries, lots of berries.

“Bear shit!”; fresh bear shit, to boot.

Vocal cords already shot, I gave myself a mental kicking for ignoring the advice of a friend who lives in Montana. The western state is home to the densest grizzly bear population in the United States, where venturing into the backcountry generally involves carrying two essential items.

"A lot of people in Montana use what's known as a bear bell," explained Andy Ryan, who's currently cycling around the world and riding through brown bear country in Japan. "It's simply a small bell attached to your backpack or bike. Bears are generally solitary animals and, for the most part, they don't want an encounter with people. Making noise gives them a chance to move away before you surprise them."

Fortunately, I had taken his second piece of advice: "Bear spray is the number one thing," he said.

"If you attract the attention of a brown bear and you're on a bike, get off it and hold it above your head if you can, spread your arms, shout loudly and stand your ground. If the bear continues to approach or charges, it's time to deploy the bear spray. The canister is highly pressurised and has an effective range of around 30 feet. Rather than aiming directly at the bear's face, sweep the spray from side to side to create a cloud that the bear has to run through."

And if that fails? “Curl up into a ball and pray!”

I reached behind me and touched the back pocket of my cycling jersey. The canister was still there, cocked and loaded.

There was a bear in my midst. And if its bowel movement was anything to go by, it was a big one.

I carried on riding towards the summit, now approaching 5,000 feet. The forest gradually gave way to sweeping views across Brașov and deep into the Carpathians, affording my mind a few blissful, bear-free moments. Those vistas were the real reason I'd come up here. Some, though, are harder earned than others.

Despite lasting barely two hours, it was the most exhilarating bike ride I'd ever been on. It felt less like a ride through the mountains and more like a trip through a theme park, every blind corner carrying the promise of the next jump scare.

Eventually I turned for home, hurtling back towards Brașov at speeds touching 38mph – still nowhere near fast enough to outrun a charging bear. Yet with every metre of descending trail, the forest began to thin and the tension slowly ebbed away. The ride's finale, it seemed, wouldn't be a face-to-face encounter with Romania's most famous resident, but the quiet satisfaction of rolling back into the city with all my limbs still attached.

For once, I hadn't been the apex predator. I was somewhere much further down the food chain in that forest.

In July 2013, second-year pro Luke Durbridge watched the final stage of the Tour de France on the Champs-Élysées. He collected the hats tossed out to the fans at the roadside, and gaped at the lights show on the Arc de Triomphe, as Chris Froome was crowned the winner on the race’s 100th anniversary. “This looks like the big show,” Durbridge told himself. “I thought, ‘Next year, I really want to go.’”

Twelve months on, the Australian was back, and this time he was part of the peloton. He has since raced 12 of the last 13 Tours – more than 200 stages – each one with the same team, now named Jayco AlUla. This edition, however, will be his last; after next January’s Australian Road Championships, the 35-year-old will retire from professional cycling, calling time on a 15-year road career.

“I’m just incredibly lucky to be able to do as many [Tours] as I did,” he tells Cycling Weekly. “I just wanted to do one.”

Durbridge is one of at least five riders who have decided, on their terms, that this will be their final Tour. Alongside him in the Class of ‘26 are Damiano Caruso (Bahrain Victorious), Magnus Cort (Uno-X Mobility), Damien Howson (Pinarello Q36.5) and Ion Izagirre (Cofidis), all of whom are due to retire at the end of this season.

Riders don’t always have the luxury of knowing when their final Tour will be. Some careers end in crashes or contract breakdowns; other times, riders just never make the cut for the eight-man squad again.

While there’s often great fanfare around debutants at the Tour – take Paul Seixas and Isaac del Toro, for example – the final-timers tend to exit stage left, without a curtain call. Cycling Weekly spoke to three of them at this year’s race, and asked them about their best memories through the years, their toughest moments, and the wisdom they have for the next generation.

“Probably the most standout memory is actually the people,” says Durbridge. “All of my best friends and all of my closest relationships have come from just being in the trenches at the Tour. You probably remember the hard moments with your mates more than you do the ones where you might have got a nice victory.”

What, then, was his hardest moment? “Alpe d’Huez, 2018,” he replies, no need to stop and think. “I made the time cut by 50 seconds, last guy on the road.

“I was quite good on the climb beforehand, and then I just completely cooked it up in the heat nutrition-wise. Then I was just dipping into the soul. I got a lot of help from the crowd that day. That’s a pretty iconic moment for me. I’m pretty proud of myself that I got it done.”

Durbridge’s compatriot and former team-mate Howson is riding his third Tour de France. After competing in back-to-back editions in 2017 and 2018, he began to wonder if he’d ever return to the biggest bike race in the world. Now, eight years on, he’s back with debutants Pinarello Q36.5.

“I set it as a goal when I changed teams four years ago to Q36.5,” the 33-year-old says. “It was a goal of mine to get back to the Tour de France, and it was a goal of theirs to make the Tour de France, so it’s cool to be here in my final year, along with the team, both achieving our goals that we set many years ago.”

Howson chose the eve of this year’s Grand Départ in Barcelona to announce his retirement. Already, his farewell Tour has brought a full-circle moment.

“We started in Carcassonne the other day, and that’s the place where I fractured my scaphoid in my last Tour de France and ended my race there on stage 15,” he says.

“That was another reason I wanted to come back; after feeling the finish in Paris [in 2017], it’s an iconic moment in sport, and to get so close and break the scaphoid, I wasn’t able to get there that year. Now, eight years later, we’re back at the Tour de France and trying to tick off the team’s objectives and ambitions. But it’ll be a nice little cherry on the top for me to finish in Paris.”

Uno-X’s Magnus Cort has only failed to finish one of the eight Tours he started. Funnily, that uncompleted edition in 2022, which began in his native Denmark, is also the one that gave him the fondest memories.

“I was in the polka dot jersey,” he says of the opening stages out of Copenhagen. “Then I got a second day where I was riding alone in the breakaway. That was also very special.

“It’s something I won’t get the chance to do again now. It was the one time I had the opportunity to do something, and I was very happy that I could do it.”

Cort is one of two riders in the Class of ‘26, alongside Izagirre, who can call themselves stage winners. The Dane earned the first of his two victories on his debut in 2018, while the second came five days before he withdrew in 2022.

Rather than his wins, some fans might remember Cort more for his tongue-in-cheek hotel reviews, which he began posting on Instagram as early as 2019. “Many of them are not the best hotels, so I don’t think that’s a part I will miss,” he says. “I know a lot of people have told me they’ll miss my reviews.”

What’s the biggest hotel nightmare he’s had at the race? “It was this one we stayed in two years ago,” he says. “We stayed in a slightly different part of the hotel, and I don’t know if it was the weather in the different part, but it was a lot more moist there. There was water basically running down the walls. It was really, really nasty there.”

The rough nights, though, have taken nothing away from Cort's Tour experience. “It’s been great,” he says, but he won't reminisce any deeper just yet. That will come later. “For the moment, I’m thinking about the race and doing everything I can like every other year.”

Durbridge, too, isn’t letting himself sit back and reflect on his 13 Tours just yet. With two days still to go until Paris, he's sticking to the mantra he's always had: “I’m trying to keep it one stage at a time.”

It’s the same wisdom the Jayco AlUla road captain gives to any rider at the start of their Tour journey. “Try and take it all in,” he says. “Try not to get overwhelmed, because you want to do many Tours. I think in my first Tour de France I got a bit overwhelmed by just the size and the craziness of it, and I didn’t quite perform. But performing at the Tour is what you want to do – it’s not just about getting selected for the Tour.”

Howson’s advice is similar. “The hype is real,” he says. “But at the end of the day, it is still just a bike race, so don’t let it overwhelm you; embrace it rather than let it hold you back.”

Come Sunday evening, when the race closes on the Champs-Élysées, all the cameras will be pointed at the stage winner, the yellow jersey, and the other podium finishers. Spare a thought then for the final-timers – Durbridge, Cort, Howson, Izagirre and Caruso – and the legacies they leave behind. They might not be on the start line next year, but they'll be part of the Tour's history forever.

For more than 70 years, Alpe d'Huez has been an icon of the Tour de France. Its 21 hairpins - cycling's most famous switchbacks - snake up from the valley, climbing relentlessly toward the ski resort that spills from the summit. On any normal day, the road is wide and the bends are sweeping. But when the Tour takes over and hundreds of thousands of fans pack the slopes, that open road shrinks into a deafening, claustrophobic, smoke-filled corridor. "You have to just pray that everyone's going to move out of your way," said Tom Pidcock after he soloed to victory on the climb in 2022.

This year, in a curtain-closing double-header, the race will visit the summit twice: first via the traditional 21 hairpins on Friday's stage 19, and then from the east the following day, crossing the Col de Sarenne to finish on the final three bends. It is here that the yellow jersey will be decided, and another Tour legend could be written. Here are the stories of those who came before.

The first: Fausto Coppi, 1952

Though the first Tour was in 1903, it wasn't until 4 July 1952 that the race hosted its first true mountain-top finish: a 266km stage from Lausanne to Alpe d'Huez. Until then, the ski resort at the summit had stood deserted in the summer months. The hoteliers, tired of the tourist drought, had a whip round and paid to welcome the Tour.

The stage that day was hot and long. It took the riders more than eight hours to reach the foot of the climb, where, slumped over their steel frames and with spare inner tubes wrapped around their necks, they began hauling their bikes skywards. With 6km to go, the 1949 champion Fausto Coppi dropped Frenchman Jean Robic - "I knew he was no longer there when I couldn't hear him breathing anymore," Coppi later said - and soloed to an historic stage win.

The victory earned Coppi the yellow jersey, which he would keep to win his second Tour title. The slow nature of the stage, however, failed to convince the organisers that mountain finishes were exciting, and the climb didn't feature again until 1976.

The most surprising: Lucho Herrera, 1984

Luis 'Lucho' Herrera wasn't supposed to win on Alpe d'Huez in 1984. A 23-year-old amateur cyclist and former plant delivery man from Colombia, he was making his Grand Tour debut with team Varta-Colombia, a national squad invited to make up the numbers.

All eyes were on the yellow jersey battle between Laurent Fignon and Bernard Hinault that summer. On Alpe d'Huez, Herrera took advantage of his under-the-radar status to attack with around 10km to go. He rode at his own rhythm, and ended up holding off Fignon by 49 seconds.

The victory was momentous: Herrera became South America's first Tour stage winner, and paved the way for a golden era of Colombian cycling. The following season, Varta-Colombia turned professional as Café de Colombia, and Herrera went on to climb to greater heights, winning the King of the Mountains classifications in all three Grand Tours, and the overall at the Vuelta a España in 1987.

The fiercest: Bernard Hinault v Greg LeMond, 1986

If the 1986 Tour is, as many believe, the race's greatest edition, then stage 18 to Alpe d'Huez - the duel between La Vie Claire team-mates Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond - is perhaps its most dramatic single day.

That year, defending champion Hinault had promised to ride in the service of LeMond. The Frenchman, however, appeared to have a change of heart when he wore yellow for five days, and began eyeing his sixth title. Then, on stage 17, he lost three minutes, and the yellow jersey, to LeMond.

The scene the following day on Alpe d'Huez was one of bizarre tension. Having broken free as a duo, Hinault and LeMond rode through the hairpins shoulder-to-shoulder in what was supposed to depict team harmony, but instead laid bare the power struggle that had defined that edition of the Tour.

Team orders came for LeMond to cede the stage win to Hinault, which he duly did, on the expectation Hinault would stop attacking him. But fighting talk followed. "This Tour is not finished," Hinault told reporters at the summit. "If we have a war, it'll be a fair war and the stronger one will win." That rider ended up being LeMond. Hinault retired six weeks later.

The fastest: Marco Pantani, 1997

Still today, almost 30 years on, nobody has climbed Alpe d'Huez faster than Marco Pantani did in 1997. The full climb was measured in those days at 14.5km, which the Italian completed in 37 minutes and 35 seconds. Over the modern-day 13.8km route, his time was 36:55.

Pantani went on to finish third overall that year, before winning the race the following year, his trademark bandana wrapped around his head. Of course, history tells us that 'The Pirate' was a troubled character; although he never tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs during his career, he excelled in an era when EPO plagued the peloton. His haematocrit level, the volume percentage of red blood cells in the blood, was so high that his veins were said to run with thick, red sludge. His resting heart rate was around 34bpm.

Pantani had died by the time anyone got close to his Alpe d'Huez record, succumbing to a cocaine addiction in February 2004, aged just 34. That summer, Lance Armstrong attacked Alpe d'Huez in a mountain time trial at the Tour. He won the stage (later revoked), but fell a second short of Pantani's benchmark. The fastest time recorded since the introduction of the biological passport in 2008 belongs to Nairo Quintana, who climbed the Alpe in 39:22 during the 2015 Tour de France.

The brightest: Geraint Thomas, 2018

In 32 appearances at the Tour, Alpe d'Huez has only ever seen one rider win on its slopes in the yellow jersey: Geraint Thomas. The Welshman began the 2018 edition as a lieutenant to the defending champion Chris Froome. But when Froome lost time on an early stage across the Roubaix cobbles, Team Sky gave Thomas the nod to see how far he could go. The answer, it turned out, was all the way.

On stage 11, Thomas climbed to a stage win in La Rosière and took hold of the yellow jersey. Then came Alpe d'Huez: could he hold off Tom Dumoulin, Romain Bardet and his once leader Froome?

Thomas and the GC group climbed as if attached by rope behind the pace set by 21-year-old Tour debutant Egan Bernal, who would win the race the following year. In the end, it came down to a shoot-out at the summit. Thomas launched first, slingshotted himself around the final bend, and won by two seconds. "Not a chance in hell did I think I was going to win today," he told the TV cameras post-race. "I just can't believe it. Alpe d'Huez, man."

The youngest: Tom Pidcock, 2022

It's funny, really, that the lasting image of Tom Pidcock's Tour debut wasn't his triumph on Alpe d'Huez, but his masterclass descent of the Col du Galibier from a few hours before. Still, such is the Olympic mountain bike champion's skillset that he is capable of stunning twice in one afternoon.

The then-22-year-old must have sensed that day was one for the breakaway. With 125km to go, he tore down the Galibier like a swooping falcon to join Chris Froome's group up the road. Barely two kilometres into the bottom of the Alpe, he left his fellow escapees behind. All that remained was to navigate the mass of the crowds. "At times it just seemed like there was no road in front of me," he later told Cycling Weekly. "Then suddenly people would move and I could ride through."

Prior to Pidcock's win, 23-year-old Lucho Herrera had gone 38 years as the youngest rider to win on Alpe d'Huez. That accolade now belongs to the Briton.

The closest: Kasia Niewiadoma, 2024

Kasia Niewiadoma didn't win the stage on Alpe d'Huez at the 2024 Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. And yet, it's her name that became synonymous with the climb that summer.

The Polish rider led the reigning champion Demi Vollering by 75 seconds going into the final day. That gap, however, soon began to fall on the road, as Vollering broke clear on the Col du Glandon and barrelled towards Alpe d'Huez with the breakaway. Faltering behind, Niewiadoma chased as hard as she could. Could she manage to hold on?

The clock began to tick the moment Vollering lurched beyond Pauliena Rooijakkers to win the stage. Vollering then sat on the ground and watched. Thirty seconds passed. A minute. Until, with only four seconds to spare, Niewiadoma came sprinting across the line and collapsed.

It is, still today, the smallest winning margin in the history of both the men's and women's Tours. Had Niewiadoma eased off for only a few pedal strokes, she would have lost her yellow jersey. "It's so mind-blowing," she said afterwards. "I hated everything [up until] arriving at the finish line and learning that I won the Tour de France - it's insane."

ALPE D'HUEZ IN NUMBERS

Distance: 13.8km
Altitude: 1,850m
Elevation gain: 1,120m
Average gradient: 8.1%
Max gradient: 13%
Hairpins: 21
Tour appearances: 32 (34 after this year)
Fastest ascent: 37:35 (Marco Pantani, 1997, on the 14.5km route)

This feature was originally published in the 23 July 2026 print edition of Cycling Weekly magazine – available to buy on the newsstand every Thursday (UK only). Digital versions are available on Apple News and Readly. Subscriptions through Magazines Direct.

Tom Pidcock returned to the Tour de France this year as leader of the Pinarello Q36.5 outfit after his ProTeam failed to earn a wildcard for the 2025 edition. To celebrate the occasion, the team is sporting a special, lighter-coloured switch-out kit with matching bike liveries.

The Yorkshireman’s size 53 Pinarello Dogma F is a very different bike to the one we covered at Opening Weekend: gone is the Classics-ready 1x configuration, and in comes a pragmatic 2x drivetrain to ensure everything from the flats and gradients to the serpentine descents are dismissed without issue. For the faster average speeds of the Tour de France, he’s opted for the lighter and mixed-depth 53/58mm Zipp 454 NSW wheels and shod them in 30mm Vittoria Corsa Pro Speed time trial tyres.

Colour-wise, the Dogma F looks resplendent in its blue-to-gold matte-metallic fade – officially dubbed by Pinarello as ‘Titan and Luxter Venice’ tones. Not only are the Pinarello wordmark and Dogma F logos finished in gold, but the Zipp decals get the same treatment. It’s a wonderfully balanced and thoughtful design.

As a SRAM-sponored team, Pidcock’s Dogma F is built around the American brand’s top-tier Red AXS groupset, complete with an integrated power meter. A 54/41T, 10-36T chainset provides a balanced, albeit taller, spread of gears, paired with 165mm carbon cranks. There’s also a nifty little Leap Components 3D-printed computer cradle (something we saw liberally used on his Pinarello Bolid F TT bike) that houses a Garmin Edge 850 and a 10mm spacer under the stem – proving slammed front ends are no longer de rigueur among the pro rungs.

The touchpoints comprise a 360mm Most Talon UltraFast integrated handlebar matched to a 120mm stem, complete with a 10mm spacer underneath, Shimano Dura-Ace PD-R9100 pedals, and a new Prologo Choice saddle that features a similar carbon-fibre rail shroud as the Predator TT saddle. The balance of the build includes Tacx Ciro bottle cages with Tacx-Garmin bidons.

All in, Pidcock’s bike safely meets the UCI minimum weight limit of 6.8kg with pedals.

Pinarello Dogma F specs

• Frameset: TorayCa M40X, TiCR
• Fork: eTICR Onda Fork with ForkFlap
• Cockpit: Most Talon Ultra Fast integrated cockpit
• Seatpost: Pinarello Aero
• Groupset: SRAM Red AXS, 54/47T, 10-36T
• Wheelset: Zipp 454 NSW
• Tyres: Vittoria Corsa Pro Speed 28mm
• Saddle: Prologo Choice
• Weight: 6.86kg (with pedals)

“Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart”. This isn’t a line from a poem about the amount of work a rider puts into making the Tour de France ruining the romance of it, but it could be. The race did predate WB Yeats’ Easter, 1916 by over a decade, but that poem is about rather less trivial matters than a bike race.

Still, too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart. The sacrifices that the 184 riders at this year’s Tour made just to get to the start line are innumerable, and would seem alien to most of the fans watching the bike race. As the race gets faster and harder, more is needed just to get to the base level for the whole peloton, not just for those who are aiming for the yellow jersey.

Days at altitude are increasing, and even if riders aren’t racing, they’re away training. While a weekend in a hotel here and there might be a treat, to be living out of a suitcase for weeks feels less appetising, especially as riders almost never have agency over which hotel they stay in. It’s rarely The Ritz.

“My whole life's a sacrifice in some ways,” George Bennett of NSN Cycling explains to Cycling Weekly. “Sometimes it doesn't feel like it, because you love what you're doing, and it's a super exciting process, but since January, we're living in this bubble of sleeping in altitude generators, I've done eight weeks without seeing my partner. It's not what I have to do, it's more what I don't do. I don't go for a beer with the boys, because I'm worried about getting sick.

“All these things you really lock down on before the Tour, I think I'm not alone in that. The whole peloton makes these sacrifices. We do a lot of things that are really hard, but it's more about what we don't do.”

Being away from home is a recurring theme when asking riders about the sacrifices they make to be a professional bike rider at this level. Those who are younger might enjoy the thrill of adventure, but as they grow older, different commitments cause more pain.

“It's the things out there that people don't really see,” Picnic PostNL’s John Degenkolb says. “The family, especially, has to make sacrifices for you not being there for many, many weeks you're not there. You cannot just be like a normal father at home. It's a period of time in your life that is limited, so if you don't make those sacrifices, then you're not competitive. It's the price you have to pay in the end.”

Tomš Skujiņš of Lidl-Trek echoes this: “I wouldn't call them sacrifices, they're just choices. Spending a lot of time away from the family is probably one of the biggest ones now, as I have a young family with two daughters.

“This spring I was home for a very long time which was nice, because I was super sick, which obviously is not nice, but good side, down side. Since the beginning of May, I have slept in my house less than 10 times, and we'll be at the end of July now.”

To be exact, Dylan van Baarle of Soudal Quick-Step has counted: “Since 20 May I have been home for four days, I think that says enough.”

Of course, it isn’t just the time away which would seem alien to us about the life of a pro rider. “Saying no to some of my favourite foods is another one [sacrifice], and my favourite drinks, is another,” Skujiņš explains. “Heat training is something I don't enjoy and people would find crazy. After a hard day already, riding indoors, dressed in more than you would outside is something that seems quite silly.”

“In general, it's just about dialling everything up a little bit before the Tour,” stage winner Mauro Schmid (Jayco AlUla) tells CW. “Before the Tour, you need to be in your own bubble, you can't do anything you would normally do off the bike. Be a bit more focused on nutrition and recovery. With the altitude camps, I was pretty strict on myself to get to the best shape possible.”

Altitude camps are a common theme when riders are asked about the stark choices they have to make, but being a pro cyclist does just seem sometimes like a life stripped of a lot of fun.

“My birthday was at an altitude camp,” Pinarello Q36.5’s Fred Wright says. “I've obviously missed the World Cup, and the heat in the UK at the moment. It would be so nice to be in a pub just enjoying the games. We get to watch them, but it's not the same as being in the UK in the summer. I guess just less time with my girlfriend, too, it's not just these four weeks. It's commitment to an altitude camp, the build up races beforehand.

“We're close to the finish line now. It starts a lot further back than the first day of the Tour. It's such a weird bubble that we live in. There's a lot of weighing of food, which to a normal person, would be considered quite toxic. It's part of our job, so you get quite used to it.”

It isn’t always this bad, especially if you’re not a GC rider. Schmid explains: “I try to really enjoy the winter and when I'm training in November, December I try to have a good time off the bike, because I know how many sacrifices I will have to make in the summer, so I really try to recharge, and enjoy the time at home.

“For us, it gets normal that during the year you're so dialled in, going from race to race. It's a lot of unpacking, and moving onto the next thing.”

Next time you watch the Tour, and you’re supporting or cursing your favourite rider, make sure to think about the amount of work that has gone into getting to this point. Even the rider who finishes last will have sacrificed a whole part of their life to reach here. Just hope their heart hasn’t completely turned to stone.

Pub pundits and sports scientists agree that the Tour de France is the ultimate test of human endurance, but compared with the pioneers of a century ago, today's riders have it easy. In 1926, La Grande Boucle was more than a nickname; that year's Tour took the peloton on a 5,745km ordeal around the perimeter of France. One hundred years on, that edition remains the longest, most brutal route in the race's history - a battle of attrition as much as it was a bike race.

The average length of the 17 stages was 338km. Yes, the average. One, stage 12, from Perpignan to Toulon, was 427km. But it's stage 10 from Bayonne to Luchon, through the Pyrenees, that's gone down in cycling folklore. Contested in apocalyptic, literally life-threatening weather conditions, this race-defining leg was won by the Belgian Lucien Buysse - in a time of 17 hours, 12 minutes. He went on to take the overall victory, and frankly, he'd earned it.

The 1926 Tour transcended sport. It took place in the long shadow of the First World War, a conflict many of the competitors had fought in - four editions of the race were missed between 1915 and 1918. Amid a feverish atmosphere of instability in central Europe, the 1926 event was riven with political tensions and dominated by strong personalities. At one political pole was the staunchly nationalist Tour director Henri Desgrange; at the other were members of the French Communist Party, with its newspaper, L'Humanité, campaigning for better conditions and pay for independent riders.

It was also a catalyst for change and became a key event in the evolution of the modern Tour, a point of inflection when the conflicting desires of everyone involved - riders, route-setters, teams, bicycle manufacturers and spectators - collided spectacularly. Arguably, 1926 was the year the Tour de France came of age.

National showcase

In 1926, for the first time since the Tour de France began in 1903, the race started outside Paris, in Evian, the Alpine town near the Franco-Swiss border. The route headed north, skirting the frontiers of Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium, then hugged the coast of Normandy and Brittany, tracing the seaboard to the Spanish border before swerving south, crossing the Pyrenees, wending east along the Côte d'Azur and heading north along the land border with Italy and Switzerland. Having cycled an anticlockwise loop of the country, competitors then had to pass back through Evian and re-ascend mountain passes they'd previously climbed before riding through Burgundy and central France to the finish line in Paris. It was, quite literally, epic.

From a modern perspective, the route looks nuts. And it was. But for Desgrange, the founding father of the Tour, who was still the route-setter and organiser in 1926, the event had never been simply about bike racing. Nor was it merely a vehicle for selling copies of his newspaper, L'Auto. He had a bigger vision, and for the Tour's 20th iteration, he pushed that to its limits.

A child during the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian War, Desgrange was part of a generation that lived in fear of German invasion. Concerned that his fellow countrymen were more interested in smoking and drinking than sport, leaving them weak and defenceless against the newly formed superpower on France's eastern flank, he became obsessed with health and national pride.

After becoming a successful - and world-record-setting - cyclist, Desgrange published a book, La Tête et les Jambes (The Head and the Legs), a training manual for Frenchmen to get fighting fit through bike riding and running. The routes he designed embodied his vision for France. "For Desgrange, the Tour was a way to promote 'France' as an idea and to build belief in nationhood," says Gareth Cartman, author of We Rode All Night, a historical novel about the 1926 race, "and that's why they went right around the outside of the country. It's a way of reinforcing the French border."

Cartman says the same rationale had led Desgrange to route the 1919 race through Alsace-Lorraine, a region previously absorbed by Germany, which had just been returned to France by the Treaty of Versailles. "He uses the race to say 'this is our country', but also to inspire Frenchmen to take up cycling and become stronger," Cartman explains, "and that's why he keeps making the Tours tougher. Every time riders conquer the test, he makes it harder... until we get to 1926."

One for all

As a Cycling Weekly (then known as Cycling) reporter covering the 1926 race wrote: "With leisure and the right machine many could manage the mileage comfortably. But this is a struggle with time, when the rider who wins must keep to his machine although the roads are not worthy of the name, although he is lashed with rain and bespattered by mud and his limbs tremble with fatigue." These words would prove to be prophetic.

At 2am on Sunday, 20 June 1926, the peloton set off from Evian on a 373km 'plain stage' to Mülhausen. It was won by the Belgian Jules Buysse - no, not the eventual winner, but his younger brother. Jules, the youngest of three Buysse brothers competing in the race, also won the second stage, a 334km leg to Metz, but even early on, competitors were falling fast.

"Of the 126 riders who started the Tour, 15 fell out on the first day and seven on the second," reported Cycling on 2 July. Desgrange, who always intended the Tour to be a test of individual skill, strength and endurance, discouraged teams, and 82 of the riders who started the race were 'touriste-routiers', competing individually and without sponsorship. The remaining riders began working together, as a survival strategy. "On many stages, especially in Brittany and Normandy, riders effectively agreed not to race," says Cartman. "The route was so hard and long, they knew that, just to get to the Pyrenees in one piece, they should basically ride together. If people wanted to ride off the front, then fine. There was a kind of tacit agreement to not attack too hard."

However, each time they arrived en masse into finish towns, Desgrange responded furiously. "I think the best one was in Brest," chuckles Cartman. "After a 405km stage, he met them with folded arms and said, words to the effect of, 'You bloody bastards! You are now going to do sprints of the velodrome for this crowd because they've all come here to watch you and you can't be bothered to race each other.'" Cartman sympathises with the riders. "They knew they had three consecutive days coming up [amounting to] 900km, from Brittany to the Pyrenees, with no rest and in the middle of a heatwave. So of course they weren't going to ride hard. That's why Van Slembrouck kept the yellow jersey so long. And then came the big stage to Luchon, when the weather turned and the race started falling apart."

Atrocious conditions

Once the race entered the Pyrenees, everything changed. Stage 10 started pre-dawn, in dreadful conditions, and the weather got progressively worse. Tourists in their cars stirred up the mud and made it even harder for the riders to get through. Marcel Bidot - future coach of the French team - broke a crank and tried to continue, pedalling one-footed. The judges ultimately allowed him to borrow a bike from a spectator - it was far too small, but he managed to get to Luchon. Of the 76 riders who started the stage, 22 were forced to abort, including the favourite and defending champion Ottavio Bottecchia.

As the elements turned vicious, the tough, working-class Italian Bottecchia - a bricklayer who'd served in a cycling battalion on the frontline of WWI, and had won the two previous Tours - retired from the race "weeping like a child", according to a later report in L'Équipe. Meanwhile Lucien Buysse, a man who had very recently lost his young daughter and was already riding through waves of grief, pedalled grimly onwards, through the storm-strafed peaks, mounting an attack on the Col d'Aspin that earned him an unassailable lead and control of the race.

"After his ride from Bayonne to Luchon, Lucien Buysse seemed the least exhausted of the survivors," reads the report in the 23 July, 1926 edition of Cycling. "On this stage he rode one of the most brilliant races in the history of the Tour de France. Some motorcars that should have followed him broke down on the crazy roads. The cold on the hilltops so gripped the hands of one or two riders they were unable to change a tyre after a puncture."

Tour turning point

The middle Buysse brother was an Automoto team-mate of Bottecchia, and he'd helped the Italian secure victory in 1925, acting as the first domestique in Tour history. With a 30-minute lead in the general classification after stage 10, Buysse consolidated his lead with a consecutive win on the 323km mountain stage to Perpignan. He remained in the maillot jaune for the rest of the race.

Unsurprisingly, given his performance in the Pyrenees, Buysse was also named by L'Auto as meilleur grimpeur (best climber), an unofficial equivalent to the present-day King of the Mountains title. "It was an extraordinary Tour," concludes Cartman. "It was a pivotal point, which shaped the future of the race. Desgrange wanted to rip everything up and change it for the next year. He hated the flat stages, so he made them all time trials. He wanted it to be an individual competition, rather than teams and manufacturers using strategies to win."

Somewhat ironically, not a single stage in 1926 - Desgrange's toughest test and biggest national statement - was won by a French rider. That had never happened before and has occurred only once since, in 1999. This July, as French fans excitedly welcome to the race the nation's brightest prospect in decades, Paul Seixas, they will be desperately hoping the centenary of the 1926 edition doesn't come with a repeat performance.

1926 Tour in numbers

5,745km: The total distance - the longest route in the race's history.

427km: The length of the longest single stage.

126/41: The ratio of starters to finishers.

17:12.04: The time it took Lucien Buysse to win the brutal 326km Stage 10.

238:44.25: Buysse's total winning time.

1:22.25: The time gap between the winner, Lucien Buysse, and second-placed Nicolas Frantz.

This feature was originally published in the 2 July 2026 print edition of Cycling Weekly magazine – available to buy on the newsstand every Thursday (UK only) while digital versions are available on Apple News and Readly. Subscriptions through Magazine's Direct.

Remco Evenepoel has moved into second place on the general classification following an emphatic first road stage win at the Tour de France. The Belgian has come into this year's race in impeccable form, and is clearly able to compete with the leading protagonists in the high mountains – something he failed to achieve last year when he abandoned the race in the Pyrenees.

With a 26.1km/500m individual time trial on the cards for stage 16, Remco can potentially claw back some time on Tadej Pogačar and cement his second place on the podium.

Let’s take a closer look at the reigning Olympian’s Specialized S-Works Tarmac SL9.

Having stolen the headlines at the Grand Depart for his unreleased Specialized S-Works Shiv TT bike, the Belgian also has an S-Works Tarmac SL9 at his disposal – both a regular team-liveried option (which he raced to victory on stage 15) and a gold-themed edition that celebrates his Olympic Championship win from 2024 in Paris.

The bike pictured here, however, is the latter, and was customised by Italian master frame painters, Lumarcolors.

Lumarcolors has done an amazing job with the bike, as it complements the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe team livery and pays homage to Evenepoel’s Olympic gold medal. Naturally, there’s a lot of gold at play here, but it’s all done tastefully and not over the top.

As a result, it utilises a bespoke glittery white and gold paint scheme that still fits in with the team design – Red Bull and keyline logos are applied as a water transfer and subtly fade from gold to white.

The gold theme continues with his cassette and chain, base of the saddle, the inside crank arms (and SRAM logo on the outside arm), and the K-Edge computer mount and chain catcher. The level of detail is truly inspiring.

Having changed teams for 2026, Remco is now riding a SRAM Red AXS-equipped machine rather than the Shimano Dura-Ace Di2-outfitted bike he raced on at Soudal-QuickStep.

For the Tour de France, Remco has opted for a 54/41T, 10-33T gearing configuration, driven by 165mm cranks. As a Specialized rider, he meets sponsor obligations by using Roval Rapide CLX III wheels shod with 30mm Specialized Cotton TLR tyres. Other details/components include a Specialized S-Works Power Evo with Mirror saddle, a K-Edge computer mount and chain catcher, and Tacx Ciro bottle cages.

As usual, he's using a slammed Roval Rapide integrated cockpit.

All in, Evenepoel's 52cm S-Works Tarmac SL9 tipped our scales at 7.05kg complete with pedals, two bidons/cages and cycling computer.

Specialized S-Works Tarmac SL9 specs

• Frameset: S-Works Tarmac SL9 Fact 12r Carbon
• Fork: S-Works Fact 12r Carbon
• Cockpit: Roval Rapide
• Seatpost: S-Works Tarmac SL9 Carbon
• Groupset: SRAM Red AXS 54/41T, 10-33T
• Wheelset: Roval Rapide CLX III
• Tyres: Specialized Cotton TLR 30mm
• Saddle: Specialzied S-Works Power Evo with Mirror

What do Mathieu van der Poel, Søren Wærenskjold and Mauro Schmid all have in common?

If you said they’re all stage winners of this edition of the Tour de France – you’d be right. But there’s also something else, a detail so subtle you might not have spotted it on the TV: they all shave their arms.

Though not a new practice, arm-shaving has seemingly become more common in big races. Cycling Weekly carried out a visual survey on the ground at this year's Tour, assessing riders' forearms as they passed through the pre-stage media zone, and found that around half of the peloton now shave their arms – maybe even a slight majority.

It got us wondering why. The advantages of smooth legs are well known in cycling – less aerodynamic drag equals seconds saved – but why the arms too? Their surface area is smaller, they don’t block the air flow as much as the legs, and if the rider’s bike position is low enough, they barely poke up above the handlebars. Surely there’s no point in shaving them?

In search of answers, we asked the riders themselves. Caja Rural-Seguros RGA's Fernando Gaviria, a two-time Tour stage winner, said this is the first Tour for which he has shaved his arms. “I spoke with [my team-mate, Alex] Molenaar about whether we should do or not,” he said. “Then we spent a night in the room and we said, ‘Ok, let’s do it.’”

As a sprinter, Gaviria’s main motive is to go faster. “It’s just for more aerodynamics,” the Colombian said. “I don’t feel the difference in the climbs. I get dropped all the same.” But what does the science say? Is there an aero advantage?

In 2015, bike brand Specialized carried out a test in their wind tunnel, and found that shaved arms saved 19 seconds over 40km. Though the study wasn’t far-reaching (their sample size was a single rider), its conclusion was clear enough: the aero gains are small, negligible even, but they exist all the same.

According to Casper von Folsach, performance director at Uno-X Mobility, the impact of arm-shaving is “very individual”, and depends on how much arm hair a rider has.

“Overall there is for sure a much more significant aero penalty in leg hairs as most people have more significant hair growth on their legs, legs make up a larger surface area and are more exposed,” he said. “But that doesn't mean there's not a difference for arm hairs.”

It’s partly for this reason that the entirety of Von Folsach’s Uno-X Mobility squad came to this year’s Tour with smooth arms. Gaviria did the same because he has “a lot of hair” on his body. But even riders who aren’t so naturally hirsute are shaving their forearms. This is because there’s another, perhaps more important reason to do so, as stage 13’s winner Schmid explained.

“It makes it a bit more clean in case you get a little road rash. It’s not only for aero gains,” the Jayco AlUla rider said. “It’s the same thing with the legs; in case you crash, I think it makes it much easier because then you’re not ripping all the hairs out if you get bandages.”

Lotto Intermarché’s Baptiste Veistroffer, this edition’s breakaway hero, concurs. “It’s because of crashing, firstly,” he said. “If you crash and you need to clean it, or you need surgery, it’s easier without hair.”

It was fortunate, then, that Gaviria’s arms were hairless when he crashed on stage 12, and shredded his skin on the asphalt.

Veistroffer, pressed for more information on his arm-shaving habits, was understandably perplexed by Cycling Weekly's questioning. “This is not expected,” he laughed, but conceded he shaves his arms every one to two weeks – “only when I’m racing, not when I’m home.”

Conversely, Schmid doesn’t shave his arms as routinely as he does his legs, and only originally did so to copy another rider. “I think Marc Hirschi normally does it, and I saw him do it and thought, ‘Maybe that’s the reason why he’s so good’,” he says.

So there you have it: riders shave their arms for a few reasons, namely the perceived aero advantage, and for ease in case of road rash.

Oh, and there's another minor reason, as Von Folsach points out. “For what it's worth, many riders also report that sun screen application becomes easier,” he said, “so that's also something I guess.”

Giles Pidcock remembers a conversation he had with his 12-year-old son, Tom, about what it meant to truly ‘make it’ in cycling. “My view of success was getting paid to ride your bike, being a pro,” he says. His son had grander ideas. “Tom said, ‘F*** that. No, no, no. I want to win Paris-Roubaix, the Tour de France, the World Championships’,” Giles laughs. “His aspirations were just unlimited, and that struck me as being quite ambitious. But that’s Tom, isn’t it? Everything’s possible.”

It was four years earlier, when Tom was eight, that his passion for the Tour took root. Every July he would wait for his father to get home so they could watch the daily highlights on TV. If they were heading out for an evening ride, they’d record the broadcast to watch when they got back. It was only natural, then, that when Tom turned pro with Ineos Grenadiers in 2021, the race became a central ambition of his career.

But over the three editions he raced with Ineos, his enthusiasm for the event faded. He would describe it variously as “draining” and “not the most enjoyable”. Where had the excitement gone? Now, after a year away, Pidcock is back on cycling’s biggest stage. Riding for Tour debutants Pinarello Q36.5, he is on a mission to rediscover the joy that filled those childhood evenings.

“To find passion, you first need to, well, enjoy it. It’s all an upward cycle,” he tells Cycling Weekly in Tarragona, Spain, at the start of stage two. Perched on the top tube of his bike, he shelters beneath a canopy of trees in the media zone. When his team press officer limits the gathered journalists to a single question, Pidcock pushes back. “One question?” he says, before happily answering four.

It is all part of a new lease of life the 26-year-old has brought to the race. At the time of writing, he is fourth on GC, thanks to time gained in a smart breakaway move on stage 13. But Pidcock has always insisted his goals this time around are less tangible than a stage win or a high GC finish. “I want to enjoy being back at the Tour, and look forward to coming back here every year,” he says. “That’s the main thing. The rest is just a bike race, you know?”

To understand Pidcock’s fraught relationship with the Tour, you need to rewind four years to Alpe d’Huez in 2022. Pidcock wasn’t supposed to start the race that year. “When he joined Ineos [in 2021], we had a six-year plan with Dave [Brailsford],” says Pidcock’s father Giles. “It was going to be Cyclo-cross Worlds, Mountain Bike Worlds, one-day races, win a few Classics, and just have fun for as long as possible.”

But then, in only his second year as a pro, as the team scrambled to find a leader following 2019 champion Egan Bernal’s life-threatening training crash, Pidcock was thrust into the yellow-tinted pressure cooker. He responded brilliantly. Aged just 22, he broke away on the descent of the Col du Galibier on stage 12 and soloed to an awe-inspiring victory on Alpe d’Huez, becoming the youngest rider ever to win at the mountain’s summit.

“That’s one of the best experiences of my life,” Pidcock said at the finish. His career path seemed laid out. With hindsight, though, his father views the win with mixed feelings. “I think the Alpe d’Huez stage almost wrecked his career,” he says bluntly. “At the time, we were really excited because it’s the Tour. Then he won the stage, and everyone was like, ‘Oh, you’re ready. You can do this. You’re the next big hope.’ Everything from that moment was about winning the Tour.”

The following year, 2023, Pidcock returned to the Tour under a weight of expectation, targeting the GC. He finished 13th, faltering in the second week as the race entered the Alps, and admitted he felt like a “pretender” among the favourites. The 2024 edition proved an even bigger struggle. After catching a stomach bug ahead of the Grand Départ in Florence, he was dropped on Ineos’s pre-race training ride and faced a battle to regain his form. He ultimately withdrew ahead of stage 14, sitting 36th overall.

Some questioned whether Pidcock was truly cut out to be a GC rider. Why wasn’t it working? According to Kurt Bogaerts, his coach since 2018, bigger aspirations were eclipsing his Tour goals. “He’s tried to become world champion in all disciplines, and one big goal [in 2023] was becoming world champion on the mountain bike,” Bogaerts says.

“In Glasgow, it was a home race, and that was a big target, so you have that in the back of your mind… The year after [2024], it was the Olympics, and he had a massive goal to be double Olympic champion. That was only a few weeks [after the Tour].”

Pidcock’s relationship with Ineos had also soured. Reports of a rift with management surfaced at the 2024 Tour, and by the end of the season, he decided to leave despite having three years left on his contract. “By the end at Ineos, nothing was good enough,” one source close to Pidcock says. “Unless you won the Tour de France, it didn’t matter. No one cared.”

While around half a dozen WorldTour teams sought the Briton’s signature, he surprised many by opting for second-tier outfit Q36.5, backed by billionaire former Glencore CEO Ivan Glasenberg. The hope was that a smaller set-up would provide a fresh outlook. “I believed it was the best option for him,” says Jacques Sauvagnargues, a friend and former Team Wiggins teammate who later co-founded the app Link My Ride with Pidcock.

“I was trying to explain to him how [Mathieu] van der Poel went to Alpecin and they built the team around him. I just said, ‘That’s what you need. You need the team built around you. You had it with Wiggins and Trinity and you flourished in those environments.’”

Sauvagnargues’s theory soon proved right. Last year, Pidcock’s first season with Q36.5, the 26-year-old opened with victory at the AlUla Tour in Saudi Arabia before riding to third overall at the Vuelta a España in September – a career-best Grand Tour performance. “I think he proved everyone wrong,” Sauvagnargues says.

For Bogaerts, the podium was “confirmation” of the talent he had helped hone over the years. Why had it all suddenly clicked? A key factor in his Vuelta success was riding unburdened by expectation. “Every performance is a kind of celebration,” Bogaerts says of Q36.5’s ethos. Pidcock’s past Tour experiences, challenging as they were, had also taught him to manage pressure. But another simple, often overlooked reason drove his upturn in form: he started prioritising fun.

Sauvagnargues recalls a recent example: at the end of April, he and Pidcock went to Germany’s Nürburgring to drive race cars. The trip fell just days before the Eschborn-Frankfurt one-day race, yet Q36.5 approved it as a way for Pidcock to unwind. “I’m not sure if Ineos allowed a lot of the play, but with Q36.5, they appreciate that it’s quite an intense lifestyle that [the riders] live, and they need to release,” Sauvagnargues says. “Tom’s release is car track days… He’s an unbelievable driver. He could be a professional if he wanted to be.”

Pidcock also found fun this year at an early-season altitude camp in Chile, where he trained hard and explored new trails on his mountain bike. British champion Fred Wright, Pidcock’s teammate at Q36.5, was one of six riders who travelled with him to South America. “It was a bit of an adventure,” Wright says. It also proved critical for team building.

“We played quite a bit of [the dice game] Perudo and a bit of poker. In the end, we had a big leaderboard of games and whoever had the most points at the end of the camp won the prize pot we’d all put money into.” Who claimed the haul? “Tom – on the last night,” Wright laughs. “I was gutted. I was leading and I lost it all.”

Trips like this have led Pidcock to praise Q36.5’s “family vibe”. “Everyone around me believes in me, supports me. We’re all in this mission together,” he told the Going Mental podcast in June.

Bogaerts, who also attended the Chile camp, has witnessed this first-hand. “I think the connection with the team is, of course, much stronger,” he says. “He is the leader there, he feels responsible for the team, he wants to look after the team, and that means a lot to him.”

In the moments after the opening team time trial at this year’s Tour, Pidcock cooled down in the middle of a row of turbo trainers, shoulder to shoulder with his teammates. While other teams did the same in silence, the Q36.5 comrades nattered away, laughing as they compared stories of the day’s test. Yes, Pidcock had lost almost a minute to stage winner Jonas Vingegaard and 45 seconds to Tadej Pogačar, but that mattered little. The important thing was that he had remained true to his sole race aim: he was smiling.

Speaking before the start, in the shadow of Barcelona’s Sagrada Família, after the team presentation, he had said: “If I finish in Paris, I’m happy, then it’s been a success.”

Of course, that won’t stop people asking what he’s capable of over the coming mountain stages. Four years on from his Alpe d’Huez triumph, the Tour returns to the same climb on its final weekend for a brace of summit finishes.

Fans might wonder if that presents the chance for the perfect full-circle moment – the ecstasy of that first Tour win, after years of indifference, repeated – but it’s not the be-all, end-all for Pidcock. His ambitions have always stretched far beyond the confines of a single event. The hope, perhaps, is that by riding at the Tour less weighed down by expectations, he might now fulfil his potential at the race.

“I think goal number-one is to try to win a stage,” his coach, Bogaerts, says. Pidcock’s already come close: on stage nine to Ussel, he placed third behind Van der Poel from the breakaway, let down not by his legs but a jammed gear shifter. “Today, I was really in the game,” he said proudly afterwards. Three days prior, the Tourmalet stage, he’d lost eight minutes to a rampaging Pogačar, but remained philosophical. “It’s not the end of the world,” he shrugged at the hill-top finish in Gavarnie-Gèdre, true to his new philosophy. “Just got to keep the spirits high.” Then came his third place on stage 13 to Belfort, and his leap back into the GC mix.

To pose to his father the same question he had asked his 12-year-old son: what does ultimate success look like? “Well, anything’s possible,” Giles says. “He’s surprised me enough times to know that anything’s possible.” That childhood dream may still be realised one day – and if it is, you can be sure it’ll be on Pidcock’s own terms.

This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 16 July 2026. Some elements have been updated to reflect the results of stage 13.

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Early on in my racing career a more experienced rider told me, “The more worried you are about crashing, the more likely you are to crash.”

Always be suspicious of neat little formulations like this. They always leave a loophole – in this instance he failed to appreciate the magnitude of how much I didn’t want to crash. It turns out that if you spend the whole race cowering ten lengths off the back of the bunch, you’re pretty safe. Of course if you want to get a result, you have to learn to mix it. But you don’t have to learn to like it.

Only one of the reasons I didn’t want to crash was physical cowardice. The other was financial cowardice. I understood completely when my friend Bernard was involved in a sprint pile-up outside Saffron Walden and broke his collarbone. He rang me from A&E to ask how his bike was.

“Bar tape wrecked, saddle scuffed, otherwise it’s OK.”

“That’s a relief. I tried to let my body take the impact first. The NHS doesn’t fix bikes.”

This was in the merry days when stuff was cheap. When a whole pro-level bike cost “just” £2500, unless your crash involved a road roller or a giant vat of acid, your repair and replacement bill was a few hundred pounds at worst. (We still felt hard done by – an equivalent generational leap further back in time took you to the era when you could fix most things with a hammer, some tongs and a good hot fire.)

As bikes have grown more expensive and harder to fix, the attitude of most of the riders has, in defiance of all logic, become more aggressive. Where once you were terrified as you tried to edge up the outside of the bunch on your cheap bike by using the last available 25mm of tarmac, now you’d be triply terrified on your expensive bike because there’d be someone trying to move up outside you by bunny hopping the drain covers, and probably a 19-year old kamikaze coming up outside them on the grass.

I think the worst job in all cycling is to be the parent of a young racer. I was chatting to one of them recently who told me that the price of kit combined with the fearlessness of youth meant it was like setting your teenager off to learn to drive by doing laps of central London in a solid gold dodgem encrusted with diamonds. If your family finances exist on a bit of a knife-edge, a pyromaniac would make a more attractive child than a wannabe bike racer.

One suggestion I came across recently was to offer different racing classes based not on ability, but on the cost of the bike. That way you could race a cheaper bike and not be at a disadvantage. But there’s a major problem. If I go racing, I badly want to be surrounded by people as cowardly as me. Ideally more cowardly. I don’t want to spend my day riding at 50 kph among a whole bunch of people who’ve suddenly got one reason fewer to mind crashing. I might want my bike to be cheap, but I want yours to be expensive.

It's got to the point where I’m honestly amazed that amateur riders and juniors race on bikes that cost as much as they do. If, when I started racing, someone had told me that before I was finished most serious amateurs would feel pressured into buying super-bikes that cost very nearly as much as a new car, I’d have assumed that everyone would ride two meters apart from each other and multi-rider crashes would be something old lags like me would tell anecdotes about.

It says much for our bravery, confidence and above all for our financial irresponsibility that this hasn’t happened.

Great Inventions of Cycling

Before 2008, we all knew where we were with aerodynamics. If it looked aero, it was aero. And looking aero was about being thin, pointy and smooth. This applied as much to you as to your bike.

Then in 2008 the GB Olympic track team debuted race suits that were a bit on the baggy side and covered in huge, ugly, deeply unaerodynamic-looking raised seams, which were designed to “trip” the airflow over the suit and introduce turbulence in a carefully calculated place. Everyone scoffed, right up to the point where the team hoovered up almost all the medals available to them.

As a group, racing cyclists pivoted on the spot, and accepted the idea that things that did not look aerodynamic by the standards of “looking aero” could still be faster. After all, we didn’t want to look stupid.

This turn of events had the huge advantage for manufacturers that they could make things into funny shapes and declare that despite what they looked like, they were faster than any competitor’s product. Because we were all so sophisticated and knowledgeable, we had to believe them.

As long as the weird bump, ridge, scoop or texture had a proprietary name that included “aero” in it somewhere, and came with a nice set of graphs, it was impossible to prove it didn’t work short of actually testing it yourself. At just the moment that all bikes had been beginning to appear more or less identical, it was a valuable opportunity for some product differentiation.

It's reassuring to know that we’re still falling for it.

Acts of Cycling Stupidity

Word reaches us of a rider who was unlucky enough to crash on some ice over the winter. Among other things, his head hit the ground, fracturing his helmet into two halves.

Being tight-fisted and perhaps a bit stupid, he glued the two halves back together, and explained to a concerned clubmate that, “unless I have exactly the same crash again it’ll be fine, because the helmet will impact a different place and break a different way.”

Two weeks later he crashed again. Since his helmet hit the ground this time too, he was delighted at the cash he’d saved. However, he was a bit disappointed with a mild concussion.

He subsequently remembered that the helmet had come with a crash-replacement guarantee.