After a decade-long absence, the Philadelphia Cycling Classic has returned, bringing world-class road racing – and the noise and spectacle of the Manayunk Wall – back to the City of Brotherly Love. Here’s where to find the livestream and who to watch.

First held in 1985 as the Philadelphia International Championship, the race became one of North America’s premier one-day cycling events. It brought many of the sport’s biggest names to Philadelphia, including Greg LeMond, Peter Sagan, Lance Armstrong, Andre Greipel, Lizzie Deignan, Jeannie Longo, Giorgia Bronzinia and more

The race was last held in 2016 as a women's-only event, won by Megan Guarnier (Boels-Dolmans). Spain's Eduard Prades (Caja Rural-Seguros RGA) won the 2015 men's race.

Its return comes at a time when internationally sanctioned road racing remains scarce in the United States: Philadelphia is one of only two UCI-sanctioned 1.1 one-day road races in the country this season.

A total of 32 teams, including seven at WorldTour level, are confirmed for the women’s and men’s races.

The revived course is built around a 14.4-mile urban circuit featuring Lemon Hill and the race’s defining obstacle, the Manayunk Wall. The short but punishing climb reaches gradients of approximately 17%, providing an obvious launchpad for attacks and a gathering point for spectators.

The women will race approximately 62 miles, while the men will cover approximately 120 miles. Surviving the Wall will be essential, but the run back toward the Benjamin Franklin Parkway means the race could still favor a fast finisher who can handle repeated climbs.

How to watch the Philadelphia Cycling Classic

The racing takes place on Sunday, August 30, and the entirety of both the women’s and men’s events will be streamed live by 6abc.

Fans in the United States and internationally can watch through 6abc.com, the 6abc YouTube channel, Hulu, Disney+ and other platforms carrying the 6abc stream.

Local viewers can also follow race updates during Action News on Sunday morning and throughout the day. A dedicated Philadelphia Cycling Classic special will air on 6abc at 5:30 p.m. EDT.

Race Schedule - Sunday, 30 August:

• Women’s race:
  8:35 a.m. EDT / 1:35 p.m. BST / 2:35 p.m. CEST
• Men’s race:
  12 p.m. EDT / 5 p.m. BST / 6 p.m. CEST

Who to watch

Women to watch:

Maggie Coles-Lyster, Human Powered Health

WorldTour racer Coles-Lyster is the reigning Canadian road race champion with an extremely fast finish. Coles-Lyster is enjoying a successful comeback year following iliac artery surgery with a win at the one-day Santos Tour Down Under race and several high-profile podiums to her name this season already.

Marlies Mejías, Virginia’s Blue Ridge TWENTY28

Pan American Games champion and multiple-time Cuban national champion Marlies Mejías may race outside the WorldTour, but she is widely regarded as one of the fastest women competing in the Americas. Her years of experience across road and track have given her more than pure finishing speed: she can also survive the climbs, making her one rider the competition will not want to bring to the line.

Kristen Faulkner, EF Education-Oatly

Two-time Olympic gold medalist, Kristen Faulkner can never be counted out. She is one of the most accomplished riders in the field and a major threat to force a breakaway.

Men to watch

Quinn Simmons, Lidl-Trek

Fresh from a top-10 finish at the Leadville 100, Quinn Simmons will line up in Philadelphia wearing the Stars and Stripes as the reigning U.S. road race champion. The Coloradan spent much of July working for his Lidl-Trek teammates at the Tour de France, and for his efforts, he earned the race’s Best Teammate award for a second year in a row. In Philadelphia, Simmons may finally get his chance to race for himself. His aggressiveness and ability to drive a breakaway certainly make him well-suited for this course.

Derek Gee, Lidl-Trek

Lidl-Trek has several cards to play. If Simmons cannot make the decisive move, then maybe Canadian Derek Gee offers the team a formidable alternative. The 29-year-old has developed into one of the peloton’s most versatile riders, pairing the climbing strength needed to survive the Manayunk Wall with a strong finish.

Luke Lamperti, EF Education-EasyPost

Luke Lamperti is one of the fastest young Americans in the WorldTour, with a stage win at this year's Paris-Nice to his name. He will be among the leading contenders should the racing come down to a mass sprint.

Riley Sheehan, NSN Cycling Team

With three international victories already this season, Riley Sheehan is one of the most promising American riders racing in Europe. His combination of strength and speed gives him options whether the race is decided by a breakaway or a reduced sprint.

Ben Oliver, Modern Adventure Pro Cycling

New Zealander Ben Oliver is a former criterium racer who's led George Hincapie's Modern Adventure Pro Cycling team to its first major GC victory in Europe this season. At the Tour de Wallonie, Oliver won two stages and claimed both the points jersey and the overall title. With the strength to handle a selective race and the speed to finish it off, he arrives in Philadelphia as a genuine dark-horse contender.

The Tuesday after Paris-Roubaix weekend, I was out for a ride with a friend and I got a puncture. As I sat on a conveniently placed bench and calmly changed an inner tube, I had a moment’s peace to reflect on the fact that this was a very different affair from the punctures that had defined Roubaix events as they crossed Northern France in a torrent of cursing.

There are many, many varieties of puncture. When I started to think through all of them, I realised there is a whole matrix of possibilities: fast or slow, frightening or just annoying, the dull, even the mysterious.

At one extreme you might find very fast and very frightening in combination, as when two of my friends were descending a Welsh hill at 100 kph during a tandem race and had a front-tyre blowout. There was a bang followed by several seconds neither of them will forget. My main witness was the stoker: “I figured my mate would cushion the impact. I wasn’t looking forward to the crunching noise that was going to make, but I thought that sacrificing himself for others was very much his sort of thing. Also, he chose the tyre.”

But you can also have fast and boring. A few seconds before the start of a time trial a few seasons ago, the rider behind me said, “What’s that?” and pointed at my back tyre. It was a phenomenon I’ve never seen before or since – there was a small hole in the carcass, and the latex inner tube was gradually extruding through it as we watched, until it was a thin column the size of a cocktail stick. After about ten seconds it very quietly went “pop”, the tyre deflated, and that was the end of my race. It was both novel and dull.

Even the best Tubeless sealant offers little protection from the fast puncture, but it does offer the enhancement of “unbelievably messy”. I’d have said there was nothing worse in cycling that the fast and terrifying puncture, until I’d experienced an added sealant enema. With old-school fast and terrifying, you’re pleased to survive. With tubeless fast and terrifying, you’re slightly sorry that you did.

Mid-speed punctures are less exciting. In a race, they are just annoying. On a club run, they are just annoying. On a solo ride they can occasionally be quite pleasant – a chance to take in the view, listen to the bees in the hedgerow, peer into your saddle pack and idly wonder where your spare tube has gone, whereupon the experience becomes annoying again.

Slow, on the other hand, can drive you nuts. Can you get home? If you stop and inflate it, where on the curve of energy-expended to tyre-pressure-achieved do you maximise average velocity? How many times will you recalculate this before admitting defeat and fixing it?

Of course, as an alternative, the slow puncture can remain undetected until after you get home. And there can actually be something oddly satisfying about seeing your bike sitting on a flat tyre an hour after getting home from a long ride and realising that it looks as old and tired as you do.

There are many other punctures. There is the phantom puncture – you’re convinced you can feel it going soft, but it vanishes if you stop to check. There is the intermittent puncture – when you re-inflate the tyre and find it stays blown-up, while the puncture retreats and awaits a sinister moment to re-appear.

Ironically the one puncture that isn’t really a puncture at all is the Roubaix version. A true puncture entails an element of misfortune, and a legitimate feeling of being hard-done by.

A Roubaix puncture, in contrast, come from riding over big, sharp, uneven rocks at 50 kph on lightweight racing tyres. Honestly, it’s like kicking a wall and complaining that your foot hurts.

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.

At 1:30am this Friday, Victoria Stansfield will pedal away from her home in Chamonix, and into the unknown. “I’ve never ridden in the dark before,” she smiles, talking to Cycling Weekly over video call. “I don’t even own lights. I’ve had to buy them.”

It’s a surprising admission from the best female gran fondo racer in the world right now. This summer, Stansfield won the 177km Marmotte in the French Alps in record time, as well as the Étape du Tour de France and Étape du Tour de France Femmes – three of the most iconic sportives in the circuit. Now, she’s less than 24 hours away from her biggest challenge yet: La Dame Blanche.

It’s an idea she conjured up herself. The name comes from French folklore and means ‘The White Lady’, the female spirit of the mountains. Stansfield’s plan is to cycle 330km around Mont Blanc, and then immediately line up to compete at the 171km UTMB (Ultra Trail du Mont Blanc), the most famous event in trail running.

Nobody has ever done both back to back. In total, the challenge counts 501km, and more than 18,000m of climbing, split 8,300m on the bike, and 10,000m on the run. “My goal is to do it all in 50 hours,” Stansfield says.

And yet, she concedes, there’s a possibility she won’t finish at all. Over the past few weeks, Stansfield has been taking bets from her family and friends on the likelihood of her completing the entire route. “My husband thinks there’s an 80% chance. I put myself at 85%,” she says.

“I’m so excited to just see what I can do. The premise of it for me is: competing in a gran fondo or riding the Tour of Mont Blanc, or doing UTMB, I know I can do them, and there’s a safety in knowing that. But the two together? I truly don’t know if I can do it. I’m not 100%. That’s what excites me so much.”

You’d be forgiven if you hadn’t heard of Victoria Stansfield until now. Born in Bristol, the 31-year-old only took up cycling properly last year, but has quickly catapulted herself to the top of the amateur scene.

“I was a cross country runner,” she says of her school days. “Then I started triathlon in 2018, and went straight into half Ironman, and it was going really well.”

The following year, Stansfield left her career as an accountant to pursue becoming a professional triathlete. Covid then ground sports events to a halt, and she began caring for her father, who had become unwell with cancer.

“I took the decision to step away from triathlon, and I never went back after dad died,” she says. “Triathlon was our thing, and I didn’t know how I would feel about it without him there.”

In its place, Stansfield took up marathon running. She clocked a 2:41 on her marathon debut in Sevilla in 2021, and later transitioned into trail running. Early last year, however, she slipped in Switzerland and broke her pelvis. The doctors gave her crutches and told her not to walk for two months. “The thing I really missed was, and this sounds really strange: the feeling of the wind on my face,” she says.

Cycling came first as a way to restore fitness. But immediately Stansfield fell in love with the rush of weaving through the mountains.

Last July, a month after she first began riding a road bike, she entered a multi-day sportive in the Pyrenees called the Campilaro, and won. The following week, she entered the Étape du Tour de France Femmes, and won that too.

It’s curious then, that despite going on to do the Marmotte-Étape Hommes-Étape Femmes treble this year, Stansfield still feels like an “imposter” in the cycling world.

She says she doesn’t know how to descend or ride in a bunch, and only learnt how to corner this year after she crashed twice in the Mallorca 312 gran fondo, where she finished second.

“I’ve actually just been to get my bike looked at,” Stansfield says. “My husband told me my brakes were soft, but I wouldn’t know,” she adds with a laugh.

It’s a self-deprecating attitude that stands in contrast to her growing status in the cycling scene. She was a bit embarrassed, she says, when the mechanics at the bike shop greeted her by saying: “Here she is, the champion!”

Similarly, after she won the Étape du Tour de France Femmes earlier this month and fans asked her for photos at the top of Mont Ventoux, she laughed and asked them why.

The truth is Stansfield has never sought stardom in her riding challenges. With her upcoming La Dame Blanche, her goal is to inspire, particularly her daughter, Margot, who recently turned three.

“For me, it’s terrifying,” she says. “But I really want my little girl to go, ‘Mummy did something that really scared her.’”

The first of those fears will be riding through the night. “I should be getting to the top of the Col du Grand St-Bernard at sunrise, so it’s going to be the most stunning morning of my life,” she says.

“I’m just hoping sunrise doesn’t happen when I’m on the descent, because I think there’s a period just before sunrise when your body gets a bit freaked out… and we all know I can’t go downhill as it is.”

Barring disaster, Stansfield hopes to have two hours for her transition from cycling to starting at UTMB. She will then face a cut off of just under 47 hours to complete the 171km mountainous trail run.

“This is completely unknown,” Stansfield says. But that’s her whole reason for taking it on. “I just want more people to try and do stuff that scares them – put themselves out of their comfort zones. What’s the worst that happens?”

You can follow Victoria Stansfield's La Dame Blanche challenge live via the tracker on her website.

Three verified GoFundMe campaigns have been launched to support the families of the Milligan University cyclists killed or injured when a car driver struck the team during a training ride last week.

Sophomores Haylan Engdahl and Brayden Rogers were killed in the 19 August collision; seven other students were injured and taken to hospital.

Two of the fundraisers will help Engdahl’s and Rogers’ families cover funeral and memorial expenses. The third will help the injured cyclists and their families with medical bills, recovery costs and other urgent needs.

The three campaigns had collectively raised more than $72,000 at the time of publication.

Haylan Engdahl, 19, was a graduate of Christian Life High School in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The fundraiser remembers him as smart, funny and kind, with a deep passion for mountain biking, cyclocross and criterium racing. "Never without a smile, Haylan had a presence that was impossible not to notice," the campaign reads.

The Support Haylan Engdahl’s Family campaign was organised to help Engdahl’s mother, father and brother with funeral expenses, memorial costs and time to grieve.

Similarly, the Funeral Support for Brayden Rogers campaign aims to "ease some of the financial burden during this incredibly painful time."

Rogers was a graduate of Buckhorn High School in New Market, Alabama. He was 19.

"This heartbreaking loss has left Brayden’s family, friends and community grieving and trying to process an unimaginable tragedy,” the campaign reads.

A third fundraiser, Support Milligan University Cyclists, was organised for the seven injured riders and their families, some of whom remain in hospital.

"Donations will help offset medical expenses, recovery costs, and other urgent needs as these students work to rebuild after such a devastating event," the fundraiser reads. "Just as importantly, this fundraiser is a way to surround them with love, compassion, and support during one of the hardest moments of their lives."

On the morning of 19 August, 11 members of the Milligan University cycling team were riding on Highway 19E in Carter County, Tennessee, when they were struck by a car driver.

The driver, John Benfield, 69, of North Carolina, was taken into custody following the crash. He has been charged with two counts of vehicular homicide by recklessness and five counts of aggravated assault by vehicle. Benfield was released after posting a $300,000 bond and is due back in court on 31 August. The investigation remains ongoing, with the National Transportation Safety Board now involved.

If it were up to my wife, I would leave on every ride lit up like the proverbial Christmas tree. Neon jersey, reflective everything, all the lights - and perhaps a small rotating beacon strapped to my helmet for good measure.

I don’t blame her. A few years ago I was T-boned by a car driver because he "hadn’t seen me." Never mind that I had a green traffic light, was in the designated bicycle infrastructure, and had my bike lights flashing even though the sun wouldn’t set for another hour. After some days on the hospital trauma ward, I went home with a long list of injuries. It took nearly a year to recover, and frankly, I’ve never been quite right again.

It wasn’t the first time a driver had taken me out either, and experiences like these change the way you ride. You become more protective of your space on the road and wary of other road users. It also changes for the people who love you. You may be the one leaving to go for a ride, but your loved ones are left behind fearing you won’t come home. No matter how careful you are.

Before we continue, let me get one thing very, very clear: I do not believe cyclists should have to dress like flashing hazard signs to earn the right to use the road. No amount of neon colours or lights can compensate for a driver who isn’t looking, who’s on their phone, driving impaired or making reckless decisions.

Yet, I am also not willing to stop road cycling altogether. So if there are things I can do to make myself more seen, be proactive and aware of the road users around me, I’m interested. At the same time, I also want my gear to perform, be comfortable, look good, and generally be unobtrusive to my cycling experience. If I don’t feel good in it or it requires some cumbersome mounting or charging process, I know myself well enough to admit that I probably won’t use it consistently. And safety equipment left at home is no use to anyone.

The following is by no means an exhaustive list; they’re just a few items that have become personal staples in helping me feel a little more seen without sacrificing performance or style.

Brightly coloured jersey I actually want to wear

If visibility is the goal, clothing seems like the most logical place to start. It is already on your body, requires no batteries and covers one of the largest visible surfaces on any cyclist aside from the bike itself.

The difficulty is finding something bright that doesn’t scream, “I bought this in a desperate hope that a driver texting ‘OMW’ or scrolling TikTok won’t run me over.”

Castelli’s Espresso collection is my happy compromise.

I first tested the original Espresso kit in 2024, and it immediately felt like a different side of Castelli. Made for riding rather than racing, the Espresso range is softer, more forgiving in its sizing and light on the graphics. In short, it feels and looks good with a range of solid colours well beyond the standard black, navy and dark green palette that has dominated apparel for the past decade.

The Espresso 2 W Long Sleeve Jersey in purple has become a genuine favourite. It’s a summer-weight long-sleeve jersey in a purple that’s bright enough to stand out without feeling like Barney on two wheels.

The fit is flattering without being aggressively race-tight, and the Air_O stretch fabric is soft, breathable and comfortable for all-day adventures in the saddle. Castelli has refined the fit for this second generation, with a shorter front (less zipper bunching), a collar that sits slightly lower, and the rear pockets are more structured to reduce sagging.

Raw-cut sleeve endings keep things smooth and comfortable, while three rear pockets and a fourth zippered valuables pocket supply the expected practicalities.

Sizing remains worth discussing with Castelli. For a brand that’s known for its snugger-fitting size charts, the Espresso line is much more forgiving. In fact, you may even need to size down, so consult the size chart before purchasing.

Weather protection aside, the long sleeves are a visibility bonus. More sleeve means more colour, and therefore more of me for a driver to see.

For the warmest days (of which we’ve all had plenty this summer), I also like the short-sleeved Espresso 2 W Jersey in Giro pink. It is a girlier departure from my usual style, but the colour is done well: it's cheerful, highly visible and unmistakably 'cycling' without being fluorescent.

Are these safety jerseys? No. They are performance jerseys that happen to come in colours less likely to blend into the background. I am not wearing them as penance for riding a bicycle on public roads. I wear them because they are comfortable, stylish and genuinely good. The fact that purple and pink are more noticeable than black is simply a very welcome advantage.

Look put lights in its pedals—and I wish it were a standard feature on all pedals

I have been a career-long Speedplay user on the road. Pedal preferences are deeply personal, and after enough years, clipping into a particular system becomes so instinctive that changing feels a little like deciding to write with the other hand. But then Look put lights in its pedals.

I saw Redshift do it first with its ArcLight commuter platform and was genuinely excited to see Look integrate lights into a performance clipless platform: the Keo Blade Ceramic Vision.

It's one of those ideas that's so obvious in hindsight. A traditional rear light sits in a fixed position. Your feet, meanwhile, are constantly moving. Two red lights tracing the pedalling motion immediately signal that the object ahead is not a mailbox or a traffic cone but a human being riding a bicycle.

Look calls this use of recognisable human movement "biomotion," and claims that the dual moving lights make a cyclist 5.5 times more visible than a standard seatpost light. It can also be seen from up to a kilometre away.

Anecdotally, I do get comments on them quite frequently, which means they are indeed being noticed.

The lights can be clipped on and off the road pedal easily without having to take your pedals off the bike. They offer four steady or flashing modes, 180 degrees of visibility and a claimed battery life of up to 40 hours. And the lights add a mere 20 grams to a set of pedals compared to the non-lighted version.

Importantly, Look has integrated them into a proper high-performance pedal.

The Keo Blade Ceramic Vision has a carbon body, ceramic bearings and a broad contact area. And if you already use compatible Keo Blade V4 pedals, Look offers the lights as a retrofit kit, which is neat.

For me, the visibility element was enough to convince me to not only switch over from Speedplay, at least part of the time, but to learn how to clip in on a single-sided pedal as well.

Now I'm just waiting for someone to make an SPD-compatible light-up gravel pedal...

Lights, lights and more light

We test all sorts of bike lights at Cycling Weekly, including some powerful enough to turn night into day. But the ones I use day in, day out are less dramatic. Their greatest feature is not extraordinary output or clever software. It is that they are so unobtrusive that they're always on my bike.

Knog Plus rear light

I've had this tiny Knog Plus light for years. It's about the size of a pack of Wrigley's gum, weighs a mere 18 grams and can be charged by sticking it directly into a USB port.

With a 20-lumen output, I treat it as a supplementary rear light. Paired with the Look light-up pedals, a more powerful light or as a backup, it's always there in case I go through a tunnel, it's rainy or just to have another flashy light on my bike or person.

The Plus light clips onto a jersey pocket, bag or the supplied magnetic bike mount, so it can follow me between bikes without demanding another permanent bracket.

The light offers five modes, a claimed runtime of up to 40 hours and enough water resistance to have survived seven winters in the Pacific Northwest.

The cleverest feature is its integrated USB-A plug. Pull the light from its mount and plug the whole thing directly into a USB port. No cables needed.

Magicshine HORI 900S

Now that most new bikes come with a semi- or fully integrated cockpit, I like to keep the handlebar clutter at a minimum. I've long been using a GoPro attachment on the bottom of an out-front computer mount to attach various lights, but this compact light negates the need for even that.

The dual-mount Magicshine HORI 900S clips directly into an out-front computer mount – either sandwiched between the mount and your head unit or on the bottom side of the mount. It doesn't require a separate mount, it keeps my bars clear and my bar bag accessible should I choose to use one. And, with a mount on either side of the light unit, you can continue using your action cameras.

The 900-lumen output is bright enough to do more than flash politely during the day, while the cut-off beam is designed to put light on the road rather than into the eyes of oncoming riders and drivers. It also has a separate daytime running light, and a claimed runtime of up to 40 hours.

At 107 grams, this isn’t the smallest light, nor would it be my first choice for off-road riding at night. But for road riding, commuting and the inevitable occasion when a daytime ride runs later than planned, it strikes a good balance.

Mostly, I like that it requires very little thought. Mount it beneath the computer, charge it occasionally and switch it on. If you're taking the bike, you're taking the light.

Live tracking features

One safety feature I use without fail, and without even thinking about it, is Garmin LiveTrack. The moment I hit start on my Edge cycling computer, my pre-selected contact (in my case, my wife) receives an email with a tracking link. The link opens a browser-based map, so your designated worrier does not need a Garmin account or app to follow along. On compatible Edge units, they can even send messages that pop up on the screen. My wife no longer needs to ask where I am, although she may still ask why my two-hour ride is taking four.

Wahoo Live Track provides much the same peace of mind across its ELEMNT bike computers. Once enabled in the companion app, it creates a link you can share with family or friends. Like Garmin, Wahoo also offers auto-sharing, removing one more thing to remember as you get ready to ride.

Hammerhead has live tracking on the Karoo as well. Enable it on the computer and the Karoo Companion App can automatically share a unique link showing the unit’s live location. It is a more straightforward implementation than Garmin’s broader collection of LiveTrack, incident-detection and group-riding features, but it covers the essential requirement: allowing someone at home to see where you are.

You do not necessarily need a bike computer, either. Strava Beacon can share your live location with up to three safety contacts when recording through the Strava phone app. Beacon is free when used directly in the app, while using it through certain connected devices may require a Strava subscription. Apple’s Find My and Google Maps offer less cycling-specific alternatives, but they still provide the most important piece of information: where you are.

There is one substantial asterisk attached to nearly all these features: connectivity. Lose mobile coverage and the dot may stop moving until the connection returns. For genuinely remote rides, I rely on my Garmin inReach to communicate and share my whereabouts. It can share tracking information, exchange messages and summon assistance beyond cellular coverage. It does, however, add another device, another subscription and another battery to manage.

Oakley Meta Vanguard: for when things get hairy

Now for the controversial one.

I have already argued that the Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses would be better without Meta and its always-on AI assistant. I have privacy concerns. And yet, I keep reaching for them when I ride on the road.

Underneath all the technology is a very good pair of sports sunglasses. Oakley’s Prizm lenses offer the contrast and road definition I expect from the brand. I also love the speakers built into the arms as they are surprisingly clear and automatically adjust to wind noise. The glasses can also pair with a Garmin, supply workout information and respond to voice commands.

Frankly, much of that is clever technology I could live without. It’s the camera (and the open-ear speakers if I’m being truly honest) that keep bringing me back.

Positioned between the eyes, the 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera records up to 3K video from my point of view. If I see something worth capturing, I can take a photo or begin recording using a quick physical control or voice command if I can't remove my hands from the bars.

That is fun when the thing in front of me is a beautiful view, a friend getting shreddy or an animal beside the trail. It feels rather more consequential when the thing in front of me is an angry driver.

The easily accessible camera gives me an odd sense of reassurance in traffic. If an interaction starts getting hairy, I know I may be able to capture it almost immediately. There is comfort in the idea that, if things go sideways, some record could exist beyond my recollection of the event.

I know this reassurance has limits. A camera will not prevent a driver from hitting me. It cannot de-escalate a confrontation or guarantee that a license plate will be legible. Depending on what happens, I may not have time to activate it at all. Still, it makes me feel slightly more protected when the post-collision questioning tips borders on victim blaming: What were you doing? What were you wearing?

Of course, a conventional action camera can provide the same evidence without being connected to Meta’s ecosystem. Some can even record continuously, removing the need to anticipate an incident. But since I already have these sunglasses, it’s what I use - even if recommending them comes with a significant asterisk.

Perhaps that is the point of this whole exercise. None of these products offers perfect protection or an entirely compromise-free experience. They are simply the things I am willing to wear, charge and use because each makes riding on the road feel marginally less vulnerable.

My wife would still prefer the Christmas tree or traffic cone look.

Folding bike manufacturer Brompton has hidden three golden tickets across London, with free bike hire in the city on Thursday 27 August.

The tickets gain the lucky winner free entry to the Brompton World Championship this September, which take place at the Lee Valley VeloPark in London.

In order to take part, riders will have to follow clues to discover a bespoke, factory-etched Brompton part hidden inside its Bike Hire lockers in the capital. Usually £5 to hire a Brompton for 24-hours, on 27 August, and also on the day of the World Championship, Saturday 5 September, it is free. There are 35 lockers in London, all with Bromptons waiting to make getting around the city easier.

The competition will be launched on Thursday morning with the help of Johno Verity, the popular Instagram cyclist, who will be giving out clues on how to find the golden tickets, on his regular dawn ride.

The promotion runs from 25-28 August, with tickets found outside this window void, and only one prize is allowed per person. Each ticket must be claimed by emailing press@brompton.co.uk by 29 August sharing a photo of the unique prize. The prize is one free entry to the Brompton World Championship, plus race number and rider pack.

The Brompton World Championship will take place on Saturday 5 September. The big race begins with a Le Mans-style start, with competitors sprinting to their folded Brompton bikes before unfolding them and racing onto the circuit, with riders competing across ten qualifying heats before the fastest men and women progress to the championship finals.

Alongside the race, there will also be Brompton demonstrations and test rides, folding competitions, workshops, exclusive merchandise, as well as hospitality in the form of food and drink and entertainment.

In 2025, riders from over 25 countries contested the BWC in Coal Drops Yard, King’s Cross, but this year's event will see 650 competitors compete for the coveted crowns on the fast-paced circuit at Lee Valley VeloPark, which hosted the track cycling events during the 2012 Olympics.

New for this year are a four-person relay race, where fast-paced change overs should inject some jeopardy and entertainment into the mix for onlookers, and the Hydro Scrap Lap, a crowd-pleaser of a contest that celebrates the most creative and memorable rider of the day. Tickets and entry spots are available now.

Thirty million pounds is needed in order to deliver a lasting legacy from the Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes' British Grands Départs next year, a group of cycling and civic leaders has said.

In an open letter to the UK prime minister, Andy Burnham, sent on Wednesday, the leaders of British Cycling, Grand Départ GB 2027, Scottish Cycling, Beicio Cymru, and representatives of key start and finishes for the Grand Départs have called for £30 million of government funding to seize the opportunity created by the Tours starting in Britain.

They write: "We are calling for targeted capital investment in communities that need it most – places where demand is high but market failure has prevented provision. A £30 million government investment would create safe, accessible places to ride, helping people improve their health, build confidence on a bike, connect with others in their community, and access an affordable form of transport at a time when many households continue to face cost-of-living pressures.

"The investment would also turbocharge our wider legacy plans, extending their reach, accelerating their impact and ensuring benefits are felt for generations to come."

The men’s and women’s Tours de France will visit 10 host towns and cities across Britain in 2027, as the two races start in the same country outside of France for the first time. The men’s race will start in Edinburgh on 2 July, with a finish on stage one in Carlisle. It will then go from Keswick to Liverpool on stage two, and Welshpool to Cardiff on stage three.

The women’s race will open on 30 July in Leeds. Manchester will host the finish of stage one, as well as the start of stage two, which will run across the Peak District to Sheffield. Stage three will be held entirely in London, and will bring the race’s first-ever team time trial.

The open letter reads: "We have a pipeline of investable projects ready to deliver, many linked to Tour de France host cities and regions, in areas of high deprivation, ensuring a meaningful and visible legacy from this major event. We are also confident that Government investment would unlock significant match funding.

"Manchester City Council, host of the Tour de France Femmes, and Edinburgh City Council, host of the Tour de France, have already ringfenced capital funding that could be deployed alongside Government support. This would create tangible benefits quickly, with the Tour de France Grand Départs 2027 providing an unparalleled platform to showcase these success stories to audiences across the UK and around the world."

British Cycling aims to build on the original Places to Ride programme, which was supported by £15 million of government funding between 2019 and 2024. It supported more than 150 projects across England, generating almost £268 million in social value and an estimated £32.9 million in NHS savings, according to the organisation.

"We know the demand is there, and the opportunity is significant," the letter reads. "We would like to request a meeting with you and your team to present our business case at the earliest convenience, and explore how, together, we can capitalise on this unique opportunity."

Lee Gibbons, the interim CEO of British Cycling, said: "The Tour de France Grand Départs in 2027 represent a once-in-a-generation opportunity to inspire millions of people and showcase Britain to the world.

"We want to ensure the legacy extends far beyond the race itself. Investment in safe and accessible places to ride would help more people enjoy the physical, mental and social benefits of cycling while creating healthier and more connected communities."

“Hang on, things might get a bit noisy in a minute,” Nathan* told me over a phone call. He was training on Zwift in his apartment in Kyiv (Ukraine). He had just received an alert via Telegram, the platform used to provide real-time war updates, air-raid alerts and official government broadcasts.

Right on cue, the air raid sirens started.

“These happen so often that people tend to ignore it during the day, or they've got a good idea of what's going on [due to the Telegram texts] and make a conscious choice not to respond to it,” he tells me, once again starting to spin up the power on his Wahoo Kickr turbo trainer.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022. Reports list the death toll as close to 500,000 Russian soldiers, 55,000 Ukrainian soldiers and over 16,000 Ukrainian civilians. But, life goes on. And training continues for cyclists like Nathan – who moved to Ukraine in early July this year, and did not want to share his real name – not only inside, but out on the open road, too.

“Most cities have parks. Kyiv is more like a city in a park,” Nathan told me, speaking on the podcast I host, Going Long.

“You’re never more than five minutes away from woodland. Last week I went out and went down to the national park in Holisiivskyi Kyiv, and you could have been in the New Forest. Absolutely peaceful, nobody around. And that’s probably 20 minutes by bike from central Kyiv.”

So how safe – or not – does it feel to ride in Kyiv during a period in which Russian attacks on the capital appear to be escalating?

“Because I ride mostly in the woodland and it’s not targeted, I feel perfectly safe – all I see is people out having a good time, sitting on the beach, having a beer by the riverfront,” he says of a population trying to acknowledge its circumstances rather than letting it define them.

“If I went out in a different direction, and went up to some of the squares in town, you would see a lot of devastation. There have been times when sirens would sound as I’ve ridden back into the city, so you head to the metro or to the nearest shelter. Under the law here, you cannot be denied access to a shelter, even if there’s no immediate threat,” Nathan tells me.

Picking the right route, then, is of great importance to cyclists in Kyiv. But rides aren’t restricted to forests and woodland.

“There’s a very active Audax-affiliated cycling club here in Kyiv ” Nathan continues, “I want to pick up a 200 [mile ride], a 400, 600, and there’s a 1,200 or a 1,000 as a qualifier for Paris-Brest-Paris next year.”

Audaxes – long-distance and mass-participation challenge rides – are invariably ridden on the road; does Ukraine have the cycling infrastructure to support such events?

“Every big dual carriageway has a very wide bicycle lane next to it, and a pedestrian path, sometimes combined. It’s segregated from the road, set back from the road, either by bollards or really deep kerbs or whatever.

“When you cross an intersection, there’s a big red lane laid out across the road, and cars actually stop for you. It’s bizarre because coming from the UK, you think everybody’s trying to kill you, so you stop and let the car go. Here, they will stop and wave you on. Car drivers here are incredibly courteous and polite,” Nathan comments.

The club’s next outing takes place on Sunday August 30th, with distances of 50km and 100km available. The event website states that the slogan for 2026 is “keep your balance”, adding, “balance is an important component of cycling. You need to keep your balance, balance your strength and pace. Life in Ukraine is also a balance: peace and anxiety, work and rest, support for family and the Armed Forces of Ukraine.”

Peace doesn’t appear to be on the Russian president’s agenda, and sadly, Ukraine remains as deeply ensnared in battle as it did on 24 February 2022 when Vladimir Putin announced the start of his ‘special military operation’.

Cycling has allowed Nathan to move beyond the immediate reality of the conflict and see Kyiv as its inhabitants do: not just as a city under bombardment, but as a place where people still ride, socialise and carry on with their lives.

“We had an absolutely massive strike last week, like the biggest they’d ever had. It killed quite a few people,” Nathan states, referring to an attack on the city on August 5 which saw 17 people die and a further 44 injured.

“The mood in the office was pretty grim, but then I went out on the bike that night, cycled down the river, and there’s people sitting in the cafes, drinking beer and chatting, and young girls doing selfies, and all the stuff that normal people do in a normal life.”

The cyclists of Ukraine ride on, they continue to balance.

French manufacturer Lapierre Cycles has found hope for the future following a court hearing in Dijon that opened the company's receivership.

It comes after Accell Group, which owns the company as well as Raleigh, was declared bankrupt earlier this month.

Lapierre's directeur general William Perrier wrote about the court hearing in a post on LinkedIn on Tuesday afternoon, saying: "It doesn't mean everything is settled, nor that Lapierre is saved. It means that we have obtained the right and the time to fight."

The 20 days since insolvency proceedings began against Accell had been used as "preparation", managing customers, cash flow and suppliers, wrote Perrier.

Now, he said, a new phase would start that involved, among other things, securing a new investor.

"A new stage begins: to make the company run properly and to bring in a long-term industrial or financial investor," he wrote. "These two projects will move forward together.

"I want to salute the women and men of Lapierre once again," he continued. "Every order processed, every delivery kept, every customer and supplier reassured builds our credibility with investors. They are the ones who make the value of this company. We've got an opportunity. It's up to us to transform it into a future."

Lapierre has been a standard fixture in the men's pro peloton for more than 20 years, with French stars Thibaut Pinot and Arnaud Démare winning major races aboard its bikes. Both men's and women's Picnic PostNL teams currently ride the machines, although to limited success so far this year.

Accell Group's Dutch arm was declared bankrupt two weeks ago. Other cycling-related brands in its portfolio include Batavus, Sparta, Koga, Haibike, Winora, Ghost, Babboe and XLC – as well as the iconic Raleigh, a brand that is freighted with nostalgia for British bike riders of a certain age.

Accell Group said at the time that every "realistic option for the future of the business has been tirelessly explored", but in the end there had been no "viable solution" for it to be able to continue operating "in its current form".

A potential life line seemed to have been thrown out from an Irish-based investment firm, Quanta Capital, which has expressed interest in buying the entire group. As a sponsor of the Junior Tour of Ireland, Quanta has links to bike racing. In a statement acquired by Irish site Sticky Bottle, Quanta's chief executive Mel Sutcliffe said: “Our main objective will be to put the group onto a more stable footing as it has endured quite a tumultuous period of trading.

“We have made contact with Accell and its administrators to formalise our interest in purchasing the group.”

If that purchase does come off, it could secure a future not only for Lapierre and Raleigh, but for all their fellow stablemates.

"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.

For decades, cycling apparel has operated on a strict, binary clock: summer ends, and short-sleeved cycling jerseys are packed away, and heavy winter thermal gear takes over. But as global weather patterns blur the lines between seasons, Castelli says it has dismantled that traditional dual-season model with its appropriately named new product lineup – Transition.

The Transition range responds directly to unpredictable shoulder seasons - specifically autumn and spring - when crisp mornings lead into mild afternoons and traditional winter riding gear can quickly become overkill.

Castelli states that Transition is designed as an adaptable foundation to any cycling wardrobe. With multiple mix-and-match core pieces, which they claim will be a range of products that riders will genuinely reach for during these transition months.

The first products in the all-new range are the Corretto LS jerseys for men and women. These sit at one end of the Transition range, and Castelli has a host of new garments joining the Corretto jerseys, including lightweight bib tights, thermal bib shorts, packable insulation, and lightweight protective layers.

Castelli claims Transition is the future of cycling apparel, which isn't simply better summer and winter kit but creating high-performance clothing for all the conditions in between – gradually prioritising insulation and protection from the elements, and bridging the widening gap between traditional summer and winter kit.

Castelli Product Line Manager Andrew Montgomery explained the Castelli ethos behind the range: “The old way of riding was simple: summer gear in summer, winter gear in winter. Today, due to factors like climate change, cycling moves at a different pace. Seasons don’t hit like a switch; they transition gradually over a more prolonged period, giving us an expanded window of riding."

Andrew continued by adding, “That realisation led us to define what we call Transition: a period between summer and winter that has become increasingly important for cyclists, yet remains largely underserved. While the wider industry is still complying with a rigid, dual-season calendar, we’d rather tailor our range to the real-world conditions people are actually riding in."

Castelli says the Corretto LS jersey stands at the forefront of its technical excellence and premium design, which they call an ideal solution for when summer heat begins to wane.

It offers more coverage than the Corretto short-sleeve sibling, featuring the same lightweight, breathable and aerodynamic fabrics which allow riders to adapt smoothly without overheating.

Standout detailing includes a claimed weight of just 194g in the men’s and 170g in the women’s. The tailored fit includes an elastic silicone waist gripper to keep the jersey in place, a full-length YKK Vislon zipper with an easy-use pull, and is complemented by three back pockets plus a fourth zippered security pocket.

The men's jersey is available in two new colourways: Steel Fade/Chestnut-Vivid and Night Shade/Elmwood-Rosa Giro. The women's jersey is available in Paprika/Winter Sky.

Sizes are XS-3XL for the men's version and XXS-XL for the women’s version.

The Castelli Corretto LS Jerseys are priced at £175/ $210/ €170 for both men's and women's versions, and further information can be found at Castelli.

Images published by sister site Cyclingnews, show what appears to be a new Shimano Dura-Ace groupset being ridden at the Vuelta a España. The new groupset features a 13-cog cassette, integrated satellite-hood shifters, and possibly a new freehub. But it still appears to be semi-wireless.

Given these sightings follow the official launch of the Dura-Ace R9370 wheels and months of online leaks and speculation, we imagine this is the R9300 version of Shimano's flagship road groupset.

12 to 13-speed

The Japanese brand appears to have added a cog to the currently 12-speed Dura-Ace cassette, joining Campagnolo in offering a 13-speed road groupset (SRAM only has a 13-speed gravel groupset, XPLR AXS).

A 13-cog cassette reduces jumps between gears and increases range in a two-bydrivetrain. It is even more beneficial in a 1x setup. This could indicate Shimano is going to make single chainrings for the new Dura-Ace. Until now, the Shimano-equipped pro teams have resorted to aftermarket chainrings to run one-by, while SRAM and Campagnolo supply single rings dedicated to road use.

A new freehub?

The move to a 13-speed cassette may require a new Shimano freehub, as the leaked listing of a DT Swiss freehub body suggested, especially if it has a 10T smallest cog. Shimano looks set to decrease this from 11T to close the gear-range gap with SRAM. This would force users of wheels fitted with Shimano's current road standard, HG for 11-speed and 12-speed drivetrains, to convert their freehubs to use the new Dura-Ace.

When SRAM introduced a 13th sprocket to its XPLR cassettes, it maintained the same spacing as its 12-speed road groupsets so they both could use XDR freehubs. Meanwhile, Campagnolo's 13-speed N3W freehub is backward-compatible with older 9-, 10-, and 11-speed cassettes. But because Shimano has already found space for an extra cog on its HG freehubs with the current Dura-Ace Di2 12-speed, it may be difficult to repeat the trick.

A new rear derailleur but still wired

The new Dura-Ace rear derailleur spotted on the bikes of riders from Team Picnic PostNL and Alpecin-Premier Tech appears to have a slimmer profile and diagonal cut-outs near the charging port, suggesting it could be lighter than before.

From what we can see, there is nowhere for an external, removable battery to go, like on SRAM's AXS derailleurs. The absence of a battery and the presence of a cable running from the drive-side chainstay suggest that Shimano has retained the Dura-Ace R9200's semi-wireless design. This allows the shifters to communicate wirelessly with the derailleurs, which are connected to a battery stored in the frame.

Because Shimano's latest electronic gravel and mountain bike rear derailleurs are wireless and it has filed a patent for a wireless 13-speed road groupset, it seemed a done deal that the new Dura-Ace would be free of wires.

So why doesn't that seem to be the case? It's handy to be able to charge SRAM's removable derailleur batteries off the bike, but their runtime is shorter than that of the single battery currently used in Shimano's Di2 electronic groupsets. In addition, the external battery makes SRAM derailleurs bulkier than Shimano's, and possibly less aerodynamic as a result.

In-built satellite shifters

Shimano appears to have integrated satellite shifters into the inside of the new Dura-Ace Di2 shifters. As well as the paddles and hidden buttons on top of the hoods, these now appear to have a small lever on the inward-facing side of the pommel. It remains to be seen whether these miniature paddles will replace the hidden buttons on top of the hoods featured in the current groupset, or exist alongside them.

Both SRAM and Campagnolo have their own versions of these bonus shift buttons, which help riders seamlessly change gear when climbing out of the saddle on the hoods or when adopting the aero-hoods position.

New power meter and cranks?

We can't deduce much from the pictures of the cranksets on these bikes, which are fitted with other seemingly new Dura-Ace parts. Cyclingnews reported that the black cranks, which look similar to the existing version, are attached to off-brand chainrings on Alpecin–Premier Tech's bikes. The cranks themselves could still be prototypes like the unreleased SPD-SL pedals that have been raced this season.

We do, however, understand that Team Picnic–PostNL is using an updated Dura-Ace power meter. Shimano will have tried to improve the doubtful accuracy of the current generation.

What is Shimano saying?

A Shimano spokesman said: "Shimano is constantly developing new products, but does not comment on rumours, speculation, or unannounced products.”

I took my fixed-gear bike out for a ride recently. The bike I’ve been using since autumn had finally hit the point where it was too dirty to be seen with in public. And I didn’t want to use my summer bike because my indecisiveness about tubeless versus tubed means it won’t have tyres on it anytime in the foreseeable future.

When my gaze fell on my fixed bike (you may call it a “fixie” if you prefer, but know that I’m judging you), I thought, why not? The fashion for riding them round London with no brakes and claiming, “It makes you feel at one with the city,” is long enough passed that it felt like time to reclaim fixed for decent citizens.

Fixed bikes used to be so important. They were how old cyclists – by which I mean dyed-in-the-wool, hewn-from-tradition riders not just literal old people – demonstrated their superiority. There was nothing as gloriously passive-aggressive towards anyone on a carbon superbike as dropping them on something that looked like it had been in a ditch since 1956.

You could talk about gear ratios. And you could talk about them in gear inches, so that no one who wasn’t in your club of passive-aggressive inverted snobs had a clue what you were talking about. You could advocate for increasing the gear two inches when the clocks went forwards and all sorts of similar nonsense. No one understood a word, but it sounded brilliant.

You could also talk about “souplesse”. “Souplesse” is an indefinable smoothness of pedal stroke that comes from having your feet spun around at high speed on every descent whether you like it or not, and from wrenching your way back up the far side of the valley with a cadence in single figures. How do these things add up to make souplesse? If that’s the sort of question you asked, you were not welcome in fixed-gear club.

Anyway. It was to hark back to this older and generally much worse time that I headed out on my old bike. And it was nice. After the first mile or two of muttering, “Don’t stop pedalling,” like it’s a mantra, the simplicity of it starts to appeal.

In some ways it’s like riding a theodolite – you find gradients you’ve never noticed before, because every change arrives directly at your pedals. You have to remember to be modest with your cornering. If you get it wrong and ground a pedal, it hits the floor with enough momentum to put you into a low-Earth orbit.

Going up a hill is slow and uncomfortable. Going down is fast and uncomfortable, because however sane and rational you think you are, you still feel that it’s a matter of pride to stick with it and not use the front brake to scrub off some speed and make it all more manageable. Headwinds are horrible, but tailwinds are just amazing.

Geared bikes are certainly quicker and more comfortable. But then cycling is about more than just whatever is “best”, or the notoriously-terrible-at-stopping-you Campagnolo Delta brakeset would not be a hugely expensive collectors’ item.

In fact, as I contemplated this, I wondered if it’s not time that fixed had an upswing. It has so many things about it that we like – it’s inconvenient, baffling to an outsider, and a good excuse to buy another bike. That’s nearly the full set.

And then last week, someone sent me a report about the training benefits of riding up hills while wildly overgeared.

Next time you see Tadej Pogačar in training, guess what he’ll be riding

For a professional cyclist, signing a new equipment sponsor is hardly unusual. For Dylan Johnson, signing with a tyre sponsor is different.

The professional gravel racer, coach and YouTuber has spent his career purposefully unattached to any one tyre brand, preferring the freedom to test, scrutinise and race whatever he believed was fastest.

"I purposefully have not had a tyre sponsor for my entire career because I think that tyres are probably the most important equipment choice that gravel cyclists make," Johnson told Cycling Weekly. "And I didn't want to compromise by being beholden to one brand."

That changes now.

Johnson has signed his first tyre sponsorship with Silca as the Indianapolis-based company launches Protocol, its first-ever collection of road and gravel tyres. The contract runs for the remainder of this season and the following two years, Johnson says. But his involvement with the project dates back to 2024 when the brand first approached him.

Johnson is well aware of how the move might look coming from someone whose brand agnosticism has been central to both his racing and his reputation.

"To make this switch, hopefully my audience won't be like, ‘Oh, Dylan finally sold out,’ because I had quite a hand in the development process of these tyres," Johnson said.

"I wouldn't be signing to a tyre company if I didn't think it was the best tyre on the market, genuinely."

It also wasn't a case of Johnson simply being handed a finished product along with a sponsorship contract. He says he was involved from the project’s early stages, testing prototypes and providing feedback on everything from tyre volume and casing construction to ride feel and tread patterns.

That distinction matters for a rider who has built a considerable following by obsessing over equipment choices.

When we interviewed Johnson in early 2025, he described himself as an "optimiser", interested in finding the lightest, most aerodynamic and most efficient set-up possible. And his willingness to question conventional gravel equipment put him at the forefront of the gravel discipline's move toward much larger tyres.

After his own real-world and wind-tunnel experiments, Johnson turned to large-volume, thin-casing cross-country mountain bike tyres for gravel racing long before it became trendy. He argued that, counterintuitively, those tyres could roll faster over rough gravel while offering better puncture protection than many conventional gravel tyres.

Johnson remembers 2024 as the season when the wider trend took hold.

"2024 was the year when U.S. gravel racers made the switch from 45s to mountain bike tyres," he said. At Mid South early that season, he recalls only a handful of racers making the choice. By Big Sugar that fall, "it seemed like nearly everybody that could fit mountain bike tyres on their gravel bike was on mountain bike tyres."

The bike industry has quickly caught up. Tyre clearance has continued to grow across recent gravel launches, with most 2026 releases easily accommodating mountain-bike-sized rubber. Specialized’s latest Diverge and Crux clear a 55mm tyre, for example, while Factor’s new Sarana goes to 57mm and the new Open W.I.D.E clears a gargantuan 66mm.

For Johnson, being sponsor-free had been central to his experimentation, and his tyre choices changed according to the course: a Continental Race King for rougher events, a Schwalbe Thunder Burt for courses where lower rolling resistance took priority, and a narrower gravel tyre only when a course contained enough pavement to alter the equation.

So when Silca approached him for input back in 2024, Johnson says his demands of a gravel tyre were clear. He wanted significant volume combined with a thinner casing, essentially retaining the lessons that had drawn him towards XC tyres in the first place.

"It needs to be wide, probably 55 millimetres, and it needs to be a thinner casing than most of these gravel tyres are," Johnson recalls telling Silca. The response, he says, was that this was already exactly the direction the company was pursuing.

Meet SILCA's Protocol line of tyres

Rather than starting with a traditional road-tyre construction and adding more material and volume for gravel, Silca says it worked from the principles of cross-country mountain bike tyres towards a high-efficiency gravel platform. The company calls it an "inverse proportional" design approach: pairing larger tyre volumes with thinner, high-density 120 TPI casings.

At modern, lower inflation pressures, Silca claims the construction allows the casing to deflect around impacts more effectively, with the aim of reducing rolling resistance and weight without compromising puncture protection.

"For years, the industry approached gravel tyres by just slapping thick, heavy rubber onto traditional road tyre carcasses," said Silca CEO Joshua Poertner.

"By optimising casing ply angles, tread profiles, and material science together, we've created a tyre platform that is faster, lighter, and more supple without sacrificing durability."

Silca's entry into the tyre market consists of three gravel models and one road tyre.

• Protocol RCG-1 for fast hardpack and mixed-surface gravel
• Protocol RCG-3 for all-around rough-terrain gravel
• Protocol RCG-4 for adventure, mud and loose trail
• Protocol RCR for high-volume road

Silca positions the Protocol RCG-1 as its fastest gravel option, intended for smoother hardpack and mixed-surface courses. It pairs a low, ramped directional centre tread with taller side knobs intended to add bite as the bike leans into a corner.

The RCG-3 moves towards rougher gravel, with tightly spaced centre knobs that increase in size towards the shoulder and additional puncture protection beneath the tread. Silca positions it for demanding, rougher courses such as Unbound and Big Sugar.

For mud, sand, loose rock and more adventure-oriented riding, the RCG-4 gets considerably more aggressive, widely spaced lugs, along with bead-to-bead puncture protection.

Finally, there is the Protocol RCR, a high-volume road tyre. Silca says the RCR similarly uses increased air volume for impact absorption rather than relying on additional layers of rubber. The 29mm version is optimised around modern 25mm-internal hookless rims, while the 38mm model maximises volume within UCI regulations.

Across the Protocol range, Silca uses its new Pulsar rubber compound, carbon-fibre beads and size-specific rim compatibility. The company says its casing geometry and asymmetric tread designs are intended to minimise energy losses while improving stability, braking and cornering grip.

For Johnson, however, the spec sheet alone wasn’t enough.

He says Silca has put the tyres through both rolling-resistance and puncture-resistance testing, the two factors he personally considers most important for gravel, using both indoor and outdoor methods.

"They did drum testing and then John Karrasch, who does all the outdoor testing, he has done outdoor testing," Johnson said. "So it's been tested indoors and outdoors."

Karrasch’s testing provides an increasingly popular counterpoint to traditional laboratory drum tests. His outdoor work uses the Chung, or Virtual Elevation, method to calculate rolling resistance on pavement and several grades of actual gravel. Some tyres that perform quickly on a drum remain fast on real-world, off-road conditions, while others do not.

During the past year-and-a-half, Johnson has also experienced the less glamorous side of product development, riding prototypes through multiple iterations – some better than others. The final versions, he says, have resolved any issues he encountered along the way.

"I think the tyres feel great," he said, describing the handling as predictable and the traction in line with what he would expect from the tread designs.

The RCG-1 and RCG-3 have now effectively replaced Johnson’s previous two favourite race options. The Schwalbe Thunder Burt had been replaced with the RCG-1. And for chunkier terrain, higher puncture risk and races where cornering traction matters more, the RCG-3 takes over from the Continental Race King.

There is, inevitably, reputational risk in that declaration.

"I do realise the risk of signing a tyre deal after I've been Mr Tire Agnostic Guy for so long," he said. "I hope my audience can recognise this."

His own involvement aside, Johnson's confidence comes partly from watching Silca enter product categories in which it previously had little experience, pointing specifically to the company’s chain wax and tubeless sealant. That track record, he says, made him more comfortable racing on a first-generation tyre from a company that had never previously made one.

Ultimately, though, his argument is simpler: no sponsorship cheque is worth using equipment that he believes could cost him a result.

"It's not worth a paycheck to be on an inferior product to me," Johnson said. "For me personally, it's not worth a paycheck to be on a product that's gonna cost me race results down the line."

To that end, he left us with one final endorsement:

“I've not punctured a Silca tyre yet."

The Silca Protocol range is priced at $99 USD / £99 / €119 / $149 CAD / $159.95 AUD and is now available from Silca’s website and select retailers.

It’s not unusual to see footage of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani cycling around the mean streets of the Big Apple, decked out in his dapper suit and tie, while wearing his trademark winning smile, but one thing has been notably missing: a bike helmet.

And, as you can imagine, critics have been quick to take to social media to point out that the 34-year-old politician – a renowned master communicator and pin-up member of the influencer generation – is setting a very bad example by riding around without proper head protection.

“Where is your helmet Mr Mayor?” yells a typical commentator.

Just like in the UK, in New York it’s not a legal requirement for recreational or commuting cyclists to wear a helmet – unless they’re under the age of 14 or working as a delivery rider – but instead of ignoring the criticism or going on the defensive, Mamdani has listened to it, taken the advice on board, and very publicly purchased himself a lid.

In a video posted on Instagram, he responds to the chastising comments by saying: “You’re right. I’ve got to do better.” He is then shown unboxing a brand new bike helmet, putting it on his head and saying: “Safety first, New York. See you out there”

So rare is it for a politician to be seen to admit their mistakes, that the post has gone viral and has likely done more to encourage helmet wearing than any public safety campaign could possibly have hoped to have done.

In cycling circles, both in Britain and the United States, the helmet debate rages on. Those in favour point to evidence demonstrating that head protection drastically reduces the risk of serious injury or death in the event of a crash or a collision with a car. On the otherhand, people who are against making helmets mandatory - incuding Chris Boardman – say such laws discourage cycling (especially when it comes to city bike-share programs) and argue that helmets can dehumanise cyclists and even make drivers behave less cautiously.

Our resident riding guru Dr Hutch takes a liberal approach to the issue, but with reasonably decent helmets being available at an affordable price, it makes sense to protect your head as much as possible.

Two members of the Milligan University collegiate cycling team were killed while on a training ride in Hampton, Tennessee, on the morning of 19 August.

Eleven of the team's riders were out on a morning training ride when a car driver struck them. The incident occurred around 8 a.m. on Highway 19E, just east of Johnson City.

In a video message to the public, Milligan University president Stephen Waers shared that Sophomores Haylan Engdahl and Brayden Rogers were killed; seven other students were injured and taken to hospital. Four remained in critical condition.

The investigation is ongoing, but it's been reported that the driver, John Benfield, 69, of North Carolina, was taken into custody and charged with two counts of vehicular homicide by recklessness and five counts of aggravated assault by vehicle.

Milligan's collegiate cycling team won the men’s team time trial national championship at the U.S.A. Cycling Collegiate Road Nationals in Madison, Wisconsin, this past May.

"We are profoundly shocked and saddened to share that members of our cycling team were in an accident involving a vehicle this morning while cycling in Hampton, TN," the University said in a statement.

"There are no words to adequately describe this level of loss. Our prayers are with all those impacted by this tragedy. Please keep the Milligan community in your prayers."

Milligan University alumnus and multi-time national champion, Ama Nsek, took to Instagram to express his sadness and frustration.

"When's it going to end?" he asked in a tearful message. "Two cyclists killed. Two kids killed, and five in the hospital. It's so sad that we live in a world where we can't just ride our bikes in peace. I've seen so many cyclists get killed or heavily injured by negligent drivers, and it's just really sad. It's really frustrating."

Pinarello Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team today announced the signing of rising American talent Andrew "AJ" August. The twenty-year-old INEOS Grenadiers rider has had a breakout season thus far, with wins at the Czech Tour, Itzulia Basque Country and Settimana Internazionale Coppi e Bartali. He also scored top-10 finishes in the overall classifications at the Tour of Austria and Tour de la Provence.

Praising August as "one of the brightest young talents in American cycling," Pinarello Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team has signed the young talent on a three-year contract from January 2027 through the end of 2029.

"August is no longer simply showing potential – he is starting to turn it into victories," the team stated, referencing August's performances at the Czech Tour where he won two consecutive uphill stages to claim the general, points and youth classifications.

"Winning the Czech Tour was a confirmation for me. I had been feeling really strong in training in the weeks before, and then everything came together. To win the GC and two stages gives me a lot of confidence," August said in a press release.

"I’m still discovering my limits and what kind of rider I can become. Right now, I just want to keep discovering that and win as many races as I can."

Born in Rochester, New York, August grew up racing in the United States before making the transition directly from the junior ranks into INEOS Grenadiers' well-established high-performance programme.

"Racing in the US is completely different to racing in Europe, so it was a big transition, both as a junior and then as a professional. Joining INEOS at 18 meant jumping straight into the deep end, but it allowed me to learn how cycling works at the highest level," August commented.

Douglas Ryder, Team Principal of Pinarello Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team, said his programme is committed to providing August with the environment, support and opportunities to continue his progression.

"Andrew is a rider who has impressed us for some time. At only 20 years old, he already has valuable WorldTour experience, and what stands out is how quickly he continues to develop," Ryder said.

"We believe Andrew has all the attributes to become one of the leading riders of his generation. He is ambitious, committed to his development, and constantly looking for ways to improve. Just as importantly, he has the mindset and professionalism required to succeed at the highest level of the sport.

"We see this as a long-term project and are excited to help him take the next steps in his career."

A year after breaking his neck, Seb Grindley completed his comeback by taking victory at the North Yorkshire Grand Prix at Ampleforth Abbey.

The Lidl-Trek Future Racing rider pointed to his black armband as he crossed the line, and dedicated the win to Finlay Tarling, who was tragically killed over the weekend, and Shane O'Brien, who passed away earlier this year.

The race, formerly known as the Ryedale Grand Prix, was contested in a downpour, which made for slippery and challenging conditions. However, Grindley managed to get amongst a nine-rider breakaway, led by the Wheelbase CabTech Castelli pair of Tom Martin and Tom Armstrong, with the latter eyeing overall victory in the both the National Road Series and the Rapha Super-League.

“The race went in my favour from the beginning,” Grindley told Cycling Weekly. “I was much happier out the front. The group established itself early – maybe a quarter of an hour into the into the race. From there it just made things simple.

“We kind of just rolled through until the five finishing loops and then it got quite tactical. It was a lot of attacking, chasing, and ultimately, it was just six guys who came down to the finish, and I came out top on in the sprint.”

Jack Rootkin-Gray and Damien Clayton were second and third, but Grindley has had to overcome major hurdles recently just to get back in the peloton, let alone stand atop the podium.

“I broke a vertebra in my neck at the 2025 National Champs, which ruled out me out for the rest of that season,” he explains. “I had a really good winter and came into the season with good form, which kind of trailed off, unfortunately.

“But I managed to have a couple of weeks off, post-nationals and then a nice training block. And yeah, these two races of the national series that I've done in the past couple of weeks have been good for getting the engine going again.”

In the wake of two awful recent events that have left the cycling communities of Britain and Ireland in mourning, Grindley paid tribute to Tarling and Shane O'Brien.

“Obviously there have been a lot of emotions over the last few days, with Fin passing away,” he said. “He was a good friend of mine.”

“The timing of the win was nice – to get a victory I can honour him with. I dedicated it to Fin and also to Shane, the brother of my teammate, Liam O'Brien. He passed away not that long ago as well.”

Riders, intrigued onlookers and a host of media were drawn to Palmer Park Velodrome in Reading, England, last week to witness four Guinness World Records being broken by riders of the Penny Farthing Club.

Club riders made eight record attempts in total, and despite the high-wheeled bikes' 'Old Ordinary' designation, there was nothing ordinary about any of the record attempts, which included 100 kilometres no-handed and setting a new 24-hour benchmark.

In the event neither of those was successful, but four others were. The most visually intriguing was surely the tandem penny farthing hour record. Tim Maltin and Rufus Flann propelled their three-wheeled machine to a new mark of 21.97km (13.6 miles). Meanwhile, Guy Banham set a new 100m penny farthing speed record of 42.15kph (26.2mph), while Rolf Woodward rode his machine to a new 100km record of 4hr 55min 54sec.

However, the new 'longest ride without dismounting' record set by Richard Thoday dwarfed even Woodward's 100km attempt in the endurance stakes: Thoday, the holder of the penny farthing Land's End to John o' Groats record, completed a record unbroken ride of 382.3km.

"Richard Thoday was our main star, and he was attempting a 24-hour furthest distance, which is a shockingly long distance that I don't even like to think about," explains Penny Farthing Club founder Neil Laughton. "He did an extraordinary job. He was also after a historic record of staying on the bike for the furthest distance without dismounting. He broke that at 382 kilometres, it took him 17 hours on the bike which is extraordinary. He had a break at that point, and then his body wouldn't allow him to get back on the bike, so he couldn't complete the 24 hours."

It was the third such day held by the club, Laughton explained, and its members kicked proceedings off by taking part in a demonstration ride-out through Reading town centre, to pique the interest of locals. It seemed to work, he said.

He talked about some of the unique challenges of penny farthing riding, which he said was exacerbated by the windy and hot conditions on the day.

"The main thing is obviously penny farthings are designed from the 19th century, so it's pretty rudimentary. Generally speaking, you're seven or eight foot up in the air, riding a kind of generally a rather upright riding style. You have a solid rubber tyre, you have no suspension, you have no brakes, no gears. It's one gear, and you know, it's really quite painful sitting on the saddle, let alone riding around in the conditions."

"It was well supported," Laughton said of the event. "During the course of the two days, we had a good few hundred people turn up." Mainstream TV news was also in attendance, he said: "It was very much a success from that perspective, given that we're a minority genre of the cycling world. And we were supporting a charity called Keep Me Breathing, and I think they were very happy as well."

The new Guinness records are currently being ratified, and the club will probably hold another records day in due course. In the meantime, Thoday intends to climb into the saddle for another go at the 24 hour record and Laughton will re-attempt the 100km no-handed. This time around, he explained, he managed 22km, and in the hot and windy conditions, that was more than enough.

"I started blacking out from the pain and dehydration, so I had to stop," Laughton said, which seems like a more than sufficient excuse to us. "I will have another go in due course, but probably in cooler conditions."

As Laughton emphasises, the Penny Farthing Club is very much that – a club. So you're welcome to join and learn how to ride one of its 24 replica machines. Find out more at pennyfarthingclub.com

British Cycling has announced that Professor Pete Bonfield OBE, the vice-chancellor and president of the University of Westminster, will be the organisation’s new chief executive.

He will take over the role in mid-November, replacing Lee Gibbons, who has held the position on an interim basis since July following the resignation of Jon Dutton.

A former national youth champion, Bonfield was part of the Great Britain road cycling squad, and previously coached the British women’s triathlon team for the Athens Olympics in 2004.

His professional career has seen him hold research engineer and senior board roles, advise the UK government, and lead sustainable construction work for the London 2012 Olympics.

“I am delighted to be joining British Cycling at such an exciting time for the sport,” Bonfield said in a press release shared on Monday.

“Cycling has been a constant throughout my life, whether through racing, commuting, coaching or simply enjoying the freedom that a bike provides, and it is a privilege to have the opportunity to lead the national governing body for a sport that gives so much to so many people in diverse ways.”

Bonfield joins British Cycling as the governing body faces declines in membership and grassroots racing participation.

He is the eighth person to act as CEO in the last 10 years, and the fifth to hold the position permanently in that time.

Last March, the governing body launched a four-year strategy aiming to “reinforce Britain’s position as a world-leading cycling nation”. The plan, which Bonfield will now head, pledged to deliver an “unprecedented contribution to society, health, and the economy”, and included the launch of a new social impact programme and charity foundation.

Bonfield will also be tasked with leading British Cycling as the UK prepares to host the Grands Départs of both the men's and women's Tours de France next summer.

Commenting on the new appointment, British Cycling chair Chris Pilling praised Bonfield as an “accomplished and values-driven leader with a strong track record of leading complex organisations, building partnerships and delivering meaningful change”.

“His leadership experience, strategic vision and understanding of the opportunities facing sport and physical activity make him exceptionally well placed to lead British Cycling into its next chapter. We look forward to welcoming him to the organisation in November,” Pilling added.

British Cycling's last permanent CEO, Jon Dutton, held the position for three years before leaving last month to become the CEO of the British Olympic Association.

It’s almost impossible to watch a bike race without caring about the result. Try it sometime. I challenge you to sit through the last 20 kilometres of any race without experiencing an emotional response to how well or badly at least one or two of the bike-monkeys do.

You can try to tell yourself that the most important thing is that it’s a good race, that the fortunes of the individual riders are no concern of yours, and that what matters is that cycling is the winner. But ultimately, you care. There is a deep-seated need to pick a side.

So the question is, who do you support and why? There is a variety of algorithms available to help you choose. The most obvious one is simple – are any of the riders your son/daughter/brother/sister? If so, you’ll probably be on their side. (Among acing siblings, there is a Yates/Bäckstedt caveat if more than of one you is in the same race. If you’re the parent of racing siblings, I’m sorry, but you have to pick a favourite.)

Next, are you a friend of someone who’s racing? For the purpose of this, we’re defining “friend” as, “Can you tell me a fact about them that isn’t available on the internet?” If the rider is famous enough and the fact is embarrassing enough to publish in a magazine column, you can be my friend too.

In many ways a friend is the perfect relationship – you know about their career, you care about their success. But you’d probably also find something to enjoy in their failure. Especially if it occurs in a manner offering opportunities for ongoing mockery. When a friend of mine arrived alone on the finishing straight of a Giro d’Italia stage with only a stray three-legged dog running in circles between him and victory, I have to admit that a tiny little bit of me hoped he’d crash over the dog.

Next down the list come riders you’ve met once and who seemed OK. It might have been at a race, or a bike show, or just a random encounter on the road after you sat on their wheel for two hours. But they didn’t swear at you, spit at you, or take out a restraining order, so they must be a sort of mate.

Then come riders you met once, and who weren’t nice. This can go either way. You can wish them well nonetheless, or you can wish them ill. Whichever you choose, it can give you the personal investment you crave. (Note that as a matter of probability, wishing riders ill is much more likely to produce a result you like, at least up to the point where you’ve met and insulted more than half the field.)

The question of “riders you know” crosses heavily into social media, since it’s easy to think you truly know someone from their Instagram, and thinking you know someone is all you really need. It can offer an opportunity to “get to know” a rider – if their social media manager replies to your comment, they can be confident their employer has a fan for life. That is, in fact, why they do it.

There are riders you develop an affection for based on a single incident – for example, Pascal Eenkhoorn, a mid-ranking WorldTour pro who won himself an unexpected crop of UK fans when he gave his bottle to a youngster riding alongside the break at the Tour of Britain a few years ago. Could he have podiumed on the penultimate stage of last year’s Tour without us? It seems unlikely.

Finally, accept that logic only takes you so far. One of my best friends has spent years supporting Adam Yates while wishing nothing but ill fortune to his twin Simon Yates. He has absolutely no explanation for this.

I entered our workshop the other morning straight into an in-depth discussion between a client and one of our mechanics about the merits of a brand’s new aero wheelset.

“It can save me 20 watts, and it's 20g lighter than last year's, for only £3,000.”

I couldn’t help but think that swapping his ancient saddle bag full of spanners for a multi-tool and getting an aero jersey would probably have the same effect for a fraction of the price.

This type of attempt to buy speed is endemic among cyclists, and brands certainly play up to it. So often, clients come in asking about buying the latest carbon aero bike, while the bike that would probably suit them best sits quietly in the corner, largely ignored.

Cyclists are, generally speaking, terrible at buying bikes.

Now it's not because they are uninformed, far from it. Cyclists are some of the most fervent researchers you'll ever meet, often to their own detriment. They consume reviews, compare specifications, watch endless YouTube videos, and spend evenings disappearing down internet rabbit holes. Anyone who has had the courage to venture into a time trial forum online will understand just how zealous cyclists can be in the search for the next best thing. As someone much more erudite than me once said, ‘the problem is a feast of information but a famine of knowledge’.

The bicycle industry hasn't helped, of course. Like most leisure industries, marketing bikes has become an exercise in selling numbers. Weight, tyre clearance, gear range, aerodynamics, carbon layup, stiffness. Every new product is accompanied by a list of measurable improvements because measurable things are easy to market but largely meaningless in terms of the potential enjoyment of that bike or product. How many riders really understand what difference having a higher-strand Toray carbon layup provides?

Unfortunately, the things that make a bike enjoyable to ride aren't always the things that fit neatly into a comparison table.

Ride quality doesn't have a specification. Confidence doesn't appear on a geometry chart. The feeling you get after four comfortable hours in the saddle is difficult to reduce to a bullet point. Instead, we compare the things we can measure.

Weight is perhaps the best example. Riders will happily spend hundreds of pounds to save a couple of hundred grams, then head out carrying two full water bottles, a mini pump, multitool, snacks and enough emergency equipment to survive a trip round the world. That's not to say weight doesn't matter; weight has an influence, but its importance is often wildly exaggerated outside the world of elite racing.

I've seen countless riders buy aggressive race bikes when what they really wanted was to spend longer riding in comfort. Six months later the sleek aero bike has acquired a slightly higher stem, 50mm of headset spacers and tyres as wide as the frame will allow. They're quietly modifying it into the endurance bike they probably should have bought in the first place.

Geometry rarely gets the attention it deserves because it isn't glamorous. It's easier to get excited about carbon lay-ups or ceramic bearings than stack, reach and wheelbase measurements. Yet geometry has far more influence over how a bike feels than whether the rear derailleur is electronic or mechanical. It's a bit like buying a house based entirely on the kitchen taps whilst ignoring the floor plan.

The irony is that the best buying decisions are often the least exciting. None of us need a bike that costs more than around £1,000 – after that point it becomes an emotional purchase. A bike that fits properly, tyres suited to the roads you actually ride and sensible gearing. None of these features dominate glossy advertising campaigns, but they have an enormous influence on how much you'll enjoy cycling. It’s refreshing to see some brands start to create frames with sensible geometry but with a race bike aesthetic, like the Pinerello X, Pearson Forge and the Factor Monza.

Perhaps the biggest lesson I've learned after years around bikes is this: the specification sells the bike, but the ride keeps it. Long after you've forgotten exactly how many grams your crankset weighs or whether your handlebars are one piece or two, you'll remember if the bike encouraged you to take the long way home.

That's the specification that really matters.

Wahoo is looking to go shoulder to shoulder with market rulers Strava and Garmin with a new, three-tier subscription platform that ranges all the way from basic and free to a holistic training offering with all the bells and whistles.

The free 'Base' option features a few rudimentary features, including route planning and live tracking, but the two paid levels boast much more. Core at £4.99 / $4.99 per month and Pro at £14.99 / $17.99 per month offer training insights that are likely to interest anyone keen to improve their fitness and even get ready to compete, with Core suited to a more self-guided approach and Pro offering a deeper level of advice and insight.

Paying annually either for Core or Pro, offers savings, with Core priced at £49.99 / $49.99 and Pro £149.99 / $179.99.

The key feature of the Pro tier is the inclusion of Wahoo's SYSTM, which allows for a holistic approach to on-bike fitness thanks to the inclusion strength and yoga sessions, as well as mental and recovery protocols. Having grown out of The Sufferfest, SYSTM does of course include a host of riding sessions that tackle bread and butter fitness in the saddle.

With the various iterations of Wahoo's Elemnt among the more popular GPS head units on the market, the brand is clearly keen to expand on what they offer – not unlike Garmin's launch last year of Garmin Connect+, which also offers training insights. Wahoo has added compatibility with Coros devices, though at the moment there is no direct compatibility with Garmin, which remains the market leader in GPS devices.

To a lesser extent, Wahoo is also setting itself up as a rival to Strava, which also offers training insights and fitness plans.

Wahoo CEO Gareth Joyce said: "Today, the Wahoo app transforms complex sports science into simple, actionable insights that help athletes better understand their workouts, track their progress, and make more informed decisions about achieving their training goals.

He added: "By bringing the same proprietary sports science trusted by elite athletes to the palm of every athlete's hand, we're making our connected devices even more intuitive and easier to use. This announcement marks an important step in our journey as we continue building a connected training experience that helps every athlete spend less time interpreting data and more time becoming the athlete they aspire to be.”

I’ve been working in cycling and – by nature of being a woman working in cycling – women’s cycling for around 15 years, and if there’s one sentence I’m sick off, it’s “well, things are improving, it’s just slow.”

“Progress is there, but it’s incremental.”

The same stock response, over and over, to explain why women’s gear always follows several years after the men’s version of the same; why headline races in the men’s calendar have not existed for women; why joining the average club ride still feels like being the rare species attraction in a zoo: "Here, we have the female variant of the cyclist. It has a monthly cycle which occasionally interferes with its performance, at times in life it may carry a child, and it gets really ratty if you send sexist memes in the group WhatsApp chat."

All of this alongside annual marketing campaigns about ‘celebrating women on bikes’ that would create a big noise annually, but ultimately fade into obscurity a week later.

Perhaps it’s those past experiences that made me overlook Canyon’s ‘We Femmes’ campaign this year, with its bold jersey graphics and simple premise: "If you ride, bring a woman who doesn’t." I was becoming so long in the tooth and bored of the narrative that ‘change is coming’, I didn’t buy that a Sex Pistols-inspired pink and yellow splattered jersey would make any difference.

But, I bring good news. The Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift has just concluded its fifth year of racing, and the stats speak for themselves: momentum is gathering. Progress is finally, thank Zwift, not slow.

Strava was the latest to drop its numbers; it found a 60% increase in women taking on their first-ever 100km rides over the course of the race, and a 41% jump in first-ever 50km rides. Overall, there was a 30% uptick in ‘longest ever’ rides uploaded by women. Over in France, there was a 15% increase in rides logged by women, with a 28% distance jump.

Supporting pro women's racing isn't just about the world stage, these numbers show what happens on the podium influences everyday habits.

More women riding means more women buying, which bodes well for those of us who just want purchasing a bike with a handlebar and saddle that’s within the realms of sensibility for the female anatomy to be easy.

Announcing its sponsorship of the white jersey for 2026, Liv reported an incredible stat: 17% of women who watched the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift in 2025 actually went out and bought a bike, while 69% were motivated to ride. If that doesn’t advertise the commercial opportunities available in supporting women’s racing to brands, I don’t know what will.

Headline sponsor Zwift grew its women’s share from 9% before 2022, to 22% as reported in 2025, with director of women’s strategy at the indoor training brand, Kate Veronneau, calling the investment an “absolute, clear, undeniable success”.

For businesses, let’s not forget that women make up roughly 50% of the population, and yet 2022 stats showed UK males were making three times as many cycling trips vs females, with women around 20% of British Cycling and 15% of USA Cycling’s membership. That’s a pretty big currently untapped market with cash to spend – especially given women influence a reported 85% of consumer spending.

Disappointingly, only three of the nine stages of the race were broadcast in full, and yet 23 million people in France alone tuned in, with the race achieving a 32.9% audience share in the host country, up from 31.6% in 2025. Rest of world stats are yet to be released, but race director Marion Rousse told Cycling Weekly that organisers ASO were “giving serious consideration to broadcasting all the stages in full in the future”.

The interest was clearly there. All of a sudden, rather than the crowning race of the women’s calendar being reduced to comparison to the men's event, with headlines around how the female peloton differs from its male counterpart, the focus was on the beef (or lack thereof) between eventual victor Demi Vollering (FDJ United-SUEZ) and Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney (Canyon-SRAM), the latter’s incredible Ventoux QOM and Pauline Ferrand-Prévot’s questionable time trial position.

Whilst our own numbers are yet to be crunched, a simple snoop in Google Analytics shows an uptick of 24% in views on pages with Tour de France Femmes in the title over the course of the race, on Cycling Weekly. Our homepage was bursting with news, because there was so much to deliver. The days of 'we're covering Women's WorldTour racing because we should' are gone – we're well and truly in the era of 'the audience is here for it'.

Before this year’s race began, Canyon’s ‘We Femmes’ felt a little like another piece in the puzzle of more ‘incremental progress’. Viewed in light of this year’s utterly incredible, unmissable, can’t-wait-for-next-year’s race, and the numbers behind its success? Well, I better go grab a friend to ride with. Handy, because since the Tour de France Femmes first appeared on our screens, I've had two daughters; here's to a future where they'll never be the rare species on the group ride.

Bike racing is well known for inspiring fans to get on their bikes, and never was that more apparent than during the recent Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift, according to the latest numbers released by Strava.

Women's cycling enjoyed a significant boost, not just in France but across the world, as riders saddled up and sought to emulate their heroes.

In the race's host nation alone, women logged 15% more rides on the training platform during the week of the race versus the week before, with 28% more distance. But the global stats were the most eye-opening. Across the world, the number of women logging their longest ever ride jumped by 30%, while a full 60% more women logged their first 100km-plus activity. On top of that, 41% logged their first-ever ride 50km or more. Three-quarters of all these rides were solo, too. "Women chasing distance on their own terms," as Strava put it in its press release.

Female cyclists also seemed to be inspired by the race's ascent of Mont Ventoux on stage seven, with a huge increase in attempts to conquer the Giant of Provence by women compared to the previous week – 849% to be exact – helped by the second edition of L'Étape du Tour de France Femmes heading up it, no doubt.

Strava also released statistics from the pro peloton itself, including 994 QoM titles, 84 of which were claimed by eventual winner Demi Vollering alone. The pros also completed a total 133 Everests across the course of the nine stages, or 1.18 million metres of climbing. Average speed across all the stages was 30.2kph (18.76mph) and, Strava revealed, the collective calorie burn of 1.4 million was enough to cover around 12,400 cappuccinos. We'll drink to that.

These are just the latest impressive statistics from a race that has trod new ground across the board, with a record TV audience share in France of 32.9%, and the longest ever parcours at 1,175km (730 miles).

Vollering (SD Worx-Protime) won by 1:18 after seizing the yellow jersey on stage eight to Nice after a thrilling battle between herself, Marlen Reusser (Movistar) and Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney (Canyon-SRAM), and defending it the following day.

While massive Asian and American brands like Giant, Trek and Specialized now completely dominate the bike market, Nottingham-born Raleigh was once the biggest name in the cycling game.

The Raleigh Bicycle Company was launched in 1887, four years before Cycling Weekly first appeared in print, and for riders of a certain age, the instantly recognisable big-R heron-topped logo will forever be tattooed on their heart.

With Raleigh’s future now looking rocky (Accell Group, the Dutch company that owns both Raleigh and Lapierre, began insolvency proceedings last week, was declared bankrupt this week, and at the time of writing no rescue bid has been forthcoming), I’ve realised just how warm my memories of the brand and its bikes are.

Unlike my best buddy Jamie, I never had a Raleigh Grifter, something I spent much of the early 1980s whinging about, and I was forever covetous of my older cousin’s classic Raleigh Chopper. Instead, my first ever bike was a kid’s Raleigh racer, back when I had a haircut straight out of Stranger Things that was never troubled by a bike helmet. I was faster than my mates, but it was less good for wheelies, endos and jumping off planks.

Later, during a period of post-degree peripatetic indecision in the mid 1990s, I spent a season working as a bike courier in London, riding around on my old man's Raleigh Peak, a proper sturdy steel-framed, sans-suspension so-called mountain bike, with a surprisingly decent Shimano groupset. I stuck a set of bar-ends and some slick tyres on it, and rode that bike completely into the ground. Sorry dad.

You don’t have to search far on the internet to find vintage versions of all these classic steeds, some of them very impressively pimped. They might not have been the world's most ergonomically designed bikes, but along with the odd spot of oil they all absolutely oozed style. However, it looks increasingly likely you will no longer be able to buy any new Raleigh bikes for much longer.

"It’s so sad," says Tim Bright, who recently rode around Britain’s coastline on a Chopper. "Raleigh has been around for decades. I recently saw a film about the company, made just after the war – the amount of people they employed was incredible, and to see British craftspeople and engineers working to such a high standard opened my eyes to just how good the bikes were. And of course the iconic Chopper, never to be forgotten and maybe never to be repeated."

But, as Molly Monks, insolvency specialist and business expert at Parker Walsh, says: "Nostalgia does not pay wages, suppliers or interest. A company can be known and loved by millions and still reach a point where it cannot meet its financial obligations.”

So here, with misty eyes, we look back at some of most iconic Raleigh bicycles ever made, in the hope that the heron gets to fly again.

Raleigh Chopper

There is really only one place to start, and that’s with the Raleigh Chopper, a bike that first rolled off the production line in 1969 and went on to feature large in youth culture for more than a decade. Instantly recognisable with its high-rise bars, banana-seat (with spring suspension) and muscle bike profile – apparently inspired by a Harley-Davidson motorbike – the Chopper featured a 16-inch front wheel and 20-inch rear wheel. It also boasted a three-speed Sturmey Archer gear box, which was mounted on the top bar of the frame. Pure class. I still want one.

Raleigh Grifter

Originally released in 1976, and refined in the MK2 model in 1978, the Raleigh Grifter was the bike everyone wanted to own for the next few years. Built with a heavy-duty, thick carbon steel frame, it felt as heavy as a tractor, and had chunky tyres to suit, but Grifters were virtually indestructible. One of the bike's defining innovations was the three-speed Sturmey Archer hub gear system, which was controlled by a handlebar-mounted twist grip that had a horrible habit of shifting the gears down every time you pulled a wheelie, resulting in some serious bumpy contact between saddle and nether regions when the torque suddenly disappeared. As soon as BMXs bounced onto the scene, in the early 1980s, the Grifter fell from favour faster than flares.

Raleigh Burner BMX

This seminal BMX bike was born in 1982 and immediately bunnyhopped into must-have status as films like E.T. and BMX Bandits helped propel the backyard sport into an essential pastime for teenagers across the globe. Available in 15 models, including the top-end Aero Pro with a chrome-finish Japanese-made Tange frame and fork, over 500,000 Burners were bought in the first two years, and the star-studded Raleigh BMX team dominated the sport for ages. This was the bike that launched Nicole Kidman’s career…

Raleigh Vektar

Flush with the success of the Burner, in 1985 Raleigh released the beast that was the Vektar. On its powder-coated steel frame, it had an actual electronic dashboard featuring Tomorrow's World-level technology including a speedometer, odometer, an FM radio (with a big aerial extending out the back of the bike) and sound effects to suit its futuristic features. It also had a price tag that put it well out of the reach of the majority of us. But wow, what a machine.

Raleigh Bomber

Launched in 1981, the versatile Raleigh Bomber was a single-speed steed that sat somewhere between a street cruiser and an off-road explorer – a classic, reasonably affordable do-everything freedom machine for older teenage kids who’d outgrown the chopper but still went everywhere on their bikes. Boasting wide balloon tyres, a low-slung frame and cowhorn bars, it was also the first bicycle made by Raleigh to feature the 26-inch wheels which the mountain-bike revolution would very soon roll in upon. The marketing team would likely go with a different name these days, but this was a deadset bomber of a bike.

Raleigh TI

Between 1972 and 1983, the British-backed Dutch-registered TI–Raleigh team were super dominant in bike racing, with all-conquering riders sat astride frames made with state-of-the-art Reynolds 753 steel alloy tubing. Joop Zoetemelk won the 1980 Tour de France on this beautiful bike, a limited number of replicas of which were built and released in 2020, to mark the 40th anniversary of that victory. Only 250 were made – lucky you if you bagged one.

Raleigh Banana TT Bike

There are vanishingly few numbers of this unique time trial bike left in existence, and none of us ever owned or rode one, but the sight of it will invoke a few memories. Made for the short-lived but unforgettable Raleigh Banana cycling team in the dying days of the 1980s, the dragster profile was achieved via a banana-shaped sloping top tube (made with Reynolds 753 tubing), with a 700c disc wheel at the back and a deep-section 650c at the front.

The owner of iconic British bike company Raleigh and French brand Lapierre, the Accell Group, has been declared bankrupt, according to reports in the Netherlands.

An Amsterdam court declared the Dutch parts of the company bankrupt this week, the NL Times reported, after insolvency proceedings were begun last week.

However, there is hope on the horizon, with Irish-based investment firm, Quanta Capital, publicly expressing an interest in buying the entire group.

Other brands within Accell's stable include Batavus, Sparta, Koga, Haibike, Winora, Ghost, Babboe and XLC.

This week, the bankruptcy trustees wrote: "In addition, there is a complex situation within the European Accell Group, with group companies in different countries that are operationally and financially dependent on one another in certain areas. The trustees understand that the factory in Hungary has shut down and that local insolvency proceedings are being opened in various countries."

Last week, the Accell Group said every "realistic option for the future of the business has been tirelessly explored". It entered a suspension of payments, a form of insolvency, in the Netherlands.

A press release last Wednesday said that there was no "viable solution" for Accell to continue operations in its "current form".

"We have made contact with Accell and its administrators to formalise our interest in purchasing the group. Quanta’s bid will be made up of a number of investors and a global financial institution. We can say no more than that at present," Mel Sutcliffe, CEO of Quanta Capital, told Bike Europe.

"Our main objective will be to put the Group onto a more stable footing as it has endured quite a tumultuous period of trading," he continued. Sutcliffe is as former elite cyclist, who previously operated Raleigh Ireland. A bid could come as early as next week.

There is no news of the immediate future of Nottingham-founded Raleigh, which was once the largest bike company in the world. According to its website, administrators have been appointed.

The notice reads: "Oliver Wright, Joanne Hewitt-Schembri and Shamil Malde of FTI Consulting LLP (“FTI”) were appointed as Joint Administrators (the “Joint Administrators”) of Accell UK & Ireland Ltd ("the Company") on 6 August 2026. The affairs, business and property of the Company are being managed by the Joint Administrators. The Joint Administrators act as agents of the Company and without personal liability."

Separately, Lapierre has filed for judicial reorganisation with the Dijon Commercial Court in France, which could give the brand the ability to split off from the group and seek new investment. The brand currently supplies bikes to WorldTour team Picnic PostNL.

"The observation period will give Cycles Lapierre the necessary time to continue its operations, consolidate its recovery plan, and bring in an investor capable of providing long-term financing for its future," a press release said.

"We are determined not to let this flagship of the French cycling industry disappear," William Perrier, the director general of Cycles Lapierre, said, according to Le Monde. "We will work to regain our independence and autonomy."

After a scorching Tour de France, a few damp days of 14 or 15°C at the Arctic Race of Norway (ARN), from 13 to 16 August, may come as a relief to the pro peloton. But not even Norway can guarantee a post-Tour ice bath any more; temperatures at the 2024 race won by Magnus Cort, averaged 25°C, the hottest on record for Arctic Norway. The 2025 edition, when Tom Pidcock finished second to Corbin Strong, took place after the country’s most severe heatwave on record, in what turned out to be its warmest recorded year, taking the country as a whole.

This July, Rjukan, in Telemark county – considered one of the best ice climbing areas in Northern Europe – and Drammen, southwest of the capital Oslo, peaked at 33°C. A few days later, fire tore through Drammen, destroying a hundred homes. Meanwhile, in the far north, the Svalbard archipelago, Norway’s northernmost territory midway between its northern coast and the North Pole, is heating faster than anywhere else on the planet.

This week 18 teams, along with organisational staff and media, arrive at the Arctic Race for four days of racing at what is being heralded as a groundbreaking race. In 2021 the organisers achieved certification from Norway's Eco-Lighthouse organisation, which helps businesses improve their environmental impact and reduce waste, and it is one of the 80 founding signatories of the UCI Climate Action Charter in 2022.

Central to both schemes is transport, and here, ARN has indeed been groundbreaking. In 2023 the ARN became “the first cycling race to transition to a fully electric fleet,” as cycling’s world governing body, the UCI, recalls in a recent website report, “The Green Breakaway: Arctic Race of Norway, electrifying the far north.”

However, viewed with a modicum of skepticism, ARN’s 130-car Electric Vehicle (EV) fleet reflects Norway’s unique market conditions. Norway incentivised EV adoption in the 1990s and became the world leader in about 2013. By the end of 2025, 96 per cent of new cars purchased in Norway were fully electric, compared with just 23.4 per cent in the UK and 20% in France.

Plus, current race transport sponsor Hyundai sells nothing but fully electric cars there. A glance at the race’s environmental audit shows that, as well as the 130 EVs, the 2025 Arctic Race still needed the services of 92 diesel vans and heavy vehicles, 690 national and international flights, and 18 speedboat trips. All of which highlight the difficulties the UCI is having in making any progress in enforcing the rule that all teams become carbon neutral by 2030.

The portrayal of the Arctic Race of Norway as pioneers in green event management has to contend with a glaring paradox. As Marius Heide, Norwegian Green Party councillor for the north Norwegian town of Harstad – the home of the race’s co-organiser Arctic Sport – wrote in an article for local newspaper iHarstad after last year’s edition: “The electric cars in the Arctic Race may save 10 or 15 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, but they’re promoting Equinor, which exports oil and gas that cause 280 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in other countries every year.”

Equinor, known as Statoil until 2018, is the Norwegian state-owned oil and gas giant. As Statoil, it sponsored the first five ARNs. When Equinor’s current sponsorship deal with ARN expires in 2030, it will have completed 18 years of continuous partnership.

Joined at the hip

Equinor and the Arctic Race of Norway are inseparable, joined, if not at the hip, then in the town of Harstad, population 21,000. Harstad is the hometown of the event organiser Arctic Sport, which held a race around the island of Andørja, just east of Harstad, in the year 2000, grew in ambition, and took plans for the Arctic Race to Paris in April 2011, where ASO (Amaury Sports Organisation), the owners of the Tour de France, gave them a warm reception. Harstad is also where, in 1976, Statoil opened its first office outside its headquarters in Stavanger. As Equinor, it now operates four oilfields in the Norwegian and Barents Seas from the town.

Yet the UCI website report extolling ARN’s green credentials doesn’t mention Equinor. The website of the 2026 Arctic Race of Norway describes its main sponsor without using the word “oil,” preferring to call it “an international energy company committed to value creation in a low-carbon future,” alongside a photograph of an offshore windfarm.

Ninety-nine per cent of the energy Equinor produces comes from fossil fuels. The sports-washing reveals a great deal about the current predicament of professional cycling and its contradictory stance towards its role in the global climate crisis. The fossil fuel sector remains one of the most lucrative in the global economy and Middle Eastern money has flooded into the sport over the last ten years.

Equinor, which sponsors ARN overall, as well as the general classification and best young rider competition, recently announced record profits of $11.5bn (£8.6bn) for the three months to the end of June, compared with $6.54 billion for the same period in 2025. In a retreat that mirrors moves by BP and Shell, Equinor recently announced plans to actually cut its renewable energy activities while increasing oil and gas production.

Exactly how it does the latter is of immediate interest to the north Norway communities that welcome the Arctic Race every year. Harstad stands 250 km north of the Arctic Circle and 1020 km from Oslo, at the north-eastern end of a spectacular 200 km archipelago jutting out into the Norwegian Sea famous for deep fjords, jagged peaks and quiet fishing villages: the Lofoten, Vesterålen, and Senja Islands, known collectively as LoVeSe. Undersea reserves off the LoVeSe Islands are estimated to hold 1.3 billion barrels of oil.

Environmental groups campaign against Arctic oil drilling, partly because of climate change, but also because of the vulnerability of the area. The seas off the LoVeSe Islands are the spawning grounds for the world’s last large, robust cod stock, while the Røst Reef, the world's largest known deep-water coral reef, is just 100 km to the west. The extreme conditions, with 50 foot, ice-covered waves make it almost impossible to clear up Arctic spills.

Environmentalist Lars Haltbrekken, the climate spokesperson for Norway’s Socialist Left Party and the former head of Friends of the Earth (Norway), told Cycling Weekly, “Most of the islands’ inhabitants are against oil drilling there. Around the year 2007, all the municipalities voted against oil drilling in these areas. All the local mayors were against oil drilling. Nothing suggests there has been any change in these attitudes.”

The only political parties in favour of drilling in LoVeSe are the Conservatives and the far right Progress Party. In some polls, they have a majority. If they form a government after the 2029 general election, Halbrekken says, "I think they’ll start planning for oil drilling in these areas.”

If it happens, the history of Equinor’s involvement in the Arctic Race of Norway and community involvement may lose some of its local support.

Ingrained in the community

As much as it is a bike race, the Arctic Race of Norway is a series of community parties; an institution in northern Norway. Harstad has seen national heroes Thor Hushovd and Alexander Kristoff win stages there. The race returned last year to see Corbin Strong take the uphill sprint on stage one, before going on to win the race overall. Not even controversial sponsors like Equinor or Strong’s team, Israel-Premier Tech, could dampen the spectators’ spirits.

Kimi Nie-Nilssen, a 19-year-old Norwegian Green Party youth politician brought up in Harstad, grew up attending community festivals sponsored by Statoil or Equinor, which are held all the time, all over Norway. “Many people feel there is a shortage of family events and things to create a good atmosphere downtown, so, when something finally happens in Harsted, people don’t want to think about genocide or rising sea levels,” Nie-Nilssen told Cycling Weekly.

As Nie-Nilssen says: “When I was in ninth grade, the whole school went to the Equinor offices, and they talked about work opportunities and how they are solving global warming.”

A recent poll has shown that a majority of Norwegians under 24 years old favour leaving oil in the ground because of the climate crisis. Equinor’s sponsorship, not only of the general classification but also of the best young rider jersey, together with a competition for pupils at schools along the race route to design the trophies, looks like part of a longstanding effort to combat disaffection among the young.

Cycling offers an opportunity for major oil companies, which have been forced to rethink their sponsorship strategies in recent years.

For Equinor, 2024 was a particularly difficult year. Before a deluge of climate activism opposing high polluter advertising in sports and culture, Equinor terminated longstanding sponsorship agreements with Norway’s football federation (which dated back to 1993), its ski federation (2009) and its largest cultural festival – the student festival UKA in Trondhjem (2007) – as well as the interactive children's gallery, WonderLab, at the Science Museum in London (2016).

Announcing the end of their agreement, the Science Museum specifically cited Equinor’s failure to lower its carbon emissions enough to align itself with the Paris Climate Agreement goal limiting global warming to 1.5°C.

Professional cycling has no such reticence, it seems, and clings to its current business plan of packaging up public goodwill and selling it to petrostates, oil and gas giants and high-polluting petrochemicals companies. But at least the peloton will be served by electric vehicles.

ASO and the UCI were contacted for comment in relation to this article, and we'll update the piece should the organisations respond.

Riders, suppliers and business partners were reportedly left out of pocket after the collapse of a British women's team.

According to reports by the BBC, the collapse of Hess Cycling, among other things, left an unpaid debt of £50,000 owed to one team supplier.

Last year, Cycling Weekly reported extensively on the end of Hess Cycling, a British Continental women’s team that folded amid financial pressures and the fallout of a fraud investigation into the owner’s business affairs.

It began, though, with the stated objective of becoming Britain's first Women's WorldTour team and elevating the status of the sport. Initially licensed in Luxembourg, before applying for a British Continental race license, the team was envisioned and launched by the Swiss businessman Rolf Hess, who talked a big game.

Hess’s declared five-year plan was to build a budget of €5million. "Our first-year budget is €750,000, with no sponsor at all," he boasted to the BBC at time. "This is entrepreneurship – we do it ourselves. We didn't buy a team – we are building a team."

Last year, it won the East Cleveland Classic through Alice McWilliam and finished third at the Rapha Lincoln Grand Prix with Grace Lister. It also competed in the 2025 Tour of Britain, but will be missing from this year's tour.

Hess' collapse followed a turbulent year for the team with a fraud investigation into its owner’s business and allegations of missed payments to riders.

"There were reasonable money issues from the start where riders were paid late or wouldn't get reimbursements," one rider told the BBC.

"We were lucky if we even saw half a million [as a team]," the cyclist said. "There was even no money at team camps and other stuff they didn't pay for. There were big bills… I know there were other riders still owed money – a lot of it."

According to the BBC, several suppliers were left with substantial unpaid bills, and soon the walls started closing in.

"Unfortunately, [our] sponsor withdrew from the partnership at the beginning of 2025," Hess said in a statement. "Hess Sports Group continued to fund operations, contributing more than £200,000 over the course of summer 2025, while working to enable the team to compete under a financially sustainable model.

"This shortfall in funding had a material impact on our operations, but allowed our athletes to compete while we worked on securing the team's future. Hess Sports Group remains committed to repaying all its creditors."

The anonymous rider added: "The team had a duty to us as riders and they  failed."

The highs and lows of being an elite-level cyclist have been perfectly illustrated over the past 10 days by English track rider Will Tidball, who went from winning gold in the team pursuit at the Commonwealth Games to having a massive splinter removed from his backside after crashing.

The 25-year-old, who has also been a track world champion, had an eventful time in Glasgow, where he was a late super-sub for the race that earned him a gold medal, after England’s Josh Charlton was sick on his teammate's bike in the aftermath of a qualifying round.

His surprise inclusion helped propel the national team to victory in the final against Australia, with a performance that also saw the four-man lineup set a new Commonwealth Games record.

On his penultimate day of racing at the Games, however, Tidball was brought back to Earth with a bang, when he crashed and skidded along the wooden deck of the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome, collecting a 7.6cm splinter in his backside in the process – an injury that required medical attention.

"I just had nowhere to go and then I ended up on the floor and had a three-inch splinter in my backside, that wasn't particularly nice,” Tidball told the BBC.

The Devon-based rider was supposed to be competing the following day, but the shrapnel had other ideas. "I raced the next day but I had to pull out after the splint went into my glute, then suddenly I wasn't on my best form," he explained.

"I had to have surgery with a doctor, who scalpel-ed it out. I had stitches,” he continued. "But the good news is I have got a gold medal and then a massive splinter to put next to it... a little souvenir.”

On Instagram, Tidball wrote last week: "Sports the greatest humbler... From gold on Thursday to getting this removed from my bum tonight. I’ve had better Saturday nights."

Back at home, Tidball will make an appearance in Exmouth at 7pm on Thursday, with members of the public having been invited to join him for a meet-and-ride at the Exeter Aces cycle speedway. Note: this is a BYO tweezers event.

I remember taking my first proper road bike for its first ride. After about 20 minutes I thought, “This is great. I love this. But I really, really need to do something about this saddle.”

To this day, about 20 minutes into any given ride, I still think the same thing. It’s been 30 years.

And it’s discomfiting. As roadies, the skinny saddle is what defines us. Many, many times, in the face of outsiders cackling, “That must feel like sitting on a razor blade,” I have explained, in as boring a manner as I can, that the narrow shape and careful anatomical shaping means that counterintuitively it’s much more comfortable than the big, squashy saddle on a cheap hybrid. I do this with a straight face, while less intellectual parts of me are muttering, “Mate, a razor blade is exactly what it’s like.”

I’ve tried saddle after saddle, and never managed to find one that I truly like. There’s better. There’s worse – all the way down to the one that I removed and threw into a Fenland river in rage, preferring to ride home standing up. But there isn’t really “good”.

There is something wrong with each of them, as if the saddle manufacturers are deliberately withholding perfection:

“We’ve found the perfect shape!”

“Great. All we need to do is add a weird plastic trim under the nose of the saddle.”

“I’ll do that. Shall we make it really sharp, and ensure it sticks into the rider’s thighs?”

“Of course! Why do you even ask? Mamma mia, it’s like you’ve never designed a saddle before!”

A couple of years ago, in desperation, I went for a saddle pressure-mapping session with a bike fitter. The fitter put a pad over my saddle that, when I sat on it, showed how my weight was distributed – red for high-pressure areas (the uncomfortable bits), then orange and yellow, then green, and blue for lower.

It’s oddly intimate. No one has ever paid so much attention to that area, or blown it up to such size on a monitor. And never has the phrase, “Oooh. That’s strange,” filled me with such anxiety.

The image looked like a thermal imaging camera shot of a burning petrol station. We swapped saddles, again and again. We never achieved the soothing blues and greens of proper comfort. We did, at last, get to something that looked more like a crooked financier burning evidence while eating curry under a patio heater, but never any better.

Apparently what I needed was a very flat saddle without a hole in the middle. It seems strange that that should have been so difficult to find. Inevitably, the best saddle we came across has been discontinued.

Of course, I don’t know what it feels like for anyone else. Perhaps after 100 miles, every rider is equally blighted by pressure points and abrasion. It could well be that I’m just soft figuratively rather than literally, and everyone else has grown numb from the waist down.

Certainly there is some evidence in that direction. It came from my friend Bernard. He was openly contemptuous of my saddle-mapping exercise.

“You know when you get a really big saddle sore,” he said. “Well, that doesn’t stop me. Even if it feels like I’ve grown another testicle, I keep riding because that’s what bike riders do. When it boils down to it, no one should ever stop doing what they love just because their backside hurts.”

I told him he should put that on a T-shirt.

“In the grand scheme of things, it's only three and a half hours…so yeah, it was actually all right.”

Casper von Folsach, who this week rode his road bike into the record books, with what is believed to be the fastest 100-mile effort ever recorded on a non-time trial bike, isn’t one to blow his own trumpet too loudly. So we’ll have to do it for him.

Von Folsach. a 33-year-old road and track cyclist, rode for UCI Continental teams including ColoQuick and Giant–Castelli during his professional career. He also competed at the 2012 Olympics for Denmark in the men's team pursuit, and is now a performance coach for Uno-X Mobility.

Now, he rides for WattShop CC. And, fittingly, Von Folsach can still crank out the watts when he wants to. On Sunday, riding on the CTT's R100/9 course in Monmouthshire, he did just that, smashing a 100-mile ride in an extraordinary time of 3:27:08.

So, what is it really like to maintain maximum effort for ‘only’ three and a half hours?

“Even for the hour record, you shouldn't go out at a pace that feels maximal, and that's definitely true for three and a half hours," he explains. "It should feel quite manageable. I deliberately wanted to try and ramp it up, rather than like dive off a cliff. It's just a much nicer way to do it.”

“It slowly starts to creep up on you, like after an hour and a half,” Von Folsach admitted. “Then you're like, ‘Oh, it actually isn't as easy doing 300 watts as it was in the beginning’. With around half an hour to go, I could start to feel that if I did a sprint now, I would cramp up… [it felt] like my muscles are telling me that what I'm doing right now is not that that's not something they're used to.”

Even at the end of his record-setting century, the Dane feels like he could have continued powering on.

"[From] the finish you've got a little 11-kilometre bonus warm down to go back to the HQ, just because it's like on a on a big dual carriageway. I just I don't like going very slow, so I still just kept pressing on, but in a much more relaxed position. I think if I had to, I could still have another 15 minutes at the same power. It's more the position – to hold that is really tough for that long. Actually, more so than the power band.”

The mental challenge is almost as tough as the physical strain, and staying focussed for that length of time can’t be easy. Where does he go to in his head while he’s riding along a dual carriageway, we want to know.

“You get into a bit of a flow state,” says Von Folsach. “It's not like you're thinking 'oh I need to also remember to empty the dishwasher, hang up washing’. I just focus on the effort, keeping tabs on all these little things like how am I feeling? What's my power? What's my speed? What's my position? Remembering to drink and eat… And seeing what the others are doing.”

While there is a well-established record for riding 100 mile distance on a TT bike, a category for road bikes doesn’t actually exist yet, so Von Folsach didn’t have anything precise to aim for.

"The closest [thing] to a target was the Spindata prediction. That that usually gives you a pretty good idea on where you land, and something to aim for. I think I was like nine seconds off that in the end. Like I was nine seconds slower, and over such a long distance, you can pretty much always find nine seconds.”

"Pending CTT introduction of road-bike specific competition records, this stands as the fastest known time for the distance" WattShop CC wrote on their social media pages this week.

In the absence of official records, verifying this comes down to tapping into people’s knowledge about what other riders have done. From what can be gleaned, it appears the standing fastest known time was set back in 1983, by Ian Cammish, who rode 100 miles in 3 hours 31 minutes on a semi-standard road bike – an astonishing time, given the advancement of bikes and clothing in the last four decades.

After Von Folsach’s ride, it’s possible official recognition of the category will follow, and interest could grow, something the Dane would welcome, even if it meant losing his record to another rider.

“It's more a case of wanting to see the sport grow, or at least not decline,” he says. “It's no secret that it's been struggling with numbers, but the road category seems to have stopped the bleeding somewhat. Maybe you could you could hope for a little bit of an uptake in participation from riders finding the road bike category a bit more accessible and not having to buy a dedicated TT bike.

“So yeah, I definitely wouldn't mind losing the record to someone. It might give motivation to get it back, if that was to happen.”

For now, Von Folsach is looking forward to the National 12-hour TT Championships next weekend. “I think the longest ride I've ever done is around 10 hours,” he says. “And, actually, I don't know if there's a road bike record for 12 hours…maybe I’ll try and figure out what that is and then we'll see how far I get.”

Bond Almand might be young, but he is no rookie when it comes to big-distance cycling. On 15 November 2024, when he was a 20-year-old student, he finished a 14,000-mile solo, unsupported bikepacking expedition from the North coast of Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in the very far south of Argentina, setting a new world record for riding the Pan-American Route in 75 days. In September the following year, he bagged another world record, for the fastest North–South cycle crossing of the United States.

Currently he is cycling between 170 and 200 miles a day as he attempts to ride between the 30 stadiums of the teams that populate the USA’s National Football League (NFL) before the first game of the 2026–27 season kicks off. When Cycling Weekly first caught up with Almand, by phone on his approach to Dallas, he was enduring a horrendous heatwave.

“The temperature is around 114°F [45°C],” he said. “I’m sweating out more liquid than I can possibly take on by drinking. Every day I have to sit down and just rehydrate.

I’m buying a lot of ice, and shoving it anywhere it can fit. Sometimes I walk into liquor stores and hang out in the walk-in beer fridge. Unfortunately, they usually move me along pretty quickly.”

During his mission, Almand will ride just over 11,112 miles, and it hasn’t been easy to plot a scenic or particularly safe route. “It’s hard cycling where I am now, around Dallas,” he told me. “There is just no cycling infrastructure at all. In the Gulf of Mexico there are tons of swamps and lots of highways. It can get a bit dangerous.

“And I’ve had seven punctures so far, mostly from riding on the shoulder of the highway. Before this trip, I cycled over 10,000 miles without a single puncture. I started off using tubeless, but 30 miles in I tore a tyre. I had to make an early unscheduled stop at a bike shop and I’ve been on tubes since.”

Different ball game

As with his earlier continent-crossing expeditions, Almand is cycling most of the route on his own. But the 22-year-old does have a companion of sorts: a football, which he is taking to all the stadiums.

“A lot of people ask me about the football,” he says. “You don’t often see someone biking around with a football. I had a custom-holder made from carbon. It sits behind my saddle, like a bikepacking bag. I think it’s a one off, completely unique. But people seem more interested in the football than the fact I’m cycling to all the stadiums.

He is riding a Trek SLR road bike. “It’s basically the same bike the WorldTour guys ride,” says Almand. “Except it’s got a custom paint job – purple. It feels like a shame to put bikepacking bags on it.

“I don’t carry too much, though. Extreme won’t let me camp, for liability reasons. I have one bag with gear beneath the aero bars. It weights between 5 and 8 pounds [2.25–3.5kg]. I’m carrying a basic change of clothes, some tools and that’s it.”

His current mission seems to be a very different kind of expedition to his previous endeavours, and I ask how it came about. “I was approached by Extreme Networks,” Almand explains. “They had the idea of biking a football between all the stadiums. I was supposed to be riding the Transcontinental Race, but I thought to myself ‘the Transcontinental will still be there next year, this opportunity might not be.’

He is doing the ride to raise money and awareness for GENYOUth, an organisation that promotes sporting activities and healthy diets and lifestyles for children across America.

Halftime

At the time of writing, Almand is now fast approaching the halfway mark, with almost 5,300 miles on the clock, and he is enjoying somewhat more comfortable conditions on the East Coast. “I’m riding in much cooler temperatures,” he tells me. “The roads are way more enjoyable too.”

There are tough times ahead, though, as he needs to traverse the country from east to west and cross the Rocky Mountains before the end is in sight. He’s been on his own so far, but will have some support when he gets to the deserts in Utah, Arizona and Nevada.

“Sometimes you can go for 100 to 110 miles with no access to water out there,” he explains. “My girlfriend will be with me for that part, for support, morale and to help me get water.”

The 2026 NFL season is due to kick-off with the reigning Super Bowl champions, the Seattle Seahawks, playing the New England Patriots at Lumen Field in Washington on Wednesday 9 September.

Almand was born in Seattle, and supports the Seahawks, so this has a lovely symmetry to it. “It’s going to be very cool to finish there,” he tells me. He’s hoping to get the honour of kicking the ball on the field, but he sounds a bit concerned about the state of it.

“The football is filthy,” he admits. “All the dirt gets thrown up against it from the wheels, and on one side it has noticeable discolouration from the sun. It’s been bleached already.”

He sounds quite concerned about it, but refutes any suggestion that he might have started treating it like a companion. “So, you haven’t given it a name yet, or drawn a face on it?”

“Er… Noooo,” he laughs, sounding somewhat bemused.

“And you’re not talking to it yet, à la Tom Hanks and Wilson in The Castaway?”

Apparently not. Or maybe he just doesn’t know what the hell I’m talking about, since I’m referencing a film that was released four years before he was born.

You can track the young adventurer’s progress via the expedition website.

A few years ago I was competing in a 24-hour ultra-endurance event. Daylight had vanished and the road before me was lit solely by the light mounted to my helmet. Beside me, just three metres to my left, a barn owl tracked the very same beam. It flew with me for minutes and I felt privileged to play a small part in its evening hunt.

This symbiotic encounter underlined something I already knew: the bicycle gives you the best seat in the house for wildlife viewing.

Yesterday, though, up close and personal took on a whole new meaning.

It was late afternoon, the temperature had dipped and the hills were waiting. Although Southeast England isn’t bursting at the seams with premium-grade gravel surfaces, there’s enough bridleways and green lanes to piece together a half-decent parcours. I specced three good off-road ascents of around five minutes in length, the goal being V02-max style efforts.

But the scratch hadn’t quite been itched, so I added 15 off-the-cuff minutes of threshold to conclude the session. Winding up some heavy-duty wattage I settled into the effort, happy to be riding fast, feeling strong, tyres skipping over loose green lane grit.

Then beside me a dramatic melee in the foliage, followed by a bright russet explosion of fur and limbs and antlers that burst out onto the trail. A huge roe buck had jumped into the path less than metre from my front wheel.

Roe deer are medium-sized deer, at around 60 to 75 centimeters high to the shoulder. They’re ‘abundant’ in the UK, according to the British Deer Society, and weigh 10-25 kilograms; the males (bucks) sport antlers (bad news for me).

For a split-second our eyes met. I saw panic and fear. He saw resignation. This was going to hurt. I was riding at over 20 miles per hour – too fast for this impromptu meet and greet to conclude without at least one of us leaving the scene in a lot of discomfort.

I slammed on the brakes, clipped his rump with my right leg, hit the deck and unceremoniously scattered myself along a further five metres of the trail. The roe buck disappeared, thankfully seemingly unscathed.

I lay on the floor in a state of complete shock, my right side starting to sting as I looked down to see a shredded pair of cycling shorts soaked through with blood. My jersey had suffered the same fate and my helmet had been reduced to a heavily-crumpled keepsake.

Waking up this morning, my body ached. The bike escaped with little more than a scuffed bar end. I'll need a new helmet, a new pair of shorts, a new jersey and probably a few weeks for the bruising to subside.

But what of the wider lesson? I love the outdoors, and I want to ride in a way that respects its inhabitants; I also don't like hitting the deck. I expect most of us feel the same. How can future encounters such as this be avoided?

According to the British Deer Association’s technical advisor – and author of a catalogue of deer-based literature – Charles Smith-Jones, the time of year (early August) likely played a strong role in my ‘oh deer’ moment.

“Roe bucks are particularly active at this time of the year,” Smith-Jones explains. “It’s their rutting season so it’s common to see the bigger males move quickly to survey their territories.”

“Fallow and red deer usually have their rut in the early autumn, and they can often be much bigger than roe,” he continues.

I’d always considered off-road the ‘safer’ landscape over the road, where cars certainly seem to rule the roost. However, the encounter has seen me reevaluate how comfortable I am letting excitement take over my senses in the pursuit of power numbers.

“On the bike it’s difficult but you have to learn to be aware of your surroundings, watch out for erratic movements in foliage,” advises Smith-Jones. “If you’re in a car we always advise that you ‘never veer for a deer’ as this can often have more significant consequences than hitting the animal

“The highest periods of risk, when the deer are most active and likely to cross your path, are from sunset to midnight and the hours shortly before and after sunrise. And remember, if you’ve seen one, there’s likely more about.”

I will continue to ride hard on gravel, but high-intensity efforts will exclusively take place in open expanses, where wandering wildlife can be preempted. And the next time I’m weaving through a leafy countryside corridor, I'll be looking as much into the undergrowth as I will at the trail ahead.

Isaac del Toro has committed to riding for UAE Team Emirates-XRG for the next five years, signing what’s believed to be one of the biggest deals in bike racing.

The 22-year-old had previously agreed to stay with his current team until 2029, but after the Mexican’s mature performances this season, UAE Team Emirates-XRG moved swiftly to agree terms and lock the prodigiously talented rider in for a further two years.

Already this year, Del Toro has tasted victory at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and enjoyed a brilliant run at the Tour de France, where he stood on the podium having finished third in GC, won a stage and took home the white jersey awarded to the best young rider. These performances backed up his stunning achievements in the 2025 Giro d’Italia, where he won stages, wore pink and finished as runner-up.

The agreement means Del Toro has a deal that extends beyond that of his teammate and mentor Tadej Pogačar, whose current contract will see him stay with the most dominant WorldTour squad on the circuit until 2030.

It also locks him in for longer period of time than UAE Team Emirates-XRG’s two other young talents, Pablo Torres (20) and Jan Christen (22), who have both committed to the team until 2030. Whether it's enough to quell speculation about UAE's rumoured interest in Decathlon CMA CGM's 19-year-old rider Paul Seixas remains to be seen.

Although he won’t be taking part in the upcoming Vuelta a España, Del Toro has shone this season as he settled comfortably into his role as Pogačar’s lieutenant and wingman, with the Slovenian champion consistently showering his potential heir apparent with support and praise.

"This team feels like home," Del Toro wrote on the UAE Team Emirates-XRG website. "We share the same ambition, the same passion for racing and the same desire to keep getting better. Signing long-term gives me a lot of confidence because I know I’m in the right place for my future.

"We’ve already achieved some amazing victories together, but I honestly believe the best is still to come. I’m excited to keep growing with this team and fighting for the biggest races in the world."

"I’m very happy to continue this journey with UAE Team Emirates-XRG. From the moment I joined the team, everybody has believed in me and given me the best environment to develop as both a rider and a person.

"Every season I’ve learned something new from my teammates and the people working around me, and I feel that I’m improving all the time."

The owners of iconic British bike brand Raleigh and others including Lapierre, the Accell Group, has begun insolvency proceedings, it was announced on Wednesday.

The Dutch company, which bought Raleigh for €100 million in 2012, said that every "realistic option for the future of the business has been tirelessly explored". It entered a suspension of payments, a form of insolvency, in the Netherlands.

Insolvency means a company is unable to meet its debt obligations. The company can restructure or seek a buyer before entering administration.

The news follows a series of difficult years for the Accell Group, which included job cuts in 2024, and losses for Raleigh reported last year. Accell also owns Haibike, Winora, Ghost, Batavus, Koga, Sparta, Babboe and Carqon.

Accell Group was bought by US private equity firm KKR for €1.56 billion (£1.31 billion) in 2022.

In February this year, following a restructuring, Accell reached an agreement with its shareholders and lenders which saw ownership of the company transferred to its lenders. "This was not intended to be a long-term ownership structure," the company said.

However, a press release on Wednesday said that there was no "viable solution" for Accell to continue operations in its "current form".

Therefore, the company has initiated local insolvency proceedings of the group's subsidiaries.

"This is a deeply sad and frustrating situation given all the hard work and everything we have achieved, with the support of shareholders and lenders, to restructure Accell’s operations and finances," Accell's CEO, Jonas Nilsson, said in a press release. "It is an especially difficult moment for our employees, creditors, customers, suppliers, and partners.

"Every realistic option for the future of the business has been tirelessly explored, and none have resulted in a solution to continue the Group in its current form. Our immediate focus is to support an orderly process, provide clarity wherever possible, and work with the relevant court-appointed administrators to preserve viable activities and employment where circumstances allow."

Raleigh was founded in Nottingham in 1885, and was once the largest bike manufacturing company in the world; the brand is famous for design classics including the Raleigh Chopper. In the 1970s and 1980s, it sponsored the TI-Raleigh squad, which won the Tour de France in 1980 through Joop Zoetemlek.

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.

This Thanet Silverlight was delivered to P.S. Wells of Crawley on 9 December 1950, so perhaps Santa visited early that year. Indeed, the weather was suitably Arctic, with records showing it was the coldest December since 1890, with widespread heavy snow and persistent ice.

Holed up in these conditions, it’s unlikely that ‘P.S.’ would have cycled the popular 22-mile route to Brighton pier until the following spring, but I bet that, if he or she finally made the trip, they would have worn a permanent grin. It was a very desirable bike.

“The Silverlight was a ‘clubman's’ bike,” explains current owner Richard Hoddinott of vintage specialists Velo Pages. “I guess you could have raced on one, but it’s not really designed for it. Instead, I can imagine slinging a saddlebag on and heading out for a nice long run, you know, a Sunday jaunt.”

The Silverlight’s frame design is famously radical. Inspired by the lightweight airframes of WWII-era aircraft, founder Les Cassel strived to improve on the traditional diamond-shaped frame by optimising its bracing. He adopted Hellenic seatstays and, most noticeably, a suspended bottom bracket. The BB shell is cradled by elongated chainstays, as well as the seat and down tubes that converge at a prominent point.

These 'improvements' were made in conjunction with the use of narrow-gauge Accles & Pollock Kromo chrome molybdenum tubing. The primary tubes are beautifully slim, a design choice enabled by one of chrome molybdenum's key benefits: its tubes are low-temperature silver brazed, a process that increases their strength. Despite this, on later bikes, the BB area was reinforced with additional lugs, which points to some early failures.

Despite Cassel’s innovations, the Silverlight was only made in small numbers between 1945 and 1958. Reviewed in this very magazine in 1948, it was priced at £46 12s 6d, which is only about £1,500 in today’s money – premium bikes were clearly much cheaper then!

Last weekend, 82-year-old Bob Montgomery was celebrating the successful conclusion of his latest challenge: a 5,290-kilometre road-cycling expedition right across Australia, accompanied by his 18-year-old grandson Tom Malcolm.

The intrepid pair had just spent 41 days pedalling through some of the harshest conditions on the planet, averaging 160km a day while riding from Broome on the northwest coast of Western Australia, to Bowral in New South Wales, raising money for a charity that provides assistance to people living with motor neurone disease, a condition suffered by one of Montgomery's cousins.

Then, earlier this week, the family shared the sad news that their beloved Papa had passed away, explaining on social media that he had died unexpectedly the day after finishing the ride.

“Fittingly, and now poignantly, the ride was named One Last Ride,” said the post. “At 82 years of age, Bob was still passionately sharing his message only hours before his passing.”

This latest journey across Australia was Montgomery’s sixth long-distance charity bike ride across large sections of the country, and his fifth in support of MND NSW, raising money and awareness for "a cause that was deeply personal to him,” as the family explained. During this last ride alone, Montgomery raised AU$104,965 in donations, and the fundraising page remains open for those who would like to contribute.

Previously adventures included a 3,000km ride from the Three Sisters in Katoomba to Port Douglas in Tropical Far North Queensland, a 3,900km cycle from Perth to the Blue Mountains near Sydney, a 4,200km epic from Darwin to Perth and another 2,900km pedal-powered journey from Darwin to Port Douglas. He had also done an earlier 1121km ride with grandson Tom, then aged just 12, cycling from Sydney to Melbourne in 2019, rising $30,000 for a charity that supports people with Huntington’s Disease.

While deeply saddened by their loss, the family would like Montgomery to be remembered for his extraordinary achievements. “Papa was an absolute legend and his story was definitely one of a kind,” his granddaughter Camille told us. “He loved everything cycling, and nutrition,” she continued, explaining how he would collect copies of Cycling Weekly. “[He] always loved showing them us all.”

A lifelong sportsman and cyclist, Montgomery was riding a Trek road bike during his challenge. "For those who are thinking about the bike, it’s not electric," he wrote on his website just before setting off. "It will be all pedal power.”

"My wife Jenny named the ride, ‘ONE LAST RIDE’, so I am taking the hint and calling it my last distance ride for charity,” he continued. “That makes it even more important that I reach my target to raise $500,000 in donations or sponsorship for research into Motor Neurone Disease.

“I will be riding for all of those people affected by this disease, THOSE WHO NO LONGER CAN. I have seen family and friends suffer. It’s heart breaking. I can’t do anything medically to help people suffering with MND, but I can help by raising much needed money for research and support sufferers of this disease."

MND NSW shared a tribute describing Montgomery as a “cherished friend and tireless supporter of MND NSW”, and saying the charity was “deeply saddened” by his sudden passing. “For many years, Bob dedicated himself to raising vital funds and awareness for people living with motor neurone disease,” the group’s CEO, Liam O’Meara, said in a statement.

Bob Montgomery, 5 January 1944 – 3 August 2026

“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.

Former Giro d'Italia stage winner Danilo Napolitano has been hit with a 20-year ban after being found guilty of anti-doping violations at Salus Ciclista Seregno, the junior team where he was a director. It was regarded as one of Italy's elite junior outfits.

The president of the club, Marco Moretto, was banned for eight years.

Reports have linked Napolitano to the UAE L'Imad Women's WorldTour team, where he was working at the service course as a warehouseman and staff assistant until recently, according to a report by road.cc. The team, which goes into next week's Tour de France Femmes with one of the strongest squads, has denied all knowledge of Napolitano's doping links.

Both Napolitano and Moretto had been provisionally suspended earlier this year, with the official verdicts now delivered.

Napolitano, who is now 45, was a professional from 2004 to 2017, riding for teams including Katusha and Lampre – the Italian team that would ultimately become UAE Team Emirates in 2017. He retired after four seasons at Wanty-Gobert. He rode six Grand Tours, and won a bunch sprint in the 2007 Giro d'Italia ahead of Robbie McEwen and Alessandro Petacchi. He also won three editions of the Coppa Bernocchi one-day race.

He was charged with violating articles 2.6 and 2.8 of the World Anti-Doping Authority (WADA) code. The first of these relates to possession of prohibited substances or use of prohibited methods; the second the administration or attempted administration. Moretto was charged with articles relating to complicity and burden of proof.

Usually these charges would result in a maximum four-year ban, but because of Salus Ciclista Seregno's youth status, this was increased. The bans were handed down by Italy's anti-doping authority, NADO Italia and mean that Napolitano will not be able to have any involvement with cycle sport until 7 April, 2046.

People of a certain age – myself included – are always going to have a place in their heart for the Raleigh Chopper, but no matter how much you might love these iconic 70s bikes, they were never made for long-distance cycling. Pulling wheelies and jumping off planks – yes, bring it on, and stick a card in the spokes while you’re at it, for Evel Knievel sound effects. But expeditions…no.

However, no one, it seems, told Tim Bright about this. As Cycling Weekly previously reported, in April this year Bright, who has chronic myeloid leukaemia, set off on a mission: to ride a Raleigh Chopper around the coastline of Britain, raising money for cancer charities.

When I spoke to him in May, Bright had ridden from Norfolk to Wales, via the lovely but horrendously hilly South West counties of Dorset, Devon, Cornwall and Somerset. He’d already had two frame failures, and despite a natural optimism to suit his name, in all honesty, I rather wondered whether he’d really make it all the way. I mean a Raleigh Chopper… right the way around the country. It’s nuts.

Well, shame on me, because tomorrow Bright will roll into Cromer in Norfolk to be met by the mayor and a town crier, and hopefully a load of well-wishers, because he’s only gone and done it, and he deserves a big fanfare.

“It’s been the most mind-blowing experience of my entire life,” Bright tells me as he nears the end of his epic ride. “I did hit a bit of a wall in Wales,” he admits. “I just felt so ill with the chemo, and I wasn’t sure the bike was going to make it.”

But he banished the ‘Doom Monster’, as he calls the voice that whispers negative thoughts into his mind, and just kept going. “The frame has snapped in eight different places in total,” he reveals. “But people have fixed it for free every time, the support has just been amazing. And every time it’s fixed, the weld is stronger than the metal around it.”

Bright too, seems to bounce back from severe adversity with remarkable resilience. “Doing this ride has changed how I live with my leukaemia, he tells me. “It’s changed not only my physical but my mental condition as well.”

He was hospitalised with gastroenteritis in Dumfries, and had to take a week off to build his strength back. But then he was back on the road, in that unbelievably uncomfortable looking riding position.

“It’s actually sorted my back right out,” he tells me, ever ready with a positive take. “I’ve always suffered from a bad back, but now it seems to be fine.”

Bright did have to cut out the Highlands section of his planned route, after being told that more frame breaks were inevitable and that he wouldn’t be able to get it fixed in the far north, so he re-routed along the Forth and Clyde Canal.

However, as of 10am tomorrow, he will have ridden 2003 miles on a Raleigh Chopper. Which is extraordinary – and may even constitute the furthest distance ever cycled on a Chopper. And he has brought in over £11,000 for charity through his fund-raising page Giving Cancer the Chop...per, which remains open.

If you’re near Cromer tomorrow, go and see Bright in The Shoreline café/bar (which is donating £1 for every coffee sold while he is there to the cause) and give him a slap on the back – but make it a gentle one… he had to ride around the whole country on a kids’ bike to sort that out.

While David Duffield may have clowned around, intentionally or not, during his 40-year career as a broadcast commentator, his many record-breaking achievements as a cyclist in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s deserve to be taken more seriously.

True to form, Duffer’s weapon of choice was that most eccentric of cycles, the trike. Hurtling across fast-changing landscapes on his sturdy Higgins three-wheeler, Duffers successfully laid claim to multiple long-distance records, including a 1959 50-mile time of one hour, 57 minutes, and 4 seconds, a 1971 London to Cardiff time of 7 hours, 20 minutes, and 38 seconds and a 1960 End-to-End time of 2 days, 10 hours, 58 minutes and 29 seconds. All on a trike weighing 16.1kg/35.5lbs.

“It’s a hell of a machine, a real beast,” says current owner Richard Hoddinott of vintage specialists Velo Pages. “He raced for 17 years on this trike, from 1955 to 1971, achieving 11 RRA records on it, which is staggering.”

Numbered 9230, this mid-fifties Higgins is predominantly built from oversized Reynolds 531 tubing. Duffield was a tall lad, well over 6ft, which explains the immense 26-inch (centre to seat tube top) frame size. Gearing is courtesy of a five-speed 14-23t block at the rear, and 49/45t chainrings at the front.

Both mechs are branded ‘Benelux’, from the once popular Cyclo Gear Company of Birmingham, with the front operated via a bar-end shifter. The Williams cranks and Constrictor Cobra pedals are steel, no doubt for strength, because Duffield knew how to put the hammer down.

Twin-front brakes are commonplace on trikes because there’s no rear brake, and the risk of going OTB is negligible. However, twin light mounts, one on each fork blade, are unusual – clearly specified by a man destined to ride epic distances through many a dark night.

When watching bike racing on television, getting dropped looks so straightforward. That moment when a rider loses contact with the back wheel in front of them, and a gap starts to open, then grows, then finally becomes an irretrievable gulf. Depending on who it happens to, either they vanish and are never seen again, or the coverage will linger on them cruelly. Whichever, the moment of fracture is clearly visible. The crisis in the mind of the rider, however, is not.

I’ve been dropped many times on several continents. It’s never simple. When a gap opens, you know you need to close it immediately because every metre it grows means an exponential increase in the effort needed to close it.

So, despite the fact you’re at your limit already, you get out of the saddle and sprint. But the wheel in front gets no closer. You try to give even more – although already you know there is no more.

You hope and pray – maybe the riders ahead will hesitate? But a terrible truth becomes apparent. You will not close the gap. In everyone else’s reality, it’s just a few seconds. But it’s whole minutes if it’s you, whether you’re slipping out of the front group in a World Tour race or trying to reel in a frisky club run.

One question I always think about in these bleak moments is, what exactly is going wrong? Why can’t I close the gap? What’s stopping me?

There are a number of theories. The first is that it is just physiology. You just can’t push any harder because something biochemical is stopping you – lactate is the traditional enemy, and while it’s almost certainly not that, maybe it’s something like it. You’ve smashed the glass for your “only in emergencies” energy supply, drained it, and it’s not enough. Your legs simply stop obeying commands.

The next theory is that there’s a circuit-breaker of some sort in your central nervous system. It decides that you’ve had enough, that the end of what you can safely attempt has arrived. It’s not a conscious thought – it’s like your heart beating, it just happens, because it has to.

These are both good theories. I like them both. In the white-heat of failure I certainly like both of them more than I like theory three. Theory three is, put simply, that you just decide you’ve had enough. You are experiencing as much discomfort as you’re prepared to live with, and you quit.

I can deny it as hard as I like, but this is what it feels like to me. It boils down to whether the key moment is a realisation of bleak reality, or a conscious decision about what you’re going to do. And I think it’s a decision.

It’s a decision that comes very hard on the heels of the first time the voice inside your head says, “My goodness. This is hard. And gosh it’s uncomfortable. You know what would make this stop? That’s right… you can make it go away… I mean, how much is it really worth to you to hang on?”

More than once, I’ve made the decision, then changed my mind and tried to chase, and failed again. Sometimes I’ve persuaded myself that if I keep plugging away at my own pace, they’ll have to slow down and gradually I’ll reel them in again like the diesel I am. This has been known to work, but all it does is give me the opportunity to get dropped on the next hill instead.

Most often I’m just left alone with my regrets and the conviction that there was more in there if only I’d had the bravery to dig for it. I don’t think I’ve ever once felt like I had given all there was. It greatly enhances the feeling of failure.

It looks simple. It isn’t.

Great Inventions of Cycling - 1945

The signpost sprint is exactly what it sounds like – a sprint for a signpost. Normally a feature of an informal club run or reliability trial, they started to become an increasing feature of UK group rides after World War Two, as British riders discovered there were things in the world other than riding time trials and drinking tea.

The signpost might be a village name sign, a speed limit sign, a “café 500 metres” sign or essentially anything sticking out of a verge. Every group will have their own key sprints – it’s never something as simple as every village. Some are deeply historic – there’s a chaingang in Yorkshire that’s been sprinting for the same sign on the outskirts of Leeds since the 1950s.

If you’ve never ridden with a particular group before, rest assured that you won’t crack the algorithm for what’s a sprint and what’s not first, second or third time out. You will begin to suspect that they select what’s a sprint and what’s not based on whether you’re positioned to get to it first. And that is probably exactly what they’re doing.

Remember if you go for a sprint that, while considerable bragging rights attach to “winning”, you must remain casual about it. If you absolutely have to put your arms in the air, make sure you do so safely, and above all, ironically.

Acts of Cycling Stupidity

I recently heard a rumour about a new variety of cheating, which I very much hope is true. It’s probably limited to online racing, although I’d enjoy watching someone attempt to use it in the real world.

It concerns a UK-based rider who, having given up on more technological varieties of gaming his turbo trainer numbers, sought a more analogue method. He attached his tandem to the trainer, and got his 12-year-old son to ride stoker.

Since he really only wants about an extra 30-40 watts most of the time (more would arouse suspicion), his son is usually happy to do it for £20 an hour, and he doesn’t even need to set down his phone.

If he’s lucky his son won’t think of putting the price up. Or just plain blackmailing him.

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.

Cycling UK (CUK) has called for proper testing and better awareness of ebike regulations, following the confiscation and destruction of a perfectly legal ebike worth £6,500 ($8,600).

West Midlands Police had initially decided the bike was illegal after using what CUK says is a flawed test, but has since admitted the mistake. It no longer plans to prosecute the rider and has agreed to pay compensation to Birmingham Bike Foundry, from whom the machine was on loan.

Bodyworn footage appears to show the police officer lifting the rear wheel of the bike in question – a Tern HSD S00 cargo bike – spinning the pedals and noting the speed registered on the cycle computer. However, this is a flawed method of detecting an illegal bike, CUK says.

The rider was supported via CUK's Cyclists' Defence Fund, which was set up 25 years ago to help defend the rights of cyclists.

The key to tackling illegal ebikes is officer education, CUK associate director Duncan Dollimore told Cycling Weekly in a statement.

”As the Association of Cycle Traders (ACT) and Wheels for Wellbeing have outlined in their policy asks, the starting point needs to be better understanding of the legal definition of an ebike, or an EAPC (Electrically Assisted Pedal Cycle)," he said. "A legal ebike requires the rider to pedal for the motor to assist, and it must cut out at 15.5mph. If pedalling is not needed, or the motor assists above this limit, you’re likely looking at an e-motorbike.

He continued: “Training needs to help officers identify the key signs of tampering or chipping, derestriction or illegal modification. Officers also need to be familiar with common specifications of legal ebikes, and being able to distinguish them from electrically powered mopeds or motorbikes that are sometimes incorrectly described as ebikes."

Testing needs to be consistent and evidence-based, he said, adding: "Officers need clear, national procedures for testing, and access to technical expertise when needed.”

In a separate statement, Dollimore said: “If police forces are going to destroy ebikes worth thousands of pounds, they need to be able to carry out a proper test to determine whether they’re legal or not. It is encouraging that West Midlands Police have now engaged and acknowledged that the testing they carried out was flawed and that they will review their approach.

He added: “While there was no suggestion of bad faith, this case demonstrated the importance of better training and greater awareness around e-bike regulations. It’s through the generous donations of our supporters that means the Cyclists’ Defence Fund can support cases like this, so huge thanks to all of those who have done so.”

In a statement obtained by the BBC, West Midlands Police said: "We stopped a rider on 24 April in Birmingham city centre and issued a fixed penalty notice for an offence of riding without insurance.

"The rider was advised of his rights to challenge the decision in court and the bike was seized. We have since received a complaint about the seizure, and that is being reviewed."

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)