Garmin has quietly unveiled three new models in its bike computer lineup, and a new addition to its smart indoor trainer Tacx range.

The headline grabber is the new flagship Garmin Edge 1060 bike computer, replacing the top-tier Garmin Edge 1050. The new Edge 1060 adds an onboard microphone and speaker, plus intelligent navigation, improved battery life, and its signature high-resolution display.

Elsewhere, the Explore 3 series caters to touring and recreational riders who prioritise straightforward navigation over deep performance metrics, with an Explore 3 Plus variant borrowing the 1060's voice and audio features.

Perfectly timed for indoor riding season, Garmin’s Tacx division has released the Nēra smart trainer, which offers the preinstalled Zwift Cog and Click virtual shifting system. The Nēra also brings all-new multidirectional movement, with built-in motion pods designed directly into the unit for what they claim will be a comfortable and realistic ride.

All the new Garmin devices are available now, and below you'll find more information and the all-important prices.

Garmin Edge 1060

Taking over the top spot in Garmin’s computer lineup, the new Edge 1060 builds on the Edge 1050 with key hardware and navigation upgrades. It also becomes the most expensive bike computer on the market, launching at $799.99/£699.99 and surpassing the 1050 by about $100/£100.

The headline addition is hands-free voice control. Powered by an integrated microphone and speaker, riders can trigger actions simply by saying "OK Garmin," keeping hands safely on the handlebars. The unit also integrates with the Garmin Messenger app to send and play audio messages on the go.

Route planning gets a boost with real-time road closure alerts, interactive route previews, and a "free flow routing" mode designed to prioritise uninterrupted paths with minimal stops.

On top of a customisable home screen and emergency reverse charging. Battery life ranges from 20 hours under heavy load to 60 hours in battery saver mode, the same as the 1050.

There's no solar charging seen on other Garmin devices because the Edge 1060 uses a bright liquid crystal display panel (inherited from the Edge 105O and can't utilise the Garmin solar-harvesting Power Glass.

Garmin Edge Explore 3 and Edge Explore 3 Plus 

Expanding its bike computer lineup, Garmin has unveiled the Edge Explore 3 and Edge Explore 3 Plus. Succeeding the popular Edge Explore 2, Garmin says the new units are designed to be easy-to-use GPS cycling computers

The two siblings are the same size, with the Plus adding internal hardware.

The main addition to the higher-spec Explore 3 Plus is hands-free voice control, thanks to a new onboard microphone and speaker—mirroring the tech on the Edge 1060. Both units get boosted navigation, including pin-drop navigation, live road hazard warnings, "free flow routing" to avoid frequent stops, and interactive previews of upcoming points of interest.

Under heavy use, the standard Explore 3 delivers up to 16 hours of battery life, while the feature-rich Plus model offers 14 hours; both extend to an impressive 48 hours in battery saver mode.

Elsewhere, the feature list includes Garmin Coach training plans, live tracking, incident detection, e-bike and smartwatch connectivity, and real-time carbon footprint metrics.

Pricing for the Garmin Edge Explore 3 is $399.99/£349.99, and the Garmin Edge Explore 3 Plus is $499.99/£429.99.

Tacx Nēra Smart Trainer

Garmin, which owns Tacx, has expanded its indoor cycling ecosystem with the launch of the Tacx Nēra, a performance smart trainer positioned alongside the premium Tacx Neo 3M and Tacx Neo 2T models.

The unit is ride-ready out of the box, available with either a preinstalled cassette or a Zwift Ready configuration with the Zwift Cog and Click for virtual shifting.

Built to handle heavy efforts, the Nēra supports sprint efforts up to 2,200 watts, simulates gradients up to 20%, and maintains an impressive power and cadence accuracy within 1%.

All new integrated motion pods deliver multidirectional movement, covering forward, backward, and side-to-side motion, for what they say is a comfortable, immersive ride feel. Connectivity is equally robust, with built-in Wi-Fi for fast virtual racing on Zwift or ROUVY, plus native syncing with compatible Edge computers and the best Garmin smartwatches.

The Nēra is also compatible with the Tacx Alpine hill climb and steering simulator, and can be collapsed and carried with foldable legs and a built-in carry handle.

The standard Tacx Nēra and the Tacx Nēra with Cog and Click are priced at $999.99/£859.99.

The Tour de France 2027 opening ceremony and team presentation in Edinburgh ahead of the British Grand Départ will be a paid-for, ticketed event, the race organisers have announced.

Around 9,000 tickets are expected to go on sale, with prices starting at £27.

The event, scheduled to take place from 18:30 on Wednesday 30 June, will be held on the esplanade outside Edinburgh Castle, and will involve the producers of the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo, a bagpipes and dance show that performs every August in the city.

Tickets will go on priority pre-sale this Friday 23 October to people who subscribe to the Grand Départ GB newsletter. Visit the Le Tour GB website to sign up.

Members of British Cycling, Scottish Cycling and Beicio Cymru will then have a pre-sale window from midday the following day, Saturday 24 October.

On Monday 26 October, the pre-sale will open up to customers of the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

Any remaining tickets will then go on general sale at midday on Friday 30 October.

Fans without tickets will still be able to see the riders as they approach Edinburgh Castle on the Royal Mile, but will not able to access the presentation.

It is highly uncommon, though not unprecedented, for the Tour de France’s opening ceremony and team presentation to require tickets.

The event consists of all 23 teams (184 riders) riding on stage to be introduced to the crowds. Last year’s presentation took place at the foot of the Basilica of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain. In Lille the year before it was in the city’s Grand Place, while in Florence in 2024 it was at the Piazzale Michelangelo. All three were open free-of-charge to the public.

The last time the Tour started in the UK, however, the opening ceremony and team presentation were ticketed, with more than 10,000 people attending inside Leeds Arena.

The race will begin on Friday 1 July, two days after the opening ceremony, leaving Edinburgh for a stage finish in Carlisle. Stage two will stretch the following day from Keswick to Liverpool, and stage three from Welshpool to Cardiff.

The full route for next year’s Tour de France will be officially announced in a ceremony in Paris at 10:00 (BST) this Thursday 22 October.

Iconic, dominant, legendary – such superlatives are often overused and undeserved in the world of cycling, but in Alcyon’s case, all of them hit the mark. This remarkable bike was built in the mid-twenties, a period as momentous as it was triumphant for the French brand.

Founded in a western suburb of Paris in 1903, the brand had established its own cycling team within two years. It would ‘own’ racing well into the thirties, winning the Tour de France seven times, Paris-Roubaix nine times, Paris-Tours nine times, and the Tour of Belgium 13 times. And that’s just for starters.

When, during the 1929 Tour, the team had the audacity to work, well, as a team in the Alps – shielding star rider Maurice De Waele from attack – race founder Henri Desgrange, in a fit of fury, responded by banning commercial teams. They wouldn’t be welcomed back for thirty-one years.

“They were winning across the board,” says current owner Richard Hoddinott of vintage specialists The Velo Pages. “Alcyon represented the pinnacle of that era of racing machines, and this particular bike is the best preserved 1920s racing bike I've ever seen. It took me eight years of negotiations to buy it from a collector in the south of France. It’s completely original, right down to the tyres.”

It’s uncertain whether this is a team bike, but its survival intact is intriguing, as is its livery. Blue was always associated with the brand, inspired by the colour of the kingfisher’s plumage in the Greek myth of Alcyone and Ceyx.

Alongside talented French riders, such as the impossibly suave André Leducq, the team also signed many Belgian stars, including De Waele, Romain Maes, and Sylvère Maes. Consequently, it’s alleged that blue was chosen for the Belgian national team jersey as a tribute to Alcyon.

Back in May, Lorena Wiebes won Stage One of the Giro d’Italia Women. She did not get to enjoy it for long. Within two hours, she’d been disqualified for riding an illegal bike, and banished from both the stage and the entire race. Her bike had been under the minimum 6.8-kilogram weight limit, by 20 grams.

This whole affair made a lot of people very angry. Wiebes, her team, most of her rivals, and almost anyone watching the event. It’s hard to find anyone who really liked the outcome – it didn’t even bring much satisfaction to the race organisers or the commissaires.

If you want to grasp how little 20 g is, there’s about 10 g of air in each tyre. (That’s a sum I first did in 2008 when working out what advantage a mate of mine was going to get from a very expensive plan to fill his tyres with helium. I didn’t tell him.)

Naturally, I decided to work out how much of an advantage you get from saving 20 g on a flat sprint stage. It was 139 km long, with (are you ready?) 240 m of climbing. I ride in Cambridgeshire most of the time, and I can barely concoct a ride that flat if I try.

It turns out that if you do the maths there aren’t enough decimal places in the universe to quantify the smallness of the advantage gained on those gradients. It’s the same if you calculate the advantage in sprint acceleration. It’s a decimal point, and a whole lot of zeroes. By the time you get to a non-zero digit you’ve stopped caring.

However, there’s a problem with the outrage. That is, on this occasion, for once in their lives, the commissaries have applied the UCI’s rule exactly as written. The sanction for an underweight bike is expulsion from the race. That’s it. There was no fudging or looking the other way, even though I suspect they probably wanted to. For years we’ve asked for consistency and now we have it.

There’s even precedent for them to follow – as recently as last October they disqualified Jan-Willem van Schip from the Tour of Holland for a seatpost that hadn’t been registered with the technical committee. Absolutely no one (apart from him) minded, presumably because he’s not as famous as Wiebes.

There are many other illegal things that make a much bigger difference in a result than the nothing at all that 20 g makes. There are sticky bottles, illegal feeds, or stopping for a pee where a Belgian pensioner with binoculars might see you from the roof of their campervan. For those offences commissaires often just look the other way – one commissaire recently told me off for criticising a sticky-bottle episode because, as he put it, “If he hadn’t taken it he’d probably have been dropped from the break.” If they do take action, it’s a fine and a points deduction.

But we’d go mad if we started trying to work out sanctions on the basis of how much actual difference it made. How much did you gain from that illegal feed? How much did you use your sneaky alleged electric motor?

The issue here is simply that the rule is wrong. It’s disproportionate, and it would be very simple to change it. If a sticky bottle is a fine, then for a first-time offence of up to 200 g underweight the right punishment is maybe relegation at the finish and nothing more. For a margin of over 200 g, maybe relegation and a time penalty big enough to dent a GC hope.

Honestly, getting disqualified from a whole Grand Tour should probably require that when you arrive at the bike check, the bike is bobbing above your head on a string like a balloon.

"I don't have six fingers, I swear," endurance coach and Isle of Wight local Joe Staunton joked. Behind him, the harvest moon hung globular and magnificent against a pastel sunset, the sea crashing against the beach below us.

The joke plays on a stereotype that has long burdened the island. Forget its luscious blue vistas and sun-drenched soils, and it's easy to poke fun at the small island hanging off the English coast – but its islanders are determined to paint its image anew.

The Isle of Wight is famous for a few things: it was the Victorian poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson's favourite place, it's home to some of the last red squirrels in the UK, and in 2010 the idyllic waters of Freshwater Bay became the scene of a £56 million cocaine bust.

But it's also a great place to explore by bike. The perimeter ride is already popular, with visitors circling the route along its undulating white coastal cliffs over the course of a day, and last year DJ Pete Tong and cycling commentator Orla Chennaoui brought luxury bike holiday LeBlanq to the island.

While Staunton is neither a Caulkhead (a born-and-bred islander) nor a DFL ("Down from London"), he's passionate about the place he's decided to call home. He took me, round-the-world record-breakers Amy and Kyle Hudson, influencer Paris Wood and her partner Ben McCullough on a ride that showcased his favourite parts of the island.

Starting in Freshwater, on the western edge of the island, we began a steady ascent over the Compton Bay cliffs before ploughing along six kilometres of undulating Military Road. From there we were rolling, the momentum gained from short, sharp climbs carrying us to Newchurch for coffee and cake at Pedallers Café.

We made a few more spontaneous stops, too. The nostalgia of the miniature village hooked all five of our party, as did the waft of garlic as we passed the island's famous farm. The Isle of Wight is the sunniest place in the UK, with over 2,000 hours of sunlight a year, and the islanders make the most of it: they distil mermaid gin infused with homegrown citrus fruits and export their tomato harvests across the country. This summer alone, 10 million sweetcorn cobs were ferried to the mainland, and the garlic grown here is the best in the country – though the chilli garlic relish is not for the faint-hearted.

Onwards we cycled into the heart of the island, each of us imbued with the bulb's distinctive whiff. Here crows circled above open fields as we snaked through quiet, hedge-lined country lanes. Though relatively flat, the island still harbours some stinging ascents, and Staunton peppered them throughout the 97km route. The first came before our lunch stop at the Spyglass Inn – 160 metres of elevation over five kilometres – with another 170m kicker straight after.

It was around this point that I hit a wall. Ill-equipped for a day out with social media influencers on lovely bikes, my flat-pedalled old gravel bike was a poor match for the island hills – my lack of fitness didn't help, either. I made a sorry companion for Staunton, who has worked with national champions during his time as an endurance coach, but he stuck with me, chivvying me along with stories of growing up on the island.

Over half of the Isle of Wight is protected as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, he told me, home to rare species of butterflies and wildflowers found only in England's chalk soils. The scenery regularly stopped us in our tracks, with the slow-eroding cliff faces overlooking the blue-green expanse of the English Channel. The island loses between one and three metres of coastline a year to erosion, but each retreat exposes new treasures. One palaeontologist crowned the Isle of Wight the most diverse location for dinosaur bones in the country, and it's even got a dinosaur of its own: the "white rock spinosaurid", an enormous carnivore that roamed the land over 125 million years ago.

As we made our way back towards the Albion Hotel for a post-ride dip in the sea and dinner at The Red Lion (butternut gnocchi for me, please!), I found myself elated, despite my screaming legs.

The pace of life here is slow. Even if you find yourself out on a big bike ride, the energy on the island feels rejuvenating. Jenna, a DFL who settled on the island eight years ago, remembers spotting her painter and decorator down at the beach when he was supposed to be painting her kitchen – there was a really good swell, apparently. I met another woman on an early-morning swim, both of us dodging breaking waves. She moved to the island over a decade ago after a career spent around the world. Now she joins a group of friends every morning for a swim – many of whom I saw litter-picking at a silent beachfront disco the night before.

One of our group asked Staunton what "the point" of the Isle of Wight was. I kind of understood what she was getting at: it's just a dislodged piece of old England, right? After a weekend of eating well, sea swimming and cycling across the island, whatever preconceived notions I had of island life changed. There is real community here – I was shown its unique blend of culinary culture, quiet country roads and punchy climbs by a rider genuinely passionate about his home. There's no better advertisement than that.

The good thing is for many of us living in the south of England, the island is surprisingly accessible. You can travel by train in an hour and thirty minutes from London and cycle straight from the ferry port – you can even drive there from Bristol in 2 hours. You can visit a garlic farm boasting produce as left-field as garlic ice cream, go for a sauna and a dip in the sea or complete the 65-mile perimeter ride and be home in time for tea. Plus, there are dinosaurs everywhere.

We were guests of The Albion Hotel in Freshwater, Isle of Wight, who kindly hosted our stay.

Wightlink operates ferry services to the Isle of Wight. Find out more at wightlink.co.uk.

The UCI has cancelled the 2026 Urban Cycling World Championships in Saudi Arabia after missile strikes on the country's capital.

The Worlds were scheduled to take place from 3 to 7 November, but cycling's governing body was under pressure to take action after the Houthi attack on Riyadh's international airport on Saturday, which killed 13 and left 300 injured.

The specific circumstances were not referenced in the UCI's statement, but just alluded to as "recent developments in the region". 2026 was the second year in a row that the Urban Worlds were to take place in Riyadh, which sees riders compete for rainbow jerseys in trials and BMX Freestyle. Last year Great Britain won two medals, including gold for Charlie Rolls in the men's elite 26" trials event.

Australia and Austria had already withdrawn from the Worlds, and other sporting events had already been postponed, including the PIF Saudi International in golf.

"The decision follows consultation with athletes, staff and the selection panel, with the athletes fully informed and supportive of the decision," an AusCycling statement this week read.

"It reflects the escalating regional conflict, the loss of life and the Australian Government’s updated Smartraveller advice."

"The Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) and the Saudi Cycling Federation announce that the 2026 UCI Urban Cycling World Championships, scheduled to take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, from 3 to 7 November, will not proceed," a UCI spokesperson said on Friday. "The event was set to bring together the world’s best riders in trials and BMX Freestyle (Park and Flatland).

"The decision follows a joint assessment of recent developments in the region and their impact on the logistical organisation of the Championships.

"The UCI regrets having to take this decision and expresses its appreciation to the Saudi Cycling Federation for their support and cooperation throughout preparations for the event. It also thanks the athletes, teams and National Federations for their understanding.

"The Saudi Cycling Federation reaffirms its commitment to developing cycling in the Kingdom and strengthening its partnership with the UCI. These efforts aim to support the growth of the sport, broaden participation and continue attracting major international cycling events to Saudi Arabia in the years ahead.

"The UCI will communicate shortly on the sporting consequences of this announcement."

By the early 1980s, Motobécane was one of France’s old guard. Like its compatriots Peugeot, Gitane, and Mercier, its bikes were still winning numerous races, but its glory days were numbered.

None of these iconic brands survived the decade, driven to extinction by overseas competition and the incoming tide of new-fangled carbon fibre. French component manufacturers Simplex, Huret, Mafac, and Maillard suffered a similar fate, heralding the end of a Grand French Era for cycling brands.

Fortunately, such strife was too distant in the future to trouble Jean-Luc Vandenbroucke, as he won prologue after prologue for La Redoute–Motobécane between 1980 and 1983. This large yet lithe beauty, a size 60cm ’81 model, was his ride midway through his stint with the team.

“It’s so wonderfully Gallic,” says current owner Richard Hoddinott of vintage specialists The Velo Pages. “Just as there’s an expectation for Italian bikes to feature Campag, almost every peripheral component on this Motobécane is French – the elegant 53t Stronglight chainset, the Simplex mechs and shifters, the Sachs Maillard 6-speed cassette, the Maillard 700 hubs and the Mavic Super Champion rims. Only the Cinelli cockpit, Selle Italia saddle and Weinmann 400 brakes are sourced from further afield.”

Motobécane was renowned for its frame finishes, and this bike does not disappoint. The deep blue flam metallic paintwork, the chromed forks – note the seamless Cinelli microfusion crown – and the rear triangle sparkle as if they’ve been dusted with diamonds.

After retiring from racing, Vandenbroucke built a successful career as a directeur sportif for Lotto, where he faced the heartbreaking challenge of coaching his troubled nephew, Frank Vandenbroucke. The French cycling industry fought back too, with brands such as Look, Lapierre and Van Rysel now commonplace in the pro peloton.

As of this week, cyclists caught going through red lights in the City of London could find themselves facing a snap decision: pay a £50 on-the-spot fine, or stand in a ‘sin bin’ and watch a short two-minute video, designed to make them reflect on their actions.

It’s a no-brainer. No one in their right mind would pony up fifty notes when they could spend two-minutes watching a little cautionary movie, surely? (It takes longer than that for the officer to fill out the paperwork for the fine). And, predictably, every single one of the 70 velo-villains nabbed by the City of London Police force for hopping the lights on Wednesday, when the new initiative was first rolled out, went for the video option.

But what does this video show, and will it be effective in reducing behaviour that the police say has become endemic on the capital’s streets?

Well, I’ve seen it. And I’ll never jump a light again.

To be honest, I’m a pretty well-behaved cyclist these days anyway (of course I am, I work for Cycling Weekly), and I also now live in a place where both traffic lights and police officers are few and far between. But there was a time when I lived in London and worked as a bike courier, and I’d routinely go through dozens of red lights every day.

It is, in essence, a selfish act to run a red light, and we all know it's a bad thing to do. You’re basically saying that your time is more important than everyone else’s. And this alternative punishment is very much of the ‘we’re not angry with you, we’re just disappointed’ school of disciplinary psychology, which tends to be much more effective.

"We issue cyclists fixed penalty notices for going through red lights in the city on a daily basis," explains Sergeant Stuart Ford, Cycle Team lead at City of London Police. "Riders running reds is one of our biggest complaints, from residents, people visiting and working in the city. We have to act on what they're saying. And it is a bit of a nightmare out there for pedestrians and vulnerable road users.

"Between 8 and 9 in the morning, in the city, we get 20,000 cyclists come through. We're only a small team, there's only ten of us, if we're all out in the morning, we might issue 20 tickets. That's nothing. That's not going to get the message out there.

"So I came up with this 3E approach, which is engage with people, educate them, and enforce the law. The whole point is I want to get some sort of behavioural change. A lot of cyclists are very good and they abide by the laws of the road, but some don’t. Rather than issuing tickets all the time, I wanted to come up with something else, where we give them an opportunity to watch a safety video and give them a bit of a warning if you like."

Sergeant Ford says he doesn’t especially love the term 'sin bin', and prefers to call it a "cycle time out zone". Riders who agree to watch the video stand on a five-by-two-metre mat with a picture of a bike on it, surrounded by a police logo, and watch the short film.

"I've been a cyclist my whole life," says Ford. "I've got four or five road bikes at home myself. It's what I do. I like bikes. So I'm coming from a good place. I don't want to be penalising people that want to do the right thing getting on their bikes. I just want people to abide by the law."

The video shows the potential consequences of your selfish actions on others, in this case people with sight impairment, some of whom describe frightening encounters with pedal-powered light jumpers. It’s filmed in a way that encourages empathy with these people, and for good measure, one of them invokes the physical and mental damage that could be done to their guide dog – which is a complete clincher – and what that would mean for their freedom.

You’d have to be monster if having this perspective thrust in your face didn’t make you stop and think, or in this case, think and stop. Watching the video, I found myself regretting all those red-light indiscretions of years gone by. I never ran over any assistance labradors (seriously, I didn’t – don’t write in), but it could have happened loads of times.

There are counterpoints to be made, about drivers’ behaviour, but it’s hard to argue with the basic premiss of Ford's thinking, and most cycling-oriented orientated organisations are in agreement.

"Cyclists are not really the issue of safety on the roads, that's more cars and driving and speeding, so it's kind of fiddling whilst Rome burns on safety grounds," says Tom Fyans from the London Cycling Campaign. “But we are broadly supportive. We think it's an innovative way of getting through to cyclists that they've got responsibilities on the road to keep people safe other than themselves.

"There are more bikes than cars now in the City of London, so the situation is a little different there to elsewhere. And if it gets cyclist respecting red lights a bit more and thinking about how to stay safe on the road, and keep others safe, that's a good thing."

There is another part of the video, for those perhaps lacking in empathy, which isn’t for media or general public consumption, that shows real footage of a bike rider going through a red light, getting knocked off her bike, and then talking about the life-long consequences of that rash decision. I’ve not seen that yet bit, and I don’t intend to – I’ll just stop at the red lights from now on.

Vin Denson, who died on Wednesday 14 October aged 90, was the last survivor of the pioneering generation of British professional cyclists who established themselves at the highest level of European road racing during the 1950s and 1960s.

Alongside Brian Robinson, Tom Simpson and Barry Hoban, Denson helped open doors for the generations of British cyclists who followed. Born in Chester, he developed his strength in the fiercely competitive world of British time trialling, track and road racing before crossing the Channel to pursue his ambitions.

Denson became one of professional cycling's most respected domestiques, riding for two of the sport's greatest champions, Rik Van Looy and Jacques Anquetil.

His finest years came with Anquetil's Ford France team in 1965 and 1966. "It was like being with Manchester United," Denson recalled. The riders were treated as celebrities, once attending a reception with Prince Rainier and Princess Grace in Monaco.

But behind the glamour lay extraordinary hard work.

In May 1965, Denson played a crucial role in one of cycling's greatest feats. Anquetil won the mountainous Critérium du Dauphiné, then travelled overnight to Bordeaux to contest the 584-kilometre Bordeaux-Paris classic, starting at one o'clock the following morning.

Denson and Jean Stablinski were entrusted with shepherding their exhausted leader through the night.

"Jacques was riding so close to me his shoulder would occasionally brush mine," Denson recalled. "To help him I pushed him for long stretches." At one point Anquetil leaned against Denson, apparently falling asleep while still riding. Somehow, he recovered and completed his historic double.

The following year Denson made history himself, becoming the first British rider to win a stage of the Giro d'Italia. Riding for Ford France, he escaped on the mountainous ninth stage from Naples to Campobasso, dropping his breakaway companions and battling alone to victory.

It was a landmark achievement for British cycling, and proof that Denson was far more than a willing workhorse. He also won the 1965 Tour of Luxembourg.

The death of his close friend Tom Simpson during the 1967 Tour de France affected Denson profoundly. He eventually retired from professional racing in 1969.

Strong, loyal, immensely capable and full of wonderful stories, Vin belonged to an era when British cyclists had to fight for every opportunity abroad.

With his passing, the final link to that remarkable pioneering generation has gone.

Cycling Weekly's thoughts are with Denson's friends and family.

British Cycling and the Great Britain Cycling Team have implemented an action plan "focused on leadership, development, feedback and wellbeing" after a rider and staff survey revealed that some thought parts had a "toxic" culture.

According to a report in The Times on Wednesday, an independent survey, funded by UK Sport and conducted by a company called the Happiness Index, uncovered a fall in morale among its elite riders, and an alleged lack of accountability in the GBCT's senior leadership.

A spokesperson for British Cycling said that the wellbeing of its staff was "fundamental to everything we do", and said that an action plan was being implemented to address concerns.

This is not the first time that the culture at BC has been criticised, with a 2017 report into the GBCT saying that a "culture of fear" existed.

Separately, this week, British track sprinter Matthew Richardson was withdrawn last-minute from this week's UCI Track World Championships amid reports of serious misconduct, also revealed in The Times.

As part of the survey conducted most recently, athletes and staff were asked for three words to describe the culture of their World Class Programme; "driven" was most-used by athletes, but that was quickly followed by "toxic". Other words included "cold", "unconcerned", "distant", "unclear" and "restrictive".

According to The Times, the Happiness Index calculated saw a satisfaction score of -42 for male riders and -31 for female riders, the scale running from -100 to +100. The male and female staff scores were -4 and -5, respectively, all of which was a dramatic drop from the last time it was taken.

"The wellbeing of our staff and riders is fundamental to everything we do at British Cycling," a BC spokesperson said.

"The Culture Feedback Survey, which has been the subject of recent reports, is independently run to provide a valuable tool to help us learn and improve. The majority of team members say they love their jobs and overall favourability has increased, ranking ‘very good’ in the latest study.

"However, it is important to recognise others want to see improvements, and we are committed to listening and acting on this.

"As a result, the Great Britain Cycling Team has developed an action plan that is being implemented alongside wider work across British Cycling, focused on leadership, development, feedback and wellbeing. UK Sport is aware and supportive of the action we are taking."

The action plan is also focusing on "psychological safety, empowerment, and colleague experience", The Times reported.

A spokesman for UK Sport said: "It is critical to us that the sports we invest in have a safe, healthy and high-performing culture where athlete voice is included in decision-making. That is why the sports we work with undertake periodic, independent surveys of their athletes and staff within performance programmes to form one part of the assessment of the culture within those environments.

"We have engaged with British Cycling on the findings of their most recent culture survey and are aware of the action plan that they are already implementing to address some of the themes it raised.

"We will continue to work with British Cycling as they embed this plan and ensure their performance culture is of the highest possible standard."

Early nights, a sensible diet and long hours in the saddle required, anyone who has raced a bike knows that it's no easy sport to dedicate yourself to. But there's another hurdle too – one that affects some more than others: cost.

For seven years, US wheel manufacturer Boyd Cycling has been refurbing and donating customers' unwanted wheels to young riders – and now, in conjunction with the Kent Cyclopark Charity, it's bringing that philanthropic strategy to UK shores.

The strategy operates annually throughout each October, and acts as a kind of part-exchange deal, with those donating wheels benefiting too: those who trade in their old wheels, either in a Boyd retailer or online, receive a 20% discount when buying new Boyd wheels.

Boyd Cycling says customers can trade in any wheelset, irrespective of brand, or model. The company will then service as required before donating to young cyclists. Those trading in their wheels will have them assessed for suitability and serviceability in the first instance, and Cyclopark will then carry out any work that needs doing before passing them on to young riders.

The riders benefiting from the wheels will mostly be those patronising Cyclopark in the U12 up to U23 categories, across both cyclo-cross and road racing disciplines.

Cyclopark and its accompanying charity provides a mostly self-funded space for riders of all ages to race and ride at Gravesend, Kent. As well as the road circuit itself, the venue features a cafe, BMX pump track and MTB trails, and six fitness studios.

Cyclopark's CEO Jonny Hamp said in a statement: “Every day we see the difference cycling can make in young people's lives here at Cyclopark Charity. It’s about much more than riding a bike. It’s building confidence, making friendships, developing new skills and feeling part of a community. We know that the cost of equipment can be a real barrier, especially for young riders.

“That’s why we’re really pleased to be working with Boyd Cycling on this fantastic initiative. By giving quality equipment a second life, we’re helping to create opportunities for the next generation of cyclists, ensuring that enthusiasm and potential, rather than financial circumstances, determine how far they can go."

There’s a two-word phrase Jarrad Smith picks out to describe MAAP’s cycling kit: “affordable luxury."

“It’s not outlandish like a Louis Vuitton handbag, like five grand or something,” the brand's co-founder says. “But it’s a product that can bring you joy, get you exercising, get you involved in the community.”

Smith is sitting on an enormous, custom-made, neon green sofa in MAAP’s new London store. The floor beneath him is paved with cobblestones – a nod to the store’s location in the backstreets of Soho – and light is shimmering from the metal walls. Opened this month, this is the 11th of what the Australian brand likes to call a ‘LaB’, a hub that stands for ‘Life around Bikes’, which hosts ride-outs, events, serves coffee, and, crucially, sells cycling apparel.

The jerseys on the rails carry price tags from £130 to £235, the bib shorts from £195 to £265. It’s not the most expensive kit on the market – some brands ask for more than £300 for their bib shorts – but it’s certainly not far off.

“I feel like people are willing to pay slightly more for a more premium product,” Smith says.

“Just recently we launched the new Pro Air jersey, and it’s my favourite jersey, and it’s probably one of our most expensive jerseys. But the performance of it, and the fit, and the way the fabrics work, and the way it performs, it’s just reassuring that when you wear it, you feel really good in it, and I think you’re happy to pay for that because it’s just so rewarding.”

MAAP’s business results seem to prove Smith's theory; although he doesn’t go into details, he says the company is profitable, and has always been a “very high-growth brand”.

Some of its competitors in the same market, however, have found the going to have gotten tough. Rapha, for example, whose Soho clubhouse is only a few minutes’ walk from MAAP’s new LaB, recently revealed annual operating losses of £21.2m.

In a press release shared with Cycling Weekly, Rapha stated its “numbers reflect deliberate decisions to invest in our brand, product quality, cycling communities and customer experiences,” calling these “choices that will strengthen the business over time.”

For some customers, the losses were a comeuppance for what they believed was prohibitively priced products. But Rapha is generally cheaper than MAAP. How does Smith justify criticism about the cost of his jerseys and bibs? “It depends who’s saying it,” he says.

“If we weren’t selling them, I wouldn’t make them. They’re probably potentially not our customer, or it’s a bit out of reach and they don’t want to spend that much, or they don’t appreciate the aesthetic of it as well.

“We’re not putting a price tag on our products because of the MAAP logo on there. It’s the cost to make it: the design team, the fabrics we select, sustainable fabrics. To make one jersey, there are four fabrics on it, and it’s expensive. Most of the fabrics are coming from Italian mills and the best lycras in the world.”

Smith also points to the comfort of the clothing. “Especially with a bib,” he says. “When you get more serious and you’re riding more and more, that comfort in the saddle is probably the most important part of the ride.

“I think if you’re new to cycling and you’re a bit nervous to spend so much, you might start [with a cheap, entry-level brand]. But once they’ve tried our bibs, people are like, ‘Ah I appreciate it. I get it. It’s so much more comfortable. Now I can ride more.’”

Smith founded MAAP 12 years ago in his garage with his business partner, Oliver Cousins. Inspired by surf and skate fashion, the pair set out to make a high-end product that people around the world would love – affordable luxury, as Smith would call it. Today, they have stores in cities like Shanghai, Los Angeles, and Berlin.

Opening in London, though, seemed to push against the tide. This summer, a similar showroom in King’s Cross, VIA Atelier, shuttered its doors with a notice citing overdue rent payments. It was just one example in a wider trend of bike shops closing across the country.

Did MAAP have any concerns about opening against this backdrop? “When we were first looking into it, it was still Covid, all the retail was shut, and we were coming in all guns blazing then,” Smith says. “I don’t think the market was any worse than it was at that point because these shops were literally all boarded up.

“Within the cycling industry, yes, some of them are shutting down and whatnot, but for us, business is going well and everything’s been very positive.”

The LaBs are all part of the company’s expansion. This February, MAAP hired its first CEO, Ian Elliott, who was formerly the head of marketing. “As we’ve grown, we’ve had to learn to run a bigger business,” says Smith.

“The challenge, I think, is just making sure we’re continuing to innovate – new products, new ways of doing things with fabrics – and also finding new partnerships and keeping it relevant.”

One thing Smith is excited about going forward is MAAP’s growing off-bike range, which now includes a £415 puffer jacket, launched last Thursday.

Likewise, he says sponsoring the Australian WorldTour team Jayco AlUla, which MAAP has done for the past two seasons, has been “awesome – it’s like a dream come true”.

“I think what’s critical about it is validating our performance and product. Probably early on, people thought we were just a bit more of a fashion-y brand, but we actually were rooted in performance. We just try to make it look aesthetically pleasing in our style.”

The Jayco-AlUla deal is due to run up at the end of 2027, though there are options to renew. For Smith, it’s important that his brand is represented at the highest level of the sport. “It’d be like playing tennis without having someone at Wimbledon or the Australian Open,” he says.

It's that same thinking that has led him to opening 11 stores around the world; a bold strategy, some might say, particularly in a saturated market and against a global shift towards online shopping, but Smith is confident it’s the right one.

“We’re quite astute to making sure all our ducks are in a row, and we sort of don’t focus on other brands and other businesses,” he says. “We’re always very busy focusing on our own trajectory.”

The Tour of Auvergne-Rhône Alps is still one of my favourite races. It may have changed its name from the easier-to-remember Critérium du Dauphiné, but in another aspect it hasn’t changed at all. It is the New Bike Race, when all the new stuff appears before the Tour de France.

Or at least, it sort of appears. Nothing gets formally announced or launched; it gets leaked. And like any leak, it first and foremost serves the interests of the leaker.

The new S-Works SL9, for example, was not paraded for the press, but was photographed with a telephoto lens by Cyclingnews journo Will Jones while he was hiding in a bush. Which was very enterprising of him.

On the other hand, it’s hard not to feel that if the team really wanted to keep it a secret they might not have brought it to the centre of the biggest concentration of bike-tech reporters in the world and left it leaning against the mechanics’ truck. Granted it was the “non-public” side of the truck, but still. MI6 would find things to criticise.

There was a bike from Cube, which was presented at a photo-call, with no information whatsoever offered about it. There was an Orbea, which was presented in a little more detail, but with weird hand-painted camouflage squiggles to apparently try to disguise its exact shape. And the new Van Rysel was “spotted” on a team car roof-rack without so much as a paper bag over it.

Other popular ways to tease new bikes include the classic, “Rider gives away new team bike in careless social media post!” where half a bike is visible in the background of a post about, let’s say, the rider’s dog. Despite it accidentally giving away a “secret”, this post is never deleted. Same with YouTube videos.

All I can say is, how well the marketing departments know me. If you introduce me to a new bike by means of a press-release, lots of good photos, maybe a white paper on the technology that’s gone into it, with some aero-testing numbers and a full spec, well, I probably won’t be that excited. I can see exactly what it is and what it does, and in the end, it’s just a bike.

On the other hand, show me a blurry image of a bike apparently snatched on an iPhone, and within seconds I’m fully zoomed in trying to spot the alleged differences from the maker’s earlier bikes. “A curved seat tube, you say? Re-profiled head-tube? Let me see…. ooooh! That’s lovely!” Or show me only half a bike with a dog in the way. Then tell me it’s not yet commercially available, and don’t tell me the price.

Moments later you’ll find me in my bike-store looking at the very lovely bikes I already own and love muttering, “Stupid straight seat-tube. If that was curved I bet that would reduce the turbulence flowing onto the back wheel. And that old head-tube, that must be costing at least five watts.”

It’s the same sort of fog-of-ignorance upgrade-it mindset that savvy bike-shop owners take advantage of when, instead of helping a customer to find the right bike for them at the right price, they leave them alone with their own thoughts, their credit card, and some minimal information. That way the customer persuades him or herself that they need features and specs no responsible salesperson would try to sell them.

The only thing that saves me is the quantity of new stuff. So many new bikes at once, along with so many new wheelsets, new tyres, and new helmets. It just produces a paralysis of indecision. I want it all so badly that I can’t prioritise.

One day the bike trade is going to work this out, of course, and just leak one single, beautiful product. When they do, I’ll basically be a salmon, flapping on their hook.

This week Belgian manufacturer Ridley broke cover with a new lightweight climbing bike, the 6.2kg Falcn RS 2.0. In doing so, it also poo-pooed – a phrase you don't hear often – the 'one bike to rule them all' philosophy, with its aero but relatively heavy Fast 2.0, which sidles in next to the Falcn in the Ridley stable for a lethal two-pronged approach to top-tier racing.

Now, the one-bike philosophy exists on at least two levels. There's the example presented by Ridley – suitable for taking on different courses at the highest levels of elite racing. And then there's the example that exists in your shed and mine (apologies, of course, if you're a WorldTour pro reading this. It happens).

The idea that us 'normal' cyclists (call us club riders, weekend warriors, amateurs – we can take it) might only have to spend money on one single bike holds enduring and widespread appeal. Something you could commute on, race on, ride tracks and trails on. It would take up less space; it would involve less faff; and it would certainly involve not having to shell out multiple times over for something that does pretty much the same as all the other things, but not quite. If that makes sense.

The fabled one-bike is held up as a two-wheeled Holy Grail but, leaving aside the question of whether such a machine actually exists, do any of us really want it? After all, just imagine that, this Christmas, you're gifted such a machine. It sings, it dances, it plays the bloody bagpipes… and you never need to buy another. Is that cause for celebration? No, of course it isn't.

Here's the reason: one of the fun things about being a bike rider is buying bikes. And then buying stuff for those bikes. And then, once you're done with that, it's imagining what bikes and what stuff you'll be buying as soon as you get even the flimsiest excuse to do so. The n+1 equation dictates that. It's also at diametrically opposed odds with the one-bike theory, and it's definitely the funnest of the two.

Admittedly, back up in the elite ranks, the bike industry has been making a pretty good fist of the one-bike strategy. In 2020, for example, Specialized did away with its aero Venge – remember that? – instead bolstering the aero capabilities of its Tarmac to essentially take the place of both. Victories in the Tour de France Femmes and the World Championships would testify that it's doing OK.

This one-bike approach has been echoed across the industry in recent years, with Cannondale doing the same with its SuperSix Evo, and Trek with the Madone Gen 8. There are, however, rumblings that suggest another about-turn could be on the cards in the industry more broadly, and we could see manufacturers follow Ridley's approach in future.

It's worth pointing out that 'do-it-all' is pretty subjective and means different things to different riders. Some of us might not ride off-road at all, so that capability is unnecessary. Some commute by bike, some don't… the list of specifics goes on.

Whatever your cycling repertoire, though, there is one machine that can do most things, from long road rides to off-roading, commuting and cyclo-cross racing – that would be the gravel bike. But it's probably best not to admit that, not to yourself, and definitely not to anyone else. After all, one bike only – where's the fun in that?

Over a thousand Van Rysel GRVL AF bikes have urgently been recalled by Decathlon America, because of concerns around the front wheel lock nut becoming loose and undoing over time.

Although no accidents or injuries have so far been reported as result of this fault on the extremely popular bike, the identified flaw could create a potentially dangerous situation for riders, "posing a crash hazard", as stated on the US government's Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) website, creating a "risk of serious injury or death".

The recall involves around 1,150 individual bikes across the highly versatile and reasonably priced family, designed for gravel riding, road cycling, commuting to work and more extensive multi-day bikepacking adventures.

According to Decathlon's recall: "Front lock nut on the bicycle fork may loosen during use, which can lead to a loss of steering control or component detachment, posing a fall and crash hazard to riders."

The specific models involved are the following: the word brown CN FR (model number 8911304), apex beige CN FR (8911305), sword pink CN FR (8911308), and GRVL AF GRX black (8929130).

The impacted bikes, which retail for anywhere between $1,400 and $2,300, were all sold in sizes extra-small, small, medium, large and extra-large through REI Co-op outlets in the United States, between March of 2025 and August of this year.

Each of the named bike models can easily be identified by name, and also through the Van Rysel Product ID (which begins with the number 5 and can be located on the barcode sticker on the frame near the bottom bracket of the bike).

It's important to note that only Van Rysel bikes with the Product IDs/ SKUs mentioned on the official CPSC webpage are affected, and riders with other models do not need to be concerned, or to take any action.

Decathlon America are asking people with the bikes involved to take them along to their nearest REI Co-op outlet, where their bike will be inspected and repair of the fork assembly is being offered if required, obviously all free of charge. Anyone who is unable to visit an REI location is advised to contact Decathlon customer service for assistance.

A British police force has been criticised for posting misleading information on the legality of e-bikes.

In a now-deleted post on Facebook, the Tewkesbury Neighbourhood Policing team, part of the Gloucestershire Constabulary, wrote that "privately owned e-bikes require road tax, vehicle insurance, and a valid MOT".

Appearing to confuse e-bikes, which are pedal-assisted and limited to 15.5mph, with e-motorbikes, which are not, the policing team were appealing for information regarding a report of dangerous riding in Brockworth, Gloucestershire.

The post continued: "Anyone breaking the law risks a £300 fixed penalty notice, six points on a driving licence, and your illegal electric bike or scooter being seized and destroyed."

Duncan Dollimore, from British cycling advocacy group and charity Cycling UK, said that the police needed to "stop this confusing narrative and understand the difference" between e-bikes and e-motorbikes.

"The statement from Tewkesbury Neighbourhood Policing team confuses legal e-bikes and e-motorbikes, when in reality they are different means of transport, with different laws applying to them," Dollimore said. "We need the police to stop this confusing narrative and understand the difference, as these misconceptions continue to cause issues to people who are genuine legal e-bike riders. To be considered an e-bike, you need to pedal for the motor to assist, and it needs to cut out at 15.5mph, otherwise it’s an e-motorbike. E-bikes do not require tax, insurance or an MOT, but e-motorbikes do.

"E-bikes can make a huge difference to people’s lives, particularly for older people, those new to cycling or with mobility issues, and police forces across the country need to be better trained to make sure they know the difference. That starts with clear, national procedures for police forces to properly assess whether a bike is an e-bike or an e-motorbike."

E-bikes, legally "electrically assisted pedal cycles" are pedal-assisted, limited to 15.5mph, and have a continuous rated power output of no more than 250 watts. If it does not comply with these, the bike is not legally an EAPC and does need to be registered, taxed and insured.

A spokesperson for Gloucestershire police said: "In recent days we issued an appeal which included some incorrect information in relation to e-bikes. Once this was brought to our attention, we removed the article from our online sites.

"For more information on the rules of riding an electrically assisted pedal cycle, visit: Riding an electric bike: the rules - GOV.UK."

This enigmatic Claud Butler track bike is a period puzzle that only begins to reveal a version of its truth when associated with its likely rider, the colourful Jack Heid. On first inspection, the bike resembles a 1939 Champion Path model, with its period-correct oversized Chater-Lee bottom bracket and cast lugs. However, a closer look reveals a distinctive 1948 ‘Olympic rings’ head tube badge.

There’s no mistaking the livery, which boldly screams ‘USA!’ as only the Stars and Stripes can. Consider that Claud Butler had a close relationship with talented New Yorker Heid around this period, and pieces of the puzzle begin to fall into place.

Disenchanted with the East Coast racing scene, Heid flew to London for the 1948 Olympics, where he immediately became obsessed with European competition. Over the next few years, he successfully raced as an amateur across Belgium, France, England, and Scandinavia; unheard of for an American at the time.

Despite minor celebrity status – the English media dubbed him the Yankee Clipper – his existence was, at least initially, hand-to-mouth, surviving on his winnings and the illicit proceeds of smuggling watches and bike parts into England from continental Europe. Did Claud Butler give this bike to a cash-strapped, opportunistic Heid?

“There are tantalising clues,” says current owner Richard Hoddinott of vintage specialists The Velo Pages. “The numbering on the BB suggests 1949, then there’s the head tube badge and the bold US livery. I believe this is a pre-war frame possibly refurbished in 1949 for the World Championships in Denmark, or a ’49 frame that’s been built with older parts due to post-war shortages.

Heid won bronze in the amateur sprint at the World Championships and continued racing successfully in Europe for several years, eventually earning a comfortable living. He returned to the US with his Belgian wife, Julia, in 1951. He died in 1987 and was inducted in the US Bicycling Hall of Fame two years later.

Soudal Quick-Step rider Dylan van Baarle was injured in a serious incident "involving a car" during a training ride in the Netherlands, which left the 34-year-old Dutchman with a broken wrist and put an abrupt end to his season.

Although the road riding calendar has all but come to a close, the timing of the crash is particularly unfortunate, given that van Baarle is due to get married in less than two weeks. However, his fiancée, fellow pro rider Pauline Ferrand-Prévot, took to social media to say that that the situation could have been far worse, and thanking Soudal Quick-Step for their actions after the incident.

"He took a hard blow to the head,” said 2025 Tour de France Femmes winner Ferrand-Prévot. “The helmet definitely saved his life… He also has a broken arm, and the surgery will take place tomorrow – thanks to Soudal Quick-Step for arranging it so quickly."

The collision took place on Wednesday, and according to reports, vVn Baarle, a former Paris-Roubaix winner who has endured an injury and accident strewn few years – having fractured his hand and scapula in 2023, broken his collarbone twice (in 2024 and 2025), and also busting his hip in 2024 – took a "big impact".

"Dylan van Baarle was involved in a road traffic accident involving a car, during training today in Tiel, Netherlands," a statement on the Soudal Quick-Step website confirmed. "Following the incident Dylan was taken to hospital where he underwent a CT scan, which has fortunately revealed no damage to his skull and spine. He did however sustain a fracture to his wrist, which will require surgery and mean an end to his season."

Van Baarle is due to marry his partner, and former Tour de France Femmes winner, Ferrand-Prévot, who rides for Visma–Lease a Bike, later this month, and it was the Frenchwoman who broke the news, saying: “Dylan was involved in a car accident this morning while he was training. He was taken to the hospital immediately.”

"I'm very, very grateful that it all turned out reasonably well," she continued. "I’m going to sleep alone for a few nights, but I think that’s part of the tradition leading up to the big wedding day."

I always enjoy the walk or jog to Parkrun. As you near the arena, such as it is, whether it is an actual park, or a seafront, or beside a motorway, over a bridge, as I did once. Once you’ve done the hard work of getting out of bed and making it to the designated place, you get to enjoy the anticipation in the air. People of all ages and abilities, semi-professional runners and people attempting their first ever 5km, all converge on the same spot, ready for the 9am start. It’s hugely successful, because the barriers to entry are so low: you need a pair of trainers, to be registered – which is free – and to complete a 5km at your speed. There is little danger, little cost, and few causes for apprehension. It’s little wonder that around 400,000 people take part each week.

Even then, it took me five years between signing up to Parkrun and actually embarking on one. I’ve now done 36, which is more reflective of my priorities on a Saturday morning than anything else, but it took me a while to not be intimidated by the event with little to no barriers. It took moving city, joining a run club and meeting like-minded people to encourage me to actually take part.

I was reflecting on all this when I went to watch my first ever cyclo-cross race in person last weekend. It was a local event, Round One of the Western Cyclo-Cross League in Cheltenham, England. Not to take part, no I’m not ready to do that, but to support my friends Rosalie and Laura in their first-ever race. There was the familiar trudge to a park, sadly with fewer people, but still a bit of a buzz. I can’t believe it took me this long to go to a race. The atmosphere was friendly, and reassuringly unintimidating, and it was great to see a range of ages and abilities race, from the semi-elite group at the front , to the much bigger group in the middle, having fun and taking part in their own battles. Just like Parkrun, there were those aiming for the win, or at least challenging for it, and then those using it as type two fun.

Cheering on the race, with the help of a continental lager – it is a CX race after all – I was taken by just how fun and friendly it looked, with a few of the competitors even thanking us for the support as they went round. It was far from the intimidating event that it could have been, that the world of road racing certainly seems to me, hill-climbing is similarly open. People just turn up with a bike they are prepared to ride off-road on, pay the fee (which in this case was £25), learn the course, and race for under an hour. The risks are low, especially the muddier it is. There are no open roads, no cars, it’s fun, and unless you’re battling at the front, it’s unlikely to be overly competitive. At least that’s how it seemed to me. There are technical bits, but nothing insurmountable, especially at the beginning of the season; then the worse the weather gets, the more the chaos mounts too.

The differences between Parkrun and a CX race are stark, of course. At the latter you do need a bike, you have to pay, and it feels a lot more hidden away; something you would only take part in if you met the right person, or were encouraged by a club. The equipment, especially, is a huge barrier to entry – I don’t have a gravel bike, so I’m out immediately. However, as we are several years into the gravel boom right now, you might have one, and I would encourage you to at least look into taking part in your local race. It’s easier said than done, obviously, but what’s the worst that could happen?

Organisers, locally and nationally, with the help of British Cycling, could do with a bit of a marketing revolution, to show that anyone can do it. I didn’t realise you could just turn up on the day and take part, so some clarity on the rules would certainly help, especially if you’re not part of a traditional cycling club that might push out info on this sort of thing. My friend Rosalie was hooked; she’s already done her second event. If we could harness this across the country, then maybe we could get loads more people hooked on racing. All I need now is a bike.

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

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

British bike brand Ridgeback has recalled three of its hybrid and commuter models due to reported defects in the tyres.

The company has asked customers to “immediately” stop riding any of their Comet, Motion or Speed models sold since 2020, which could be affected.

“The tyres on affected bicycles may have manufacturing defects along the tread pattern which could lead to a failure of the tyre posing a fall hazard,” Ridgeback said in a statement.

The brand also shared images of the issue, which show the middle of the tyre’s tread bursting open. According to Ridgeback, this occurs when the defective tyres are inflated to the recommended pressure printed on the sidewall.

It is uncertain how many customers in total the recall affects. A safety notice was published on the UK Government’s Office for Product Safety and Standards (OPSS) website earlier this month with a ‘medium’ risk level.

“The product presents a risk of injuries as the tyres may fail while the bicycle is in use. This could cause the rider to lose control and fall,” the OPSS notice said.

Philippa Wheeler, a product safety solicitor at law firm Leigh Day, warned tyre failures can lead to “serious and life-changing injuries”.

"While recalls can be unsettling for consumers, prompt action to address potential safety defects is an important safeguard,” Wheeler said.

“Customers have a right to expect that the products they purchase are safe and free from defects, and effective recall processes play a vital role when products fall short of those standards."

Across the three recalled bike models, Ridgeback has listed 54 affected product item numbers, all with the prefix ‘RB21’, pertaining to different frame sizes and colourways. The full list can be found on Ridgeback’s recall notice.

The brand has asked any customers who fear they might be affected to “please stop riding your bicycle immediately”, and contact their local Ridgeback dealer. Any defective tyres will be replaced.

“We recognise that many of you will rely on your bicycle as a primary mode of transportation. Ensuring that you are safe and back on your Ridgeback as swiftly as possible is our utmost priority,” the brand said.

“We’d like to apologise for the inconvenience caused and thank you for choosing Ridgeback.”

The Stages SB200 earned its name because the Stages team believes it is “10 times better” than its predecessor, the SB20.

The SB200 is Stages’ first indoor smart bike since the SB20 was released in 2019, and it's seen updates in several areas, from aesthetics to a new display screen and an updated Stages app.

The SB200 product development team said that the focus was on creating a bike which would suit a wide range of riders, from the recreational fitness buff to the pro-level rider.

“You can just get on this bike and ride,” says Pat Warner, vice president of research and development at Stages. “We want people to ride bikes, and the SB200 allows everyone to simply get on and ride.”

The bike maintains its existing quiet drivetrain – as noted in the 4.5/5 star review it received from CW's digital editor – but key updates include dropping a whopping 25kg (55lbs) from the previously hefty frame and adding an integrated display screen.

What’s new?

The SB200 adds new features, reportedly without sacrificing quality and functionality.

One of the most notable changes is the fully built bike's weight. The SB20 weighed about 62.5kg (138lbs), while the SB200 shaves off 25kg (55lbs) and weighs 37.5kg (82lbs).

Most of the weight savings came from the frame and the flywheel. The Stages team stressed that heavier flywheels, which mean more inertia, are a thing of the past.

Stages prefers to describe “max output” as a function of how well the bike handles torque.

The Stages team cited pushing 400w at 40rpm to demonstrate the SB200's high resistance and torque-handling capability; if a rider pushed those watts at that rpm, the bike would still be responsive and usable.

However, depending on cadence, the SB200 has a max wattage of about 2,500 watts.

Speaking of cadence and output, those two metrics can be greatly influenced by crank length. The SB20 allowed for an adjustable crank length via a clubbed crank arm with four different holes for changeable crank lengths.

The SB200 improves on the “clubbed” crank arm design with a patent-pending, sleek crank-length adjustment system using flippable brackets that slide into place at the end of the crank arm. The bracket orientations correspond to four crank lengths: 165mm, 170mm, 172mm, and 175mm.

The adjustable crank brackets and all other adjustable parts of the bike – seatpost and handlebar height and handlebar fore/aft – are all controlled with one eight mm Allen bolt. The hex key for the Allen bolt is built into the rear seat stay and clips in and out via a magnet.

Additionally, the front and rear of the SB200 got major upgrades from the SB20.

The front features a unique semi-circle design meant to encourage movement like the real road. The SB20 had a rigid, straight front end that created a more rigid ride, and if that’s your preferred riding style, you can purchase the Rigid Ride front end and swap out the curved option on the SB200.

The rear of the SB200 now features two plush rubber feet to create a gentle side-to-side motion while riding, easing low back strain and once again fostering that “real world” feel.

The SB200 also has two wheels at the rear, replacing the pair at the front of the SB20. The Stages team says putting the wheels in the back makes more sense, since most of the bike’s weight is toward the rear.

Key specifications

The last visible hardware change is that the SB200 adds a small display screen beneath its phone and iPad holders (the iPad holder is fully removable).

The display screen lets a rider “just get on this bike and ride.” When not synced with a third-party training app, the display shows workout stats that the everyday fitness buff is interested in: cadence, calories, control mode (erg vs. simulation), distance, gear, heart rate (with connected heart rate monitor), power, profile, speed, time, and firmware update status.

With a third-party indoor training apps such as TrainingPeaks Virtual, Zwift, MyWhoosh, or Rouvy involved, the display screen will sync with the app’s stats and reflect your power, rpm, and more as reported in the third-party app.

The Stages app also got a makeover in the SB200 process.

Riders can now sync workouts from TrainingPeaks into the app, or choose from about 40 pre-programmed workouts in Stages’ small but growing free workout library.

Real-world feel meets real-world shifting

Stages notes that a lot of thought went into improving the SB200's shifting experience. The shifters operate like a standard road bike, with noticeable tactile feedback as you move through your drivetrain of choice. You can shift one gear at a time with the shifter closest to you, or jump five gears in either direction with the second shifter.

When you reach the end of the cassette you’ve chosen, an audible “beep” will let you know.

Plus, there are eight total buttons – four on the inside of each hood – that are fully programmable and control the built-in display as well as features of virtual riding apps.

The SB200 gives riders multiple drivetrain options, all customisable in the Stages app.

A rider can choose SRAM or Shimano 1X and 2X cassettes with a variety of gearing options right in the free app.

The real “secret sauce” of the Stages SB line, though, is its Dream Drive. Dream Drive is a fully customisable 1x system with up to 30 gears (from easiest to hardest gear).

You can get extremely specific with your gear configuration, creating “half gears” not available on a real-world cassette. If you want, you could create a Dream Drive with only five gears, creating huge torque jumps between gears.

If you’re training for a specific terrain or course, Dream Drive is one way to hone your efforts, especially if you upload a GPX file to TrainingPeaks Virtual and then adjust Dream Drive to match the ride profile's demands.

Stages SB200 - first ride impressions

My first ride on the SB200 lasted about two hours and included everything from low-cadence, high-power efforts to crit-style virtual racing on the TrainingPeaks Virtual platform.

Before the ride began, though, I was pleased with how easy the bike was to adjust. The built-in Allen key at the rear seat stay was easy to pop in and out, and all changeable aspects only took a few minutes to adjust in total.

The SB200 doesn't offer saddle fore/aft adjustment.

Additionally, you can put on your own saddle if you want. I thought that the Stages-designed saddle that comes with the bike was comfortable enough, but the standard cinched rail design means you could swap in your preferred seat.

Once I got my fit dialed in, I started to ride. I was immediately struck by how realistic the bike felt, from tactile shifting to just the right amount of movement to be road-like.

The shifters’ tactile feedback was noticeable, but not overly so. I switched between a SRAM 2X 12-speed setup and Dream Drive; you can switch between drivetrains mid-ride using the buttons inside the hoods or via the Stages Cycling app.

The bike's curved front, combined with the SB200's spongy rear feet, provides just the right amount of movement as you pedal. The gentle side-to-side motion mimics riding on the road accurately without ever feeling unstable, even during standing efforts.

A huge plus is that, thanks to the poly V-belt drive, the bike is whisper-quiet.

I also appreciated the narrower handlebars. Stages says they opted for a narrower handlebar design on the SB200 to reflect the style many are choosing on their road bikes today. I thought it was nice to have narrower handlebars, as I have had countless experiences with stationary bikes offering absurdly wide handlebars, which makes for an uncomfortable ride.

What I found difficult to get the hang of were the buttons inside each shifter. The buttons control things like avatar movement in TrainingPeaks Virtual (the only platform that syncs with the SB200’s hardware without a third-party app or modification) and navigating within virtual cycling platforms.

With practice, I’m sure I’d get the hang of the buttons, but memorizing the functions of eight total buttons right off the bat and syncing my thumbs to remember where each button is was quite the mental exercise.

Despite some challenges wrapping my mind-body connection around the buttons, the rest of the ride was smooth, quiet, and realistic.

The SB200 is now available directly from Stages at $2,399.

If only this bike could talk. It’s clearly an Eddy Merckx team bike from the late Molteni era; almost certainly from 1972. What an incredible year that was for Merckx.

He achieved a Giro d'Italia-Tour de France double, won three Monuments (Milan-San Remo, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, and Il Lombardia), and secured other victories, including La Flèche Wallonne, the Trofeo Baracchi and the hour record in Mexico City.

This wasn’t his bike; the frame is far too small, but it’s exciting to suppose that it might have been ridden alongside him, and ultimately behind him, by a supportive teammate on the stage-defining slopes of the Col d'Izoard and the Passo dello Stelvio.

“There’s a unique quality to this bike,” says current owner Richard Hoddinott of vintage specialists The Velo Pages. “The handling is very purposeful, it’s special. The build is top-notch too, Campagnolo throughout, with Cinelli bars and stem, and a Unicanitor saddle. I particularly love the patina, the worn 531 decals and the large, characterful Nuovo Record chainring that’s been drilled in a slightly haphazard fashion.”

Merckx employed Belgian entrepreneur Fernand Kessels to supply Molteni Team bikes in the early seventies, along with a number from both Colnago and De Rosa. Kessels was more at home behind a desk than behind brazing goggles, so he commissioned various high-end frame builders, including Marcel van der Este.

Tantalisingly, there’s a note painted on the underside of the bottom bracket that reads ‘K V.D. ELST’. Does the K stand for Kessels, and the rest of the script indicate van der Este? A misspelling seems unlikely, but it’s possible. Or perhaps it identifies the shop or rider the bike was intended for after the team had finished with it. We’ll never know.

I was out for a ride with my friend Bernard last week. We were about an hour in, on a hot afternoon, when he pulled over, took out an Allen key and dropped his saddle by a few millimetres.

“It’s a hot day,” he said, as if that amounted to an explanation.

I probed deeper.

“I like to put my saddle down a little on a hot day. It feels right,” he said.

If I’m honest, I’d been hoping for some bucket-of-blue-steam nonsense about the bike having expanded in the heat, something I could possibly mock in print. But if he wants to do it because it feels right, well, who am I to argue?

Bernard has strong opinions on the whole world of bike-fit and bike-fitting. “Bike fit,” he likes to declare, “is a myth.” He especially likes saying it to riders who’ve had a professional bike fit.

And it’s true that in Bernard’s bike-riding youth, and even in mine just about, bike fit didn’t really exist as a specialism. Although if you went to a bespoke frame builder (the common premium option until carbon fibre took over), the frame builder would usually have some sort of home-brew system for working out frame geometry from body dimensions. (Luckily, the systems were adaptable enough that if your bike came out of the building-jig looking totally different, as it usually did, that would be just fine too.)

He still prefers to ignore all that. “If it looks right, it is right,” has always been his guiding principle. This means that you take what’s more or less average among people you want to be like, and authoritatively declare it to be correct. It only recently struck me that this is exactly how ChatGPT works.

When pressed for more details about what looks right, it turns out he has a whole range of rules-of-thumb. There is a formula for saddle height above the bottom bracket axle, which is 0.833 multiplied by your inside leg. Your bars are in the right place when, “if you bend your elbows a bit, not as much as if you’re driving a breakaway, more as if you’re trying to make your reflection in a shop window look a bit less embarrassing,” the top of the bars obscures your view of the front hub.

Your saddle should be “level” unless you’re “a triathlete, time triallist or some other sort of weirdo”, and the tip of the saddle should be, “60-65 mm behind the bottom bracket, unless you’re a triathlete, time triallist, or some other sort of weirdo.” Your cranks will be, “170 mm, unless you’re a Gen-Z fashion victim, in which case they’ll be 155 mm until you bloody grow up a bit.”

That’s bike-fit by Bernard. The thing is, I reckon his system is not a million miles out. If you used it, it would do. It helps that humans are adaptable. A few millimetres one way or another doesn’t make much difference to most of us – we can accommodate it.

There are some things Bernard’s system misses. You could work out your preferred saddle by trial and error, but the errors these days are getting towards £200 a go, so it’s useful to find a shortcut. And many people really benefit from detailed fitting around cleat positions and angles, and insoles to prevent knee issues.

And he’s right that you should never be afraid to tinker. You can always change it back. Eddy Merckx used to not infrequently stop mid-race and change his saddle height – he always carried a little spanner just in case. It amuses me that in this respect, if in absolutely no other, my friend Bernard resembles the greatest rider of all time.

Although Merckx probably never looked at his reflection in a shop window and felt embarrassed.

Seemingly cut from a completely different cloth to every other elite cyclist in the modern era, former WorldTour-rider Lachlan Morton has always ridden a unique path, combining wins at major events such as Unbound with original endurance challenges and extreme record-setting rides, often raising funds for charities such as World Bicycle Relief.

But this week, talking to Cycling Weekly after winning the 3-Peaks Cyclo-cross race in Yorkshire, the Australian dropped a bombshell, revealing that he is about to leave EF Education-EasyPost, the team he has been part of since 2019, and that something new is looming on his horizon.

“The 3-Peaks was like my last time pinning on a number with EF,” he told CW. “It was a cool place to do it.”

When we spoke, he couldn’t reveal his exact plans (more about that below), but did give us a little teaser. “I'm doing an endurance ride, starting next Monday. I can't say exactly what it is, but it'll be a long multi-day ride here in the U.S. And then yeah, that will be it.

“I'll still be riding, just not in the pink anymore.”

Even when he was a WorldTour rider, competing in Grand Tours including the Vuelta a España and Giro d'Italia, Morton rode in a range of rough and tough off-road races around the world through EF Education First's alternative calendar.

It was during this period that he was exposed to some very British events, including the GBduro (a race he won in 2019) and the 3-Peaks, a challenge Morton didn't win in either of his first two attempts, in 2019 and 2025, but which kept calling him back.

"It's just one of those races that gets under your skin, so I've been back a few times since," he explained. "Every time you do it you learn more, and you realise things you could do differently or better, and that rings true even when you win.”

Morton became completely captivated with British bike racing culture, which led to him doing his last race in the distinctive pink livery of EF Education-EasyPost right here in England.

“I love the UK scene,” he says. “People get very passionate about very specific disciplines and events, and the history of those events and disciplines. And it feels like everything grows from a strong local place, and branches out from there, from club runs and the local racing scene. And experience is passed down from older riders to riders just getting into it.

“This is something I find fascinating, and it's similar to the environment I grew up in – except the British go way harder for the niche element, like hill climbing, and get really passionate. And I think that's very cool.”

Despite his success and popularity, Morton, who now lives in California, has maintained his easy-going Australian attitude to life, and he evidently enjoys the fact that even people with celebrity status in world cycling don’t get special treatment at local bike races in the UK.

“I like that it’s a scene you have to prove yourself in,” he says. “There's always a healthy amount of banter, or people hanging sh*t on you. When you turn up, you really have to earn your spot there. It's like a funny but rewarding thing to go through.

“And it's also a beautiful place to just go and ride. That's always my struggle, going over for the 3-Peaks. I just want to go and do all the riding I can around Yorkshire, because it's so beautiful. I end up riding more than I should before the race.”

Keen-eyed spectators at the 3-Peaks might have noticed Morton had a slightly less hirsute look than we've become used to, with a neatly trimmed 'tache and beard, but he denies that this is part of his new direction.

"My wife drops hints every now and then - she prefers me clean shaven, so every now and then I have a reset… I'm in the reset phase," he explains. "I'll be back to my shaggy-looking self in a couple weeks time. That's how it tends to go. Same with my hair I like grow it until it annoys me and then it just shave off and start again.

So at least we know he's not going corporate. And Morton promises that, whatever his future holds, he’ll be coming back to defend his 3-Peaks crown. “It's not a matter of 'I've done it now', because it's just such a great event,” he tells me. “I'd love to go back as many times as possible.”

And he has no shortage of plans for future adventures, all over the planet. “I'd really love to ride in Pakistan,” he says. “I've been looking at northern Pakistan, where the terrain looks like it lends itself to really crazy adventures.

“Papua New Guinea would be a cool place to go and see on bike. And then in South America I really want to go to Ecuador.”

Right now, though, it seems the Wild West of America is where he is heading for his next adventure.

Update: Morton races the Pony Express

Since we spoke to him, Morton has revealed that his very last adventure with EF Education-EasyPost will be a multi-day ride across the American West along the route of the legendary 19th-century postal service, the Pony Express.

Starting on 5 October, he will attempt to ride the 1,966-mile (3,164km) route faster than the horsemen who carried mail from St. Joseph in Missouri to Sacramento in California, passing through Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada en route.

Founded in 1860, the horsemen of the Pony Express service were tasked with delivering mail across the decidedly untamed West in 10 days or less. It was an extremely perilous journey and the service only last 18 months, after which time it was replaced by the telegraph, but the heroism of the riders made it a legendary part of the American story.

The fastest time was set in 1861, when Abraham Lincoln's inaugural address (which is credited with helping to persuade California to remain in the Union as the Civil War simmered) was carried across the distance in seven days and 17 hours, with horses being changed every 10 miles (16km) and riders changing every 75 to 100 miles (120 to 160km).

Can Morton do it quicker?

He plans to travel light, resupplying and switching bikes from a truck, also carrying his brother Gus, who will be filming the trip.

"The idea is to mimic how they used to switch out horses," says the Australian adventurer. "I'll be swapping between a gravel bike, a road bike, and a mountain bike depending on the terrain. The route I've put together tries to get as close to the original as I could. I'm excited because it'll use all the different disciplines I've raced."

"You start on the plains, essentially, coming across Kansas, then across the basin through Wyoming, into Utah," explains Morton. "The real crux is the Nevada section — the stretch from Salt Lake City across to Carson City – because it's incredibly remote and very exposed. There's a lot that could go wrong there, and you're very much on your own. That's probably the hardest part.

"Then you cross the Sierra Nevada on the southern side of Lake Tahoe and drop through the foothills, which I know well because I live out there now, and finish in Sacramento.”

Want a job? Know how to fix a bike? Then you might be in luck.

A brand new report suggests that Europe is suffering from a dearth of bike mechanics, with 105,000 new ones needed by 2032 to meet demand and prevent people abandoning their bikes.

Published by NextGen Mechanics initiative and European Cycling Industries (ECI), the report says the shortage is already reportedly changing how people travel. It also draws on Shimano's State of the Nation 2026 survey of 25,000 respondents, which found that 212 million people across Europe experience barriers to maintaining their bikes. Of those, 121 million cycle less as a result, and 7.6 million have stopped cycling altogether.

There's already a shortage with 45,000 needed right now to meet current demand, the report says, with the additional numbers needed as the market continues to expand thanks to e-bikes, leasing and fleet models such as London's Lime bikes.

The report comprises a map illustrating levels of accessibility to mechanics across Europe. The Netherlands leads the way, with only 34.92% of cyclists reporting barriers to maintaining their bikes, and the UK is also among the least troubled countries in this respect; 40.92% of people, however, respondents still reported issues with getting their bikes repaired. Perhaps more surprisingly, that number was significantly higher again among French and Italian riders. Eastern European riders experienced the most difficulty, with 55% of Romanian and Turkish riders reporting issues.

Director of the Association of Cycle Traders and Cytech, Jonathan Harrison, was a significant contributor to the report, and he told Cycling Weekly he hoped it would help to improve the perception of what a bike mechanic does – both in the eyes of the public and those in the role or considering it – and make it a more attractive career. At the moment, he said, mechanics often saw the job as a stop-gap with too few prospects for good pay and progress.

"We're hoping that this project will be the start of work to raise the level of professionalism as a mechanic," he said, "[and that] the perception of a bike service and repair will raise in value, and therefore the wages of mechanics will follow and subsequently more people will consider it as a career."

Mechanics not only deserved to be paid more, he added, but because working on bikes was becoming increasingly technical, the job itself deserved a perception shift.

Not only, that, he said, but it was also, on paper, safe from AI. Always a plus: "It's really hands-on… it's a really skilled job, and people overlook that a bit," he added. "I personally always take my bike to a mechanic because they sort it out, and if I tried to do it, I'd make a mess of it. But yeah, hopefully it'll be a safe job from AI.

"We've got to try and change it, because actually technology on the bicycle now is not that simple anymore. We've got e-bikes, electrical systems, software, diagnostics… you know, really complex components, hydraulics. You know it's so much more complicated now to work on a bike than it was, say, 30 years ago," he told CW.

Giving the example of fleet bikes such as those available for public hire on city streets, Harrison pointed out that they required many mechanics, without whom, potential bike riders would end up back in their cars.

"People would go back to public transport; public transport gets overcrowded; they jump back in their cars. They do all these things. We're trying to work towards a better, clearer, cleaner cycling ecosystem," he said.

There was one strand of good news underlying the shortfall of mechanics, Harrison added, which was that the rate of bike shop closures had fallen significantly, and that new ones were starting to open – bringing with them, of course, demand for new mechanics.

Henry Silvester of Silvester Bros. cycles in Farnborough, Hants (UK), said he'd yet to see the report but that the figures did not surprise him.

"We've got growth in that sector of the business in that people now don't do their own repairs," he said. "A lot of them now will come to cycle shops for pretty much 90% of bike repairs."

The jobs his workshop would often carry out included puncture repairs, inflating tyres, adjusting handlebars, and fitting grips, he told Cycling Weekly. Not because bike owners would necessarily be unable to do it themselves, he said, but because they just don't have the time.

"Bikes are getting more technical – that definitely is one reason. But I also think people are busy in their lives now, and you know both parents or both people are working in a family. There's less spare time for jobs like that to be completed. So I think a lot of the time they just pop it into the shop. It's a service. A bit like getting their boiler checked every year, or getting their car looked at or MOT'd. It's another extension of those."

The future is, in theory, promising for mechanics, estimated Silvester. With so much work coming in and jobs becoming ever more technical, salaries should increase. Like many such things, though, it's likely to take time.

"All of this will help the industry," he said. "But I think it is just something that is going to take a bit of time to sort of get rolling, really."

As well as being pretty much AI-proof, the often-humble LBS workshop remains a huge part of the bricks and mortar industry, and feels as though it's likely to remain so for some time.

As Silvester says: "The workshops have helped keep local bike shops running really. Without a workshop, if you had to just rely on bicycle sales or P&A [parts and accessories] sales, you'd be in trouble."

Cycling Weekly can today reveal that ultra-endurance cyclist Dr Sarah Ruggins is planning a new expedition and world record attempt, Project Atlas, during which she will attempt to pedal around the planet faster than anyone has previously done.

The current Guinness World Record for circumnavigating the globe by bicycle is held by Mark Beaumont, who completed his epic journey in 2017, cycling 18,032 miles from Greenwich to Greenwich in a time of 78 days, 14 hours, and 40 minutes.

The British adventurer remains the only person to have achieved the big loop in less than 80 days, after Alaskan ultra-cyclist Lael Wilcox abandoned her attempt to best Beaumont’s time earlier this year, bailing after 14 days because she was suffering from heat exhaustion in the midst of a brutal heatwave that was scorching a large part of the planet.

Wilcox does still hold the women’s round-the-world record – 108 days, 12 hours and 12 minutes – which she set in 2024, but Ruggins has the outright record firmly in her sights, and believes she can shave three full days from Beaumont’s benchmark, completing the 29,000km (18,000-mile) challenge in just 75 days.

To achieve this, the Canadian-born adventurer – who plans to set off from Peggy’s Cove in Nova Scotia, close to her family’s home, on 4 May 2027 – will need to ride an average of 400 km (250 miles) per day.

When you learn that Ruggins, who spent a decade recovering from a rare autoimmune condition in her teens, couldn’t even ride a bike just three years ago, you could be forgiven for doubting her ability to achieve this. But she has form.

The 38-year-old, who appears on the cover of the current edition of Cycling Weekly and features large in our article about Fastest Known Times (FKTs), already holds two outright records, one for riding LEJOGLE (Land’s End–John O’Groats-Land’s End) in five days, 11 hours and 14 minutes in 2025, and another for cycling 6042km (3754 miles) south-to-north across the European Continent in 13 days, 20 hours and 27 minutes earlier this year.

Both times are considerably quicker than anyone else, male or female, has ever achieved, before or since. “I look for challenging routes, where the fastest known times are held by men, and I look for routes that whose records have been challenged multiple times, and people have failed,” Ruggins told Cycling Weekly. The round-the -planet record, the ultimate FKT, certainly ticks all those boxes.

"We've been cooking this up for three years," she says. "When we did LEJOGLE we took a country, and when we did the European record, we took a continent, and so now we're taking the world.

“Our three-year trilogy was always country, continent, world. And the reason we did it that way is because I'm new to cycling. I got my first bike in 2023. And from there I’ve built the team. I've built my riding competencies, and so as we learn to work together, and as our skills developed together, so too, did the complexities of challenges we want to take on.”

Beaumont certainly doesn’t doubt Ruggins' ability, nor the seriousness of her attempt to beat his decade-old time. “Mark texted me back in June and said: ‘You're going to be the one to break my world record,’” she reveals. “He has been a mentor and a friend to me for several years. Mark opened many doors for me in this industry and he's one of the people who has actually given me the belief that this is possible.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly then, Ruggins is keen not to present her new expedition as an all-out assault on her mentor’s biggest achievement. “I'm not saying I want to beat Mark Beaumont,” she tells me. “I just want to see if a person can go around the world in 75 days.”

Although it’s inevitable that people will portray her Project ATLAS ride as a race against the existing fastest time, in one important sense they’re not directly comparable, because Ruggins is taking a very different route to the one Beaumont followed.

"Mark had the benefit of going around the world in 2017, when there was far less geopolitical disruption than now," she says. "He crossed through Russia down into China, and obviously, we can't do that. So, my route will also be quite different from Mark's. We're starting from a blank sheet of paper.

“We're bound by the exact same rules that that he was, but obviously we can't go through Russia. We can't pass east across Europe through Ukraine or Iran to get to the Stans. And every flight I take means I will have to increase my mileage every day versus his pace. So we have to be quite clever, and therefore the route is still under construction, but we will announce it in a few months.”

Cycling Weekly will report on the route and other elements of the expedition as they evolve, so watch this space.

You may have heard about Spain's new cycling rules, which come into force this Thursday (1 October). For the country's cyclists, they're a mixed but mostly positive bag which, assuming the drivers of Spain and its island territories take note, should theoretically mean that the nation's bike riders will be just a little bit safer.

The new regulations include welcome, tougher new rules for car drivers overtaking cyclists, more flexibility for riders out on the road, and – less popular with some, perhaps – tighter rules on wearing helmets. If you're planning on a bit of spring sunshine in Majorca next year, take note.

The Spanish government's state gazette says: "[The New] Bicycle regulations have several objectives: firstly, to promote cycling as a healthy and sustainable mode of transportation that helps reduce urban pollution, and… encourage greater bicycle use in the city. Secondly, the regulations introduce measures that enhance the safety of cyclists, who are vulnerable road users."

A quick run-down of the most salient points includes the removal of all previous exemptions regarding the wearing of helmets. Currently, riders can forgo helmet use on long climbs, in extreme heat, and for medical reasons, but the new General Traffic Regulations call these "no longer justifiable". So, if you get caught out on Sa Calobra next March with your helmet hanging from your bars, that'll be a €200 fine.

Anyone under-16, or who rides a bike for their job, must use a helmet at all times and on all roads, while over-16s are only obligated to do so on intra-urban (rural) roads.

The most welcome rule changes are likely to be the ones pertaining to drivers overtaking riders. They must still give the rider 1.5m space while overtaking, but must now slow to 20kph below the speed limit on rural roads as they do so; as well as hang back "at least" five metres from the rider until they choose to make the manoeuvre.

The gazette says: "When overtaking pedestrians, animals, animal-drawn vehicles, mopeds, personal mobility vehicles, cyclists or groups of cyclists, the overtaking driver must take special care with the manoeuvre, in order to avoid creating any dangerous situation for them."

Cyclists are also encouraged to take the primary position and ride in the centre of the lane. This makes the cyclist more visible to drivers, makes their movements more predictable, and discourages risky overtakes. Urban one-way roads with speed limits of 30kph or less could also see cyclists allowed to travel both ways, subject to signage.

All good for the cyclists of Spain – and those visiting any time soon, which could include a fair few readers and plenty of WorldTour pros. But what's in it for the rest of us? Sadly, probably nothing immediately. But give it time. There is more than one political and philosophical theory postulating that when things improve in one country, they are eventually likely to improve in its neighbour in a similar way.

Importantly, the rest of Europe is witnessing its neighbour taking progressive strides – strides which don't involve wholesale replanning of town infrastructure, but simple guidelines. We probably shouldn't kid ourselves that Spain's doing this so that the local group ride can have a more untroubled crack at setting a new PR for its usual course. Instead, this is about wider issues: reducing road deaths and pollution – important issues on (almost) any nation's 'To Do' list.

It could take time, but we have already seen the UK adopt measures grounded in the cycletopia of Europe's most bike-friendly cities. The Dutch reach, for example, or the hierarchy of road users, which puts the onus on the drivers of bigger, heavier vehicles to look out for those who are more vulnerable.

In North America, Portland, Oregon and Montréal have introduced Dutch-inspired intersections, while Minneapolis has experimented with them too.

Progress like this advances incredibly slowly, and for us in the UK or the US, the new regs are not a signal to attach tassles to bar-ends and throw a party. Even for Spain's riders, introducing new traffic laws is one thing, but educating drivers and then ensuring they adhere to them are separate challenges. Similar issues exist in the UK, where it remains largely down to cyclists with cameras to report overtaking transgressions by motorists, despite clear Highway Code guidelines.

What the new rules are though, is another strike of the hammer in just one of the nails in the coffin of the unfettered dominance of motor vehicles on our roads. Bit by bit, regulation by regulation, we're getting there.

The rollout of the long-awaited next-generation Shimano Dura-Ace R9300 groupset appears to be gathering momentum, with Mathieu van der Poel using the unreleased components at the World Championships road race in Montréal on Sunday.

The Dutchman had been spotted riding it during the course reconnaissance on Wednesday as well, and must have deemed it race-worthy on a course that has seen a lot of dropped chains and mechanicals over the past week.

The tell-tale features of the new groupset are the protruding shift buttons on the inside of the hoods, and, if you're able to get close enough to count the rings of the cassette, the 13-speed drivetrain.

The prototype groupset was previously spotted at the Vuelta a España, and at the Tour de Luxembourg, where Van der Poel escaped on a 174 km solo to win stage 5.

Uncertainty remains over whether Shimano riders are running full production-ready groupsets or if there are still tweaks to be made before the commercial product is released.

Van De Poel has been riding the Dura-Ace R9370 carbon spoked wheels for well over a year, and a leaked DT Swiss specification sheet back in August confirmed that the new groupset will use a new freehub body standard to accommodate a smaller 13th cog. The big question still remains: will the new groupset be fully wireless?

Riders spotted on the new R9300 are all clearly running the new shifters, with their renewed ergonomics and satellite shifting buttons. But the rear derailleur has a visible wire, which appears to be a refined R9200 design rather than a road adaptation of the brand's fully wireless GRX gravel groupsets.

Many unknowns remain about the new R9300 Dura-Ace groupset, and both Shimano and its sponsored teams remain tight-lipped. However, its appearance at a race as high-profile as the UCI World Championships suggests that whatever parts are in use are unlikely to be mere prototypes.

Riders of Van De Poel’s calibre, who have a legitimate shot at the rainbow bands, wouldn't be taking the risk of using unproven components. The Dutchman was already burned by prototype tech early in the season at Paris-Roubaix, when he punctured twice on the Arenberg and was left unable to ride teammate Jasper Philipsen's bike due to incompatibility with the new Shimano SPD-SLR cleats.

Dura Ace has traditionally launched in the summer, aligning with the season's biggest race, the Tour de France. With Il Lombardia on October 10, the only elite men's race left this season, a full commercial release now looks unlikely until early 2027.

I arranged a ride recently with a couple of friends, who then suggested that we all join another local ride that I didn’t know. I said yes, on the basis that however old you are, you’re still supposed to pretend to like meeting new people and putting yourself in a position where their almost certain incompetence can cause you serious injury.

In the end I more-or-less enjoyed it. Small groups that ride together a lot usually end up behaving like they’ve been married for years – you know each other, you know the routes, there are few surprises. And a new group can remind you how nice that is.

“Left,” shouted someone in the new outfit as we approached a junction. Then, “No, right, sorry… No, left… Sorry the GPS has reset itself, can we stop for a moment?” We went right, which was wrong, so in an attempt to get back on track we took a route through a housing estate that eventually led to an impassable muddy trail.

It’s important to accept that all group rides that have not yet achieved married status need to have officers. This one was our navigator. On a bigger, more formal ride, it’s a role fulfilled by the ride-leader. The most outstanding characteristic of the navigator / ride-leader is being bad at navigation.

This is because they’re anxious about it, and they’re anxious about it because they are the sort of conscientious person who volunteered to be in charge, planned a route, uploaded it to a GPS that they don’t know how to work, and made wild promises about being able to find the café. They don’t want to mess all of this up.

Another reason they’re anxious is that they will be at all times undermined by the other chief officer, the sergeant major. This is a self-appointed role. The sergeant major likes to provide instructions. “Change at the front, w*nkers!” “Stop bloody pointing to tiny potholes! Only point at things that you can’t effing ride over!” “Why are you shouting ‘car up’? We’ve just as much right to be here as he does – he can bloody wait.” And so on. It’s a constant stream of slightly too-aggressive instructions.

Luckily, the mortal enemy of the sergeant major is the wrecker. Sometimes he (it’s normally a he) is an innocent who just wants a better work out. Sometimes it’s someone who should know better. But the key is they go to the front on every hill and hit it. Any chance they get, they go to the front and hit it.

They want to ride hard, but they do not want to go on a hard ride – they want to ride hard on a steady ride. They are totally immune to the sergeant major, which is why they’re tolerated by everyone else.

There are other ride regulars, even if they’re not yet officers. My favourite is the gifted beginner. Not every ride has one. At their best they’re like a man called Dan who turned up a couple of times to a fast group ride I used to go on, riding a cheap aluminium hybrid from Halfords. In the run-in to the first hill of the route everyone who hadn’t ridden with him before would queue up to patronisingly tell him not to worry when he got dropped, we’d wait for him.

Cometh the hill, Dan would unleash about 650 watts and steam off toward the summit like he was being pulled by a ski-lift. It was brilliant. (He was very talented, but gave up cycling after a couple of months – I’ve often wondered what he might have done if he’d stayed.)

Me? I’m the quiet one. The one who just gets on with the ride. Although I have a suspicion that if you think you’re the quiet one, you’re probably the wrecker.

Not many track bikes can claim associations with Manchester, Milan and Osaka, but this Keirin racing machine, built by Yoshiaki Nagasawa for Mancunian pro Matt Crampton in 2009, does. Crampton, a contemporary of Sir Chris Hoy, has a trophy cabinet bulging from numerous Commonwealth Games and European Track Championships.

Still, it was winning the Japanese Keirin Association Race in Manchester in 2008 that led to an invitation to join the Japan Keirin School in Izu, Japan.

Part training academy, part spiritual retreat, wholly disciplinarian, the school is as intense as the racing scene, which exists solely to generate 1.328 trillion yen (£6,481m) in annual gambling revenue. Keirin is big business in Japan; a contact sport far removed from the sanitised Olympic and UCI versions.

Hoy and Crampton raced Keirin frequently in Japan during the late 2000s. Both pros maintain that nothing honed their track skills for international competition more than belting around an outdoor asphalt track in all weathers with a group of eight fiercely competitive Japanese riders.

“Crampton may have been new to the scene, but he knew how to choose a bike,” says current owner Richard Hoddinott of vintage specialists The Velo Pages. “Nagasawa is a legendary Keirin frame builder who served a lengthy apprenticeship with Ugo De Rosa in 1970s Milan.”

Back in Osaka, Nagasawa applied his learned skills to Keirin bikes, which, to ensure fair play for those having a flutter, must be near identical. The frames have to be steel, and all components must be approved by the Nihon Jitensha Shinkōkai (NJS), the sport’s governing body. The NJS seldom changes its standards, so the bikes have barely changed since the 1970s, bar contemporary drive chain components.

The sport’s restrictive standards may seem at odds with creativity, yet Nagasawa can work magic with lengths of Japanese Tange chromoly steel tubing and a brazing torch like few others. Note the heart on the forks, a tribute to the late, great Ugo.

A £104 million funding package has been made available to the Walk Wheel Cycle Trust (WWCT) by the British government, to be spent on improving walking and cycling routes around the country, making them safer and more accessible for more people.

The health and societal benefits of encouraging people to cycle are well documented, but, just like last year, we’re left wondering whether this sum is even close to being enough to achieve meaningful updates to a network that the charity charged with looking after them admits are in need of much improvement.

The WWCT is a Bristol-based charity, formerly known as Sustrans, which is responsible for developing, maintaining and improving the National Cycle Network (NCN), a web of signed cycling routes that roll across the country, covering a total distance of 12,739 miles (20,501km), which was initially launched with a £42.5 million National Lottery grant 30 years ago, in 1995.

The funding package was announced at the Active Travel England’s (ATE) ‘Making Active Places’ conference in Manchester on Tuesday by transport secretary Heidi Alexander, when the Government positioned it as part of what they described as a 'record investment' in non-motorised travel, saying the sum builds on their commitment to establish the basis of a national active travel network by 2030, which will benefit millions of people across England.

In reality, the funding package (which is utterly dwarfed by the £27 billion investment the government recently pledged to spend upgrading the country's motorways and A -roads) had already been earmarked for use in improving active travel routes as part of the Cycling and Walking Investment Strategy, but what will be interesting is how and where the WWCT choose to spend the money, and how far it can possibly be stretched.

According to the announcement, the cash will be spread across hundreds of projects aimed at establishing more traffic-free routes, improving surfaces and making crossings safer, and there was also talk of consolidating local active-travel plans into a single national digital platform.

Cycling Weekly subsequently asked the charity for more details on how it intended to use the £104 million.

"Funding will be allocated to projects across England, benefiting a wide range of communities," said Carole Patrick, National Cycle Network Director at Walk Wheel Cycle Trust.

"Major projects under development include upgrades to the English portion of the Avenue Verte [the National Cycle Network route linking London and Paris], as well as new walking, wheeling and cycling routes that make use of opportunities created by the HS2 corridor.

"The National Cycle Network is an incredible resource. However, it faces challenges. Many routes need to be improved to make them more inclusive and the network is vulnerable to climate impacts. This funding will allow us to make it safer and more accessible – moving on-road sections to new traffic-free paths, removing barriers, resurfacing and widening paths, and making the network safer for women and girls."

This last goal relates to a gender gap that the charity has identified through their Walking and Cycling Index, published annually each March, which clearly and persistently shows that twice as many men are regularly cycling as women, and that women and girls feel less safe while riding bikes than their male counterparts.

In March this year, Patrick wrote about how the WWCT are working to build safer active travel networks that are better designed for women and girls, with campaigns to achieve improved lighting being a big focus.

These are laudable objectives, but concerns remain about how realistic such goals are with such relatively modest levels of funding.

Bikepacking luggage brand Tailfin is to join Castelli and Sportful in the MVC Group portfolio, after being acquired by the Italian holding company.

Tailfin was founded in Bristol, England, in 2017 by engineer Nick Broadbent, and has become renowned in the gravel and bikepacking community for its innovative luggage systems. Among these are the Speedpack and Cargopack systems, which feature a lightweight rack and bag and can be fitted, pretty much, to any machine.

Broadbent and his team will maintain a minority stake in Tailfin and continue to manage the company, while at the same time being able to take advantage of MVC's global presence, according to a statement released by MVC. The past five years has seen Tailfin grow by an average 50%, with 2025 seeing nearly €10 million in revenues globally, most in the UK, US and Germany. The company has an enviable register of R&D riders helping to develop its products, Aussie ultra-riding veteran Lachlan Morton and former Paris-Roubaix winner Alison Jackson among them.

Broadbent said: "Since Tailfin was founded, we have invested heavily in innovation to develop products that set the standard within the rapidly growing category of bikepacking and adventure cycling. Joining MVC Group will allow us to accelerate this journey further, leveraging the Group’s industrial strength and international presence, while preserving the identity, autonomy and innovation culture that have made Tailfin so successful.”

MVC Group, which is headquartered in the Veneto region of northern Italy and specialises in apparel for cycling and outdoor sports, is in the process of an international expansion, with the Tailfin acquisition forming part of this. It considers the UK brand "highly complementary" to its Castelli and Sportful offerings.

MVC CEO Emilo Foà said in a statement: "With Tailfin, we are not simply adding a new product category: we are integrating a leading brand whose positioning around excellence and strong focus on innovation are fully aligned with our own brands, while also being complementary to their offering.

"We are delighted to welcome Nick and the entire team, and look forward to working together to unlock Tailfin’s significant potential for further international growth and to embark on a new phase of shared development."

A decade had passed since I last spoke to Bob Munro, and it seems rude to admit it, but I'd assumed he was dead. When we spoke in 2016, he told me he was living with multiple myeloma, a rare form of blood cancer that affects the bones – a diagnosis with grim statistics: one in five patients died within three months, and nearly half within five years. Munro was approaching the five-year mark, and he told me he felt lucky to be alive. How, then, was he still around 10 years on?

His email arrived shortly before this year's Tour de France, with "Blast from the past" in the subject line – and "blast" was no mere figure of speech. Munro was getting in touch not to tell me he was still alive, nor just that he was still cycling, but that he was about to ride the full route of the Tour at the age of 66. Unable to find a polite way to ask "How the hell is this possible?", I suggested we catch up properly when he got back.

A month later, the man who appears on my screen from his home in Windsor – once he has worked out how to use Google Meet – is tanned, lean and as vibrant as when we spoke a decade ago. But his astonishing health must wait. First, I want to hear what it was like climbing Alpe d'Huez twice after nearly 3,000km of riding. "It took me bloody hours to get up there," says Munro with a wry grin, describing the finale of stage 19. "It was horrendous. But it was the best day and the worst day cycling all at the same time."

That has been the theme of Munro's life since we last spoke: terrible lows and incredible highs in rapid succession. Just five years ago, he was broken and housebound, but by the end of last year he had signed up for Cure Leukaemia's 'Tour 21' challenge – riding the full route of the 2026 Tour one week ahead of the pros. As it turned out, it was even more difficult than he could have anticipated. Temperatures soared into the high 30s every day and, as the oldest rider in the 12-strong group, he was relying on the only two slower than him for company at the back – until both crashed and had to abandon. "That left me as the weakest link, the lanterne rouge of the event," Munro says. "It just put extra psychological pressure on, knowing I was the one effectively setting the time limit every day."

As if that burden were not enough, towards the end of the second week his legs began to swell, and the rest of his body soon followed. "I spoke to the doctor who was with us," he says, "and we concluded that it was probably fluid retention from overdosing on electrolytes – I'd been putting two tabs in every bottle." At its peak, the swelling added 10kg to his weight – far from ideal before a stage featuring 5,400m of ascent. Thankfully, there was plenty of descending in the meantime. "From the Col de Noyer, it was sweeping downhill for what felt like most of the rest of the day," he says, still revelling in the memory of stage 19. "The scenery on those descents, it was just brilliant. The best day of cycling I've ever had."

Munro is refreshingly no-nonsense about struggles on the bike. He has known true suffering, more of it than anyone should have to go through. On a 2019 trip to France, for instance, he sustained an excruciating injury. "Descending Col d'Izoard, I hit a pothole and the pain went straight through my back. I thought, 'Oh shit, I think I've got a collapsed vertebra.' I was in so much pain that I had to stand on the pedals the whole way down." That evening he could barely sit or lie down, yet the next morning he was back on his bike. "I was thinking of Geraint Thomas, that time he rode a Tour stage [in 2013] with a cracked pelvis – and I rode my best-ever time up Alpe d'Huez with a collapsed vertebra. Having said that, I didn't cycle again after that day for about nine months."

That back injury, Munro soon realised, was a sign that the drugs had stopped working and tumours were forming again, weakening his bones. "I'd taken about 10 different lines of treatment, and I'd run out of options," he says. "My bones were breaking so often – I had eight fractured ribs in the space of 18 months, as well as the collapsed vertebra, a fractured arm and a fractured leg. Just coughing or rolling over in bed – or even a wave hitting me in the sea – was enough to fracture a rib."

By 2021, Munro was running out of hope. "I remember my wife and I sitting in a cocktail bar celebrating our wedding anniversary, and I said, 'I'm glad we're having a nice time because I think this is probably our last anniversary.'" His wife was taken aback by his uncharacteristic pessimism, but one drug after another had failed to work in the long term, and the reality had become impossible to ignore. A glimmer of hope arrived the following February when he was invited to join a clinical trial of a new immunotherapy treatment at the Royal Marsden in London. The impact was punishing but ultimately remarkable. "I had a really bad year of side effects," says Munro, "but by the end of that first year [2022], I was in complete remission – for the first time in 11 years of continuous treatment. It's just a miracle, really."

For the past four years, Munro's monthly scans have detected no cancer, and he's back to being "Mr Optimistic". "It's still not classed as a cure, but I'm daring to believe it might be," he says, adding that he has voluntarily stopped taking the "miracle" drug to avoid the side effects. As soon as he was feeling better, Munro's thoughts returned to cycling. In our original interview in 2016, he told me about founding a London–Paris fundraising ride for Myeloma UK – an event that has since raised more than £1.7m. Riding the full route of the Tour de France naturally appealed as an even grander challenge; the only question mark hung over raising the minimum £30k in sponsorship.

Munro laughs at the irony: living so much longer than expected had begun to make him worry about how far his savings would have to stretch. But he need not have worried. Having twice cycled from Land's End to John o' Groats as a ride leader the previous summer – and having personally raised more than a quarter of a million pounds over the past decade – upping the fundraising ante proved well within his capability. Ultimately, he would go on to raise more than double the target.

Securing the cash was arguably the easy part. To prepare for the formidable physical toll of the route, Munro drew up a plan with coach Jake Hollins (topp-cycling.com). "From the start of the year I was doing at least 200 miles every week, 80% at Zone 2, and throwing in the odd 100-miler." The work saw his FTP rise from 275 to 298 watts, and his weight drop from 93 to 88kg. Seeking benchmarks among previous participants, he tracked down the heaviest and oldest riders to have completed all 21 stages. "Both happened to be Americans – the big guy told me he was 265lb, which is 120kg. The oldest guy was 69, three years older than me. So, in both cases, it gave me a bit of encouragement."

Munro has continued working as a cycling tour leader, has his own charity tour operation (grandtourcycling.org), and has even qualified as a Bikeability instructor. "I'm now a professional cyclist – I get paid to ride my bike," he jokes, but beneath the humour lies a serious point: he is loving life. "I'm 66, and while my friends have all retired, I've basically gone back to work." Munro previously worked in foreign exchange in the City until illness forced him to step away. I wonder whether, in a strange way, he is happier now than he was before cancer. "Absolutely, yeah," he says. "It's incredible. It's such a turnaround. I mean, I wouldn't advise anybody to use the method I used to get there, but I'm still thankful for it."

The perks of a City income evidently pale beside an extra 10 years of life. "I remember when I was diagnosed, it was my younger son's 21st birthday, and obviously it was ruined – Dad was in hospital. But since then, my eldest has married, and we have grandchildren, two girls, [aged] three and seven. I just feel so lucky." Wedding anniversaries are no longer overshadowed by the fear that each might be his last – just in time for the couple's upcoming 40th. Recalling that uncharacteristic moment of pessimism in the cocktail bar, he tells me he made it up to his wife the following year with a special card. As he holds it up to the camera, I feel less guilty about assuming I would never hear from him again. It is plain black except for three words in white block capitals at its centre: "NOT DEAD YET."

To donate to Bob Munro's fundraising appeal, visit: shorturl.at/KuYru. Entry details for next year's Tour 21 available here: shorturl.at/eMtUN

Team-mate's view: 'His smile kept me going'

Fellow 'Tour 21' rider Jeff Davis, 53, from Redondo Beach, California, had his own deeply personal motivation for signing up to the challenge

"My daughter [Lucy] was diagnosed with leukaemia three years ago, when she was 17. Having been a cyclist for nearly 30 years, I turned to cycling to ease my sorrows – it has really helped me cope with what we're dealing with as a family.

"I saw a mini documentary [about 'Tour 21'], which inspired me to step forward. It felt like a good way to pay it forward and to do something good with my passion while helping other families.

"I had a bike crash about two months before the event and had surgery on my shoulder, so I was battling the consequences of that. The weakness on the affected side made me adjust my position on the bike, meaning my lower back was screaming at me every day.

"Bob was an inspiration to me – just seeing him battle adversity day in, day out was such a motivator. Seeing his smile every day really, really helped me get back on the bike and keep going. Getting to know him, and hearing that a medical trial saved his life, has given our family some hope too."

This article was first published in the 27 August 2026 print edition of Cycling Weekly magazine – available to buy on the newsstand every Thursday (UK only) while digital versions are available on Apple News and Readly. Subscriptions through Magazine's Direct.

British premium cycling clothing brand Rapha is set to have a "proposed organisational restructure and a formal consultation process", as the company prepares to post deepening financial losses. Despite this, Rapha says that its "strategy is working".

A press release on Wednesday afternoon, sent after Fran Millar announced that she had resigned as CEO, revealed that turnover had dropped by £7m from £96m in FY24, the period ending 26 January 2025, to £89m in FY25, the period ending 25 January 2026.

The brand also posted a trading loss in its EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) of £5.6m this year, an increase from £2.6m the previous year. Its operating loss is now at £21.2m, which has increased from £17.2m the previous financial year. This means losses for the ninth year in a row.

The press release, shared with Cycling Weekly, reads: "These numbers reflect deliberate decisions to invest in our brand, product quality, cycling communities and customer experiences, while reducing our reliance on discount and promotional related activities – choices that will strengthen the business over time.

"Early signs in the current financial year suggest the strategy is working. We are seeing encouraging revenue growth in a number of our key territories and in our like-for-like Clubhouses, with fewer days on promotion and increased customer acquisition vs last year. Rapha Cycling Club membership has returned to growth, increasing by 18% year-to-date.

"Rapha's new Clubhouse concept is also performing strongly: Shanghai has recorded some of the highest footfall across the global Clubhouse network, and Bentonville has attracted 31% more new customers year on year. Customer lifetime value is growing and product innovation in our pinnacle performance range, Pro Team, is positively impacting sales."

Last year, it was explained that a large part of Rapha’s annual losses stems from an amortisation, which is responsible for around £10m of losses a year.

As a result of the company's financial situation, "significant changes" are now planned at Rapha to try and ensure the future of the brand. The first of these was confirmed as Millar's departure.

"This involves a proposed organisational restructure and a formal consultation process with affected team members will now take place," the press release explains. "We believe these proposed changes are necessary but recognise the personal impact on affected colleagues, and we do not take these decisions lightly."

The company is owned by brothers Steuart and Tom Walton, the grandchildren of the billionaire founders of the retail giant Walmart. "My brother and I have been majority owners of Rapha for nine years," Steuart Walton said. "We love the brand, the product, and what Rapha stands for, and we are deeply grateful to the people who have made the company so special.

“Our belief in Rapha has not changed. We remain committed to the power of cycling to make the world a better place and to Rapha’s unique role in advancing that idea. We are confident in the long-term future of the brand and committed to helping Rapha achieve its ambitions."

UK cycling retailer Sigma Sports has returned to profit following three years of losses amounting to £8m.

The London-based business posted a pre-tax profit of £171,268 in its latest accounts, which were published on Companies House last week and cover the year to 31 December 2025. The results follow three years in the red, with pre-tax losses of over £1m in 2024, £3m in 2023 and £4m in 2022.

On publishing the deep losses of 2022, Sigma Sports’ chief financial officer Oliver Lawson cited the cost-of-living crisis, rising interest rates, and the global economic impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, all of which contributed to a “decline in consumer confidence”.

The company’s latest accounts point to a recovery in the industry, which lulled after the boom in popularity during the Covid pandemic.

“2025 was a positive year for Sigma Sports, with the business maintaining its position as the leading premium retailer in the sector,” Lawson wrote in the accounts published last week.

“Growth was driven by both online and physical retail channels, reinforcing the importance of an omnichannel approach.”

Sigma Sports, whose original store was founded in Hampton Wick, London, in 1992, expanded its high street presence in 2025 by opening its third store, this time in Letchworth Garden City, just north of the capital. The opening “exceeded expectations”, Lawson wrote, generating revenues of £2m from April to December, and encouraging the directors to open a fourth store in Wilmslow, in the north west of England, earlier this year.

The company also grew its head count in 2025, up from 106 full-time employees to 128.

Sigma Sports’ most profitable years came during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021, when demand for sports equipment ballooned.

Across the two years, the company posted pre-tax profits of more than £14m, but experienced difficulty in the subsequent years, like many retailers in the UK, as the cost-of-living crisis deepened.

In late 2023, one of Sigma Sports’ main competitors in the UK market, Wiggle Chain Reaction Cycles, entered administration. Sigma Sports went on to experience “an acceleration of performance” following Wiggle's demise, and gained market share, Lawson notes in the 2024 accounts.

The business’s latest results give no indication of performance in 2026. Sigma Sports relies on the UK market for 97% of its trade.

Cycling Weekly has heard from other sources in the industry that this year has generally been a positive one for retailers.

“Data from the Bicycle Association has shown month-on-month growth through the year, and August was one of the highest grossing months,” said Mike Rice of Balfe’s Bikes.

“I think the cycle industry is returning to a growth mode and it’s in a healthier position than it has been for years in the post-Covid era.”

Fran Millar has left Rapha as CEO after two years at the cycling clothing brand, warning of "significant operational changes" to come.

First reported by Escape Collective early on Wednesday, the news was confirmed by the now-former CEO herself in an Instagram post. Rapha is yet to comment.

Millar suggested in her post that her "vision and strategy" remained in place, with Escape reporting that employees had been told that her five-year plan would continue. She was appointed in September 2024, after a career which had seen her work as CEO of British clothing brand Belstaff, which was owned by Ineos CEO Sir Jim Ratcliffe at the time, and previously in charge of Team Ineos in cycling.

Last October, Rapha revealed financial losses for the eighth year in a row, but Millar said there was no need for alarm bells. The company's accounts showed an operating loss of £17.2m. This is a slight improvement on the previous year, when the operating loss totalled £21.2m. In the same accounts, the directors reduced the company's value by £102m.

"After two bonkers and brilliant years, I’ve decided to leave Rapha," Millar wrote on Wednesday. "The vision and strategy I set are in place, and the path ahead for the brand is clear. What remains is delivery.

"To support that, the business will make significant organisational changes to reduce cost and drive efficiency, and those changes call for a different governance and leadership structure. With that in mind, I proposed to the board that I step down as CEO.

"I am incredibly proud of the passionate, loyal, committed people who work at Rapha across the world and it has been a joy to lead them for two years.

"All that remains to say is THANK YOU to our team, our members, our customers and the brand. It’s been an honour."

A large part of Rapha’s annual losses stems from an amortisation, which is responsible for around £10m of losses a year. "It’s an accounting adjustment," Michelle Woolaghan, Rapha's chief financial officer, explained last year.

Last year, Rapha announced it was parting ways with EF Pro Cycling’s men’s and women’s teams after seven years, but signed a new partnership with the USA national team from 2026 to 2029. At the beginning of the year, Rapha closed five of its Clubhouses across the USA and the UK; Millar called it a "painful decision" but the "right call" at the time.

It's understood that Millar's strategy included reducing Rapha's range of clothing and slowing discounting on products, which peaked after the Covid pandemic.

The company is owned by brothers Steuart and Tom Walton, the grandchildren of the billionaire founders of the retail giant Walmart.

“I was on the bus with the Visma guys, like with Wout van Aert and Pascal Eenkhoorn, and really from then, all I've aspired to do is to race for Visma one day, and hopefully ride the Tour de France with them.”

Xander Graham is reflecting on an extraordinary day five years ago, which burns bright in his memory, when, during stage seven of the 2021 Tour of Britain, he kept pace with a breakaway group as they rode towards his hometown of Edinburgh. Aged just 12 at the time, he was rewarded for his efforts by being handed a bidon by Eenkhoorn, who was then riding for Jumbo-Visma, and was later invited to meet the team. The video clip of the moment went viral, but now the story has gone almost full circle.

Now 17, Graham still has that bidon and knows exactly where it is (“on a shelf in my garage”). But as of this week, he also has something else, something that is putting him within touching distance of the dream he’s been holding onto for the last five years: a contract with JEGG-SKIL-DJR, a Dutch team who are directly affiliated with Visma-Lease a Bike.

“I was already a fan of Visma back then,” he tells Cycling Weekly. “But from that day onwards, it definitely made me love them, and they became my favourite team now. So, yeah, it really is like a dream come true.”

But it hasn’t come out of nowhere. In the intervening five years, Graham has been working hard to make his fream come true. A key member of the Yorkshire-based Prologue Cycling Team, he is halfway through a two-year programme with the Manchester Cycling Academy.

“I'm also a beneficiary of the Braveheart programme in Scotland,” he tells me. “The fund supports riders with funding for transport and costs, so they can get across to Europe to race, which is a massive help for me.”

As commentators Ned Boulting and Adam Blythe noted at the time, when they described the encounter as the best moment of the tour thus far, the Scottish youngster showed remarkable pace even as a pre-teen.

“I rode my bike from being four years old,” Xander tells me. “I used to do local mountain-bike dirt grits and then from there some cyclocross and a bit of road. From under-14 to under-16, I did every discipline – mountain biking, cyclocross, road and track – but for this last year, I've fully focused on road riding.”

And it has paid off. In spring this year, he was made aware of a young talent day being held by JEGG for under-19s.

“Loads of people applied, but I got through,” Xander explains. “Then we had to do testing in Belgium. Two or three weeks later I got a message from the head of JEGG, and he invited me to a training camp in Germany. After that he said that there was a space on the team for me.”

“I'll be based at home in Edinburgh, but I’ll fly out to races and training camps and stuff like that. I've got a training camp with them later in the year – that will be the first time that I’ll actually meet up with them.”

Major outdoor retailer Backcountry today announced its acquisition of Velofix, a mobile bike shop network operating across the United States and Canada.

Backcountry plans to integrate the network into its bike assembly and delivery operations, helping bridge the gap between a boxed bicycle arriving at a customer’s door and getting them ready to ride.

Velofix’s 96 certified technicians – or bike mechanics – work out of fully equipped vans, bringing the repair shop to customers’ front doors.

"A rider in Boulder or Boston can order a bike from us and have a Velofix technician build it, tune it, and hand it over ready to ride," said Kevin Lenau, Backcountry’s president.

The transaction closed Sept. 17. Financial terms were not disclosed.

The deal follows a series of acquisitions since CSC Generation bought Backcountry in September 2024. Backcountry added Utah-based Level Nine Sports in July 2025, then acquired Velotech, the parent company of BikeTiresDirect, Western Bikeworks and TriSports, later that year. With Competitive Cyclist already in the portfolio, Backcountry is assembling quite a collection of cycling businesses.

Outside cycling, Backcountry acquired outdoor apparel and gear brand Coalatree in April 2026. It also launched Backcountry Garage, an incubator intended to help outdoor brands grow through access to its resources, expertise and distribution.

Backcountry says it plans to expand Velofix’s services but hasn’t detailed those additions. It also hasn't yet revealed when it will integrate the mobile network into its operations.

For many years, Wiggle was the first place most people would look when searching for cycling equipment and apparel, from spare tubes, tools, repair kits and affordable dhb cycling shorts and jerseys through to helmets, shoes, saddles, pedals, pumps, frames and entire bikes. It was a one-stop Amazon for bike riders. You even used to get a little packet of sweets with each delivery.

But while Wiggle seemed all-powerful, behind the scenes elements were failing and eventually the wheels fell off. The company went into administration three years ago, was subsequently acquired by Frasers Group for a bargain and now, as we reported last week, even the URL has disappeared, along with the once-ubiquitous logo. The entire brand has seemingly been swallowed by another subsidiary of the Fraser Group: Evans Cycles.

So, what does the demise of the major player in the online cycling market mean? Why did it happen, where are riders spending their money now, and how has it impacted other retailers in the bike businesses?

Obviously, the relentless rise of online retail within the cycling industry – epitomised by Wiggle – was not welcomed by all. Cycling shops, especially traditional and small independent stores, couldn’t compete on price with a massive company that operated on an industrial scale with comparatively small overheads. Of course, what web purchasers saved in discounts they lost in service and expertise, but still the market became increasingly challenging.

Some shops, including many with a long histories like Brixton Cycles, sadly shut, with the 'survive to 25' mantra wearing thin, but others doubled down on their bespoke credentials and/or evolved to offer online sales as well as in-store service. And finally this adaptability and tenacity appears to have paid some dividends.

“This has been a pretty good year for the cycle industry,” says Mike Rice, CEO of Balfe’s, which operates 12 bike shops across London and the South East, and also trades online. Like other similar-sized businesses, Balfe’s have been buffeted by some big headwinds in recent years, but Rice sounded very positive when Cycling Weekly spoke to him this week.

“Data from the Bicycle Association has shown month-on-month growth throughout the year, and August was one of the highest grossing months,” he told me. “I think the cycle industry is returning to a growth mode and it’s in a healthier position than it has been for years – in the post-COVID era.”

His sentiments are backed up by the recently released accounts of Sigma Sports, which reveal the company made a profit last year, for the first time since 2021.

Rice reports an increase in sales both in-store and online. “We've adapted our product range to fill some of the voids that had been created by the demise of Wiggle Chain Reaction. We now have around 70,000 active SKUs on our website, and over time we’re looking to grow that. But at Balfe we operate a single pricing policy, so the price you see on the web is the price you pay in store. It's our duty to give a consistent offering.”

This last point seems key. “Sales online is generally driven by price,” observes Justin Hoy, MD of Pronto Bikes in Frome, Somerset. Hoy has completely eschewed web sales because of the pressures to discount in the online marketplace, but his company is growing and has very advanced plans to open a second store in Ringwood before the end of this year.

“I don't want to be in a price war with Merlin, Wiggle, Sigma Sport or whoever,” he says. “It's a lot of work for little gain. It seems all those businesses that have been big online, have either gone bankrupt or are really struggling. To me, there's something wrong with that business model.

“We announced that we'd be opening Ringwood a couple of weeks ago, and a couple of days later Primera closed down. But I think they've been suckered down that line of the internet and well, you can only get to a certain point. I mean, even Planet X is gone.

“We're growing, which is great. But if we're suddenly making less margin, because we've got to match whoever else is online, we're going to be busy fools. It's not financially viable to continue like that.”

Hoy has taken a very different approach. “We have set ourselves up as a community,” he tells me. “Our business is not just about offering products that people want to buy, but offering them the ability to meet other people and go riding together. People don't join the cycle industry to get rich, because it's not a massively lucrative thing for anyone. They join it because they like riding bikes. And we love riding bikes.

“We opened in Frome in Covid, and started a club off the back of the shop: Pronto CC. Because of Covid, we were meeting in the car park across the road and groups of six would do a little chain gang ride. The first week we announced it, 30 people turned up. And then word got round, and three weeks later we had 85 people rock up for this chain gang ride. Soon we got to the point where we’re having Christmas parties with 150 people, which is brilliant.

“You feed the shop by people coming in, and it being have a place to meet. We've got a cafe in here, so it's a nice place for people to sit and sit and chill out and drink a cup of coffee mid-ride, or to meet to go for a ride.”

For Hoy, selling kit online at discounted prices but without the service is the antithesis of the community-based business he has worked hard to build. “If people want to buy things online, that will happen,” he admits, but says something gets lost along the way.

“We've done super well with Pinarello, because they don't allow you to sell online. You're not allowed to ship a Pinarello bike. That's great, from my point of view, and it’s why the brand has grown. The customer sees the value in that product, because they've got to come into a shop, they've got to be fitted to it. They get to pick it up and they get to experience that sense of collection. It's not just opening a parcel."

And when people come into a bricks-and-mortar store like Pronto Bikes, they get the benefit of many years’ experience and knowledge.

“We've been in the bike industry long enough to know what's going on,” says Hoy. “Tony [from Torke Cycling], one of the best bike fitters in the world, works from here. People fly in from bike shops around the world to get taught by Tony.

“And we stock up to £15,000 worth of shoes, because everyone's feet are different. [An online outfitter] will just sell someone a pair of shoes because they can, but we want to be able look at someone's feet and sell them the shoe that fits them best. It adds real value to what you offer, and it's the right thing to do.”

World Bicycle Relief (WBR), the charity that provides sturdy bicycles to rural communities across the globe, has announced the first upgrade to its two-chain Buffalo bike.

The Buffalo Pro is the newest iteration of the Utility S2 bike that was released in July 2024 and bore an innovative drivetrain with two chains. The system, described as an “engineering feat”, allows riders to backpedal shift across two chain tensions to swap between two gears.

Last week, WBR announced the release of two updated bike models: the two-chain Buffalo Pro and single-speed Buffalo One. The new versions build on two decades of design for the charity’s flagship bike, of which more than a million have now been distributed around the world.

Speaking to Cycling Weekly, Andy Samways, WBR’s VP of product development, explained the latest updates focused on the bike as a whole, rather than the just dual drivetrain.

“We were broadly happy with our bike. It’s been doing really well,” Samways said. “We hit a million last year, and so in that time, I think we’d amassed a bunch of observations and things we’d seen, some things we wanted to tackle, and so we just took a pass through all of those issues.”

The changes include front and back disc brakes on the Pro model, an updated stand to make loading and unloading cargo more stable, and the introduction of two frame sizes: standard and large. The previous model was one size fits all.

“Although it’s not a huge technical innovation for us, it does mean that more people can ride the bike,” said Samways of the size options.

“Taller riders never complained about the bike, but it was clear to us from watching how they use it and how they ride that there was an opportunity to make the bike more comfortable and functional for them.

“Similarly, when we were testing our very early prototypes of this generation in Kenya, a woman came to us and asked if we sold children’s bikes, and we don’t. Rather than produce a kids’ bike, we want to make sure that a much younger rider can get on our bikes, and so the geometry changes for our standard-sized bike allow us to get a much shorter, much younger rider on that bike.”

WBR runs bike distribution programmes in seven countries – Zimbabwe, Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania and Colombia – although its bikes are present in at least 28.

The latest iteration of Buffalo bikes took three years to design and develop, and are already being rolled out into communities.

The cost to donate a single-speed Buffalo One is £138 ($185), which covers the price of materials, manufacturing and distribution. A two-speed Buffalo Pro is around £20 ($27) more.

“That two-speed drivetrain is still the star of the show,” said Samways, adding that the system underwent no major changes in the update.

“It’s a product that, because it’s so unique, it’s very much at the beginning of its life,” he said.

“If you look at a derailleur, for example, that’s had like 100 years of innovations and improvements and refinements, and this is a very new thing. We know there’s plenty of room to keep improving that, so we’ve been working on bearings and material processes, and just trying to refine it as we learn about how it behaves in the field.”

As it stands, the single-speed Buffalo One is best for users on flat terrain, while the two-chain Buffalo Pro was built to withstand hillier regions, as well as cargo loads sometimes exceeding 100kg.

Samways, who has been working with WBR since 2010 and was previously employed by parts manufacturer SRAM to develop drivetrain solutions for the charity, hopes one day to have the two-chain technology on all Buffalo bikes.

“That’ll be something we’ll look at in the future,” he said. “But it does take time for us to work the manufacturing, find the efficiencies, and bring it down to a price where we can make it a standard feature.”

It's all part of WBR's commitment to keep developing. As the charity's bikes reach more people, and are ridden to their limits on hard-wearing terrain, Samways and his team of around 17 developers are always looking for ways to make the design more durable and accessible.

“We’re never done [innovating],” he said. “Our bikes are used so hard for so long. We will work on one set of problems, and then we’ll move on to the next. We’ll just keep chipping away at whatever presents itself as the next big problem.”

I’ve always liked long-sleeved jerseys. I have weirdly long arms that I’ve never really liked, and I enjoy my riding more if I can’t see them.

In winter, it’s fine. Winter jerseys have long sleeves. In summer, it’s harder. The vast majority of modern summer jerseys are short-sleeved, and the handful of properly light long-sleeved ones are never really comfortable because the arms are weirdly stretchy. So that means the irritation of arm-warmers, and the annual spring ritual where I lose my grip on an arm-warmer as I’m pulling it on and smack myself in the face.

It never used to be like this. I’m always a bit self-conscious about how long I’ve been a bike rider but I’m not ashamed to admit to being old enough to remember that perfectly normal, usable, long-sleeved and lightweight jerseys definitely used to exist.

Last week I punched myself in the face for the second time this year and decided that enough was enough. Down I went to the bottom of my kit drawer and found a couple of old long-sleeved jerseys. I put one on. In disbelief, I took it off and tried the other one. It was the same. They were so big I could have set myself up in there with a pair of binoculars and a packed lunch and used it as a bird-hide.

That at least solved the mystery of why the sleeves used to fit better, but it left a lot of other questions - did I really race in one of these things?

Both horrified and curious, I watched some old bike-racing videos. And, right enough, all jerseys used to be much, much baggier. I found some footage of Marco Pantani wearing a skinsuit so generous he could have turned around inside it and looked out of his own backside to see if Jan Ullrich was sneaking up on him, and no one would have noticed. Magnus Backstedt won Paris-Roubaix in a jersey he and both his daughters could wear at once.

So, anyway, I went for a ride in my bird-hide. And it was just lovely. There was a delightful current of air that could drift through. A wasp that flew in just turned around and flew out again. I could get things in and out of my pockets so easily that at one point I fished out a gel just so I could read the recycling information on the packet. It was like going cycling in a dressing gown, in a good way.

I’ll admit there are downsides. Some bits of flapping feel like they add to the ventilation, but some bits are just irritating; I don’t need the ability to assess the angle of a crosswind from the flags on my arms. And I remember that a baggy jersey stretches over time, so that the pockets gradually stop being on your lower back, and creep ever downwards to create the sort of lumpy-buttocked silhouette more normally associated with an iffy Turkish cosmetic surgeon.

And of course it’s slower. Ultimately, that’s why it all changed. Mark Cavendish won the Worlds in 2011 in a skinsuit, and suddenly jerseys got tight. They also got more expensive – you can make a baggy jersey out of anything and be a bit slapdash about it. To make a good tight one, you need to buy better fabrics, make more sizes, maybe do some aero testing, and use some more-considered seam patterns.

It's been a classic great-leap-sideways. Less comfortable, more expensive, slightly faster. It feels like an odd set of trade-offs for 99% of us, 99% of the time.

If you’ve got a big old jersey sitting in a drawer, or you can find one second-hand, give it a go. You might like it.

The internet is up in arms after an ad released by sports betting company Novig starring Sydney Sweeney stirred controversy this past week. The ad features Sweeney, an American actress, using different sports equipment to cover elements of her naked body, whilst she says the words ‘sports’, and then, ‘it’s just sports’.

The response from female athletes has been pretty loud and unanimous, expressing frustration with what they perceive to be the sexualisation and mockery of women in sport, with several prominent athletes taking to social media with content showing what a woman in sport looks like to them. Amongst others, Tour de France Femmes winner Demi Vollering shared a reel with her audience in which she also said; “it’s also sad women still need to have this conversation”.

Women’s sport has been on the rise in recent years, with more and more eyes tuning in and, as a response, better funding going into it. We saw the Lionesses (England’s women’s football team) win Euros in 2022 and 2025, which helped stir up public interest in women’s sport in the UK, and in cycling we have recently seen the return of the women’s edition of the Tour De France with viewership increasing year on year and crowds turning out in full force to spectate the race.

The stats have shown that women’s sports’ popularity is on the rise, and with this comes the respect for and perception of the female athletes themselves. For me that is why this ad felt like such a kick in the teeth to a movement that has been gaining so much traction in recent years.

As a professional female athlete, I know how hard it can be to get people to take you seriously in your sport and how hard it is to maintain female participation levels. Two-thirds of teenage girls drop out of sport by the age of 16 as a result of the barriers to continued participation. There exist many cultural and social reasons for this. The barriers to reaching a level where you can earn a full-time salary from your sport are greater still.

Our bodies go through such extreme changes in adolescence, and body confidence can really impact levels of participation in young people, particularly women. Add in the media shooting out an advert of a naked, slim, beautiful actress in sporting contexts, and you send a rather extreme, unhealthy message to these young women about what a woman in sport should look like.

Some have sprung to the defence of the advert, and Sweeney herself pointed out that professional athletes have taken part in naked photoshoots in the past, asking where the difference is with the Novig campaign.

For me, the clear distinction here lies in a professional showing off their athletic body with the goal of promoting body positivity: showing its strength and power. Versus someone who is not an athlete sexualising their body in order to sell a product. In this instance, a gambling product aimed at men. It is a celebration of male voyeurism rather than a celebration of an athletic female body.

There is no denying that this advert has been successful. It has been divisive and is clearly provocative, perhaps made intentionally to anger people. The age-old saying ‘no PR is bad PR’ seems to apply here, as the backlash has meant that the advert has spread even further, and perhaps to new audiences. Even by the people it upset.

I see these conversations as an opportunity to highlight women’s sport in a positive light and the need for these discussions about respect for women in sport, as well as their participation in sport at all levels. What shocked me the most this week was not the advert itself, but the comments on the social media feeds of the female athletes who spoke out. Misogyny is still very much present in some parts of our society, and, unfortunately for me, a section of the internet that was fed my content via the algorithm.

Amongst many rather unpleasant comments, a follower of mine told another woman in my comments to ‘go back to the kitchen’, while I was told by other men that “nobody cares about women's sports”, and “Riding a bike? Wow…you’ve achieved what most have by age 6”. There were also comments about how only five women would be able to finish the Tour if it was the length of the men’s race, and others such as “women’s sport is a joke”.

And this was only on my post. These comments are replicated thousands of times across multiple responses to the ad. This campaign really unearthed a wider and deeper problem, which is that there still exists a real societal issue with the perception of women, and in particular within sporting settings.

In 2026 this feels rather crazy to be saying, but I do think that with the rise in popularity of figures like Andrew Tate comes a rise in a rather depressing sub-section of society who really do lack respect for women in all walks of life.

So what can we do? We can keep shouting from the rooftops about how exciting women’s cycling is. (It really is!) We can inspire other women to get on two wheels or just move their bodies in the way they feel most comfortable. We can encourage those around us to interact with women’s sport in whatever way they can. We can support and encourage the female athletes in our lives: our mothers, our sisters and our daughters. Because this advert shouldn’t be a step back for women’s sport, but an opportunity for a huge leap forward.

Is cycling your career already, and if not, do you want it to be? We're hiring for a new role within the Cycling Weekly and Cyclingnews team. And, if your world revolves around bikes, we want to hear from you.

Cycling Weekly is the most-read cycling magazine in the UK, and cyclingweekly.com is one of the world's biggest cycling websites. This is a role that will help to shape, grow, and transform our brand, helping deliver and create social and video content that informs and inspires our audience. Our sibling title, Cyclingnews, is pretty big too, and this role will work across both brands.

This is a UK-based full-time role. It will take the form of hybrid working, with two days a week in our Winnersh office, close to Reading, and three days working from home. To apply for this role, please submit your CV and a covering letter explaining why this is your dream job.

If you haven't heard of our parent company, Future, it's the global leader in specialist media. With over 3,000 employees working across 200+ media brands, Future is a prime destination for passionate people worldwide looking to consume trusted, expert content that educates and inspires action - both online and off - through our specialist websites, magazines, events, newsletters, podcasts and social spaces.

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You'll be video presenting and storytelling, understanding the latest social media trends and create content that helps grow both brands' audiences.

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Interested? Find out more, and apply, here.

A new museum entirely dedicated to British bike racing is being planned for a town in Nottinghamshire where one of the greatest professional bike racers Britain has ever produced spent his formative years.

As youngster, Tom Simpson delivered groceries around the houses of Harworth and the Bassetlaw district, but he would go on to become a road-racing world champion, Olympic and Commonwealth medallist and, in 1962, the first British rider to ever wear the leader's yellow jersey in the Tour de France.

Tragically, during the 13th stage of the 1967 Tour de France, 29-year-old Simpson collapsed and died during the climb of Mont Ventoux, having suffered heart failure, which was officially recorded as having been caused by exhaustion, but has also been blamed on the use of alcohol and amphetamines, a practise prevalent at the time. A monument is now located on the spot where he fell.

The new museum won’t be named after Simpson, but the location has been chosen specifically to honour him, as came to light this week, after Bassetlaw Labour MP Jo White revealed in an interview printed in the Doncaster Free Press that she had been involved in talks with the curators of the proposed British Cycle Racing Museum.

“There are cycling museums in the UK, but nothing dedicated to this telling the story of British racing," says Chris Sidwell, who says he came up with the concept of the museum, and also just happens to be Tom Simpson's nephew.

"Cycle racing is our most successful Olympic sport, our highest funded Olympic sport. It's the pinnacle. British men and women have won all the grand tours. And it's not celebrated anywhere [apart from] a little bit in Manchester.

“I thought that Harworth, the place where Thompson comes from, was the ideal place for it to be. This is where the British men's yellow jerseys story started."

The plans have evolved to go beyond simply a museum, as Sidwell explains. "It will also be a community centre that will encourage cycling. We've got all sorts of little bolt-ons. We trying to connect up to the national cycle network as well from the site. We've built a green wheel cycleway around Harworth.

"We're trying to make it a destination. It's going to become a cycling town. It was a coal mining town. We haven't got coal anymore, we've got cycling - so we're selling cycling."

The ultra-cycling world is in mourning following the death of one of its luminaries, Max Riese. The Austrian was an accomplished ultra-distance racer, as well as the founder of gravel and ultra-riding community GravGrav.

The 33-year-old placed fourth in last year's Tour Divide – the blue riband ultra-bikepacking event. More recently he won the Hellenic Mountain Race in May and was second in the Silk Road Mountain race in August. Both major events on the ultra-racing calendar.

"It is with extremely heavy hearts that we share the news that Max Riese passed away in a fatal accident on the 15.09.26," read a statement released by GravGrav on social media last night.

It continued: "As we all know, Max is a special soul. Although ultra-racing is an individual pursuit, Max cared deeply about the people and the community around it.

"He leaves behind an irreplaceable space, in the larger community, for gravgrav, but mostly for his family, for Lisa, and his closest ones.

"Let’s all continue riding, exploring, bringing people together, and keep connecting the community Max cared about so deeply. Your spirit will live on in our hearts, in our ideas, and in our actions. You will be missed more than words can express."

It finished: "See you around, Max".

Tailfin, whom Riese represented as an R&D rider, posted a message on Instagram saying: "Rest in peace, Max Riese. A teammate, a friend and a competitor. Your spirit will live on through the community you built. See you on the climb, Max."

At once affable and passionate, Riese has featured in the web pages of Cycling Weekly previously. We ran the story last year when he set a record for a triple Everest, which he completed near his Salzburg home. He also appeared on Cycling Weekly's Going Long podcast, where he spoke about how he discovered a love of ultra-riding, including confounding restaurant proprietors by being able to order two pizzas in one go.

"It fascinated us," he said. "It was just this idea, like, 'can we do it?'. Like going from Salzburg to Munich and back in one day – over 500 kilometres. We had a bunch of friends that basically said, 'how about we try and do this route in 24 hours'? And it was just fun. Also the surreality of like, after 14 hours or something you arrive in Munich after 300 kilometres, and you go into a pizzeria and order two pizzas at once, and they look at you like 'Okay…."

Cycling Weekly's thoughts are with Max Riese's family and friends at this difficult time. The ultra-riding community will miss him.

Starting next week, a group of active Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), volunteers from Tower Lifeboat Station in London will embark on an eight-day, 540km bike ride to raise money for the charity, which saves lives at sea in the UK and Ireland.

It will take place from the charity’s headquarters in Poole to Lifeboat Pier in London, pedalling one kilometre for each life the crew has saved on the Thames since the station was established in 2002.

A core group of five or six cyclists will ride the entire route, visiting other lifeboat stations as they travel along England’s Southeast coast, via Cowes on the Isle of Wight, Littlehampton, Dungeness, Walmer and Whitstable, with additional riders joining the core group for single days. On the last leg, from Gravesend to London, the group are planning to cycle while wearing full gear.

The original plan was for the volunteer lifesavers to wear visible gear for most of the ride, and to invite more people to join them on various legs, but after recent incidents of aggression towards members of the RNLI by anti-immigrant belligerents, additional risk assessments have been made to protect the safety of the participants.

“We've had some really lovely messages of support, but we've also had some horrific messages,” explains ride organiser Toni Scarr. “So we won't be wearing any RNLI gear in various critical locations. We're also looking at the timing of where we go past a few places as well. We may well need to change our route.”

Founded in 1824, and now operating 238 lifeboat stations and 240 beach-based lifeguard units around the UK and Ireland, the RNLI is a charity that is entirely reliant on donations to perform its service, which has seen volunteers save over 146,700 lives to date. Having just had a recent intake of new volunteers, the Tower RNLI riders are using the challenge to raise money to help with training and equipment costs.

Based on the River Thames, providing a 24-hour search-and-rescue service on one of Britain's busiest waterways, Tower RNLI is currently the busiest lifeboat station in the entire country, with the crew responding to over 600 calls out from HM Coastguard every year. The goal of the ride is to raise £10,000 to help equip and train the new lifesavers so they are ready when the next emergency happens.

“The second of January next year is our 25th anniversary,” Tower RNLI volunteer and full-distance rider Nick Harding told Cycling Weekly. “We've been on 11,930 shouts in those 25 years, and 540 lives have been saved. When we started planning the ride, we were on 530, so the distance keeps getting a little bit longer.”

“Actually, it’s 541 lives saved now,” he adds, explaining about an incident the crew responded to last week. “If we need to throw in a couple of legs, or go around a park a few times [to make up the growing number], then we will, but we'll see how we feel towards the end.”

Even before donning their rescue gear for the final leg, the group is likely to look a little different to the average group of riders. “We're all using our own bikes,” Harding tells me. There's quite a wide range – someone's on a Brompton. I'm on a nice Cinelli gravel bike myself.”

Harding is a keen bikepacker, but the group will be very mixed, with some less experienced members. “We're not doing massive daily distances, but we want to visit as many lifeboat stations on the way as we can. Our longest day is 49 miles and our shortest day is the last day from Gravesend, which is just under 30.”

Like all good ideas, the seed for this concept was planted during a conversation in a pub, during the Tower’s Christmas party last year. “I was chatting to Toni [Scarr], and she said, let's do a group ride to mark the anniversary. By the end of the evening, she'd recruited half the crew to the cause. And this rides is what has transpired from that conversation.”

It transpires that Scarr has previous in this department. In 2014 she organised a Tower to Tours challenge that saw RNLI volunteers (in relay) run from London to Dover, swim the English Channel and then ride to the town of Tours in Centre-Val de Loire in France. So really, by comparison, this lot are getting off lightly.

"There's just a lot and going on and we haven't fundraised for a while," Scarr tells me. "But we've also had a massive recruitment recently. last time it was similar, in that we needed to train a whole load of new people, but that was 10 years ago. So, it has come round to that focus again. And it sounded like fun."

Support the Tower RNLI crew through their JustGiving fundraising page.

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

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

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

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

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

Swiss bike manufacturer Stromer has expanded the its recall of its electric commuter bikes due to a risk of failing suspension forks.

First announced last year, the e-bike company recalled 6,500 of its ST3, ST5 and ST7 models, fitted with WREN forks, because the suspension fork steerer tube "can fatigue prematurely and crack, break or separate during use and, as a result, the rider may lose control of his bike, posing fall and injury hazard".

At the time, the brand said it had received 15 reports of failing forks, of which eight led to injuries.

In light of the reports, Stromer told its customers: "For safety reasons, do not use your Stromer until the WREN suspension fork has been replaced."

According to the UK's Office for Product Safety and Standards, the recall has now been expanded as of this month.

"This recall expansion concerns a batch with modified design (oval hole vs round hole), due to the possibility that these forks present the same safety risks as the recalled WREN forks," the report reads. "Consumers who own bike that is fitted with a newly identified affected batch have been contacted directly and should contact their dealer to arrange for their front suspension fork to be replaced free of charge."

Stromer says: "Owners of Stromer ST3, ST5 and ST7 are asked to verify whether a WREN front suspension fork has been installed on their bikes. To do so, please click the applicable images for your bike below."

"Stromer sincerely apologizes for the inconvenience and thanks all customers for their cooperation and understanding," Stromer added last year.

You can do so on its website, with the serial number found on your WREN suspension fork. Anyone concerned they may be affected by the recall can contact Stromer directly at safety@stromerbike.com for further information, or visit the brand’s website.

Stromer’s range of e-bikes are generally sold as high-powered commuting models. The advertised prices of the models affected by the recall range from €8,458 (£7,423 / $9,930) for the ST3, up to €11,490 (£10,084 / $13,490) for the ST7.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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