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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raleigh Chopper

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

Raleigh Grifter

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

Raleigh Burner BMX

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

Raleigh Vektar

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

Raleigh Bomber

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

Raleigh TI

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

Raleigh Banana TT Bike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joined at the hip

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ingrained in the community

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“We’ve found the perfect shape!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Different ball game

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

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

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

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

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

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

Halftime

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bob Montgomery, 5 January 1944 – 3 August 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It looks simple. It isn’t.

Great Inventions of Cycling - 1945

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

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

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

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

Acts of Cycling Stupidity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It has been a sweltering Tour. In a warming world, in which Europe is heating at twice the global average rate, it could hardly have been otherwise.

With water use restrictions in 92 of France’s 96 mainland departments, and the national news full of forest fires, dry rivers, depleted soil and disappearing aquifers, climate change is everyday conversation among ordinary Frenchmen and women, including, of course, Tour fans. Three stages have had to be reorganised, and even Tadej Pogačar, normally so softly spoken, has said, “If I had [the] power, I’d change the whole calendar. I would not race in July and in August.”

On one thing, there is no controversy. To avoid even higher temperatures in future, we need to phase-out fossil fuels, and quickly. But fossil fuel sponsored sport has become the twenty-first century's opium of the people. We have just watched a World Cup festooned with sponsorship by the world’s biggest oil company, Aramco. The Tour de France offers much the same thing: a mobile, daily, four-hour advert for petrostates, oil and petrochemicals companies.

Understandably, few riders dare speak out, or even publicly acknowledge the awkwardness of their silence. Curious to know what they really think, I was introduced to a male pro, no stranger to winning, on a team with a fossil fuel sponsor. He agreed to talk on condition he could remain nameless, given that his comments could damage his prospects of future employment in the sport. I agreed to his terms, and I started by asking if the subject of fossil fuel sponsors ever came up in conversation with other riders.

He told me, “We’re out training and racing even on the hottest days so you’d think it would, but it rarely does. You’re never told not to talk about it, but you self-censor without even realising it. Maybe it dates back to the Armstrong era, when no one spoke about doping. A lot of people from those years are still in the sport. Silence is second nature to them.

“As every cyclist knows, fossil fuel-based sponsors have raised team budgets and riders’ wages. The general feeling inside the sport is that criticisng the companies who fund it is a bit like what used to be called spitting in the soup. I’d go further and say that, concerning the climate crisis, and professional cycling’s addiction to sponsorship from oil companies, airlines and car manufacturers, there is a rule of silence, as deeply rooted in cycling culture as the old omertá about doping.”

The entire sport is overflowing with oil company and petrostate sponsors.

“At the Tour de France, they are ten a penny, but their reach in cycling is deeper than you might imagine. It’s not just teams, it’s events, federations, everything. It’s almost imposible to avoid becoming a billboard for them.”

“I think it plays on ignorance too. Cycling is one of the most ignorant sports in the world. It’s so demanding that there isn’t much space for extra-curricular thinking. Young riders just want to leave school and go pro. They don’t have a wider perspective: they aren’t thinking about socioeconomics, and there are fewer spots in procycling that in most professional sports.

“Most riders don’t even know what their sponsors do, especially in the lower echelons of the sport where you get fifteen sponsors on the jersey. It’s probably true in the WorldTour too. I reckon more than fifty per cent of the bunch wouldn’t know who Picnic or XRG or CMA CGN are.”

From my interviewees’ perspective inside the sport, today's cycling sponsors have broken the old relationship that bound them to wider society.

He told me, “Ordinary people are very concerned about climate change, but cycling doesn’t engage with them. In the old days, sponsoring a team or a race was a form of advertising. It was part of a conversation. The sponsors of many of the top-end teams don’t care what the wider world thinks. And cycling’s leadership is ready to sell its soul for petrodollars. It’s completely rudderless. For that reason, the sport is way behind the general public.”

Aware that he could be accused of hypocrisy, my interviewee conceded, “You’re probably asking, if I’m so concerned about climate change and carbon emissions, why do I ride for a team sponsored by a fossil fuel producer? Well, in case you were wondering, I’m not Tadej Pogačar. Cycling is a small sport, and there are so few opportunities, you’re not in a position to turn contract offers down. If there were more options, you could go to a team that shares your ethics. As it is, if you want to be a professional cyclist and you’re not the best in the world, you can’t pick and choose.”

In any case, riding professionally is almost impossible without leaving a huge carbon footprint. “The race calendar is totally international and all year round, and we fly everywhere, sometimes by ridiculous routes. The influx of Asian sponsors will mean even more air miles. I remember a one-day race in a long-haul location where a French rider on a small team flew for 30 hours to spend three days on the ground–madness from every angle: rider performance, ecological impact and cost. Teams with more money at bigger races do even more brain dead stuff. If they rubbed even two brain cells together they could save money and massively reduce your impact. A sustainability officer alongside the logistics people would make a lot of sense.”

However, there are signs of change inside the peloton, he told me.

“The conversation is happening more and more. The Tour has been affected by forest fires. The Giro, where it’s normally snowing, was held in 30 degree heat.”

Even so, he told me, “Riders further down the food chain won’t say anything. In a team scenario, when you want to be taken seriously, people just laugh. Your DS would take you to the side and say, come on, this is our sponsor, you can’t be saying that kind of stuff. But maybe at the top level, where they are a bit more comfortable in their salary and job, riders will begin to speak out.”

Right now, English cyclist Joe Dick is approaching the final few metres of an unusual odyssey: the 23-year-old sports fanatic has just ridden his Cube road bike from the Estadio Azteca in Mexico City to the MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, a suburb of New York City – a 5000km escapade he was determined to complete between the first kick of the opening game of 2026 FIFA World Cup and the final whistle of the tournament.

The trainee sport and exercise psychologist from Warwickshire pedalled away from the Aztec Stadium in the heart of the Mexican capital when the whistle blew for the first game of the 2026 World Cup, on 11 June, kicking off both the contest between Mexico and South Africa and Dick’s extraordinary journey. According to the challenge he’d set himself, he had just 39 days to complete his mission and reach the MetLife Stadium in time for the final – a game that he had hoped would feature England.

Dick has been planning this cycling challenge for some time, and it’s underpinned by a very serious cause, which is close to his heart.

“I've had this idea for about two years now,” he told Cycling Weekly on the phone, while riding along an interstate heading into New York, as trucks thundered past in the background.

“I love my sports and exercise, and I love travel. I wanted to put what I've been learning with sport psychology into practise while doing this endurance challenge, and it's a great opportunity to raise some money for a mental health charity, which is something I'm passionate about."

En route Joe has raised thousands of pounds for Campaign Against Living Miserably, a suicide prevention charity that supported him during a difficult time in his own life.

He chose to call his campaign ‘Beat The Final Whistle’ as “a tribute to the thousands of people whose ‘final whistle’ comes far too early.”

“This cause is deeply personal to me, as l’ve faced my own struggles with mental health and know how vital awareness and support can be,” he said on the Instagram post that announced the challenge.

“48 teams will compete in the tournament, representing a whopping quarter of the globe. It seems apt then, and poignant, to highlight that 1 in 4 of us will have experienced suicidal thoughts. It’s a statistic that is shocking as it is solvable. And change can occur with more attention, resources, and open conversation.”

In his Instagram diary, documenting his adventure, Dick bubbles with positivity, but he has ADHD and he is very open and honest about the challenges that entails. The journey has also been bumpy at times.

"In my first week, in Mexico, I encountered a lot of punctures… In that first week when I knew there were so many miles ahead of me, that was really hard to get through," he told the BBC. "But that's when I sort of had to practise what I preach in terms of my sports psychology."

And he has prevailed. Dicks will arrive at the MetLife Stadium well before the final whistle, in time to actually enjoy watching the final – even though it’s not going to feature his team.

“I’m gutted about the result!” he told me the day after England were knocked out of the cup by Argentina. But on the upside, he the riding was going well, and he was ahead of schedule.

“I’m on track for the final – baring any disasters I should get there the day before. My dad is flying out to meet me. We don't have a ticket for the final – obviously they are crazy expensive – so we'll watch it in a bar somewhere. I'll definitely be rooting for Spain!”

On Monday, July 13, 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump signed executive orders removing protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in Utah.

The Associated Press reports the Grand Staircase-Escalante holds large coal reserves, while the Bears Ears area has uranium deposits.

The impact immediately affects cyclists who use the Cedar Mesa Loop and Grand Staircase Loop routes.

The Outdoor Alliance says the “extraordinary landscapes are home to world-class bikepacking.”

“They also protect irreplaceable cultural landscapes, wildlife habitat, and the ancestral homelands of Tribal Nations that have stewarded these places since time immemorial,” said the Alliance on its website.

The reduction in access to safe, off-road cycling spaces comes in an era when road cyclists make up its largest ever reported percent of traffic fatalities.

Under Department of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, “DEI bike lanes,” speed cameras, and other data-backed measures and best practices for reducing cyclist fatalities and collisions were removed.

The scope and impact of land protections reduction

The Trump administration slashed the two Utah monuments by a combined roughly three million acres, reducing them to approximately a tenth of their previous size.

Grand Staircase-Escalante protections were reduced from 1.87 million acres to 181,500 acres, and Bears Ears protections were slashed from 1.36 million acres to 121,100 acres.

The now-excluded land is available for further development and non-passive uses, such as mineral extraction, road construction, off-highway vehicles, and ranching.

Opponents including tribal coalitions and environmental groups contend that the Property Clause of the The Constitution (Article IV, Section 3) grants Congress, not the president, exclusive power to dispose of or reduce federal property.

The Salt Lake City Tribune reported the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance plans to sue over the monument size reductions.

Indigenous tribes were not informed or asked about the decision to reduce the monument boundaries, reported The Tribune.

Tribes were part of a years-long consultation process that shaped the current management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante, the group said.

The power to remove protections for public use lands

National parks are established by Congress, however national monuments are created by presidents through the Antiquities Act of 1906, which grants the president the power to create boundaries.

The Act does not specify the executive branch’s ability to change protections once established.

The current administration claims that because the protections were created by the Antiquities Act, it inherently has the power to alter or remove the same boundaries.

President Bill Clinton established the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in 1996, and President Barack Obama created Bears Ears National Monument in 2016.

During his first term, Trump reduced the boundaries of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments.

The recent actions were immediately challenged in federal court by a coalition of tribes and conservation groups, however, the specific lawsuits were never resolved when the subsequent Biden administration restored the monument boundaries.

President Biden issued protected monument proclamations for Bears Ears, highlighting its “unparalleled rock climbing” at Indian Creek, “the paradise for hikers, birders, and horseback riders” in Elk Ridge and other “hunting, backpacking, canyoneering, whitewater rafting, and mountain biking” destinations.

Similarly, Biden’s Grand Staircase-Escalante proclamation emphasized the area’s “world-class outdoor recreation opportunities, including rock climbing, hunting, hiking, backpacking, canyoneering, river running, mountain biking, and horseback riding.”

The Supreme Court never definitively ruled on whether a president has the authority to abolish or shrink a national monument.

How to take action to preserve national monuments

Those who want to take action and try to help restore protections to national monuments can sign a petition that forwards an email to the White House.

You can also contact the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service at national and state levels, and make your opinion known to your state representative.

A bike rider in New South Wales, Australia, has been bitten on the thigh by a deadly eastern brown snake after accidently running over the highly venomous serpent, which was sunbathing on the trail.

The two-metre-long snake became entangled in the drivetrain of the woman’s bike after she ran it over while riding the Northern Rivers Rail Trail near Burringbar, in northern New South Wales. Terrified, it lashed out and landed a bite on the woman’s leg.

Eastern browns are widely considered to be the second-most poisonous land snake on the planet (after the taipan), and the woman, reported to be in her 60s, was fortunate in that she received a ‘dry bite’ – which means no venom was injected into her system.

Paramedics attended the incident, which happened around lunchtime on Wednesday 15 July, and the cyclist was taken to Tweed Valley hospital, where she is believed to be in a stable condition. Unfortunately, it was a less happy ending for the snake.

Local snake catcher Sarah Mailey from I'll Catch It Snake Catchers was called in to disentangle the snake from the bike. "It had its full head swinging around, able to bite and there were a few people standing around just watching," she recounted to ABC News.

After some time, she was able to pin the snake's head, to stop it biting anyone else, while police officers and some bystanders extracted the rest of the animal from the bike. Sadly, the snake was subsequently euthanised, because it was deemed too severely injured to recover.

After the incident, Mailey told Cycling Weekly that in Australia (and other countries where venomous snakes are common) people cycling should always be prepared for an encounter. "It's so important to take a compression bandage on rides, and know how to perform snakebite first aid," she said.

Mailey explained to reporters that the snake was not in prime condition even before the accident, with a pre-existing eye injury that likely contributed to its slow reaction as the bike approached.

“She probably just thought it was a stick or a shadow and given that the snake’s blind in that eye, it’s obviously not seen the shadow coming towards it and given it enough time to move,” Mailey told The Guardian.

It’s mid winter in Australia, and being cold-blooded creatures, snakes move slower in cooler weather, when they’re often seen trying to absorb heat from the dark tarmacked roads and trails.

“If it was any other time of year and the snake wasn’t blind, it would have had energy and seen her coming and got out of the way,” Mailey explained. “So it’s just a mixture of the time of the year, it being a blind snake, and it’s just part of life, unfortunately.”

There are plenty of excellent e-bikes on the market in Britain, but illegally modified and non-regulation versions are also proliferating across the country, creating a perilous situation for riders and other road users alike. A new poll conducted this week by YouGov has discovered that 84% of people in the UK can't tell the difference between a perfectly legal e-bike and one that contravenes the laws that surround such machines in the UK.

To combat this situation, two influential main cycle industry bodies – the Bicycle Association (BA) and the Association of Cycle Traders (ACT) – have launched a new safety trustmark, E-Bike Positive, with the goal of helping the public purchase e-bikes that are legal and safe.

Britain has relatively strict regulations in place when it comes to e-bikes, meaning battery powered steeds are very safe when bought from reputable outlets. But many models that do not comply with these tech-specs appear to side-step customs and thousands more are modified by unscrupulous backyard mechanics, and even some high street outlets.

The existence of illegal and dangerous e-bikes on the roads – and in people’s homes and garages – is a disaster for everyone, with fast, heavy bikes vastly increasing the risk of serious injury when they’re involved in collisions (which also drives anti-cyclist hate), and dodgy batteries causing intense fires during the recharging process.

Some people actively seek out bikes that can go faster than legally permitted, but other consumers are caught out by a poorly policed industry, and accidentally purchase bikes that fall foul of the legal guidelines. Would you be able to tell the difference? The vast majority of us can’t.

BA and the ACT have established the E-Bike Positive scheme precisely to help this latter group, bringing together responsible brands and approved retailers with an instantly recognisable safety trust mark.

Launched this week, the initiative involves 33 brands, which are responsible for 80% of reputable e-bikes sold in Britain. Some 600 stores have signed up around the country, including big names like Halfords, Decathlon and Evans Cycles, plus hundreds of independent high street bike shops, all of which will be listed on the website: ebikepositive.co.uk.

To become an ‘E-Bike Positive approved retailer’, bike shops have to commit to only selling (and servicing and repairing) road-legal e-bikes, and to supplying only compatible, safety-tested batteries and chargers with full safety information. E-Bike Positive retailers must refuse to work on non-road-legal and unsafe e-bikes.

Approved retailers must also be an authorised stockist of at least one E-Bike Positive verified brand and agree to verification, including mystery shopper visits and documentation reviews.

“Reputable brands spend years and considerable sums developing e-bikes which meet longstanding international standards and all the regulations for their legal sale and use on the road,” explains Steve Garidis, Executive Director, Bicycle Association.

“They are a fantastic product with a wide variety of customers and benefits to health and the environment. But all this is undermined by illegal and unsafe products often sold through online marketplaces to unsuspecting consumers. That’s why, as the industry trade bodies representing reputable e-bike brands and retailers, we have developed a safety trust mark as part of the E-Bike Positive scheme, so consumers can easily identify safe and legal e-bikes and where they may be purchased.”

Jonathan Harrison, Director, Association of Cycle Traders, added: “Our members are proud to sell properly tested, road‑legal e‑bikes, but until now they have had no simple way to prove it to customers who are understandably seeking reassurance. E‑Bike Positive changes that.

“When retailers and the brands they stock carry the trust mark, customers can buy with confidence, knowing the products come from independently verified brands and that the retailer is committed to recognised standards and responsible retailing.”

What you need to know when buying an e-bike

There are two main features that mean an e-bike is road legal in the UK. First a motor is pedal assist only. This means the motor matches your effort. If you pedal faster, the motor puts in more power, when you slow down, it slows down. It does not provide drive independently. If it does it's illegal. If it works on a twist-style throttle it's illegal. Secondly, a legal e-bike cuts out at approximately 15.5mph, or 25kmh. Once a rider tips over this speed all power cuts out.

Although the legality of it is less clear, the next thing you need to check is the battery. Unregulated, homemade, chipped or even extremely cheap batteries can be dangerous, with more and more house fires being caused by batteries being left on charge over night, overheating and bursting into flames.

Most reputable e-bike systems will use batteries from either Sony, Panasonic or Samsung which are perfectly safe if used correctly. If you're unsure, ask.

FDJ-Suez have bolstered their team with the addition, announced today, of American multi-discipline champion Kate Courtney. An all-rounder with an incredible pedalling pedigree, Courtney is the current US National road race Champion and has been UCI Mountain Bike Cross-Country World Champion (2018), a UCI Cross-Country World Cup winner (2019) and UCI Marathon Mountain Bike World Champion (2025).

This year, Courtney made an incredibly successful switch to road. In May, she entered her first road race since she was 16, having a crack at the Tour de Feminin in the Czech Republic, and took victory on Stage Four. The following month she won her first US National Road Race title in Charleston. Soon she will be riding alongside Demi Vollering in the FDJ-Suez squad.

According to the release put out by FDJ-Suez today, Courtney will be in action for the team within the week, taking part in La Périgord Ladies on 18 July, Picto-Charentaise the next day, and the Lloyds Tour of Britain Women from the 19–23 August.

"Kate is a magnificient athlete whose profile shows great potential on short to mid-range climbs and demanding efforts," says Stephen Delcourt, FDJ-Suez General Manager. "We are excited to support her as she discovers European road racing. FDJ United Suez has always embraced athletes who have thrived in disciplines beyond road cycling. This diversity of backgrounds and cultures will continue to elevate our team as we pursue the highest levels of performance in women's sport."

“It is hard to put into words what this opportunity means to me," said Courtney after the deal was announced. "I never expected to be able to make the jump to the World Tour level so quickly and I am so motivated to rise to this huge challenge and really find out what I am capable of as an athlete and person in this final chapter of my career. I am so grateful to Stephen and the entire team for seeing the potential and giving me this chance to chase a huge dream.

"It is not hard to see from the outside that FDJ United Suez is building something really special. The way the team races - aggressively, fearlessly and with complete belief in one another - has been inspiring to me as a fan. And now it is even more inspiring to me as a rider. It feels like the team environment I have been searching for my entire career - and I could not be more excited to start learning and chasing one of the biggest and most challenging goals I have ever spoken out loud.”

Courtney, who comes from Marin County, California - literally the birthplace of mountain biking - is also a prominent advocate for women's sport through cycling, and founded the NGO She Sends Foundation in 2023.

NSN Cycling Team and Uno X-Mobility are wearing concussion sensors at the Tour de France. Riders' helmets are equipped with technology that issues an alert when it detects a significant head impact.

The small device also records data on the severity of the incident to inform post-crash recovery efforts.

In recent years, the Tour de France has seen some nasty crashes, particularly during the lead-out phase before a sprint, and this kind of technology is designed to help team staff identify anomalies and improve rider safety across the board.

At the opposite end of the cycling spectrum, downhill mountain bikers have been using the HIT Connect impact sensor (a wearable head-impact device designed for mountain biking) that mounts to the back of the helmet and measures forces on the head. Considering the speeds associated with the discipline, it's become a no-brainer.

NSN and Uno X are using the ProMD impact sensor, which fits into a band of blue foam between the cradle and dial, in helmets from their respective sponsors, Ekoi and Sweet Protection. On the road, concussion protocols have come under scrutiny in recent years amid growing awareness of the risks of head injuries.

We've asked Dr Jack Hardwicke, senior lecturer in the sociology of sport at Nottingham Trent University's School of Science and Technology, about how he thinks cycling is dealing with concussion and how concussion sensors could improve that.

Luca Viano, Ekoi's helmet product manager, has answered our questions on this safety innovation.

How is elite cycling dealing dealing with concussion?

"It’s improving, but still has a long way to go," says Dr Hardwicke.

Currently riders who are assessed for head injuries after a crash are penalised because they lose time. He would like cycling to consider a rule change that, for example, lets riders draft back to where they were in the race.

But the main problems are cultural and economic.

"Elite cycling, like most sports, still has a strong culture of ‘getting back on the bike’ following crashes and injury," he says.

"This culture is encouraged by many coaches, mechanics, medics, athletes, journalists their glorifying reporting of ‘heroic’ riders competing with injury etc.

"There are also strong economic pressures on athletes not to withdraw for fear of letting the team down and/or jeopardising sponsorship.

"There needs to be more efforts placed into shifting this culture so cyclists have less pressure to compete following a crash."

To negate this pressure, he'd like to see independent doctors have the power to rule on whether a rider carries on.

"Until there’s greater cultural change, policies and protocols will always be bent and broken in practice," he adds.

"Adam Yates' recent concussion in the Giro is a prime example."

How does the impact sensor work?

In its R2 carbon helmet, Ekoi's best road bike helmet, the company has incorporated an impact sensor developed by Meditech's ProMD.

"It is an intelligent crash detection system designed to enhance rider safety by monitoring both linear and rotational impacts in real time," says Viano. "Using advanced motion sensors and proprietary algorithms, it distinguishes genuine crashes from normal riding vibrations, reducing false alarms while providing reliable impact detection."

When it senses a head impact, it sends an emergency alert to notify people of the incident if the rider cannot call for help themselves.

"The sensor also records impact data that can support post-crash evaluation and help riders make informed decisions after an accident," adds Viano.

Although ProMD claims its device provides lab-grade data from its G-force sensors, Viano says: "It is intended as a safety monitoring tool and should not be considered a medical device for diagnosing concussion or other head injuries."

Dr Hardwicke says concussion sensors like ProMD's could help by providing an "objective measurement" that determines whether or not a rider continues racing after a crash.

"This would help move away from having to use roadside assessments of riders showing signs and symptoms," he adds.

Why has Ekoi introduced this technology to helmets?

Many brands include MIPS in their helmets or have their own anti-concussion technology, but why does Ekoi think helmets should also have impact detection?

"Triggering an alarm will allow a faster response when medical intervention is needed," says Viano. "This is extremely important when riding alone in particular.

"Secondly, collecting precise impact data, such as on linear and rotational acceleration, duration of the impact, and direction of the impact, will help medical assessment and the recovery plan."

Ekoi also says the data will be beneficial for research and development of safer helmets.

"This data will also help us develop better helmets by combining the information from real accidents, laboratory impact tests, and damages directly visible on helmets tested in a laboratory or crashed in a race," says Viano.

"We collect all crashed helmets by our teams and study them to understand what can be done better in future products."

Are there any downsides to the technology?

The sensor is held within impact-absorbing foam and attached to the dial on the back of the helmet. According to Viano, this has no adverse impact on the helmet.

"It weighs a few grams and does not affect or reduce the helmet’s safety performance," he says.

The same applies when similar sensors are inserted into the EPS, the helmet's protective foam.

"In that case, several impact tests are performed in different conditions (high and low temperature, UV exposure, water exposure) on every helmet size to confirm that it does not alter the safety performance of the helmet itself," he adds.

Who is using the ProMD impact sensor and how good it it?

NSN is trialing the sensor at the Tour de France, and Ekoi's goal is for all its sponsored teams, including Lotto-Intermarché and XDS-Astana in the pro peloton, to adopt it. After Torstein Træen crashed wearing the yellow jersey on stage six, Uno X-Mobility said analysis of data from his helmet sensor informed the decision to withdraw him from the race the next day with concussion and multiple rib fractures.

Besides indicating when a rider crashes and hits their head, which, in the shock of the incident, they may not necessarily recall themselves, the ProMD can better educate doctors.

"Medical staff can use the information from the impacts over time, and assess, for example, if there is a stress overload, or even combine the impact sensor data with any other smart sensor," says Viano.

It could help them understand the interactions among, for example, training score, sleep score, recovery score, BPM, HRV, and the accelerations caused by one or more crashes over time.

"In short, doctors can help riders to build a better recovery plan after a crash, and make sure there are no spikes in any parameters that can cause any risk to them."

Dr Hardwicke says: "Concussion sensors could provide an immediate indication of the extent of impact a rider has sustained, as this is often missed in big bunch crashes or those that occur off camera.

"This is useful additional data to make a call on removing a rider. But for them to be most effective, independent doctors will be important.

"There are also still issues around how accurate the sensors actually are and where they are placed.

"For example, if sensors are placed in helmets, then the helmet slipping can produce false readings.

"But they are still a useful addition and the approach should still always be on the side of caution when it comes to brain injuries."

Will impact detection sensors catch on in road cycling helmets?

It's no surprise that Viano believes they will.

"Technology should be used to improve both safety and health, and impact-detection systems can provide very valuable information," he says.

"Any tool that helps riders, their families, or emergency contacts make faster and more informed decisions can contribute to a better cycling experience for everyone."

But in a sport where calls for better safety are growing louder, his argument is hard to dispute.

Eddie McGourley has been riding bikes for over 70 years, and he started racing as a junior back in 1958, but this week, part way around his 83rd lap of the sun, he pedalled himself right into the record books.

It’s yet to be officially acknowledged by Guinness, the self-appointed guardians of such things, but as far as he understands it, the fastest time any octogenarian had previously pedalled the 1,000-odd miles from Land’s End to John O’Groats was 14 days, and McGourley has just done the distance in 10 and a half days.

Riding with companion Stephen Foster, a whippersnapper of 71, McGourley set off from Land’s End on Monday 29 June, and has been riding an average of 100 miles every day since, until reaching John O’Groats in the far north of Scotland around midday on Thursday Thursday 9 July.

“On the first day, going through Cornwall, we did about 130 miles,” he tells me. “After that we were riding for around 10 hours a day. We started off every day with some porridge, had a bacon sandwich for lunch, and a big dinner. And some whisky!"

They had a support crew, but the weather has thrown everything possible at the pair, including thick fog and mist towards the end of the challenge. And wind, of course, the nemesis of the long-distance bike rider. “I was blown off my bike twice going through Glen Coe,” McGourley reveals. “I’ve got a bit of bruising, but I’m alright.”

This Wearsider warrior is made of tough stuff, however, and he’s well used to putting in the hard yards in the saddle of a bike. McGourley was three times crowned North East cycling champion in his younger days, and in 1970 won King of the Mountains in the Milk Race – the long-running precursor to the Tour of Britain. “That was the last year the race went across 14 days,” he tells me.

McGourley, who ran a bike shop in Sunderland for decades and built the Basso bike he used for most of the challenge himself, remains the president of Houghton Cycling Club, an organisation he has been a member of for most of his life.

“I always get out and ride twice a week,” he says. “But while preparing for this challenge, I’ve been cycling most days. I come from County Durham – it’s pretty hilly around here – great training.”

McGourley came up with the idea of setting a new octogenarian FKT on the LeJoG route after picking up a copy of the Guinness Book of Records at the library, but he set his heart on completing the challenge to honour his late wife, Winifred, and to raise money for the St Cuthbert's Hospice in Durham where she spent her final days.

"The nurses there were wonderful," he tells me. "I just wanted to say thank you for everything they did."

So far he has raised over £11,000 and the donation page remains open and active.

And, somewhat astonishingly, McGourley wasn’t the only octogenarian riding the length of Britain over the last couple of weeks. The day before McGourley set off from Land's End, Peggy Keenor-Crome, who is also 83, arrived at the southwestern tip of Cornwall, having ridden there from John O'Groats in 17 days, setting a record for the oldest woman to cycle the route, and the fastest known time for a woman in her 80s.

Peggy is raising money for Devon Air Ambulance, a service that saved the life of her granddaughter Alice when she was a small child.

I met up with an old friend recently. We used to race together as students and have kept in touch, but I hadn’t seen him for a long, long time. Since we raced together I’ve gone on to do more bike racing, and he went on to start a business that made him irritatingly rich. (Irritating to me. He seems OK with it.)

“I’m not sure I’d have made the company work without bike racing – you learn so much that’s so useful. I’m sure you’ve lots of transferable skills if you ever decided to grow up and get a real job,” he said casually.

My first thought was to tell him that the main thing I’ve learned from cycling is how to sack off to go for a ride. I can be endlessly creative in my justifications for this. My essential go-to is always the promise that I’ll return energised and ready to do useful work, but I’ve also come up with “thinking time”, “meditation” and “something to do with blood sugar levels that makes my brain work better – I can’t quite explain it but if my theory is right, I’ll be able to express it more clearly when I get back.”

There are other things I’ve learned that might possibly be more use in a business environment. I can cope with disappointment, for example. It would almost be worth applying for a real job so that when the interviewer asks me what talents I have, I can tell them that, first and foremost, when it all turns to crap and we’re standing outside the building with all our possessions in bin-liners, it won’t cause me too much personal distress.

I’ll be able to add that a mastery of excuses long honed round the result board of a time trial means that not only will I be relaxed in the face of disaster, but that someone above me will take the blame.

Years of tinkering with bikes has given me a can-do approach. Almost always if you take something apart carefully it’s possible to put it back together again. Sometimes in this process you manage to fix a problem, either knowingly or unknowingly. Usually you learn something interesting along the way. But the key is not to be put off by apparent complexity. Get some tools and get cracking.

This means that in an actual job environment I would be fearless in the face of the complicated. I would be totally up for dismantling an entire IT system, for example. I wouldn’t be the sort of person who sat wringing their hands and waiting for support, I’d get right into it. Either I’d fix it, or I’d break it properly – and so often in life it’s easier to fix the totally broken than the slightly broken. It’s like giving the bike shop a clean slate to work with.

Another business thing I really do understand is marketing. I’ve learned a great deal from being its victim – I’ve discovered that I’m almost infinitely suggestable, and that I’m totally convinced that the more expensive something is the better it must be.

I am far from unique in this. In cycling the best way to increase the demand for something is to put the price up. I’m not sure that all the other industries have caught up with this yet. If you make it expensive and tell people it’s made of a new improved version of whatever material the thing is normally made from, to which you must give a proprietary name that can’t be cross-referenced to any known universal standard, you can sell anything.

I’d say you couldn’t put a price on knowledge like that, except that you can. I know because I’ve paid it. Over and over again.

I explained all this to my friend. He didn’t offer me a job.

How to..... be annoying

There are occasions when you want to be friendly and cooperative in your dealings with other riders. And there are times when you do not. Most often it’s in either a race scenario where your agenda does not match the riders around you, or on the sort of group ride that, for whatever reason, needs to be made less fun and you feel that you’re the little git who can make that happen.

You can just sit on the back – but that’s only a little annoying, and only in a smallish group. If you want to try it, you can spice it up by beginning to go through before you “change your mind”, so the rider who’s just done a turn has to sprint to get back in.

You can be much more annoying at the front of the group. Don’t go through – just slow down and make someone come around you. Or go through, then slow down. Or go through and swerve from one side of the road to the other while making incomprehensible gesticulations.

There are more subtle ways too. You can ride at a decent pace, but do it in (ideally) a downwind gutter. Swerve around drain covers and potholes without warning. Not annoying enough? Get out of the saddle every so often and make sure to kick the bike backwards a little when you do, to give the rider behind you a little fright. It’s especially effective combined with a drain cover.

But don’t brake-check people. There’s being annoying, and there’s that.

Dear Doc

last weekend on the club ride, one of our number broke their chain. We didn’t have a chain-tool or a quick-link between us, so in the end we decided that pushing Jon home was the only option.

This went all right, there were a few of us to share the pushing. Until we got to a junction a few miles from home.

“Left!” shouted the ride leader.

“Why?” said Jon. “The GPS says go right. It’s supposed to be a 100km ride – it’s only about 90 if we go straight back. I want to get my weekly miles in.”

We turned left.

It’s inconceivable that in the late 1950s, Ray Booty covered 100-mile distances on this bike in times that most modern riders, aero-optimised to the nth degree, can only dream of. The bike looks so ordinary, you could imagine commuting to work on it, which, apparently, is what Booty did – hence the tape protecting the rear stays from saddlebag rub.

On Bank Holiday Monday, 6^th August 1956, Booty broke the RTTA 100-mile time trial record with an 84” fixed gear, posting a time of 3h 58m 28s. He was the first person to ride a sub-four-hour ‘out and back’ century.

Weeks later, he surpassed the RRA 100-mile ‘straight-out’ record, switching from the fixed gear to a close ratio, three-speed Sturmey Archer AC51 hub, as pictured here. His time was 3h 28m 40s, a record that stood for incredible 34 years.

None of the components on this bike are particularly noteworthy, but the frame is. It’s a 1955 Raleigh Record Ace (RRA) built in Raleigh’s ‘special build’ workshop by either Billy Blackamore or Ted Silverstone, perhaps both.

In a Nottinghamshire factory that spanned 78 acres and employed 9,000 workers, it was just this duo of master frame-builders who crafted frames for a select few pros. Famously, these rare frames are stamped with an ‘RP’ identifier – Booty’s TT bike is RP117.

Booty, who died in 2012, won many titles and accolades in the 1950s, including gold in the 1958 Empire and Commonwealth Games, but he declined to go pro.

“He was a modest fellow who enjoyed his cycling and didn’t want to turn it into a job,” says current owner Richard Hoddinott of Velo Pages. “I imagine if he were around today, he wouldn't be propagating notoriety from social media. He'd just be letting his pedals do the talking, which is why, to me, he's the ultimate amateur.”

At 07:00 (CET) last Saturday morning, Mark Kowalski cycled across the border from Bulgaria into Greece, came to a stop, pulled out his phone and dialled his fianceé. He had news. With that final border crossing, the London-based Canadian ultracyclist and bikepacker had just broken a bike-riding world record.

Kowalski’s tracker showed that he had just cycled exactly 2798.59km, averaging 404.25km per day for the last week. But the record he’d just stamped his name on had nothing directly to do with distance. Since setting off at 09:00 (CET) on the previous Saturday, from a border town in The Netherlands, Kowalski had pedalled through 21 different countries in seven days, beating the previous tally of 20 nations.

In the end, the 40-year-old finished his race against the clock with two hours to spare. But for the entirety of the previous seven days he had been living on his nerves. “The whole trip was super stressful,” Kowalski tells me. “Before starting, I was 65% sure I could do it. But I had enough doubt that I didn’t tell anyone about it until just before I left. Even towards the end, I was never completely confident. Never at any point did I think it was a shoo-in.”

“My strength isn’t speed,” he admits. “I’m slow and steady. The first day I rode for 12 hours, and the last day I had no sleep at all and rode for 24 hours. But my usual pattern was to get up at 2am and ride for 19 hours, with about 1 hours pause time built into that.”

A three-time veteran of the 4000km Transcontinental Race, Kowalski is no newcomer to enormous self-supported cycling challenges, but this was a bit different to anything he’d done before. Chasing the erstwhile record, he had a dot on his tracker, showing where he need to be.

“That red dot never slept,” he tells me on the phone from Greece, with fatigue still evident in his voice. “I’d go to sleep ahead of it and then wake up and have to chase it. At the beginning it was very stressful. I was riding through a heatwave. I called my partner on the second day, really doubting myself. It wasn’t until around day four that I came out of the doldrums and I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.”

From Vaal – which is conveniently positioned on the border with the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium, enabling him to tick three countries quickly off the list – Kowalski went south, passing through Luxembourg, France and Switzerland. Tracing Lake Constance, he crossed into Austria, collected Liechtenstein then went east through the Tirol.

After darting south from Innsbruck into northern Italy, he steered northeast to visit the Czech Republic, then dropped south through Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro – doing a quick out-and-back to touch his tyres on Albanian soil – and then continuing east to North Macedonia, Bulgaria and finally into Greece.

“My partner asked me to give the Transcontinental a break, and so I came up with this idea instead,” he tells me. “But when I first started researching it, I thought the record was 19 countries. I’d had worked out that I could do 20, or 21 at a real push. Then I discovered that the record was actually 20, set by Craig Nilsson in 2025. That was a blow!”

“I was designing my own route, and then I looked at Craig’s, and it was so obviously the best one. I did try and vary it, but when I did I mostly went wrong. Like when I ran into a fence trying to reach a bike trail along the Danube, and had to backtrack. I hit a stretch of gravel and it felt wrong. I was riding alongside this fence thinking ‘I’m just going further and further in the wrong direction here’. In the end I only lost about 20 minutes.”

A Green Party councillor in London, Kowalski used his ride to raise money for Action for Refugees in Lewisham. Confined to the capital, for the most part, he prepared for his expedition by doing endless 6-hour indoor training sessions, and working on a nutrition plan that meant he could stomach taking on 100g of carbs per hour. “Wine gums and mints are great,” he confides. “Mentos are basically 100% carbs!”

During his odyssey, he was riding a Reilly Titanium Reflex gravel bike. “It’s got aero bars and a massive dish on the back for the hills,” he says. “But really it was built for comfort, and I had Redshift suspension seatpost, which really helps with back pain. I put a whole new drive chain on it, but it kept slipping. I just kept going – I wasn’t going to take it to a repair shop to wait hours, only to be told they couldn’t fix it.”

Fully loaded, he estimates the bike weighed about 20kg. “I carried some spare clothing, an emergency sleeping system – a bivvy and blow-up mattress, which I used once. I carried tools – I was probably over prepared in that sense.”

Slippage aside, he got away likely with technical issues, and only suffered two punctures during the entire trip, while running Continental GP5000 32mm tyres.

Does he worry about Nilsson coming back to reclaim his record – something he’s already done once? “Not really,” he tells me. “To reach another country, you’d have to ride another 300km. To do that you’d need to be Victor Bosoni [the young French rider currently winning events like the Traka].”

After announcing his resignation in January, Jon Dutton’s tenure as British Cycling CEO has now come to an end, with an interim CEO put in place until a permanent replacement can be appointed.

Dutton joined British Cycling in 2023 after a five-year period as chief executive of the Rugby League World Cup. He has been appointed to one of the most prominent roles in British sport as the new CEO of the British Olympic Association.

British Cycling board member Lee Gibbons has been drafted in as interim CEO, beginning the role on the 13th of July.

“Gibbons brings a wealth of experience from the sports agency sector, other sports rights holders and commercial brands, including nine years at adidas where he ran the sports marketing division,” read a British Cycling statement.

British Cycling say that recruitment for a new CEO is now in its final stages and Gibbons will remain in post until a new CEO is able to join the organisation.

These changes come at a time when the organisation’s board is without a chair, following Frank Slevin’s decision to step down from the position in March due to a bowel cancer diagnosis. Slevin held the role for eight years.

Andy Cook and James Davies have shared the role of acting chair in Slevin’s absence. British Cycling say that a new chair of the board will be announced soon.

Dutton came on board with British Cycling at a turbulent point in its history, during which the organisation lost around 200,000 members shortly after petrochemical company Shell made an agreement to become a major sponsor - a deal which was struck before Dutton’s stint in charge.

British Cycling has also faced recent criticism for its policy that stopped transgender women from competing in female racing categories.

Dutton led a period of strategic change within British Cycling, seeking to boost its social impact and instilling a new mission statement to ‘bring the joy of cycling to everyone’, while working to grow the sport as one that is more accessible and inclusive.

He told Cycling Weekly last year that he hopes to see Great Britain & Northern Ireland's Olympic selection over the coming cycles “to be truly representative of society.”

“We want cycling across Great Britain to represent society, and it is clear in some areas that is not the case,” he added.

Under his tenure, British Cycling played a key role in bringing the 2027 Tour de France grand départes to British soil and also stepped in as the organisers of the Tours of Britain.

“The finish line has arrived far sooner than I had anticipated,” Dutton wrote in a post on LinkedIn signalling the end of his time with BC.

“This journey has been a rollercoaster of challenge, joy, and everything in-between. I’m eternally grateful for the humbling opportunity to lead such a magnificent organisation.”

“It’s been a privilege, an honour and a pleasure,” he added. “I’ve made mistakes, some will cheer my time on while others will jeer, but I leave knowing I’ve given it my all.”

The 2026 Tour de France begins on Saturday with a team time trial in Barcelona, Spain.

The course, 19.6km long, opens on the city's seafront, before heading past the Sagrada Família and south to Montjuïc, finishing on a double-header of climbs: first, the Côte de Montjuïc, 1.1km at 5.1%, before the Côte du Stade Olympique, 800m at 7%, at the top of which the finish line is drawn.

Tour debutants and wild-card invitees Caja Rural-Seguros RGA will be the first team down the ramp at 17:05 CET (16:05 BST).

The remaining 22 teams will then set off at five-minute intervals, with UAE Team Emirates-XRG, the team of defending champion Tadej Pogačar, the last to begin their effort at 18:55 CET (17:55 BST).

The stage is expected to finish around 19:15 ET (18:15 BST).

It is the first time since since 1971 that the Tour has started with a team time trial.

This year, the race organiser, ASO, has introduced a new timing system at the race: times will be recorded individually, not as a team.

ASO has been trialling this system at Paris-Nice since 2023, and did so again at the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes last month.

The winner of the stage is the entire team, rather than the fastest individual. However, individual times will count towards the general classification, and the race's first yellow jersey will go to the fastest rider across the line on the day.

Any riders who finish outside an extra 30% of the winner's time will be eliminated from the race.

Below are the start times for all 23 competing teams. For information on how to watch the race, visit our streaming guide.

Stage 1 team time trial start times

Time passes and things change. Kids don’t do paper rounds anymore (many won’t touch a newspaper in their entire lives), and it seems that young Saturday staff in bike shops are experiencing a similar extinction event. And this will cut off an entry point into the cycling world that has existed for decades, a leading industry body has said this week. But why are many bike shops no longer employing weekend staff?

According to Jonathan Harrison, Director of the Association of Cycle Traders (ACT), it is mainly down to rising costs and onerous employment obligations. However, retailers we spoke to cited changing bike trends, such as electronic gears, hydraulic disc brakes and tubeless tyres as major factors.

In a press release this week, Harrison argued that the combination of minimum wage increases, holiday pay entitlements and new sick pay requirements introduced in April is deterring independent bike shops from taking on young part-time staff, which is choking off an entry point into the industry.

"The Saturday lad or lass has been how generations of people fell into the cycle trade," Harrison said. "They came in for the love of bikes, learned the ropes, and many of them went on to build careers in the industry. That pipeline is now under serious threat."

The release goes on to quote Paul Kenchington, director of The Bicycle Chain in Bridgwater, who said: "In the early days of our business the Saturday lad or lass worked for the experience and the staff discount, with a small wage as the bonus. Some of our best people started that way. But the product is now complex, the marketplace is cut-throat, and the cumulative cost of employing someone one day a week has reached the point where many of us are simply stepping back."

When Cycling Weekly spoke to some independent bike shops, it was actually the complexity of the modern bicycle that came up as the biggest barrier to employing weekend staff, over and above any concerns about improved employees’ rights.

“We haven’t been able to employ any Saturday staff for some time,” said Sid Soanes from Soanes Cycles, an independent bike shop that began life in Colyton, Devon, in 1902 as Liberty Cycles. Back then, bikes were handmade in the shop, and Sidney J Soanes (Sid’s grandfather) joined the business as a mechanic in 1910. Over a century, and four generations later, the bike shop is still owned and run by the same family, but a lot has changed.

“Saturday is our busiest day, and bikes are just too technical these days for an untrained young person to do anything meaningful with. Now we’re dealing with electronic gears, hydraulic brakes, tubeless tyres – you just don’t get the minor repairs and servicing that a Saturday lad might have been able to work on without supervision.”

“It’s the same with work experience,” continues Soames. “We used to take loads of kids on work experience, but it’s not doable now, because bikes are far too technical and complicated. It's a shame, but we can’t spend enough time with them to make it worthwhile for them or us.”

Tom Armstrong, an elite rider who races for Wheelbase CabTech Castelli and placed second in this year's Rutland–Melton CiCLE Classic, works for JE James Cycles when he’s not riding, and he agrees.

“At one time, you could start as a Saturday lad in bike shop, sweeping the floor and so on, and when there was a spare minute learn how to true a wheel or something, but it's not like that anymore,” he told Cycling Weekly.

“Bike shops have to range e-bikes, of course, and then you’re dealing with motors and batteries, and you almost have to be an electrician. But even ‘standard’ bikes are incredibly technical. Now, when we do a handover and give a bike back to a customer, you need to be there with a laptop, asking them what phone they use, talking to them about apps and all sort of things.”

“Weekend jobs still exist in big bike shops, but they’re different. Now, unless you’re a fully trained mechanic, you’re likely to be out on the shop floor, showing customers what’s available – basically working as a sales assistant, but not getting your hands dirty.”

Harrison did also acknowledge this issue, recognising that the demise of Saturday jobs isn’t purely down to cost: "The job itself has changed,” he said. “Customers expect expert advice on e-bikes, on fit, on technology. That's a lot to ask of someone working one day a week, and when the financial risk of employing them has also risen, many shop owners are simply deciding it isn't worth it."

This is something Armstrong has seen firsthand, and he agrees that it’s having a big impact, not just on the industry, but also how kids get into the sport. “The bike shop that really helped me out when I was a young rider, Broadgate Cycles in Preston, has just closed,” he explains. “It was a family business and had been passed down from generation to generation, but the times are so tough and margins so tight, that they decided it wasn’t worth it. I got my first and second bikes from there – I’m very sad to see it go.”

The ACT, which is part of the Bira Group and represents cycle traders and retailers across Britain, championing independent bike shops, is appealing to the government to review the impact of recent employment legislation on small independent retailers, and to consider whether targeted exemptions or support for young and part-time workers could help preserve entry-level roles that are vital to the future of the trade.

When, in 1982, Gerald O’Donovan, then head of Raleigh’s elite Specialist Bicycle Development Unit (SBDU), discovered that Tommy Godwin was riding time trials at the ripe old age of 61, he didn’t hesitate to build the veteran Olympian a bike suitable for a champion.

“As well as being a remarkable engineer with a natural gift for marketing, Gerald was one of the most generous people I have ever known,” explains current owner, Dave Marsh, of the Universal Cycle Centre, Rotherham.

Godwin was a cycling icon for decades. He won two bronze medals at Herne Hill during the London 1948 Olympics, managed the British team at the Tokyo 1964 Olympics, and was, at 91, an official ambassador and torch bearer for the London 2012 Olympics. Marsh first met him trackside after winning the Masters category of the 1997 National Championship points race at Manchester Velodrome.

“Tommy presented me with my medal,” Marsh fondly recalls. “Little did I suspect that I’d be buying this bike from him four years later at a Kidderminster cycle jumble.”

Godwin was having a clear-out that included his TI Raleigh Team Bike. “We did a meticulous restoration,” remembers Marsh, “including a respray by talented ex-SBDU frame painter Phil ‘Skill’ Insley, who first painted it back in ’82. Even the decals are original.”

The frame is built entirely from heat-treated Reynolds 753 tubing, a stronger, thinner-walled version of 531. The rest of the build is almost entirely ‘no expense spared’ Campagnolo Super Record. The training wheels shown feature 28/32 spoke Mavic Mach 2 CD grey anodised rims shod with durable Vittoria Rally tubulars, but Marsh also owns the original TT-ready 28/28 spoke Arc-en-Ciel rims that Godwin paired with fast silk tubulars.

The Saba stem evokes ’80s nostalgia. It’s a Cinelli, but pantographed by Italo Berigliano, whose London-based company Saba imported lust-worthy bike components from Italy. The bars are also Cinelli, a 42cm width model 64.

The full route details for the five stages of the 2026 Lloyds Tour of Britain Men were revealed on Wednesday by British Cycling, which gets underway on Wednesday 2 September and runs until Sunday 6 September.

The course will see some of the world's top riders racing across 910.3k (565 miles) of Britain, from Michaelgate in Lincoln, via the Yorkshire Dales to the Lammermuir Hills, just across the border in southern Scotland, tacking 8814 metres of ascent enroute.

"The route brings unique challenges to the riders, while delivering a backdrop which shows the best of Britain, from the beautiful coastline, across the highways, through our stunning countryside, and up some iconic and challenging categorised climbs,” says Jonathan Day, Director of Events for British Cycling Ventures.

Stage one, Lincoln-Lincoln, Weds 2 Sept 2026, 187.6km

This is the first year Britain’s biggest professional men’s cycle race has visited Lincoln, but riders will see plenty of the city on this 187.6km stage, which takes rolls out of town into the Lincolnshire Wolds and through Market Rasen, riding north to visit Caistor in the West Lindsey District, before wending west through Waddingham and then south to head back towards Lincoln via Ingham.

Once back in the city, with 120km already on the clock, riders will climb Michaelgate (11.3% average gradient) five times while doping crowd-pleasing laps of the famous Lincoln Grand Prix circuit, a prestigious part of the Lloyds National Road Series.

Stage two, Boston–Skegness, Thurs 3 Sept 2026, 185.2km

Day two will see the race start further south, in Boston, with riders heading north past Coningsby (WWII base of the 617 Squadron - better known as the bomb bouncing 'Dambusters') and pedalling through Woodhall Spa, Horncastle and Wragby, before heading east back into the Lincolnshire Wolds, where the route intersects with the stage one course at Binbrook.

The peloton will then ride east, via Louth to meet the coast and ride beside the North Sea through Mablethorpe and Sutton-on-Sea, with a climb close Langton Hill, before dropping to end in a sprint finish into Skegness.

Stage three, Hull–Beverley, Fri 4 Sept 2026, 200.6km

The tour starts north of the Humber on day three, with the peloton departing Hull and heading up England's east coast, pedalling through Withernsea and continuing up to Hornsea and Skipseam before bearing inland to Burton Agnes.

Riders face a sequence of climbs en route to Driffield before descending into Wetwang, racing four times around a 16km circuit in Beverley, with the finish line positioned atop a testing uphill final stretch to the racecourse.

Stage four, Helmsley–Leyburn, Sat 5 Sept 2026, 170.5km

Riders face 2459m of ascent during the toughest stage of the 2026 Tour, as the race moves into North Yorkshire and tackles terrain that will likely prove pivotal in determining the final General Classification standings.

From the market town of Helmsley in the North York Moors National Park, the course winds through Easingwold, Boroughbridge and the cathedral city of Ripon before entering the Yorkshire Dales National Park. From Pateley Bridge, a stiff climb out of Greenhow Bank (4km at 7,2% average gradient) takes riders west towards Grassington and Wharfedale before the course head north to Buckden.

Between Cray and the finishline in Leyburn, the peloton will pass through some spectacular scenery - familiar to those who spectated the 2014 Tour de France Grande Depart - as riders climb Kidstones (2.9km at 6.3% average gradient and 12.6% max), race past Aysgarth Falls and tackle the climbs of Greets Moss (4.4km at 6.9% average gradient) and Grinton Moor (4.4km at 5.3% average gradient).

Stage five, Earlston–Earlston, Sun 6 September 2026, 166.4km 

On the final day the race heads into southern Scotland, to the Berwickshire town of Earlston, making its debut appearance on the Tour of Britain.

Heading east, through Smailholm towards Kelso, the route then elbows north to visit Hume, Greenlaw and Duns. Riders will then do battle during climbs in the Lammermuir Hills, passing Whiteadder Water before ascending to Redstone Rig and Duddy Bank. The route then returns to Earlston, where riders will race around two circuits of a 19km lap to the final finish line.

Further details about the routes of all five stages, and more information about the race and host venues, is all available on the BC website.

Tour of Britain 2026 stage table

The French retail giant Decathlon has invested in Britain’s largest bike manufacturer, Brompton with a strategic partnership aimed at turbo charging the brand's iconic folding bikes penetration into key markets, specifically Germany and China.

In a deal thought to be worth about £18 million, which became public knowledge on Tuesday morning, reported on in The Guardian, Decathlon Pulse (the investment and innovation arm of Decathlon) have secured a 10% stake in Brompton Bicycle, while BA Capital (a Shanghai-based venture capital firm) have bagged a 5% interest.

Founded by inventor Andrew Ritchie, Brompton bikes were born in London in 1975 and now, 50 years and 1.2 million bikes later, the signature three-way folding mobility machines are available in 47 markets around the globe, along with electric versions of the bikes, powered by the brand's proprietary e-Motiq system, and the more-recently launched G Line model, which gave the bikes gravel riding capability.

“For over 50 years, Brompton has been dedicated to helping people move around cities in a way that is simpler, more flexible and more enjoyable," said Will Butler-Adams, Brompton CEO, who opined that the European bike industry was “over the worst” after a slump in sales following the Covid-created boom and insisted that “cycling is in the ascendant.”

"As demand for smarter and more sustainable urban transport continues to grow, we see a tremendous opportunity ahead," he continued. "Decathlon Pulse and BA Capital bring complementary expertise, global networks and a shared belief in our mission. We are excited to welcome them as long-term partners as we continue to grow while staying true to who we are.”

Decathlon has previously partnered with – and added some financial heft to – brands such as bike computer and bike light manufacturer Magene and smartwatch makers Coros. And despite the significant size of the investment, spokesfolk for the brand are anxious to stress that the quality and style of the steeds will not change, saying 'Brompton will remain Brompton'.

"Brompton embodies a unique combination of performance, durability and community engagement that perfectly complements our approach," added Franck Vigo, CEO of Decathlon Pulse. "This partnership is about scaling that model while preserving what makes Brompton truly unique. This partnership is about scaling that model while preserving what makes Brompton truly unique.”

As much as the Brompton brand masters attempt to reassure their existing customers and fanbase, however, the immense gravitational pull of the Chinese market, and transformative potential of penetrating it, is writ large in the deal.

“The rise of experience-driven consumption is reshaping China’s consumer market," enthuses Michael Zhang, Managing Partner of BA Capital. "As health awareness grows and outdoor lifestyles gain momentum, cycling is expanding beyond sport into everyday occasions such as commuting, travel, and social activities. Brompton’s strength lies not only in its product leadership, but also in its unique ability to bring together products, culture, and community.

“We believe globalisation is a two-way journey. As China becomes an increasingly important market for international brands, we are proud to be part of Brompton’s long-term journey in China as it brings exceptional cycling experiences to more consumers."

Keegan Swenson and Sofía Gómez Villafañe won the 2026 editions of SBT GRVL presented by Wahoo on Sunday in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Swenson claimed his fourth title at the 108-mile Black Course while Gómez Villafañe held off a determined Sarah Lange in the final kilometre.

SBT GRVL is one of the marquee events on the American gravel calendar, drawing thousands of riders to the champagne gravel roads of Routt County. The 2026 edition returned to downtown Steamboat Springs after last year's race was held on a modified circuit in nearby Hayden. Each SBT GRVL course started and finished on Yampa Street, with the new 2026 Black Course featuring favourite sections of previous routes plus with entirely new segments. There were also separate starts for elite men, elite women, and amateur categories in 2026, as well as a rolling safety enclosure.

How the race played out

After beginning the 2026 season with a devastating hip fracture, Keegan Swenson has made a brilliant return to form. After an early breakaway featuring Adam Roberge got away, Swenson forced a selection partway through the race. Following the steep gradients of Wahooligan Hill, Swenson bridged across to Roberge along with Cobe Freeburn and Henry Nelson.

Swenson wasn't going to wait around for the sprint, so with 20 miles to go, he went solo. With a healthy gap to the field, Swenson nabbed his fourth SBT GRVL title ahead of Alexey Vermeulen who came impressively out of the chase group. Freeburn sprinted to third on the podium, while Nelson finished fourth, the best result of his young career.

Swenson's approach at SBT GRVL is consistent and dominant: make the race hard early, reduce the group, and solo to the line. "You have to push all day and break the group up and whittle it down," he said after his third title in 2024. "You don't want to come to the line with a bunch of guys, ideally you want to come solo or with just one other. You slowly want to turn the pace up, see how everyone else is doing." The same was true in 2026.

Result: SBT GRVL men's 2026

1. Keegan Swenson
2. A. Vermeulen
3. C. Freeburn
4. H. Nelson
5. A. Roberge

SBT GRVL Women's race

In the women's race, everyone had their eye on Unbound Gravel winner Sofia Gómez Villafañe. The Specialized Off-Road rider arrived as the pre-race favourite and former Steamboat winner, but it was another rider who made the decisive move of the day.

Sarah Lange led the small group of leaders over the top of Wahooligan Pass, and with a few miles to go, Lange still had a gap. But then came the charging figure of Gómez Villafañe. A two-up sprint seemed imminent, but Gómez Villafañe had other ideas. The Specialized Off-Road rider launched just inside the final kilometre and Lange had no answer. Gómez Villafañe took the win with Lange in second, and US gravel national champion Lauren Stephens in third.

For Gómez Villafañe, winning SBT GRVL was about more than the place on the results sheet. In fact, she almost didn't line up for the race, saying, "Physically and mentally you don't always get to show up at 100% for events, and that's kinda what I felt here. Once I got into Cow Creek, I found the Sofia that I know, the Sofia that knows how to race hard."

Result: Sea Otter Gravel women's 2026

1. Sofía Gómez Villafañe
2. S. Lange
3. L. Stephens
4. P. Onweller
5. C. Decker

Becky Mursell is buzzing, and well she might be. Her work – a photography project called The Everyday Cyclist that has been four years in the making – has been launched and is on display in the stunning grounds of Osterley Park in London. More than that, the message she wanted to send is now out there: cycling is very much for everyone, whoever you are, whatever your background.

Working in a London bike shop, Mursell was surrounded by the usual slick marketing bumpf with which we're all well-versed: models draped in nice kit riding fancy bikes in beautiful locations. But it wasn't long before she realised that the people in the images weren't really representative of the people she was serving in the shop.

"I was on the shop floor selling bikes, and I was like, oh, I don't really relate to some of this imagery, you know?" she tells Cycling Weekly. "At the time I just had a hybrid, and it's not really the people who I see coming to the shop, people who I see out and about on the roads. As I started to get more photography commissions, I did drop the bike shop job, and I thought, well, I'll do a project, like a personal project, and fuse my passions."

That was back in 2022, and since then Mursell has become a full-time photographer, enabling her to start The Everyday Cyclist project in earnest. It saw her ultimately gather more than 120 subjects from all over London, riding no less than 3,500km in the process and spending time photographing them in spots that meant something to them, and talking to them about their passion for two wheels.

Thanks in part to a highly successful crowdfunding appeal that enabled her to fund the exhibition, those subjects and many of their stories are now being exhibited to the general public, for free, in Osterley Park.

It was a "surreal" experience, Mursell says, seeing the exhibition finally come to fruition and open up for the first time.

"When I went back for the first time to the park – after the install day – and saw members of the public stop and interact with the artwork, it took a moment for it all to sink in that I had actually pulled this all off," she says. "I've even had a few people come up to me in the park with really positive feedback, which makes it all feel worthwhile."

Mursell found her subjects from all over, beginning with friends and then progressing to reaching out to others and even getting London Cycling Campaign involved. There were even occasions where she encountered other riders while out on her bike, and asked whether they would be involved. The response, she says, has been overwhelmingly positive.

"I've never done the portrait off the bat," she says, "but a few people I have been out and about cycling, spotted somebody, and then literally cycled up to them: 'Hello, my name is Becky'. And then, a week or two later, we're actually on the shoot."

Some of those Mursell photographed will be recognisable to Cycling Weekly readers, including Pinarello Q36.5 pro rider Fred Wright, and broadcasters Rebecca Charlton and Jeremy Vine.

But most are not famous at all. People from all walks of life who have a mutual enjoyment of riding a cycle of some form, include adaptive machines that allow those who are unable to ride a standard bike access to transport, fresh air, and freedom.

Mursell gives the example of Quailyn, who suffers from epilepsy and pelvic arthritis and was only able to get around using lifts from family and friends – before getting an e-trike through the Wheels For Wellbeing charity.

"It's been an absolute game changer for her," Mursell says. "Suddenly she's got her complete independence. She says that before, sometimes she'd have to use a walking stick briefly, but because she's moving about because of the trike, her physicality has got better."

Mursell adds: "Notoriously the imagery around adaptive cycles is really poor, so as I started to kind of get connected into that world, I was like, this is really important to show a good variety of those bikes that share those stories, display them equally – it doesn't just have to be sports."

"I'm just trying to encourage cycling to be a more welcoming space, because I think too many people don't see themselves [in it]. They're like, oh, I have to be a certain type, I have to have a certain bike, that kind of thing," she says.

The Everyday Cyclist displays in Osterley Park until 6 July, before moving to Brockwell Park in Brixton on 8 July until 31 August, after which Mursell says she hopes to tour the exhibition more widely.

Last week, Dr Sarah Ruggins arrived in Nordkapp, in the far north Arctic-tickling tip of Norway, exactly 13 days, 20 hours and 27 minutes after setting off on her bicycle from Tarifa in southern Spain. Her total riding distance was 6,042km, and just to put that into context, last year’s entire Tour de France was 3,301.9km in length, spread across 21 stages and three and a half weeks.

In completing her epic journey in such a blisteringly fast time, the Canadian-born athlete and adventurer not only smashed the existing world speed record for riding from the bottom to the top of Europe – knocking over three days and 32 off the time set by Dr Ian Walker, in 2019 – she also set a new record for the greatest distance ever ridden by a woman in a week, riding 3,364.08km in seven days.

These figures are phenomenal in anyone’s book, but when you consider that Ruggins couldn’t even ride a bike just three years ago, they’re nothing short of incredible. Now a triple-record holding ultra-cyclist (she also holds the John O’Groats to Land’s End and Back record), Ruggins only began cycling in 2023, after spending 10 years recovering from a rare autoimmune condition.

A promising track and field athlete as a child, with realistic Olympic aspirations, Ruggins was diagnosed with the condition when she was 15, and the illness left her bedridden and in need of 24-hour care. A couple of years before setting her LEJOGLE cycling record, Ruggins was planning to run from Land’s End to John O’Groats, when she run collapsed with series of dreadful injuries as result of her illness, suffering two broken ankles, and fractures in her femur and pelvis – just weeks before the planned start.

Undeterred, she secured an entry for the Transcontinental Race, a 4,000km unsupported race across Europe, and then bought a bike and started training. Ruggins crashed out of the 2023 event, but returned stronger in 2024, and finished near the front.

But, even having proved herself capable of climbing such a steep training and learning curve, Ruggins achievement over the last fortnight is jaw dropping. So, how on earth did she manage to pull off such an incredible ride, let alone in the heatwave conditions she started off in last month?

Dr Ruggins has a PHD in finance – suffice to say, she knows her way around an abacas, and number discipline was obviously a crucial factor to achieving what she has done over the last couple of weeks.

With that in mind, Cycling Weekly spoke to the rider and some of her support crew earlier this week, when they were enroute back to Britain (where Ruggins is now based), and together we have gathered the stats and stories that tell the tale of this extraordinary double record-setting ride.

Riding by numbers

One – Ruggins rode the entire route on a single bike, the Liv EnviLiv Advanced SL (also much beloved by Cycling Weekly tech writer Hannah Bussey). She also rode the entire route on one chain.

12 – Number of croissants with cream cheese eaten per day by Ruggins during the latter part of the ride, after she overcame the nausea that plagued her during the early stages.

Nine – Countries passed through during the continent-crossing adventure.

Two – Number of punctures Ruggins suffered during the entire ride.

14 – Number of times Ruggins listed to Salt by Ben Camden during her mammoth cycle. “I felt very overstimulated,” she says. “I had my earbuds silent most of the time. But this track reminded me of my partner, Ryan. My second most-listened to track was Hymn by Charlotte de Witte - that one kept me awake at night!”

90 – Minutes of lie-down sleep Ruggins allowed herself every day until she broke the seven-day distance record (after which she treated herself with a 3-hour kip)

Four – The maximum number of off-bike micro rests Ruggins allowed her during each day (five minutes of which were taken up with eating and medical checks, leaving 5 minutes for a quick nap)

8,623 – Amount of money, in GBP sterling, that Ruggins has so far raised for World Bicycle Relief, a charity that helps people and communities around the world by providing them with life-changing bikes.

Two – Number of fingers Ruggin’s has no feeling in (temporarily, we hope) after suffering nerve damage during her ride. “I was unable to use the aero position for much of the ride, because of saddle discomfort,” she told us. “So I was riding on the hood for most of the way, and I'm paying for it now!"

35,000 – metres climbed during the 6,042km ride

22 – Hours spent in the saddle every day during the challenge

11,000 – calories consumed on average every day

20 – Number of kilometres of mud, sand and gravel Ruggins was forced to ride her road bike across when she encountered some unexpected road works whilst leaving Poland.

35 – Degrees of heat (in Celsius) that Ruggins was riding in during the first few days of her record attempt, while racing across Spain and France. “Nutrition, especially hydration, was very challenging, in those conditions” she says. “I was taking on 2 litres of electrolyte-loaded liquids every hour, and the only thing I could eat was gels.”

11,748 – Kilometres driven by Ruggins’ media and support car

500 – Number of Buffalo Bicycles Ruggins is aiming to provide to people in poor rural regions around the world.

Read an interview with Sarah Ruggins in the current print edition of Cycling Weekly – subscribe here!

Sometimes as a writer of columns I find I’m writing a column that’s a sort of “Part 2” to a piece I did a few weeks earlier. Perhaps I didn’t quite finish the thought first time, or I came up with a decent joke after I’d filed the copy, or I changed my mind and wanted to pretend I hadn’t been stupid enough to write the first one.

And sometimes I realise I’m writing a whole series of themed columns that you could collate into one long whinge. To wit, I’ve noticed that a recurrent motif of recent years has been, “Gosh, hasn’t cycling got expensive?”

In general I’ve been against this trend. But, last weekend, as I tried to find something in my overly-cluttered bike store I found myself thinking differently: “If everything had been as expensive ten years ago as it is now I’d have a lot more space in here.”

In fact a bit of quick maths suggests that the increased cost of bikes and the consequent reduction in my ability to buy them would save enough storage space that I could get off with a smaller house. Financially I’d actually come out in front.

The advantage is actually two-fold. First, as mentioned, you can afford less. Second, to upgrade you have absolutely no choice but to sell something you already own. This saves even more space. You can’t conceivably afford to keep anything you don’t use.

I’ve only preserved one bike from my racing career as a memento – it’s a TT bike that I won quite a lot on, and which was perhaps the prettiest of my race bikes. Its aesthetic qualities are, however, hard to appreciate because it’s surrounded in its storage unit by a mighty collection of some of the best wheels, bars, saddles, and random bits given to me by sponsors down the years that I hadn’t intended to keep, but somehow did.

I’m not a hoarder. But if the Hoarder Police raided my unit, they would have questions I’d struggle to answer.

Why do I still have all these things? The problem is that when things were cheaper, their second-hand value declined to nothing even more quickly than modern equipment. If you were a sponsored rider looking to squeeze a bit more out of the deal by selling your team equipment, you had to do it very fast.

I’ve got one friend who used to do well on Ebay, but insisted that speed was key. If the prize haul at a race included something like a pair of sunglasses, he normally had them listed for sale before he even got home. (“Exclusive pro-only promotional colourway” was, he told me, the secret to turning ugly Italian sunnies with over-sized logos into a new video game.)

He still looks back fondly on the year he broke his collarbone in mid-September and got to sell everything his team had given him a month earlier than usual.

For those of us a bit slower out of the blocks, the cash value of most things dropped below the it-might-come-in-useful-one-day value in a matter of months.

Leave it sitting for a year or two beyond that point, and you had things that no one would take even if you gave them away, like rim-brake tubular-tyre wheels. You find yourself at the local recycling centre asking a dude in a high-viz jacket what skip you should put carbon fibre in. That’s pretty heartbreaking.

Which naturally means that I don’t even do that with it – I just keep it. I tell myself that one day the value will go up again. Like an exquisite, chromed Cinelli frame from the 1950s, perhaps people will one day pay big money for old rim-brake aero wheels. And if they do, I’m going to be so rich I’ll be able to afford a modern bike.

How To… Be a Good Winner

Everyone knows the importance of grace in defeat, even if they prefer not to actually demonstrate it. Similarly, it is important to know how to win while maintaining a spirit of generosity towards your vanquished opponents or, as we winners think of them, the losers.

For example, you can help them improve their own performance for next time. Pinpoint for them any mistakes they might have made: “Mate, I just couldn’t believe my luck when you launched that incredibly stupid attack over the top of the last climb. Wow, you really handed it to me there.”

You might like to suggest that your performance was really just down to luck: “Mate, I’m just lucky. I have a lot of innate genetic talent, but as well as that I’m lucky enough to be the sort of person with a real work ethic and a will to just find ways to keep improving. Next time that could just as easily be you.”

Recognise that your opponents might not have had all of your advantages: “Mate, I think you did pretty well to be that close to me. I mean, you’ve got a lot of limitations as an athlete.”

Make sure you show them you understand the pain of defeat: “Mate, I know how hard you work. I know that you’re out training every day, sacrificing time with your family. It must really hurt to do all that and still come up short. I mean, I’d be bloody raging if something like that had happened to me.”

Acts of Cycling Stupidity

A long time ago, there was a fad for L-shaped cranks – cranks with a 90-degree bend in them. Supposedly they made it easier to pedal over top-dead-centre. Of course they did no such thing. There was maybe a visual illusion, but nothing more.

I was surprised to find an old photo of a friend of mine using them. I messaged him, mocking his credulity.

“Not a bit,” he replied. “I knew they didn’t work. But I’d also overheard one of my main rivals telling someone that he was desperate to get a pair because he was convinced they were brilliant. So I borrowed a pair and rode up and down in front of him with them at the race HQ before that year’s national championships. I’d killed him before he even got on his bike.”

The British bike charity Cycling UK announced the opening of a brand new, multi-day bikepacking trail this week, called Gallovidian Gravel, which traverses the terrain of Dumfries and Galloway in the south of Scotland.

Cycling UK has established a growing network of riding trails across the country, including the Royal Chilterns Way, King Alfred’s Way, Rebellion Way and Traws Eryri - but this is its first route located entirely north of the border, in Scotland.

The circular route, which starts and finishes in Dumfries, offers adventure-seeking gravel bike and MTB riders 330km of off-road cycling with a total of 4,002 metres of climbing, as it rolls around the wild region's rugged and history sodden landscapes, exploring remote mountains, secret lochs, ancient abbeys, volcanic coastlines, evocative ruined churches, iron age hill forts and character-filled Lowland towns and villages as it wends along forest tracks and coastal back lanes.

Designed to be done over a long weekend or half a week, riders can arrange B&B or pub-based accommodation along the way or punctuate days on the trail with wild camping experiences under star-strewn skies.

The trail, which has been designed and implemented with the help of route designers and bike-tour guides Guy Kesteven and Kieran Foster, includes unique highlights such as the artistic fishing town of Kirkcudbright, and (apparently) the world’s fanciest cow shed. Cyclists can also encounter all kinds of wildlife beside and above the trail - from eagles and ospreys to majestic red deer and wild goats.

“We’ve worked hard to create a moving story of an adventure that takes in traffic free paths and quiet back lanes, linking trail centres, craggy coasts, smugglers coves, seemingly endless forests and wild mountainscapes," said Guy Kesteven.

“Despite being the closest part of Scotland to England, the area remains largely overlooked and undiscovered," he continued. "It’s somewhere you can experience the wild solitude of Scotland’s dark sky parks, whilst also taking in deep history, delightful towns, villages, remote farms and stunning scenery at every turn.

“In short, it really has been the perfect biking area to build a route in. Similar to when we made Royal Chilterns Way, we’ve built in three distinct sections that are linked. That makes Gallovidian Gravel one of our most accessible routes yet for those without the time to tackle the full adventure in one go. We guarantee even the shortest ride in Galloway will grab your heart and make you want to return as soon as possible though.”

According to stats collected by the European Cyclists’ Federation (ECF), cycling tourism generates more than €44 billion annually, and supports myriad small businesses across Britain and the continent, from B&Bs to bike shops.

Survey data collected by Cycling UK along its King Alfred’s Way route in 2020 backs this up, revealing that on average each person riding the route spends £107.61 per day. With some 1.23 million overnight biking trips being made by adventure cyclists annually, the charity estimates that backcountry riders generate £520m per year.

“Cycling can be the best way to truly experience a place, because you’re travelling slowly enough to take everything in but fast enough to cover great distances," said Cycling UK's commercial director, Katie Hammond. "It’s always exciting to be able to unveil a new route, knowing that at the same time, it’ll boost the local businesses and communities, connecting more of our cities, towns and villages.

“Multi-day routes also offer a much greener and healthier way to travel. You get to see incredible places that are often inaccessible by car, and I’m so pleased to be revealing our first Scottish route. By joining Cycling UK, anyone can help support the creation of even more routes that make cycle adventures accessible to everyone. You’ll also be the first to know when we launch something new.”