Bike Racing

[Marco]

Allegedly Thomas is blaming (as in I'm not blaming but I am mentioning it...) bicarbonate of soda.

I've heard of various legally allowed supposedly performance enhancing substances but this is a new one on me. I just use it for baking and removal of shoe odour!

I'm surprised you haven't heard of it, it's been around years. I believe it came from horse racing, where it's called 'milkshaking'

https://paulickreport.com/news/ray-s...0the%20muscles.

Last time I checked it was legal. And don't mention it to Graham, but I've tried it in my middle-distance track racing days, having read a report that Fausto Coppi used it (er, amongst other things)

[Marco]

Roglic was running a 40 chain ring with a 44 dinner plate on the rear. Nuts but you can't argue with the result. No idea on G but I'm sure it's only a Google away

2. that the mighty, arrogant, overweening, smug, cheating Ineos didn't then do the same. Not invented here perhaps? Or Shimano don't have the same SRAM set up.

40 x 44 is the same gear size as 34 x 38. It's a pretty standard gear size that you could buy from a bike shop this lunchtime

Although on the theme of "stuck in their ways" I always thought if Ullrich has pushed a smaller gear he would have beaten twiddling, cheating Armstrong. So does Daniel Friebe in his 448 page biography The Best There Never Was.

So it must be true.

A cyclist's most efficient cadence is dependant on many factors; some riders prefer to twiddle a small gear, and some like to 'grind' a large one. It is quite possible that Ullrich would not have been able to put out as much power over the duration of a 30 minute (or greater) climb using a small gear. I'm sure that the East German and Team Telekom coaches would have tried it

But alas Ullrich was mentally damaged from his East Germany years and only knew one way to think.

Much further down the talent pile, I cycle with some respectable ex-racing cyclists who will grind up the very modest local climbs whilst I use a smaller gear. And if they p*** me off, and try to race me, I have been know to drop it down two gears and put a burst of 140rpm in to drop them.

Even though they see me disappear on a much smaller gear it doesn't seem to register to them that they could do the same, so in this respect dogma is alive and well in cycling.

[MattPo]

Does anyone here pay for the Cycling News website? Are there any catches? They will not let me look at much and I like following it.

[Marco]

At the risk of showing my age - I still think Laurent Fignon won 3 Tours and Lemond won one less than he thinks he did.

In which case, you'll like the photo below that I took an hour ago



Whilst this car is clearly owned by a person of taste, their historical accuracy is slightly wrong

[Graham Breeze]

In which case, you'll like the photo below that I took an hour ago



Whilst this car is clearly owned by a person of taste, their historical accuracy is slightly wrong

Wonderful!

I despise vanity number plates - but since four of my five immediate neighbours display them, naturally I am (slightly) discreet - but there could be an exception.

The 159 is thirteen years old so the plate will be worth more than the car.

[bigfella]

Many such as this one are also illegal, why is this ignored as it’s surely an easy revenue stream.

[Marco]

The 159 is thirteen years old so the plate will be worth more than the car.

That's nothing Graham. The owner of this car likes their Italian cars, as well as cycling. Whilst photographing their Alfa, I spotted a 50 years old one parked further down the road. I didn't recognise it, as in I've never seen one like it before. If it's what I think, it's worth more than their house - and this is in Lichfield ...

I should have noted the number plate, but as I'd just photographed one of their cars it might have been a step too far.

[Graham Breeze]

The following extract is copyright but I post it to show the sort of writing you can read in Rouleur.

Some internal and concluding paragraphs are not included.

It comes to me via the Rouleur news site. When The Fellrunner changed its layout it copied Rouleur.

Pickering is a writer of real class. An article about the Giro that starts with Fay Weldon? Cycling Weekly it isn't.

I will delete it in a few days to avoid going to prison.

THE LONG WAIT: WAS A DRAMATIC FINALE ENOUGH TO MAKE UP FOR A QUIET THREE WEEKS OF GC RACING?

WORDS: EDWARD PICKERING


In her memoir Auto da Fay, the novelist Fay Weldon observed that the human condition tended towards ennui, punctuated by rare drama. “There seems to be a general overall pattern in most lives, that nothing happens, and nothing happens, and then all of a sudden everything happens,” she wrote.

I’m not saying that the 2023 Giro d’Italia made me think of this quote, but there was a general overall pattern for most of the race, that nothing happened, and nothing happened, and then all of a sudden everything happened. It’s hard to say whether the incessant rain and cold of the first two weeks of the event had more of a chilling effect on the race than the rather unsubtle design of the final week’s percorso, but as the exploits of entertaining rides by Derek Gee, Thibaut Pinot and a few others fade from memory, the abiding memory of the 2023 Giro will be of a long, long wait for something significant to happen. Nice stage battles; shame about the GC.

Weldon also wrote: “I long for a day of judgement when the plot lines of our lives will be neatly tied, and all puzzles explained, and the meaning of events made clear.” There was one day of judgement in the 2023 Giro and that was the penultimate stage, the mountain time trial to Monte Lussari, a hitherto obscure corner of Friuli Venezia Giulia that also happened to be one of the most beautiful settings I have ever seen in a bike race. A nice landscape can go a long way to blinding us to the fact that nothing’s changing in the GC, as the tappone to Tre Cime di Lavaredo demonstrated just 24 hours before Monte Lussari. Of course, it’s true that stage races, especially Grand Tours, are attritional – cumulative fatigue is always building, even when it looks like it isn’t, and you can argue that without everything that had gone before, quiet stages and all, we wouldn’t have had that upheaval. However, Monte Lussari both dazzled with its fairytale scenery and finally, finally gave us a bike race.

Primož Roglič’s stunning victory on Monte Lussari by 40 seconds over maglia rosa Geraint Thomas, giving him the overall win by just 14 seconds, was an irresistible and compelling story of redemption. He’d looked less strong than Thomas through the mountain stages of week three, and even the handful of seconds he did manage to squeeze out of his Welsh rival at Tre Cime di Laveredo were put down to Thomas mistiming his attack with 500m to go and fizzling out in the last 100m. And of course, the looming shape of La Planche des Belles Filles, where he’d quite spectacularly lost the 2020 Tour de France to his young compatriot Tadej Pogačar in a mountain time trial on the penultimate day, cast a long and dark shadow over the Slovenian’s preparation for Monte Lussari.

In the end, Roglič won the Giro while everybody else spent three weeks trying not to lose it. Sometimes, not losing is enough, but when you ride a Grand Tour like that, you run the risk of getting caught with your pants down, and Roglič knows that better than anybody. He rode a conservative race at the 2020 Tour, and he was so concerned with not losing it that he forgot to win it. You didn’t really think he was going to make the same mistake twice?

There was a pleasing symmetry to Roglič’s triumph at Monte Lussari, and the fact that it took place in such a beautiful setting, with such an obviously febrile atmosphere from the Slovenian crowds, went some way to rescuing the 2023 Giro. However, I’ve never bought the narrative that Roglič left a piece of his soul on La Planche des Belles Filles. He’s a more complex soul than many used to give him credit for, but his blood doesn’t run hot. Within 15 days of La Planche, he’d won Liège-Bastogne-Liège; seven weeks later he won the Vuelta a España. And for somebody who is reputed to suffer more than his share of bad luck, he gets a lot of very good results in big races – apart from 2020, he’s won at least two WorldTour stage races every season for six years now. He just hasn’t won the Tour yet, is all. For many fans, he is a tragic figure, but having observed him navigating the highs and lows of cycling life with laconic equanimity for quite a few years now, I’m not sure they didn’t feel the pain of La Planche far more than Roglič actually did.

Runner-up Geraint Thomas played Primož Roglič to Primoż Roglič’s Tadej Pogačar in this Giro. The Monte Lussari time trial knocked the stuffing out of him, though he rallied enough to lead out his old friend Mark Cavendish, who was in search of his own slice of redemption in Rome the next day. The Welshman, winner of the 2018 Tour de France, has enjoyed a late-career run of form that has seen him become one of the standout GC riders of the last couple of seasons. He was third in last year’s Tour behind Jonas Vingegaard and Pogačar, and has now finished a narrow second to Roglič in the Giro. He reflected immediately after the time trial that it was better to lose by 14 seconds than by a smaller number, but he was close enough that he may look back over the last three weeks and think a little too hard about where he could have found that time. The Slovenian faltered on Monte Bondone on stage 16, and he'd been recovering from a mid-race crash. Was that the time to twist the knife?

As with last year’s Tour, Thomas rode a very defensive race. He’s one of the strongest riders in the world, is resilient and experienced, and therefore in a tactically straightforward race, he’ll always do well if he avoids bad luck. However, Ineos Grenadiers showed a lack of daring in Italy, despite strength in numbers, that was understandable given the circumstances of the race, but also demonstrates where they now stand in the Grand Tour hierarchy, which is below UAE Emirates and Jumbo-Visma. There is considerable mitigation for Ineos in the 2023 Giro. While they finished with three in the top ten, the impressive Thymen Arensman and Laurens De Plus coming sixth and tenth, they were kneecapped by the loss of Filippo Ganna to Covid and to Pavel Sivakov and especially Tao Geoghegan Hart to crashes and injuries. With five riders, controlling the bunch had to be done cleverly, and the scope for tactical adventure was severely limited by Geoghegan Hart, who had looked the equal of Roglič and Thomas, crashing out. However, it is two years since they won a Grand Tour – no emergency yet, but that hasn’t happened since 2010-2011.

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There were four main contributing factors to the general sense that the 2023 Giro took three whole weeks to come to life. The first was the weather. Low pressure pulled a blanket of cloud and chilly air over southern Europe through the middle of May, and the rain dampened any sense of adventure the peloton might have felt. Riders also reported that some of the earlier summit finishes were ridden into headwinds, which would have punished risk-taking. The second was the high attrition rate in the first half of the race from Covid and crashes – while 125 finishers is comparatively low for the Giro in modern history, the impact seemed worse because of the number of big riders who withdrew, including Remco Evenepoel, Geoghegan Hart, Aleksandr Vlasov and Filippo Ganna.


There was little subtlety, although that is not unusual in Grand Tours, and the modern trend of three-week events being won by super-elite riders representing very strong teams continued at the 2023 Giro. Of the last ten Grand Tours, nine have been won by either Jumbo, UAE, Ineos or Quick Step. Not much may have happened in the GC battle over the three weeks of the 2023 Giro. But for the smaller teams, this has been a fact of life going back much further than three weeks, with no sign of change.

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[PeteS]

Thank you, Graham. I good read.
Unfortunately I can't afford a rouleur subscription but if you could just keep posting the best bits on here, that would be great!

[Marco]

It's very 'arty' Graham, but there's nothing that couldn't have been gleaned from reading the newspapers, or watching the five minute highlights videos on Youtube or the official Giro d'Italia website.

To be honest, I could have written such an article if I'd been asked to write 1500 words on the subject. It wouldn't have been as refined, but it would have had as much, and probably more, cycling content.