Sommaire pour March 2024 de Cyclist

However, if you tend to subscribe to the meteorological definition – as I do – then winter starts at the beginning of December and ends at the end of February. Which means that the day subscription copies of this magazine flop onto the nation’s doormats is pretty much slap-bang in the middle of winter. There’s still as much winter to go as we have had already. That’s a lot of dark mornings, bitter winds, frozen fingers and soggy socks – and as 2024 is a leap year, there’s even an extra day of February just to rub our noses in it. All of which puts me in mind to book a holiday. I know I should be channelling Rule#5 and rejoicing in Britain’s character-building climate (see Trevor’s column on p130),…

This grey base layer might look unassuming, but Megmeister says its attributes are pretty special thanks to its construction. Dubbed Drynamo, the fabric is predominantly made from a merino/polyamide hybrid yarn that is recycled and in turn biodegradable, but Megmeister says its eco credentials don’t limit the base layer’s on-bike performance. The garment is seamless, having been woven in a single piece to ensure comfort, and by changing the weave pattern, mesh sections have been included to boost breathability. The merino component wicks sweat away and provides insulation, while Megmeister says the polyamide makes the garment robust to wear and tear.…

Suunto’s latest smartwatch nabs all the best bits from a bike computer and heart rate monitor and rolls them into one neat package. The 36mm display is big enough to accommodate mapping, with global maps available free from the Suunto app store, which also offers options to incorporate Strava segment tracking as well as on-the-fly nutrition planning. The Race tracks all the usual metrics, connects to devices such as power meters, and if worn constantly can assess heart rate variability (how regular your heart beats are) to judge fatigue and recovery. All this shouldn’t come at the expense of battery life, with Suunto claiming up to 26 days of normal use between charges. What’s more, the Race even tells the time.…

Race Tour of Flanders, 2nd April 2023 Tadej Pogačar attacks the final climb of the Tour of Flanders – the Paterberg – having dropped his rivals on his way to becoming the third rider ever to win both the Tour de France and Tour of Flanders. For a photographer, getting into position to capture an image like this can be equally exhausting. The climbs come thick and fast in the final part of the race, with only a few kilometres separating the Oude Kwaremont and the Paterberg, which means a mad dash on a moto to get from the one to the next in time to catch the leading riders cresting the summits. With a dozen photographers all fighting for the best positions, it can get pretty hair-raising, and then…

Nestled amidst rolling hills some 28km southeast of Adelaide lies the town of Hahndorf. Dating from early 1839 when 187 German Lutheran immigrants disembarked in Port Adelaide and negotiated the purchase of land in the Adelaide Hills, Hahndorf is recognised as Australia’s oldest surviving German settlement. How fitting that some 169 years later it was to be the scene of German sprinter André Greipel’s first official stage win at the Tour Down Under, a race he would come to dominate. In 2008 the event was celebrating its tenth edition as well as its newly acquired UCI ProTour status (the equivalent of a WorldTour race today). Officials were hoping the benchmark and an increasingly international peloton racing alongside the stars of Australian cycling would attract more than half a million spectators…

In all the excitement of a Tour de France stage, the spotlight rarely falls on the team bus driver. Except in 2013, when the driver for Orica-GreenEdge, Garikoitz Atxa, endured the infamy of getting the team bus wedged beneath the finish gantry of Stage 1, with the peloton just kilometres from the finish and getting closer by the second. ‘Have you ever had bad luck like that?’ Cyclist asks EF Education-EasyPost’s bus driver, Richard Romero. ‘Thankfully not,’ the Spaniard replies. ‘It looked very stressful. Mind you, so is driving a long and heavy vehicle up and down the mountains.’ Romero is a recent recruit to the cycling bus service but has been in the sport for 20 years. ‘I used to be a soigneur and my first professional race was…

There’s luggage but this isn’t touring; there’s sleeping on the floor but this isn’t bikepacking. There’s a time limit but this isn’t a sportive; there are awards but this isn’t a race. This is audax, a discipline as old as the hills, one on which early editions of the Tour de France were based, where riders traversed huge distances on two wheels with little more than a checkpoint map and their wits. The event photographed here by Fergus Coyle was the 2022 Moonrakers and Sunseekers audax run in November. The ride is 300km, starting out from Bristol at 10pm, turning round at Poole and then heading back to Bristol, with riders needing to get their brevet cards stamped at checkpoints to prove their long-distance mettle. As per the official rules,…

We’re up to version four of Shimano’s S-Phyre shoes, but ever since the initial change at the top of Shimano’s road shoe range from R321 to S-Phyre RC9 in 2016, it has been a case of evolution as opposed to revolution. In this instance, there has even been a case of devolution, with the RC903’s shape said to be returning to the wider fit offered by the RC901s, as a change in the RC902s made them much narrower and more tapered at the toe box. This was not well received by fans of Shimano shoes, which are generally known to offer a fit at the wider end of the spectrum. Largely, though, the new design has taken incremental steps forward and nothing drastic has altered. For example, the general construction…

With the release of the Úthald, Icelandic brand Lauf has completed its transition from the dark side. The company started in mountain biking with its unique leaf spring suspension forks (indeed, the brand’s name originally was Lauf Forks), which it then tuned for gravel. In another step in the right direction, a complete gravel frameset followed in 2017. Lauf is now an established name in gravel, having superseded that first True Grit model with the Seigla, but the Úthald marks its first steps into the light of full-blown road riding. Just like the innovative forks Lauf started out with, the Úthald’s design and rationale is somewhat unconventional. It’s designed to be a fast road bike, but not in the traditional sense of full integration and sharp handling. Úthald translates to…

Despite Miche being in the business of bike parts for over a century, it has had limited presence at the cutting edge of the wheel market. Until there was the Kleos. The Kleos RD 62 wheelset is the deepest of three new designs, all of which have spent time in the Silverstone Sports Engineering Hub wind-tunnel to ensure not just their rims but also their spokes and hubs minimise drag. As a result, the wheels’ front hub uses a fairing on its left flange. ‘This gives the wheels better aero performance by removing air turbulence from between the hub flange and the disc brake rotor, especially at wider wind angles,’ says Massimo Da Ros, Miche’s R&D manager. The hubs also use CeramicSpeed bearings as standard for lower rolling resistance. Miche…

The Z1 is one of Belgian brand Lazer’s oldest designs and remains one of its most popular thanks to its combination of light weight and ventilation. ‘We didn’t want to rest on our laurels, though, as we knew we could make it better,’ says Lazer’s Jonathan Jacobs. He is referring primarily to the inclusion of Lazer’s rotational impact protection dubbed KinetiCore. The feature works by removing blocks from the helmet’s EPS foam lining. The remaining crenelations act as controlled crumple zones in an accident, helping to dissipate rotational forces. The nature of KinetiCore means the Z1 has managed to shed its Mips additive liner, plus an extra bit of EPS foam too, helping it to meet its pre-existing lightweight remit. The new design sheds a considerable 40g, with a medium…

‘A rider, said Anquetil, is made up of two parts, a person and a bike… and in climbing the thing is to make the bike as light as possible… So at the start of every climb, Anquetil moved his water bottle from its holder to his back pocket.’ I’ve always loved this tale from Tim Krabbé’s The Rider. I have no idea if it’s true, though I can quite imagine this happening in an era when riders stuck pins in their legs to stop cramp and only raced on tubulars that had been ‘seasoned’ – stored in a dark room for several months in the belief this hardened the treads, thereby making for faster, more puncture-resistant tyres. But I digress. The point is, Maître Jacques was onto something. How much your…

1 Gorewear C5 Gore Windstopper cap £39.99, gorewear.com The only thing flat-earthers fear is sphere itself. The only thing bad weather fears is Gore. The fabric specialist’s C5 Windstopper cap has a peak to help keep low winter sun out of your eyes, flaps to keep the cold off your ears and neck, and it’s made from Gore-Tex material that Gore says is breathable yet completely windproof. If only it could stop a headwind. 2 Studio 51 jewellery From £16, studio51.cc Fences are often overlooked. So are non-tacky cycling-themed products. Studio 51’s cycling jewellery is a great way to represent your hobby/obsession/whatever you call it without socks or another cycling mug. Studio 51 uses only recycled materials, and you can get necklaces, chains, bracelets, wristbands and more, with icons including…

The Tarmac SL7 has since been superseded by the SL8, but that simply means that you can bag yourself a bargain if you’re not worried about having the latest version. This bike was £2k dearer a year ago and still represents a sweetspot in the Tarmac range between accessibility of price and quality of spec. Like all Tarmacs, the SL7 blends the lightness, aerodynamics and handling of a race bike with enough comfort to see you through a long day in the saddle. And while it’s a full £6,750 cheaper than the top-spec S-Works SL8, it doesn’t skimp on components, coming with a Shimano Ultegra groupset, integrated bar-stem and a set of nifty Roval C38 carbon wheels. It’s the perfect companion for a riding holiday in a place such as…

Just 27 days after Nazi Germany invaded France, with the world on the brink of catastrophe, the Giro d’Italia made its first pilgrimage to the Passo Falzarego, perched at an altitude of 2,105m among the twisted grey turrets of the Dolomites. The date was 5th June 1940 and the race’s 17th stage would be the tappone – the hardest day – a 110km odyssey over the Falzarego, Pordoi and Sella passes. On this dramatic day, the slopes of the Falzarego hosted a special moment of cycling history: the beginning of the fierce but respectful rivalry between Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali. The Italians were teammates at Legnano, but Bartali was supposed to be the alpha. Aged 25, he was a two-time Giro champion while Coppi, 20, was a novice in…

If you’ve ever been riding in Mallorca you’ve probably ticked off all the main climbs: Cap de Formentor, Sa Calobra and the biggest of them all, Puig Major. It’s the only HC climb on the island, and once you’ve made your way up its 14km ascent from Sóller and posed for the obligatory pictures by the tunnel entrance, you’ve made it to the very highest point accessible by road on Mallorca. Or have you? Look up and you will see a golden dome sitting atop the true summit of the mountain – a Bond villain-esque radar station that is visible from a long way off, and which has a narrow road leading up to it. The problem is that the road in question is hidden behind locked gates inside a…

Adapt or die: a choice that was faced by many small businesses during the pandemic. The cafe down the road started running a delivery service, your personal trainer decided to host their sessions over Zoom, and, if you’re from Sardinia, your local independent bike brand stopped procuring carbon frames from China and began making them itself. That’s how Fabio Putzolu started Ichnu Cycles. When Covid-19 made operating his original brand, Fabike, impossible due to the resulting supply chain issues, he decided that the only way to ensure he could continue to make bicycles was to start crafting them on home turf instead. ‘Everything at Fabike was 100 per cent designed by me, but it was produced in Asia,’ says Putzolu. ‘After the crisis of the pandemic, I wanted to be…

What the hell is water? This was the question the late American novelist David Foster Wallace posed in 2005 in a commencement speech to the graduating class of Kenyon College, Ohio. For Wallace the rhetorical purpose was not to get the students to consider water perse, but to encourage them to appreciate the extraordinary in the everyday. It’s something I find myself contemplating as I stand under a shower so powerful that it is not only blowing away the cobwebs but exfoliating more than a good few skin cells. A morning shower is something I would normally take for granted but on an island where it rains so little, this thunderous stream feels decadent to the point of indecency. Sitting at the same latitude as the Sahara Desert, Gran Canaria…

2008 The first-generation SuperSix launches, designed entirely around stiffness and weight 2011 The updated SuperSix Evo debuts, setting new standards for lightness 2012 Riding with Team Liquigas, Peter Sagan wins the green jersey and three stages at the Tour de France on a SuperSix Evo 2013 Moreno Moser wins Strade Bianche for Cannondale Pro Cycling on a SuperSix Evo 2013 Sagan wins the Tour de France green jersey again 2014 Sagan wins a third Tour de France green jersey and is presented with a ‘Green Machine’ Cannondale SuperSix Evo for the final stage into Paris 2015 Second-generation SuperSix Evo launches, with a greater focus on aerodynamics 2018 Simon Clarke and Michael Woods (EF Education) win Stages 5 and 17 of the Vuelta a España respectively, both of them riding a…

It might not (yet) be well known in Europe, but Taiwan-based Elves has been offering design and manufacture services to major international bike companies since 2006. It wasn’t until 2017 that the first frames under the Elves name became available in Asia, with the aim of producing race-focussed designs. Thanks to in-house R&D and production, and a direct-to-consumer model, these were very competitively priced. Speaking with Simon Huang, director of Elves Bike Global, this has always been a priority. ‘We want to ensure that the industry does not exclude riders from a sport because of affordability,’ he says. Fast-forward to 2024 and the company’s bikes are now widely available across several continents, with the UCI-approved Vanyar Pro Disc 2024 representing the latest version of Elves’ lightweight race frame. Huang says…

The Supernaut GR3 is a gravel bike that doesn’t like to go slow. That may sound like a corny marketing slogan, but in this case it’s actually true. The thing that most separates this bike from other gravel bikes out there is its geometry – the head tube angle is an incredibly slack 68.5°. Most gravel bikes are between 71° and 72°, so the Supernaut’s head tube figure puts it closer to cross-country mountain bike territory and it has a very pronounced effect on the way the bike handles. At slow speeds, the front end is liable to wheel flop. The shallow head tube angle means the front wheel wants to tip to one side or the other even with just minor movements at the handlebar. It can make the…

The Posedla Joyseat is a fully custom 3D printed saddle, which the brand claims is currently unique to the market. According to the Joyseat’s Czech manufacturer, its purpose is to provide tailored fits for improved riding comfort. The Joyseat is available in three models – road, gravel and MTB – and involves a three-step process from purchase to product. The fitting uses a home imprint kit, which is then paired with an in-depth questionnaire on the rider and their riding style before the saddle is made. At £420 it’s eye-watering but, in context, the price isn’t that much more than some other 3D printed carbon-based saddles that don’t include customisation. So is it worth spending over £400 on any saddle? Based on my experience, if you have the cash to…