Tabla de contenidos para October 2019 en Procycling

When Jumbo-Visma line up at the 2020 Tour, it’s possible that three of their eight men will previously have finished on a grand tour podium: Primoẑ Roglic, third at the Giro, Steven Kruijswijk, third at the Tour and, their latest signing, Tom Dumoulin, winner of the 2017 Giro. Only one team can muster similar firepower - Ineos. Jumbo-Visma has been on a roll. Since its lowest point results-wise in 2015, when it won just six races, the squad has been rebuilt as a winning machine. In 2017 it won 25 races and in 2018, 33. This year, by the beginning of September, it had won 41 races. That makes 2019 quantitatively the most successful year in its 35-year history. And Jumbo has been operating on a shoestring - ranked 17…

What’s your favourite race? The Tour. This year was the first time that I did it, but it was awesome. The level, the scale, the attention, it was all through the roof, and I loved it. What’s your favourite climb? The final climb of San Sebastián [the Murgil]. It is right in my ability range: steep, not very long, and the crowds are insane. The energy from the crowd is unbelievable. I love racing in the Basque Country. Who is the best domestique in the peloton? It’s hard to name one. Mitch Docker, Simon Clarke, Tom Scully and Nate Brown all come to mind. I’m lucky to have ridden with a ton of solid domestiques, and these guys have saved my ass more than a few times. Who is your…

Transfer season and deadline day are terms familiar to football fans. But despite changing team rosters being a constant subject of discussion in cycling, the way our sport is structured means it doesn’t really capture the public’s imagination. The 1 August ‘opening’ of the window, whereby a rider cannot agree terms with another team until then, is clearly never observed. And anyway, what if somebody holds the discussions and agrees on a rider’s behalf before this date? Rumours tend to remain just that for fear of upsetting a soon-to-be-exemployer and being left without a race calendar or even salary. Riders rarely fan any transfer flames. But also we never find out the true reasons behind surprise moves. Riders are contracted until December 31, presumably to simplify budget and tax equations,…

For many, a professional sportsman may seem like a machine made to pedal, run or score – a robot switched on when the competition starts then wrapped in cotton wool when it’s over. Maybe that’s part of the reason mockery and insults are hurled from the stands at a football match, as if the elite athlete won’t feel the abuse as keenly as a regular person. But of course athletes are flesh and blood. Maybe a better comparison is with a circus performer – a juggler or an acrobat. Every day, athletes throw up a dozen balls which could be training, nutrition, family, ambitions, friendships, contracts, teammates, bosses and pressure and then hopes he can keep them all up in the air long enough not to look foolish. And if…

No rider personifies the EF Education First ethos better than Alex Howes, who rode for the Slipstream development squad, then turned pro for the team in 2012. He was also born in Denver, Colorado, just 50km up the road from the team’s home in Boulder. Furthermore, when he took victory in the 2019 US Pro Championships in June, he became the first rider from the team to wear the stars and stripes jersey of the American national road champion. But there’s more to Howes than that. He’s one of the most intelligent interviewees in cycling, with a sharp sense of humour and a dry wit. Procycling sat down with the national champ to get his views on his team’s forays into gravel and offroad racing and listen to him explain…

When Alberto Bettiol took his seat in the winner’s press conference at the Tour of Flanders, it had been over an hour since he soloed across the finish line, but he still wore the same look of bemusement on his face. If anything, his eyes only got wider as he held the microphone up and looked out at the room of photographers and journalists. A young boy had even snuck in behind and stood at the side to watch, waiting for Bettiol to finish so he could get a photo with him. Before April 7, Alberto Bettiol was far from a household name in cycling; in fact, his was a name that few knew much about at all. The 25-year-old had never won a race, let alone got anywhere near…

From the perspective of a grassy hillside in Bukowina Tatranska, waiting for the closing stage of the Tour de Pologne to start, there seemed nothing remarkable about the approaching Lotto Soudal team car. Only when the vehicle moved into the race traffic could you see that one bike of the half-dozen spares on the roof was actually a race bike. You could tell because it bore a race plaque. Number 143. Number 143: the number that crackled through race radio at around kilometre 50 of stage 3 and which told the team director Mario Aerts that his rider Bjorg Lambrecht had crashed. The young rider was found slumped and fatally injured in a rain-soaked concrete culvert. Number 143: the number daubed dozens of times on the race route the following…

EF - GEE! We’ve taken a deep dive into the offbeat world of the EF Education First team. Our special set of features begins on page 36. DIZZY ABOUT LIZZY Banks started cycling five years ago, and has already won a Giro stage. Sophie Hurcom went to meet Britain’s new star. Page 86. A DAY IN PROVENCE Sam Dansie went to watch the new one-day race, which finishes atop the legendary climb of Mont Ventoux. His report is on page 94.…

You don’t hear of many road cyclists from Hungary… Yes, Hungary isn’t exactly known for its rich cycling history, although that’s likely to change next May with the Giro d’Italia holding its grande partenza in Budapest. The last wellknown Hungarian rider in the WorldTour was László Bodrogi, who rode for Mapei and Crédit Agricole, but who also switched his citizenship to France in 2008. Peter Kusztor of Novo Nordisk is the only rider from the country currently at ProConti level. So 21-year-old Attila Valter doesn’t have many compatriots to follow. That said, he’s doing pretty well at forging his own path so far. What do we need to know? Attila was born in Csömör, a village just outside the capital Budapest, into a cycling family – his father, Tibor, was…

Often when you win a race, you have imagined the way that you would do it beforehand, or at least had some kind of tactical plan. Il Lombardia 2014 I rode 100 per cent on instinct. I felt incredibly good. I’d hoped to attack on the final climb up to the citadel in Bergamo, but with the tifosi blocking the road we were single file and I simply couldn’t find a gap to get through. I drifted back on the descent, hoping to find an opportunity. Exiting the penultimate corner at about 1.5km, I sprinted as hard as I could and as the cat and mouse game began, the group eased and I just kept sprinting, sneaking through an impossibly small gap on the barriers. I didn’t look behind as…

Around the back of a leafy Logis hotel in the hills above Gap, Olga Belenko, EF Education First’s chef, is dishing up the riders’ supper from the back of a Mercedes Sprinter. The only thing fast about the food is the speed at which serving plates are whisked from the van to the side table in the riders’ dining area. Plates overflowing with ruby red slices of bresaola, a chafing dish of oven-roasted vine tomatoes, delicious looking blackened salmon and bowls of glossy chocolate mousse are sent in and set down beside a set of kitchen scales and hand sanitiser. In the middle of the dining table: a plastic box of fierce looking condiments. As Olga runs through a mental checklist of what is still to go out, she pivots…

Romain Bardet emerges from the Ag2r camper parked in Vaison-la-Romaine. The town captures the quintessence of Provençal life: quiet streets, upmarket shops and airy, cooling plane trees with doves in their branches. Such charm is lost on the French team’s leader who doesn’t – surely – want to be here. Not today, not the Monday morning after a wet and wild Critérium du Dauphiné. He was the only rider to make the five-hour car journey to be here. On the agenda: one more race day and then time to taper for the Tour. It’s just that the one more race day consists of climbing the weather-making mountain looming above town: Mont Ventoux, via Bédoin. And it doesn’t sound like he should be here: he fails to hide a hoarse cough…

WILIER-TRIESTINA ZERO SLR £10,000 ||| $12,215 Wilier-Triestina launched the Zero SLR just before the Tour, at which it was raced by Total Direct Energie. The Italian brand used a brand new high modulus carbon fibre with a liquid crystal polymer in the resin blend to make it light and improve road feel. A medium frameset weighs a claimed 1,120g, which is feathery given the extra material needed to manage disc brake forces. The Zero SLR adopts proven aero features including flared fork legs, dropped seat-stays, D-shaped tubes and a redesigned monocoque stem and bar that routes all cables and wires through the bar and into the head-tube. The Zero SLR is a feature-rich super bike with stunning good looks. www.wilier.com CAMPAGNOLO BORA WTO 45 2-WAY FIT £1,899.99 ||| $2,300 Campagnolo…

The fans of almost every country where cycling is popular have at least one hero, or even a superhero who acts as a kind of mascot for their nation. Britain has Chris Froome, Mark Cavendish and Geraint Thomas, France has Julian Alaphilippe and Thibaut Pinot, Spain has Alejandro Valverde, Belgium Philippe Gilbert, Italy has Vincenzo Nibali and Elia Viviani, just to name a few examples. No prizes for guessing who Slovakia’s hero is, but he’s won a lot of green and rainbow jerseys. Colombia? They have at least half a dozen! But there’s one big exception: the US market. We have a few solid and really good riders over in the United States but no superhero. It makes me wonder why, because in a population of 330 million there must…

Arctic Race of Norway Stage 2, Vågan 16 AUGUST 2019 Few races are as remote as the Arctic Race of Norway, now in its seventh year. Mathieu van der Poel, fresh off the MTB World Cup circuit, took no time getting into the road racing groove and unleashed his savage sprint to winning effect on stage 1 from A to Leknes. Here, the peloton skirts the Arctic archipelago on stage 2 between Henningsvar and Svolvar, where Bryan Coquard proved that Van der Poel was beatable after all. Though this year’s race was inside the Arctic Circle, it didn’t venture as far north as previous editions. This had the happy benefit of increasing the presence of roadside fans, particularly on stage 3 which finished on Storheia, a 3.5km climb averaging almost…

Wait, we bought a pro cycling team?! It was only a couple of years ago that I thought of cyclists as the skinny guys in Lycra who stopped for a lot of coffee. Back then, the only race I’d heard about was the Tour de France. Imagine my surprise, then, in learning EF Education First – an international education and travel company – was buying a pro cycling team. When EF’s Chairman Philip Hult told me the news, my reaction was Yoda-like. I was astonished, and at the same time, not at all. When you’ve been at EF for over two decades, you come to expect the unexpected. It didn’t take long for me to recognise a kindred spirit in Jonathan Vaughters and his crew of mavericks, characters and self-described…

RIGO 38 JV 44 CAPTAIN AMERICA 52 GRAVEL, DUDE 58 TOM’S TOUR DIARY 68 MAMMA DI PASTA 74 CHEF OLGA 80…

GIRO D’ITALIA 2008 The team execute a smash-and-grab in the opening TTT of the 2008 Giro, winning and putting Christian Vande Velde into pink. Key riders on the day: Vande Velde, Zabriskie and Millar. TOUR DE FRANCE 2008 Despite not being fancied at all for the GC, Christian Vande Velde rides superbly throughout the race and finishes fourth. One off day in the Alps cost him a podium finish. TOUR DE FRANCE 2009 The team’s reputation for finding talent is proven as Bradley Wiggins finishes fourth, later promoted to third, in the Tour. Vande Velde is eighth/seventh, so the team have two in the top 10. PARIS-ROUBAIX 2011 As Garmin-Cervèlo, the team executes a perfect tactical plan to first deal with the superior strength of Fabian Cancellara, then to put…

A SPORTING AFFAIR I loved sport as a kid but didn’t have the opportunities. I didn’t have parents who could take me to hockey practice, parents who would buy me bikes and take me to races. I was fortunate in other ways, but I never had the opportunity to tap into that love of sport. I’ve always been very competitive, so when I accidentally created this opportunity by going on a touring holiday and getting really fit by cycling to university placement and racing Strava for all the QOMs – I was like, suddenly I’ve got this fitness. It snowballed out of control so fast. I’VE GOT THE POWER I’ve always been strong. There’s a funny photo I saw from my second or third race, a circuit race. There’s the…

De Plus scores an A-plus at Binckbank BINCKBANK TOUR/ 12.08.19 – 18.08.19 To win stage races, sometimes it’s necessary to understand how Venn diagrams work. In the case of the 2019 BinckBank Tour, you’d need a classic three-circle Venn diagram. One field would be stage 4, a hilly 96km loop starting and finishing in Houffalize. Another would be the stage 6 time trial. And the third would be the traditional race-closing finale in Geraardsbergen. FINAL GENERAL CLASSIFICATION A three-man group contested stage 4: stage winner Tim Wellens, young Swiss sensation Marc Hirschi and Jumbo-Visma’s Laurens De Plus. In finishing almost half a minute clear of the next riders, this trio put themselves in a strong position to contest the GC. In the time trial, the result was more nuanced –…