Tabla de contenidos para August 2020 en Procycling

EDITOR This is the first July since 1984 that I will not sit down every day to watch the Tour de France. The postponement of the world’s biggest race has left us all with a gaping midsummer void in our lives, and the theoretical possibility of actually getting some DIY done this month is no compensation for that. There’ll be a Tour in September, but that’s ages away. However, the Procycling team have put together a special edition of the magazine for all those suffering from Tour withdrawal symptoms this July. In lieu of an actual Tour, here is a 21-feature, 21-stage mag packed with insight, immersive stories and great interviews. You can tackle a stage a day, or binge-read the entire Tour in one go. On a separate but…

DEPUTY EDITOR Not too long ago, it seemed impossible to imagine Chris Froome lining up at the Tour de France in anything other than Ineos kit. Ineos as we know it might not exist without Chris Froome, and Chris Froome would likely not be the four-times Tour champion without Ineos. But in June signs pointed to the four-time Tour winner being on his way out of the team that brought him all of his grand tour successes. Reports linked him with a move to WorldTour debutants Israel Start-Up Nation. Multiple outlets said he had been offered a three-year deal that could even be completed before August for him to race the Tour. A lot has changed since Froome won his last grand tour at the 2018 Giro. Back then he…

This month has been busy, we had another baby girl born in June. My daughter was super excited to have a little sister, the first week she didn’t want to go to bed at night or just went pretty late - normally she goes to bed at seven or eight o’clock, but it was always around nine or 10, and then she’d come out again asking how the little one was doing, why she was crying, or just to cuddle her. For me and my girlfriend it’s like everything has started again. We had this four and a half years ago when my first daughter was born. At first you think, how do we do this, how do we do that, but we haven’t forgotten everything! The nights are a…

THE TOP SIX I have a top three of Caleb Ewan, Dylan Groenewegen and Sam Bennett as the absolute quickest sprinters. In terms of being the most consistent and number of big race wins, Ewan was the best sprinter of last year. Pascal Ackermann is just under them. Fernando Gaviria is right there with Ewan and the others, but he’s just a little bit of a different type. He’s better in the slightly harder stages. And Elia Viviani is a smidge below those guys. He’s got track experience and his nous is really good, but head to head in a straight sprint, my top three have got him covered for speed each time. To beat these guys, the only way is to be on one of your best days. It’s…

Sam is super quick. What I also see in him is, like Ewan, you’ll see these two win on some really difficult finishes, which is different to someone like Groenewegen. Even a kilometre climb, or a 2k drag, or a 500m steep finish like Hatta Dam in the UAE Tour. It’s not that Bennett and Ewan have more sprint endurance than Groenewegen, but it seems maybe they’ve got a bigger tolerance to lactic acid - on those really difficult finishes they are still in the mix. And Bennet’s entertaining – we don’t know and he doesn’t know when he’s going to have one of those days. Sometimes he’s surprised at winning a really hard race, other days you think he could be among it and he blows and is nowhere.…

The good thing about Viviani is that he’s a really good, solid all-rounder. He can get through quite difficult races, like the Cadel Evans Race which he won, beating Caleb. But his number one thing is finding a way to win when it looks like it’s just not possible. He’s great at spotting gaps opening and riding through them, then they close up again. I saw him win a stage in the Tour Down Under a couple of years ago and he really threaded the needle – he went through a gap that was tiny and on to the win. He’s a good track rider and he is good at manoeuvring and seeing things like a chess master, a couple of moves ahead and anticipating things. As things are shutting…

Thirty years ago this July, one of the great sports trivia questions was brought into the world. It went like this: which cyclist’s stage win in which Tour de France was simultaneously the first and the last ever for his country? The answer: Olaf Ludwig, stage winner at Besançon in the 1990 Tour, scoring the first stage victory in the Tour for East Germany, which was to be reunited with the West that October, bringing to an end 40 years of bitter division. Though riders who’d grown up in East Germany continued to win Tour stages - Ludwig, Erik Zabel - they did so for the unified Germany. It all happened so fast for men like the ‘East German Sean Kelly’, as one contemporary described Ludwig. Cycling’s ‘grey guard’ -…

When he picks up the phone, Romain Bardet is almost home from home. Covid-19 has narrowed all of our horizons and the Ag2r La Mondiale team is no different. A dozen of the riders - the Tour pre-selection - are on a training camp in Chambonsur-Lignon, an old Huguenot enclave in the Haute-Loire, which is the next département over from Bardet’s home in Clermont-Ferrand. In the pre-covid days, teams would think nothing of flying four or five hours south to Tenerife for training camps. Now, they’re a couple of hours’ drive on the autoroute. Maybe Chambon has been deliberately chosen to remind Bardet and the team of happier times. Their base is the same hotel as they stayed in on the second rest day of the 2017 Tour, when Bardet…

2013 TOUR DE FRANCE CHRIS FROOME Key moment: Neutralising the Movistar attack on the Pyrenean stage to Bagnères-de-Bigorre 2015 TOUR DE FRANCE CHRIS FROOME Key moment: Froome’s race-winning attack at La Pierre Saint-Martin; also when Froome weakened in the Alps 2016 TOUR DE FRANCE CHRIS FROOME Key moment: Guiding Froome down the descent of the Peyresourde, where he’d attacked to win the stage 2017 TOUR DE FRANCE CHRIS FROOME Key moment: Ag2r’s attack on the Col de Peyra Taillade in the Massif Central on stage 15, where Froome was isolated 2017 VUELTA A ESPAÑA CHRIS FROOME Key moment: Slowly building a lead through the first two weeks, then Froome’s victory in the long time trial on stage 16 2018 GIRO D’ITALIA CHRIS FROOME Key moment: Froome and Sky’s long-range attack…

1st Stage, Vuelta a España 2013 (2) Stage, Tour de France 2017 (2) French National Championships road race 2019 2nd Arctic Race of Norway 2019 Stage, Tour de Suisse 2016 Stage, Tour de France 2017 Stage, Arctic Race of Norway 2019 Drôme Classic 2020 3rd Tour de Suisse 2016 Stage, Tour de Suisse 2015, 2016 Stage, Vuelta al País Vasco 2016 GP de Wallonie 2018 Drôme Classic 2019 4th Stage, Critérium du Dauphiné 2019 Stage, Arctic Race of Norway 2019 Rund um Köln 2013 French National Championships road race 2015 Ardèche Classic 2020 5th Stage, Tour de Pologne 2014 Stage, Tour de France 2017 (2)…

In the Netherlands it is a tradition that we do kermesses after the the Tour de France for two weeks, day in and day out. We literally race the day after Paris. As the paycheck is good, those races are not only for the Dutch riders. The bigger events have enough money to pull the foreign stars out of their Tour de France hangover and to lure them to race in their local event. A Tour stage winner is paid very well, the green and polka dot jersey winners are paid royally and rumour has it a yellow jersey winner gets paid €50,000 for one day of racing. Somehow the big names always end on the podium. The local organisers are happy, the public is happy and the next day…

WEENING RETURNS 39-year-old Dutchman Pieter Weening has signed for Trek-Segafredo, in order to help the team with the congested racing calendar between July and November. He last rode for ProConti squad Roompot-Charles, before the team folded at the end of last year. 12 The number of weeks Niki Terpstra could be away from his bike after he suffered a serious crash while motorpacing during training. The classics rider was diagnosed with head trauma, a broken collarbone, a collapsed lung, and a back contusion after being airlifted to hospital where he spent five days. “I think the races will be important for us, though I get the feeling we’d probably get a sponsor before we get to the Tour de France” Team manager Jim Ochowicz on CCC’s quest to find a…

Frederik is a guy who has big potential as a cyclist. He is still quite young, and he needs to learn more about fighting hard in races, so he still has things to improve on, but for sure he has always been a good and talented rider. In 2018 he was out for the whole year with a knee injury, but it’s not something he has a problem with now. He’s in a good position to go forward, and he can grow step by step. Riders gain good character from the track, and he has taken that with him onto the road, and that’s one part of training but also he has learned how you handle the bike in a sprint. You get a lot of technique from the track.…

7 How to bluff your way to a win, and tell if your rivals are really suffering They call it a ‘tell’ in poker. In cycling, I’m not sure we have a word for it to tell if a rival is suffering. Every rider is different. I try to look at the faces of rivals, listen for heavy breathing, laboured pedal strokes, especially when standing, but most pros are good at hiding it. The Yates brothers, for example, look the same when they are riding away to win or getting dropped. It’s impossible to tell. I think the most important thing is to look at changes in comportment and style, but the only way to really know is to test out your rival. When I won the Irish Nationals in…

Another month without racing ticks by faster than expected, I’m almost getting used to this new world we’re living in now. Well, maybe not wearing a mask but who is finding that normal? Things are getting moving and here in Andorra normal life is slowly returning. It was a treat to enjoy the first restaurant meals and café stops in months. And more importantly cases of infections and deaths appear to be moving the right way too. So back to the riding and what’s on the horizon now. My team recently just did a camp for the classics guys in Belgium. I believe it all ran pretty smoothly, with added social distancing measures and covid-19 tests compulsory before arriving. All of which will be the norm moving forward, I imagine.…

CHRIS FROOME Team Ineos Wins: 7 Podium: 4 VINCENZO NIBALI Trek-Segafredo Wins: 4 Podium: 7 NAIRO QUINTANA ARKÉA SAMSIC Wins: 2 Podium: 4 ALEJANDRO VALVERDE Movistar Wins: 1 Podium: 8 FABIO ARU UAE Emirates Wins: 1 Podium: 2 TOM DUMOULIN Jumbo-Visma Wins: 1 Podium: 2 PRIMOŽ ROGLIČ Jumbo-Visma Wins: 1 Podium: 1 GERAINT THOMAS Team Ineos Wins: 1 Podium: 1 RICHARD CARAPAZ Team Ineos Wins: 1 Podium: 0 SIMON YATES Mitchelton-Scott Wins: 1 Podium: 0 EGAN BERNAL Team Ineos Wins: 1 Podium: 0…

He’s so small and compact and his aerodynamics are unbelievable. Even so, he’s been practicing being not as low - he’s trying to find the sweet spot of being aero, coupled with the highest possible power output he can get. He’s found that by just coming up that little tiny bit, he can put out more power and although he’s less aero, it was making him a little bit faster. He’s got a really good engine in the sprint as well. It’s not often you’ll see him have to sit down, or labour to the line. He’s got a good range. And then also on the psychological side, he believes he is the quickest and he has a lot of fight in him. Caleb does the whole mild-mannered thing: ‘I…

I’ve always looked at Ackermann thinking, I wonder how he’ll go when he’s really fit! He’s not fat, but he’s not lean – he’s a big, solid guy who has really impressive speed. I saw him win a stage in the Tour of Poland – he came ripping along the outside and took care of Gaviria. He won at the UAE Tour this year, and all the best guys were there. Like everybody in Bora, he is living in the shadow of Peter Sagan. But he’s doing a good job of carving out a niche as the team’s best sprinter. Sagan is fast and he wins the green jersey, but Ackermann is the sprinter. Sagan is good because he’s so strong he can get himself into whatever position he wants,…

WHEN DID YOU TWO FIRST MEET? MICHAEL MATTHEWS: I think Nico wants to answer this one… NICHOLAS ROCHE: The first time I met Michael was in 2010. He was visiting Verese and we met for a panino with some other Australians and I thought he was a surfer guy coming on holiday, and then I realised he had just become world champion. It’s quite funny because sometimes you meet riders and you don’t really remember the first time you met them, but that day I just remember feeling so stupid when Simon Clarke told me, ‘This guy has just become world champion in the under-23s’. I was like, ‘Really? This guy looks like a surfer.’ Obviously our friendship over the years has grown and we have similar interests. When I…

When I did the 2015 Tour de France with MTN-Qhubeka it was really exciting. I was only a second-year professional, and to do it with an African team was not easy. We were the first one to participate as an African team, which was huge. Daniel Teklehaimanot and I were the first black African riders in the Tour, which was really amazing. It is something special for my career, to have that history. It was not easy, but it makes me more proud. Unfortunately I haven’t had that experience again, but it was good to finish the race. It was something special for me. I was the youngest at the whole race, but it was kind of amazing. We were the first African team, so we didn’t have that much…

B back in the old days, the Tour de France used to build to its crucial stages, either in the Alps or the Pyrenees. Once the battles had been fought, the peloton would wend its way back to Paris over the course of a few days - a couple of long flattish stages, maybe a time trial, then Paris. As recently as 2005, the final summit finish came on stage 15, with a whole week to go. This was followed by one more mountain stage with a long downhill finish, a rest day, and three flat or rolling stages and a time trial. 2001 was worse - the last mountain was on stage 14. Suspense was there none. In part, the final quiet few days of the Tour were a…

I woke up this morning feeling like I had smoked a pack of cigarettes. My knees feel knocky and my neck is so very sunburnt except for a few awkward crease marks, a sign of many hours looking at the road ahead. But on the phone with my team director, his first remark was, “Oh, you sound a lot more chipper than I expected!” It wasn’t because he told me that I have only one more virtual racing obligation to do - though if my legs had let me, I would have danced around my living room to Kool and the Gang’s ‘Celebration’. Despite 200 miles and 11 hours of pedalling, I was feeling energised. My friends and I decided to circumnavigate the Puget Sound on our bikes to raise…

STAGE 1 How many riders can win a grand tour? STAGE 2 The Tour and its environmental footprint STAGE 3 Robbie McEwen on cycling’s six top sprinters STAGE 4 Nicole Cooke’s 2006 Grande Boucle win STAGE 5 Chris Froome: have we got him all wrong? STAGE 6 Olaf Ludwig: 30 years on from his green jersey STAGE 7 Thomas de Gendt: breakaway king STAGE 8 Andy Schleck: 10 years on from his Tour win STAGE 9 Romain Bardet: lessons learned from the Tour STAGE 10 Don’t get caught out in the crosswinds STAGE 11 David Millar: 20 years on from win on debut STAGE 12 How to build the per fect Tour de France team STAGE 13 Nicolas Roche& Michael Matthews STAGE 14 Pablo Mazuera: Egan Bernal’s coach STAGE 15…

Groenewegen reminds me a bit of me. When he won his first stage in the Tour on the Champs-Élysées, he was absolutely busted going through the Tour; he was suffering so bad. He scraped inside the time limit but made it all the way and did an incredible sprint on the Champs to win his first stage. He went all the way from the corner, 350m. I like his attitude and I like his style of racing. I’d like to see him have an entire team just for him, where he’s the leader. With Jumbo, he’s not even down to ride the Tour this year. Groenewegen is only about 175cm tall, not much taller than me, But he’s really muscular and controlled in his sprint - his sprint looks really…

The injuries and glandular fever have really put him back. The big question mark is if he can come back to 100 per cent again. On his side he’s young - he’s still only 25. He has time and has been racing again but hasn’t looked like the Gaviria of the Quick Step years since he’s gone to UAE. He’s done a couple of good things there, but never really got into full stride. If he can get back to that level he’d be one of the top four. Like Caleb, Gaviria’s got a big sprint engine. He can pull off really long sprints at really high speeds. He gets up to speed really quickly. He’s got great explosive power when he accelerates and he can maintain that for a…

The 2016 Tour de France was the turning point. When Chris Froome took all the criticisms that he and Team Sky had sucked the fun out of the Tour, that they rode like robots and had made the Tour predictable, and raced in a way we had never seen from him before. He attacked over a mountain descent; he attacked in the finale of a flat stage in crosswinds to pick up a handful more seconds. He actually ran up Mont Ventoux while wearing the yellow jersey. “There’s no way anyone can say the racing style is boring and predictable as they have in the past,” Froome said. But are the criticisms levelled at Froome, from fans and the media, that his Tour wins have been largely boring and unexciting,…

It’s already a long time ago, but it feels like yesterday for me. It was a different, tense part of my life. I made my name at the Tour, not just 2010, but that’s why I’m still really involved in cycling. Those years gave me expertise and knowhow, that’s why I’m here today. I organise the Tour of Luxembourg, I work with Skoda at the Tour, I still travel a lot, and 2009, 2010 are why I’m still involved. It was a big step, which changed a lot of my life. It’s different, if I think back to 2010, the memory is not me in the yellow jersey, the memory is me winning a couple of stages, fighting [Alberto] Contador in the race. The victory came later, but on the…

TWENTY YEARS AGO, DAVID MILLAR MADE A SPECTACULAR TOUR DEBUT, WINNING YELLOW ON DAY ONE. IN CONVERSATI ON WITH PROCYCLING ’ SEDITOR EDWARD PICKERING, HE LOOKS BACK ON THE END OF INNOCENCE PROCYCLING: IT’S BEEN 20 YEARS, DAVID. WHAT’S YOUR PERSPECTIVE ON THAT NOW? WHEN YOU LOOK BACK, WHAT DO YOU SEE? DAVID MILLAR: How young I was, more than anything. I was a baby. That ride was all the stars aligning. Everything aligned, from the moment three and a half years before in Saint-Quentin, when Cyrille Guimard [Cofidis manager] took me out to lunch when I was an amateur. He told me my first Tour de France would be in 2000. Guimard was convinced that I was a proper contender. But he also said, we have to wait until…