Procycling - November 2015

TOUR of BRITAIN

FROM BEHIN D TH E SCEN ES

PHILIPPE GILBERTEXCLUSIVE "It's my dream

to win all the Monuments"

BRITAIN'S FORGOTTEN WORLD CHAMPIONColin Sturgess: the original 80s prodigy

ISSUE 209NOVEMBER 2015

cyclingnews.com

+Epic battles on the

toughest days in

cycling's modern era

THE 20 HARDEST STAGES

HOW FABIO ARU SNATCHED VICTORY AT THE VUELTA

I N � D E P T H

THE PEOPLE'S

CHAMP

COLOMBIAN HIGHS

Meet the Tour of Spain's

most exciting rider,

Esteban Chaves

Tom Dumoulin:

So close to a

debut Grand

Tour victory

Ambush: Fabio Aru's last-ditch attack to

Cercedilla meant he would wear the red

jersey in Madrid

THE RACEOF THE

YEAR

Location: CAT & FIDDLE, Peak District

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Temperature: 14° C

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Total distance: 180 kms - 6h05m

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ide

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off

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PROCYCLING NOVEMBER 2015 9

Contents

Issue 209 ||| November 2015

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“I’M VERY PROUD OF WHAT I’VE DONE, BUT I

BELIEVE THAT SOME NICE WINS ARE STILL TO COME.

THEN I’LL BE HAPPY.”

40Philippe Gilbert

* **

Contents

Issue 209 ||| November 2015


PHILIPPE GILBERT 40Exclusive interview with the multiple Classics

winner and former world champion

A BELTER OF A VUELTA 48Analysis of all the action from the close-run

race for the red jersey

TOM DUMOULIN 56Interview with the Vuelta revelation and new

Grand Tour contender

ESTEBAN CHAVES 62How the Colombian rider fought back from

adversity to �inish �ifth at the Vuelta

VUELTA RESULTS 68All the stage winners, and the top �inishers, at

the Tour of Spain

Q&AJULIAN ALAPHILIPPE 70Inside the world of the fast-rising French

Classics contender

THE HARDEST DAYS 72Procycling counts down the 20 toughest

stages in modern history

TOUR OF BRITAIN DIARY 82Behind the scenes at Britain’s biggest race

PROFILE:VIATCHESLAV EKIMOV 92The life and times of one of cycling’s most

resilient survivors

RETRO: COLIN STURGESS 98How bipolar disorder stole the career of one

of Britain’s brightest-ever talents

FOLIO 16

PROLOGUE 27

INSIDER 34

DIARY 36

WISH LIST 106

PRORIDE 116

SUBSCRIBE 124

ROADTESTED 125

FEATURES

REGULARS

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INSIDE THE VUELTA, THE BEST GRAND

TOUR OF 2015

48Vuelta a España race review

* **


Issue 209 November 2015

Fans of suspense found themselves short of entertainment at the

Giro d’Italia and Tour de France this year. While both Alberto

Contador, in Italy, and Chris Froome, in France, suffered late

wobbles, the destination of the �nal overall win was pretty clear

from early in the race. At the Vuelta, however, any one of three or

four riders looked like potential winners and every time one

established an advantage over the others and we �nally thought

we understood the shape of the race, the next day would bring yet

another upheaval. First, race revelation Tom Dumoulin looked set

to win. Then Fabio Aru, then Joaquim Rodríguez, then Dumoulin

again, and �nally Aru, whose red jersey-winning attack took place

on the second-last climb of the entire race.

We followed the Vuelta on site, from the chaotic start in Málaga to

the dramatic �nale in Madrid. Procycling brings you the story of the

race, along with exclusive interviews with the two stand-out stars

of the Vuelta, Tom Dumoulin and Esteban Chaves. Dumoulin

started the race as a rated time triallist and left it as a potential

Grand Tour winner. Chaves rode out of his skin to take two stages

and come �fth overall. Neither won this time but at 24 and 25

respectively, you could argue that their time has already come.

Cycling’s Grand Tour stars

leave the best until last at

the Vuelta a España

EDITORIAL

D�� E��Jamie WilkinsAs we go to press there are

four days until the Worlds Road

Race and still no one has

�igured out if it suits sprinters

or puncheurs. That’s the mark

of a great Worlds course.

E��Edward PickeringAfter watching Tom Dumoulin

at the Vuelta, Ed is wondering

what kind of rider he’ll develop

into. Grand Tour contender?

World TT champ? Hilly Classics

winner? He could be all three.

F�� E��Sam Dansie After he again found a sponsor

at the eleventh hour, Sam

thinks Jean-René Bernaudeau

should be known henceforth

as the Scarlett Pimpernel of

professional cycling.

14 PROCYCLING NOVEMBER 2015

Issue 209 November 2015

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GEO R GE BENNETTPhoto by: George Bennett

Capturing the key

moments in

cycling

8 September 2015

Tour of Britain,

Wauchope,

Scottish Borders

The high moorland roads

of the British Isles are

becoming renowned as

some of the toughest and

most beautiful bike racing

territory in the world. Here,

on stage 3 of the Tour of

Britain, from Cockermouth

to Kelso, Etixx-Quick Step

lead the peloton over the

climb of Wauchope. Etixx

were both defending Petr

Vakoc’s GC lead and

working for a possible

sprint win for Mark

Cavendish. In the end,

Vakoc crashed and

Cavendish waited for

him – a frustrating end

to the day.

Photography: © Tim De Waele

5 September 2015

Vuelta a España,

Stage 14,

Alto Campoo

Alessandro De Marchi

rides away from Sky’s

Salvatore Puccio at the

mist-enshrouded Vuelta

stage �inish at Alto

Campoo. The pair were

part of a quintet of riders

which escaped after 50

kilometres. The battle

between the �ive escapees

on the �inal climb was

one of the highlights of

the whole race, as they

repeatedly attacked

each other. In the end,

De Marchi got his timing

right and took the stage.

Best of the GC riders, over

three minutes behind, was

Nairo Quintana.


6 September 2015

Vuelta a España,

Stage 15,

Alto de Sotres,

Spain

The �inal climb of stage 15

at the Vuelta, the Alto de

Sotres, was one of the

hardest ascents of the

race due to its uneven

gradients. A long �lat

middle section was

followed by a super-steep

�inal 2km which really split

up the favourites. Here,

the group containing red

jersey Fabio Aru is almost

reaching breaking point,

with Tom Dumoulin

already distanced. In the

end, Joaquim Rodríguez

won the stage solo, closing

to within one second of

Aru in the GC.


13 September 2015

GP de Montréal,

Canada

Torrential rain batters

the peloton at the GP

de Montréal WorldTour

race in Canada. Orica-

GreenEdge are controlling

the peloton, an e�fort that

was rewarded when Adam

Yates broke away on the

Mont Royal climb in the

closing stages of the race

along with Lotto-Soudal’s

Tim Wellens. The pair

held o�f a strong and

committed chase from

a quartet of riders, before

Wellens beat Yates in

the sprint. Montréal was

Wellens’s third WorldTour

win of 2015, following a

stage and the GC in the

Eneco Tour.


17 September 2015

Coppa Bernocchi,

Legnano, Italy

Vincenzo Nibali served

notice of his excellent

form ahead of the World

Championships with a win

at the Coppa Bernocchi.

Now 96 years old, the

race is part of the Trittico

Lombardo, a series of

races traditionally used by

Italian riders to hone form

for the Worlds. The Italian

selectors also use this race,

along with the Coppa

Agostoni and Memorial

Marco Pantani to help

choose the team. In the

Pantani race, the Italians

are given dispensation to

ride as the national team.

Nibali’s results in the three

races: second, �irst, third.


THE TIME OFYOUR LIFE

ORDU

Ordu translates to “moment” in the

Basque language. It’s the perfect name

for a bike created to capture the efforts

of training and distill them into the

present, a single focus on right now.

The time you push so deep into the tun-

nel you can’t recall the minutes spent

on the road. We all know moments like

this - the rarest of events when some-

how you ride beyond your capabilities

and do the perfect effort. Everything

clicks into place and you have the time

of your life.

Lucky 13 30

Hansen breaks Grand Tour record

Reign in Spain 30

Why Vuelta was an all-time classic

If it ain’t broke 31

The UCI’s umpteenth calendar reform

Van Hourweling 32

US amateur sets women’s Hour mark

Prologue

Procycling At the heart of the peloton

Tranparency Anti-doping advocates hope

more will follow Dutchman’s example

Image

© G

etty

Imag

es

DUMOULIN RELEASES

VUELTA POWER DATA



Prologue

Highlights from cycling’s best rolling news service,

updated all day, every day

� � �

Images

© T

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24 SepKIRYIENKA WINS WORLD

CHAMPIONSHIP ITT

1 Vasil Kiryienka

(Belarus)

2 Adriano Malori

(Italy)

3 Jérôme Coppel

(France)

tinyurl.com/kirysuccess

24 Sept FROOME TO FINISH SEASON

AT SAITAMA

For the third straight season,

two-time Tour winner Chris

Froome will end his year in Japan

at the Saitama Criterium. He will

be joined by Richie Porte, Simon

Geschke and John Degenkolb.

tinyurl.com/froomesaitama

Photography: ©

Tim

De

Wae

le

Tom Dumoulin and his Giant-Alpecin team allowed a Dutch newspaper to publish aspects of his power data from the Vuelta, including his W/kg �gures

and effort durations from 10 key climbs.From the data published in Algemeen

Dagblad a week after the race, we learned that during the 24-year-old’s breakout ride, the 70kg rider produced 7.0W/kg for 5 minutes 55 seconds on stage 6’s Sierra de Cazola climb, and 5.9W/kg for 16:48 on the penultimate climb on stage 20, where he essentially capitulated to Fabio Aru, and slipped to sixth on GC.

But what was more surprising than the data itself was that the team released it when the paper approached it: Dumoulin was not under particular pressure to prove he had delivered a clean and credible performance and nor did the team seem too worried about leaking a competitive advantage to rivals.

The move contrasted with Team Sky and Chris Froome’s policy at the Tour in July. The British squad endured hostile questioning after Chris Froome’s dominant ascent of La Pierre Saint-Martin in the Pyrenees. Detractors, in the absence of of�cial data, estimated Froome’s power output and surmised he was cheating. And when Sky released a narrow set of data for the climb, claiming that to release more would be to give away a competitive edge, the team was criticised further for being, as sports scientist Dr Ross Rucker put it, “half transparent” and too selective with the data.

Giant-Alpecin trainer Adriaan Helmantel, who has worked with Dumoulin for three years, told Procycling that by presenting data for most key points in the race, they hoped to avoid the accusations levelled at Team Sky. “What we see and what we also discussed with Tom is that if you see teams only give a little bit of data it can create more suspicion. If you are going

SOME RIDERS IN THE PELOTON ARE NOT AS OPEN AS DUMOULIN WHO SAID HE COULD THINK OF “NO GOOD REASON NOT TO SHARE THE DATA”

to give something, why do it like that?” he said. This openness is in spite of the fact that Giant-Alpecin are also aware of the need to protect their competitive advantages. Data from the Burgos TT was omitted on

the grounds that it could give opponents an insight into Dumoulin’s aerodynamics. The team also stopped short of handing over raw power �les to the newspaper.

“At the moment it’s one step too far to say ‘Here are the power �les, do what you want, with them,’” Helmantel added. “It is still data that needs good treatment and care otherwise it’s easy to misinterpret,” he said. So in reality, the difference between the cases of Dumoulin and Froome was that Giant-Alpecin gave a greater quantity of information, rather than greater detail.

Most sports scientists say power data over a long period and not isolated to a single performance or race would provide

a more accurate picture of a rider’s ability and talents. But Helmantel said that being too liberal with data risked giving opponents an insight into a rider’s weak spots – for example by knowing how long a rider can defend against an attack.

How much data can we expect from Dumoulin and the team? Helmantel added that the decision to release Dumoulin’s Vuelta data had been spontaneous and the team had not yet developed a “clear strategy or approach” to releasing more information in the future. He anticipated that over the off-season the team would discuss with riders how much data they might be willing to make public on a regular basis.

Nevertheless, Giant-Alpecin, by releasing Dumoulin’s data voluntarily, staked a claim to some valuable moral high ground in the fraught debate over data and transparency, which has raged for most of the summer. Helmantel said that the response to the data publication had been positive from “spectators, journalists and scientists”.

Whether or not this is the precursor to regular power data updates from Giant-Alpecin riders will only become apparent after the winter. What is certain is that some riders in the peloton are not as open as Dumoulin who said he could think of “no good reason not to share the data”.

Dumoulin and his team

have been as obliging

with data as he was in

person with the press

at the Vuelta

At 186cm and 70kg,

Dumoulin was not

expected to climb so

well at the Vuelta but

his data is credible


22 SeptemberSCHMIDT WINS U23

WORLD TIME TRIAL TITLE

1 Mads Würtz Schmidt

(Denmark)

2 Maximillian Schachmann

(Germany)

3 Lennard Kamna

(Germany)

tinyurl.com/schmidtworlds

22 SeptemberVILLUMSEN TAKES

WOMEN’S WORLD TIME

TRIAL TITLE

1 Linda Villumsen

(New Zealand)

2 Anna Van Der Breggan

(Netherlands)

3 Lisa Brennauer

(Germany)

tinyurl.com/lindaglory

24 SeptemberSHOULDER SURGERY ENDS

CAVENDISH’S SEASON

The Etixx-Quick Step team has

announced that Mark Cavendish

will not race again this season

after undergoing surgery on the

shoulder he injured in a crash at

the Tour of Britain. The Manxman

had already pulled out of the

Richmond Worlds.

tinyurl.com/cavsurgery


ProloguePrologue

Record 13th Grand Tour in a rowAdam Hansen Popular Australian could put the record out of sight

THERE’S A GOOD CHANCE NOW THAT HANSEN’S RECORD WILL STAND FOR ANOTHER 60 YEARS � PERHAPS EVEN FOREVER

He dodged illness and endured terrible pain but by �nishing this year’s Vuelta a España, popular Lotto-Soudal rider Adam Hansen set a new all-time record for the number of Grand Tours ridden consecutively: 13. That’s more than 270 race days at the Giro, Tour and Vuelta since his odyssey began at the 2011 Vuelta. Along the way, he has helped himself to a stage each at the Italian and Spanish races, assisted André Greipel to 10 stage victories and picked up his fair share of injuries – as well as having a beer and joshing with fans who run alongside him on the �nal climbs. Most threatening to his personal quest was a broken sternum at the 2012 Giro and an AC joint dislocation on stage 2 of the Tour this year. With many riders saying Grand Tour pelotons have become wilder places in recent years, with bad crashes more frequent, Hansen’s feat is even more impressive.

Hansen attributes much of his consistency and durability to the fact that he doesn’t race much outside the three Grand Tours: this year for instance, before the Vuelta, he only had 24

race days in other events. He recorded DNFs at Paris-Nice and the ZLM Toer.

The mark broken by the shoe-designing, computer-programming Hansen was set almost 60 years ago by Bernardo Ruiz who rode 12 tours in a row but at a time when the Vuelta was just two weeks long. There’s a good chance now that Hansen’s record will stand for another 60 years – perhaps even for good.

The only other rider to complete the triple this year is Sylvain Chavanel, who is now heading to Direct Energie (formerly Europcar). Hansen is just 34 and has a contract with Lotto until the end of 2017. With Hansen planning to keep riding the three-week races until he “falls off his bike” there are hopefully a few more Grand Tours for this colourful rider yet.

Sylvain Chavanel also completed all three Grand Tours this year

Hansen’s run owes a little to luck and a lot to his toughness and determination

16 September

LANDA CONFIRMS TRANSFER TO SKY IN 2016

Mikel Landa has con�irmed his move to Team Sky in 2016 in an interview with Basque paper Deia. The 26-year-old has had a breakthrough season as a super-domestique for Fabio Aru and rode to third place on GC at the Giro d’Italia.

tinyurl.com/landasky

19 September

TOUR DE YORKSHIRE DENIED EXPANSION

The Tour de Yorkshire organisers’ request to expand to four days has been rejected by British Cycling. The race, which is backed by ASO, was created o�f the back of the Tour de France Grand Départ.

tinyurl.com/yorksltdPhotography: ©

Tim

De

Wae

le

He got away with it, did Javier Guillén. The Vuelta race director can look back on a blockbuster event that delivered landscape porn throughout and more suspense than a Hitchcock �lm. That the race entered the �nal mountain stage with three climbers breathing down the neck of a tenacious, rebadged rouleur in Tom Dumoulin, who had clung persistently to the lead, was probably beyond Guillén’s wildest hopes. No wonder, in his summary of the race, he lauded its drama. We couldn’t agree more: it was the most compelling Grand Tour of the year with a great last minute plot-twist – unless you’re a Dumoulin fan.

The cast of riders who muscled their way into the fray was young and fresh-faced and this added to the charm: 14 of 20 individual stage winners were born in 1989 or after, as were �ve of the top six on GC. After a series of Vueltas dominated by older riders, here was a new generation, easy to get excited about. Among them, Esteban Chaves was a revelation, Dumoulin was a breakthrough and Aru fought well, even if he lacks the easy grace of his Dutch rival.

Yet the race could easily have been a �op. Guillén deserves the bene�t of the doubt over the high-pro�le motorbike incidents involving Peter Sagan and Sergio Paulinho, as there have been a rash of them through the year. But the opening TTT in Puerto Banús was a �asco and a reminder of how amateurish professional cycling can be. Guillén feels put out that the TTT times didn’t count for the overall GC but it’s hard to feel sympathy for an organiser pushing so hard to be novel for novelty’s sake. The same charge could be levelled at the Andorra stage with six big climbs, which turned out to be a dreary, slow-motion grind through endless forests.

But they were rare �aws in what was otherwise a vintage edition of the Vuelta.

Sam Dansie is Procycling’s features editor.

Opinion

SAM DANSIE

THE VUELTA: A FLAWED BLOCKBUSTER

21 September

VELOCIO�SRAM ERA ENDS WITH RECORD FOURTH WORLDS TTT VICTORY

Team Velocio-SRAM, which will

disband at the end of 2015,

bowed out with a fourth straight

victory in the women’s TTT

Worlds. The team was spun out of

the High Road squad by Kristy

Scrymgeour in 2011.

tinyurl.com/Kristyglory


THE UCI’S CYCLING CALENDAR REFORMS

Five things you need to know about…

Three-year

WorldTour

licences

Late in 2016, teams will

apply for 18 WorldTour

licences, which will be

valid from 2017�2019.

Currently teams are required to

endure annual licence renewals,

often leading to end-of-season

crises enveloping teams and the

structure of the WorldTour. Last

year, for example, Europcar were

denied a 2015 WorldTour licence

because they missed the �inance

requirements and Astana were

in limbo into December after a

spate of doping positives. The

UCI hopes longer licences will

stabilise teams and encourage

investment. Licences will be

granted on ethical, �inancial,

sporting, administrative and

organisational criteria.

Tougher

anti-doping

measures

A 10-point plan

known as the ‘cahier

des charges’ will be

imposed on the 18

WorldTeams to improve the

professionalism of coaching and

rider care. The aim is to ensure

riders aren’t isolated or tempted

to resort to doping. In 2014, the

cahier des charges was piloted

by eight WorldTeams including

FDJ and Giant. The rules include

monitoring riders’ training, a cap

on race days per year, ensuring

the team has an acceptable ratio

of coaching sta�f to riders and

improving the competence of

team sta�f. A lighter version of the

cahier des charges will be applied

to second and third tier teams

from 2018 onwards.

A new universal

ranking system

Riders across all three

professional divisions

of the sport will appear

on the same ranking

ladder, as opposed to

the problematic current system,

which prevents riders from lower

tiers scoring points in WorldTour

races. It’s likely to be similar to the

old UCI system abolished in 2005.

The nation ranking will be derived

from the individual ranking and

the WorldTeam ranking will be

based on points from WorldTour-

level races only. The UCI tried to

launch it quietly for 2015 but was

forced to withdraw it when team

managers only learned about it

after the season had begun and

complained. There may even be

rankings for climbers, sprinters,

Classics riders and stage racers.

An expanded

WorldTour

calendar

The UCI

announcement

said the WorldTour

calendar will be

expanded. It’s likely that “high

quality” races will be accepted

if they help improve the “global

pro�ile” of the WorldTour. That

means it’s unlikely there will be

any new races in its European

heartland. We’d expect at least one

of the American races to enter the

WorldTour and one or two Middle

East races to make the grade, too.

And in the same way that teams

will be held to the cahier des

charges, race organisers will also

have to meet new minimum

requirements that improve – and

homogenise – the organisational

standards of top races.

What’s missing?

It’s taken two years of

negotiations for the

UCI to reach a point

where it’s happy to

share solid proposals

for the reform of elite

men’s cycling. It’s been a bumpy

ride. The statement made no

mention of plans to resolve

calendar clashes between races

such as Paris-Nice and Tirreno,

or plans to shorten certain races

such as the Vuelta. Likewise

the proposed promotion and

relegation mechanism to the

WorldTour seems to have been

abandoned. That’s a move which

is likely to please many team

managers, and certainly

Cannondale-Garmin’s Jonathan

Vaughters, who said relegation

“equalled death” from a sponsor’s

point of view.

1 2 3 4 5


Photography: ©

Tim

De

Wae

le, G

etty

Imag

es (V

an H

ouw

elin

g, G

arne

r)

8 SeptemberBOONEN INKS ONE�YEAR EXTENSION WITH ETIXX

Veteran Classics star Tom

Boonen will continue to ride for

Etixx-Quick Step in 2016 after

the Belgian team con�irmed it

has handed a one-year contract

extension to the 34-year-old. It

will be Boonen’s 14th season

with the team.

tinyurl.com/tommekestays

16 SeptemberCAVENDISH: I AM STILL AS FAST AS I EVER WAS

Sprint star Mark Cavendish

has told Cyclingnews that his

numbers show he is as fast as

ever but changes in technology,

sprint trains and stage �inishes

have all contributed to people

suggesting otherwise.

tinyurl.com/cavtalkinghead

14 SeptemberGARNER JOINS WIGGLE HONDA FOR 2016

British rider Lucy Garner has

become the second rider from

the Liv-Plantur squad to sign

with Wiggle Honda for next

season after Amy Pieters

announced her move earlier

this month.

tinyurl.com/garnertowiggle

New Women’s Hour Record UCI Hour Van Houweling’s new record could soon be challenged

VAN HOUWELING MAY NOT HOLD THE RECORD FOR LONG. THE UCI HAS SAID OTHER RIDERS HAVE EXPRESSED AN INTEREST IN TAKING ON THE HOUR

American amateur Molly Shaffer Van Houweling set a new Women’s Hour Record in September, posting a distance of 46.273km at the high-altitude Aguascalientes track in Mexico. Van Houweling’s effort broke the 12-year-old record set by Leontien Van Moorsel in 2003 by 208m and was the �rst successful attempt to break the record since the UCI changed the rules to allow the use of track pursuit bikes.

Before this successful ride, 41-year-old Van Houweling, a law professor, had ridden three previous Hour attempts since December 2014, when she broke the US record. Van Houweling said that she was inspired to take on the challenge by Jens Voigt and his successful attack on the Hour Record at the end of his career, aged 43.

Van Houweling’s attempt at the women’s UCI record had to be delayed because she had to enrol in and pay for her participation in the UCI’s Biological Passport programme for �ve months prior to the event. Van Houweling had actually broken Van Moorsel’s record in July but she was still within the �ve-month waiting period so it was unof�cial.

Van Houweling’s pacing during her record ride was supremely consistent. British coach and Hour Record expert Xavier Disley calculated that there was an almost negligible 0.02kph difference between the �rst and second halves of her effort at the fast track which is more than 1,800m above sea-level.

Van Houweling’s was only the second attempt at the women’s Hour since the rules on equipment were relaxed. British rider Sarah Storey came up 563m short at the Lee Valley velodrome in March.

However, Van Houweling may not hold the record for long. The UCI has said other riders have expressed an interest in taking on the Hour and more attempt announcements could be made in coming weeks.

Unlike Wiggins’s fully supported e�fort, Van Houweling used o�f- the-shelf equipment

Regardless of how long her record stands, for an amateur to take the Hour is remarkable

Phil GaimonYou can tell a pro is young because they’re still stoked to give blood and urine at 6 am@philgaimon 21 Sept

Kris BoeckmansHello world! Thank you for all the great messages and support. One of my hardest rides ever but I made it! #NeverGiveUp@krisboeckmans 16 Sept

Marcel KittelAnd again a rider had to abandon a race because of a motorbike. My question is: what is our riders union @cpacycling doing to change that?

@marcelkittel 2 Sept

Dan MartinWhy so many crashes this year? My opinion: guys showing less professional respect/caution, fighting for every position, take more risks@DanMartin86 30 Aug

Peter SaganStage 4...Place 2nd. What a surprise@petosagan 25 Aug

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ProloguePrologue

THE ALL-NEW

SUPERSIX EVO HI-MOD

A WHOLE NEW BALANCE OF POWER

Find your Balance of Power at CANNONDALE.COM/EVO


Illustrator: T

im M

arrs

T

his season began well and I had high hopes of getting some big results in what is an important year for me. I’m a 26-year-old sprinter, one of the Italian generation which includes Elia

Viviani, Sacha Modolo and Giacomo Nizzolo. My first WorldTour win came last year at Tirreno, and I also managed a stage at the Tour of Burgos. I felt I’d made good progress and the sensations I had in the winter were really promising. I was improving as a rider, getting stronger month by month. That’s just about the best tonic you can have as a cyclist, so I began the 2015 season in a positive frame of mind.

I began my season at the Mallorca Challenge. It was my birthday and I won on the opening day. I beat the likes of Greipel, Viviani and Bouhanni, and did it again two days later. After that I got a couple of top-threes in Oman but a crash at Tirreno put paid to my chances there. I recovered and finished second in a stage of the Tour de Yorkshire, so heading into the Giro I felt in pretty good order. It was one of my big objectives of the season but I could never have imagined what lay in wait.

We knew there would be very few sprints this year but stage 2 to Genoa was pretty much a sure thing. Then, of course, a lunatic spectator decided to ride his bike into the peloton 10km from the finish and I was at the bottom of the resulting pile-up. I made it to the end of the stage, albeit in a bit of a mess. My ankle swelled up pretty badly but I gritted my teeth as best I could and got on with it. I contested the second sprint, stage 6 to Pescaia. Somehow

I managed to finish second behind Greipel but the pain and the swelling didn’t seem to be getting any better. I thought the rest day would help but it didn’t. As soon as I climbed onto the bike the following day I knew it was over for me. Through no fault of my own, my Giro had been a total disaster.

WE’RE PROFESSIONAL CYCLISTS, however, and so we take the rough with the smooth. A month later I was back to racing and by the first week in August I felt pretty good again. I went to the Tour of Poland and this time I landed on my feet, so to speak. There was a huge pile-up on stage 2 at Dabrowa Górnicza but I managed to avoid it. I won the sprint and then I won again the following day. Suddenly, following the fiasco at the Giro, I had two precious WorldTour stage wins and exceptional form. Next stop: the Vuelta, with my morale sky-high.

Perhaps some of you will have seen what happened next but I’ll tell you anyway. Fifty kilometres into the first road stage there was another big crash and of course I came off badly. My Vuelta was over before it had even started and once again there was no way I could have seen it coming. I’d started two Grand Tours and suffered two ridiculous crashes, and

incredibly neither of them happened during the sprint, where you might expect it.

The point is that a sprinter’s life tends to be quite complicated anyway. On a mountain-top stage finish the best climber will pretty much always win but in the sprints there are a lot of variables. It’s highly tactical and highly complicated; a series of decisions you hope will give you the best possible chance. Sometimes you can be the fastest but not win for reasons outside your direct control – you might just choose the wrong wheel, for example – but you accept that as part of the job. The crashes I had at the Giro and the Vuelta, on the other hand, were both beyond my control. I had really good legs heading into both races but fate decided it just wasn’t to be.

The important thing, I guess, is to try to keep things in perspective. In 2011 I went the whole season without a crash but this year they all seem to have had my name on them. That doesn’t make me a bad rider, though, and there is no point in me feeling sorry for myself as it can happen to anyone. Fabian Cancellara, who’s one of the greatest bike riders I’ve ever seen, has also had a shocking time with crashes this year. I’m sure he is not about to throw in the towel, and neither am I.

Matteo Pelucchi rides for IAM Cycling. This year

he has won four races and crashed out five times

ON A MOUNTAIN-TOP STAGE FINISH, THE BEST

CLIMBER WILL WIN, BUT IN THE SPRINTS THERE ARE A

LOT OF VARIABLES

I N S I D E R

THE TWIN IMPOSTERS Matteo Pelucchi

Prologue

THE SWINGS AND ROUNDABOUTS OF THE CYCLING SEASON

EXCLUSIVE UK DISTRIBUTOR


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T here’s a familiar tone to this month’s happenings, I’m afraid. I am all too aware of sounding like a broken

record but it seems I’m becoming increasingly adept at being in the wrong place at the wrong time and ending up falling off when it’s beginning to look like a big result is just around the corner.

It feels like I’ve crashed a lot lately but when I count back, I’ve had four crashes to date in 2015, which means it seems I just have developed the knack of crashing at highly visible and crucial moments and it’s the severity of my crashes that has increased rather then the frequency. All the same, I am one frustrated pro after a year that has been perhaps my most consistent, with no victories but near misses in almost every race that I’ve contested.

Of course, the season is not yet over as I have a trio of Italian one-day races and the opportunity to defend my Lombardia title just around the corner, but with no racing for five weeks prior the pace of racing is going to be difficult to train for, especially with a shoulder injury that isn’t quite back to full strength yet. I decided against travelling to Richmond, as using the

Worlds as a comeback race would in my view be disrespectful to the Irish team and indeed the Championships. On that course I wouldn’t have been competitive and not making the trip gives me those few extra days to recover before the trip to Italy. It’s really tough not being there and watching on television.

My time since the Vuelta has been spent at my base in Andorra, basically riding up and down mountains, which wasn’t that much different to what the Vuelta riders were doing, on one day at least. I had a second degree shoulder separation after the crash and it took six days before I had enough mobility to be able to hold the bars and begin tentatively riding again. The advantage of being in the mountains was that I could still train hard as climbing seated wasn’t a

problem. Descending and even riding on the flat was a different story, as I struggled to grip the bars or brake with any force for about a week, meaning some very slow descents.

During my downtime I managed to get to the World Mountain Bike Championships, with the downhill finishing about 700m from my house. My first experience of world class downhilling blew me away. Only witnessing the course in person can bring home how extreme the gradients are, and they somehow manage to make it down on two wheels. Watching the trials finals was even more incomprehensible. I’ve seen

the best in the world at motorcycle trials but the balance and strength of the bike guys was really amazing to see. Getting up to the bike park for the men’s cross-country and soaking up the cowbell and airhorn filled atmosphere was really special, too. Again the technicality of the courses really surprised me as there really was no rest on a course at 2,000m altitude. La Massana seemed to do an incredible job of hosting the event and it was a really enjoyable way to get my head back in the game for the hard work ahead in the final weeks of the season. DM

I DECIDED AGAINST TRAVELLING TO RICHMOND, AS USING THE WORLDS AS

A COMEBACK RACE WOULD IN MY VIEW BE DISRESPECTFUL TO THE IRISH TEAM

AND INDEED THE CHAMPIONSHIPS

ABOVE Down again, but not out. Dan’s

had a torrid run of crashes at crucial

moments during the 2015 season

DANMARTIN

CANNONDALE �GARMIN

PRO DIARIES

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C A M P A G N O L O . C O M

Fabio Aru

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WINNER OF 2015 VUELTA, SHIFT TO VICTORY!


VALENTINA SCANDOLARA

O R I C A �A I S

LOUISMEINTJES

M T N � Q H U B E K A P/ B S A M S U N G

The end of the racing season always brings a whirlwind of mixed feelings for me. As

the racing calendar gets longer and longer – the past two years I started competing in Australia in early January – it’s normal to feel a bit tired and drained once September comes.

But at the same time, the late season brings the World Championships, the most exciting event I’ve ever been to (I have not raced Olympic Games so far but I think that would be the non-plus-ultra).

Also the build-up to the Worlds is quite special with the national coach observing every race, evaluating every performance, comparing all the riders and predicting tactics based on the course. It’s all with the goal of selecting the best candidates to wear the maglia azzurra to make ourselves and Italy proud. It’s definitely different when you race with your national team to racing with your trade team. Your jersey represents your colours, your origins, your people, your roots.

I tend to live every race as a chance to share experiences, learn from differences and create and grow bonds and friendships. The Worlds are definitely something unique for this. From when I was a junior, I used to swap my race jerseys with foreign riders. I loved it. At home, I still have all of them, stored in a big box. Every time I open it, I can link every item with a person, travel back and relive a memory. And it is just amazing.

Cycling and sport in general have this fantastic capability of bringing people together. It’s just an

opportunity, though, and like any opportunity it can be taken or wasted.

I have friends spread all around the world, and even when years pass without seeing each other, when we meet again it is like as if just a few days have passed since we last saw each other. I love it. That’s what makes sport so beautiful and so important, for everyone.

It’s good for your health and awesome for your mind. I truly believe that more sport (in schools and in work places, too) would make people healthier and happier, so they could function much better, be more balanced and productive and consequently produce more value and waste less money in medical care.

That’s why I am so happy when someone I don’t know sends me a message saying I somehow inspired him or her to take a bike and just go outside and ride it.

That’s possibly the greatest achievement a professional rider can aim for. VS

Two Grand Tours in one year. Obviously the Tour de France didn’t end the way I wanted it

to but I had an opportunity to go to the Vuelta a España. The approach to the Tour was to go there, gain experience and hopefully target one or two stages. As soon we got to the Vuelta, I was feeling really good and decided to see how far I could go for GC.

It was a very different experience riding for GC over three weeks as opposed to just targeting a stage. It’s a lot more stressful because you have to go out there and concentrate every day. It takes quite a bit of effort to be switched on for 21 days of racing. The experience was invaluable and it’s something I hope I can take forward in my career.

The result was also made more special because it really was a team effort. The majority of the team was African so it makes it even more meaningful that we made history this way by me being the first South African to finish in the top 10 of a Grand Tour. Cycling is always strange in that one rider gets the result but it’s always a team effort. You would have noticed a couple of days where the

team rode on the front protecting my place on GC when there was a dangerous rider in the break.

It took quite some time to reflect on the result. I think it might still take a while to sink in. Directly after the race I think I was too tired to even think about it but have since given it some thought.

My best day on the bike was during stage 7 to La Alpujarra. I feel like I held back and waited too long. Things are always easier in hindsight but I feel like I could have gone a bit earlier. In the moment it’s easy to be unsure and I think with one or two more years of experience and a little more depth I will hopefully be right up there with the top GC guys and ride more on instinct, too. My approach has always been to take things step by step with a gradual progression. I feel like everything has been on track.

This year has been something else. I feel like I have hit most of my goals. I am looking forward to some downtime during the off-season to reflect on it and then plan for next year. Coming from the southern hemisphere is a bonus because we live from summer to summer. It’s not a bad life going back to South Africa for summer during the off-season.

I’m looking forward to the move to Lampre-Merida. You grow up dreaming of riding at the highest level of the sport and now that will be a reality joining a WorldTour team. Time to set some new goals. LM

LEFT Louis made history at the Vuelta by

becoming the �irst South African to �inish

in the top 10 of a Grand Tour

ABOVE Valentina loves the chance to race

for her country at the Worlds and, as ever,

has her own unique take on why it’s special

PRO DIARIES


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D R A PAC P R O C YC L I N G

Since finishing the Vuelta, my first Grand Tour, everybody on the team warned me not to

give in to the temptation to take it too easy, to take too many rest days. They say if you do, the exhaustion is way higher, so I’ve been hauling my butt out of bed most days to do a couple a couple of easy hours and keep the legs turning over.

It’s been hard but I can almost feel my body adapting to the super-heavy workload of riding a Grand Tour. I feel tired but I also feel I’ve got more power. It’s quite weird really. I noticed it at the GP Impanis, which I rode a week after the Vuelta. I didn’t feel so great but posted a pretty good result – seventh. Hopefully with some proper rest and a good block of training over winter I’ll start to reap the benefits next year.

The Vuelta was a cool experience. We had some team success early in the race when Bert-Jan Lindeman took the win on stage 7. Here is a little known use of race radios for you: a chance for team-mates in the gruppetto to radio through congratulations when their team-mate wins. We were about five kilometres behind Bert-Jan and I think the rest of the gruppetto wondered what the hell had happened to us when we all started shouting and cheering.

Of course, we also had a patriotic and friendly interest in following the fortunes of Tom Dumoulin. He rode

on the Rabobank Continental team so most of us Dutch riders know him quite well. I remember at the beginning of the Vuelta he really wasn’t sure how far he could go and he said he was just going to give his best each day. It turns out that strategy got him pretty far. For me, it’s inspirational to see him doing so well and to see how fast and far he has travelled.

For me now there’s not much racing to look forward to, just the Tour de l’Eurometropole and then a race that’s close to my heart, Paris-Tours. Last year I won the U23 version, so it will be nice to go back there this year with the seniors. I’d love to post a great result there. It will be hard, I know, but if I can recover nicely after the Vuelta and take some form there, why not aim high, right? MT

The second half of Drapac Professional Cycling’s 2015 US campaign wound up last week

with the ‘Quebexican’ double header, the GP’s of Quebec and Montreal.

The two GPs are worth a mention, not simply because they were two of the biggest races that we’ll take part in this season but because they are in Canada, a country that is obsessed with hockey and (when the Blue Jays are doing well) baseball, and is not in the least bit interested in cycling.

Canada is also a long way away for almost every professional cycling team, making the prospect of putting races on there extremely difficult.

Whenever there is racing in a country that teams can’t drive to, most team managers instantly envision standing in long queues at an airport, trying to get more luggage than the E Street Band on to a commercial flight.

The reality of putting on two races that WorldTour teams have to attend (while most of them also have teams at both the Vuelta and the Tour of Britain)

is that it is going to be a very hard sell. Admittedly the WorldTour status of the races means that the UCI twists the arms of the majority of the peloton but regardless, teams still have to want to be there or the races just won’t last.

The race organisers did well flying everyone in by charter plane, while the equipment came on a transporter. They also put us all up in the Château Fontenac in Old Quebec, which as any quick internet search will show you ain’t too shabby.

The icing on the cake is that the race hotels for both Quebec and Montreal are within 500m of the start line of each event, meaning that transfers and potential complications are removed and I have a lot less to think about, which in September is probably a good thing.

While the GPs proved to be a tough ask for the majority of our riders, we came away having at least made an impression, and in my case highly impressed by the races.

Of course, once the racing was done in Montreal there was also the small matter of heading to Cross Vegas to support our rider Lachlan Norris who

took part in the first World Cup Cross round of 2015 only three days after finishing Montreal.

There are a few perks to this job and I’d say hiring a Mustang and exploring Vegas for a couple of days around the event would be one of them, the only problem was all those damn giant bats. TS

ABOVE Mike is still reeling from his �irst

Grand Tour but hopes it will give him a

big boost once he recovers

WE ALSO HAD A PATRIOTIC AND FRIENDLY INTEREST IN FOLLOWING THE FORTUNES OF TOM DUMOULIN. IT’S INSPIRATIONAL

TO SEE HIM DOING SO WELL

BELOW A convertible car isn’t ideal

when there are giant bats around


THE

INTERVIEW

Writer: Sam Dansie Portrait: Getty Images Race Photography: Tim De Waele

Last November, Philippe Gilbert told a Belgian paper that he would sacrifice top form in the hilly Classics, and particularly his beloved Liège-Bastogne-Liège, to be in the mix at the Tour of

Flanders and Roubaix. Cue a ruffled feather or two at BMC headquarters as the team moved to ensure that the Walloon’s comments didn’t derail the concord engineered between Gilbert and their other pedigreed Classics rider, Greg Van Avermaet. The team’s carefully balanced plans would, like the previous two years, see Van Avermaet be the undisputed top dog for the Flemish Classics while Gilbert was the master in the Ardennes. BMC sports director Valerio Piva was dispatched to have lunch with Gilbert and gently remind him of the programme.

This anecdote was told at the BMC training camp in December 2014 by the team’s sporting manager, Allan Peiper. His wry smile intimated that curbing Gilbert’s enthusiasm – even as the rider is heading towards his mid-30s – is something that periodically

needs to be done. He’s the bike rider’s bike rider after all, said Peiper, and he has an insatiable appetite to ride and win everything.

An undeniable streak of mischief runs through Gilbert, like red lettering in Blackpool rock. And he’s ever so slightly hot-headed, too. If something riles him, he’ll vent. This summer he was veering off message in the Belgian media again when he was unsure if he would be selected for the Tour de France.

“Ask Jim Ochowicz,” he huffed to Het Laatste Nieuws at the Tour de Suisse. “It’s hard to stay motivated when you don’t know your programme. I hope that I no longer have to prove anything. If they [BMC management] still need convincing results, I would find that disappointing,” he added before pointing out two well-taken stage wins at the Giro this year; proof, he said, that he was fighting fit and ready to go. At that point he even had the backing of Piva. Three days later however, he got his answer and it wasn’t the one he was after. For the second year running the team didn’t send him to

What’s left for Philippe Gilbert to prove? With a Worlds title, three Monuments and

nine Grand Tour stages among 60 professional victories, you’d think not much.

However, the BMC leader’s desire to win is as sharp as ever, especially when it comes

to cementing his place in history by broadening his palmarès. He even believes

he could challenge at Paris-Roubaix. “I want to win all the Classics,” he tells us. But at 33, exactly how

realistic are his ambitions?


THE

INTERVIEW


Philippe Gilbert

“REMEMBER THE FINAL OF VALKENBURG WHEN I WON. AT THE BOTTOM OF THE CAUBERG

THERE WERE FOUR BELGIANS IN THE FIRST FIVE. THEY DIDN’T KNOW WHICH ONE TO LOOK AT”

the Tour and instead, a niggling knee injury sustained in a crash in April’s Flèche Wallonne would be examined, treated and allowed to recover.

NEVERTHELESS, BY THE time Procycling sat down with Gilbert on the eve of the Eneco Tour in Friesland, northern Holland, he insisted he was glad to have missed the Tour and fixed the knee problem – a small fracture of the postero-lateral tibia head – no matter how attractive the first week of the Tour had looked to a rider of his calibre and qualities.

“It was really bad news when we found this but at the same time I was also really happy that we found the reason for the pain,” he says. “I was always able to ride but I never had a day without pain either. There was always something there and I had a lot of extra treatment like massage and chiropractors. I was always busy with them,” he adds.

But most importantly the enforced break had kept him fresh for the last half of his season, he said. His recent results spoke for themselves. Before Eneco, he had made a winning return at the GP Pino Cerami in Belgium and had followed that up with a stage win at the Tour de Wallonie. And his second place at Clásica San Sebastián against a field of Tour-hardened riders was an even better indication of how fired up, both mentally and physically, he was for the remainder of the season.

Of course, post-July, most roads, one way or another, lead to the World Championships. And this year to a 16.2km circuit which appeared to offer Gilbert a good opportunity to add another medal to the gold he won in 2012 in Valkenburg. He admitted that the route had sharpened his interest from the start of the year. “Every time I know I have a nice circuit it’s a motivation for me,” he says. “I tried to make

my season with this in my mind – and always having some power and freshness left. At the end of the season you have

to be fresh physically and mentally.” Gilbert is steeped in the tradition of the

Worlds and it’s clearly a week of the year he relishes. Partly it’s down to his success there – his win on the Valkenburg parcours counts as his favourite result – but also Belgium’s strong track record. “We are a country with a lot of specialists in the one-day races,” he says. “I think we all love this kind of race: Van Avermaet, Boonen, me and also the young guys – I can see they like it already,” he says. “I think Belgium in any World Championship will always be a contender because everybody knows that the World Championships are part of history and of Belgian cycling.”

He also believes that the Belgian team’s strength lies in its depth. “It’s easier when you come to the start because the other teams don’t know what card you’re going to play,” he says. “Remember the final of Valkenburg when I won. Boonen was there with 3km to go at the bottom of the

Cauberg. There were four Belgian guys on the Cauberg in the first five. The others didn’t know which one of us to look at.

“In the end, if you win, personally it’s nice, but if [it’s one] of your team-mates then it’s also nice. I had the two experiences – I was also there in the team when Boonen was World Champion, so I had this experience first and I was very proud to be part of this squad. At this time it was 12 riders so an even bigger group – and a bigger party!” he laughs.

LOOKING BACK OVER a 13-year career, Gilbert’s rise was slow and relatively steady. The six years spent under Marc Madiot’s wing at Française des Jeux were the making of him as he emerged as a thrilling puncheur, who revelled in one-day racing. In 2009, with Silence-Lotto, four wins in 10 days, culminating with his first Giro di

Lombardia title, cemented his position as a top Classics rider and a contender at the other end of the year.

Yet 2011 was the year that made Gilbert and proved that all the expectation had been justified. The spring alone was monolithic: Strade Bianche, Brabantse Pijl, Amstel Gold Race,

Above Always with

one eye on the Worlds

in Richmond, Gilbert is

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Left The parcours was

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2012 Worlds and he

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THE

INTERVIEW

“I’VE BEEN SAYING THIS FOR YEARS NOW: MY DREAM IS STILL

TO WIN ALL THE CLASSICS. I WON A LOT OF THEM AND

I KNOW HOW HARD THEY ARE”

Top left Gilbert still hopes to emulate Roger De Vlaeminck in winning all of the Monuments

Right Victory in Liège would crown most careers but it was just barely the highlight of Gilbert’s epic 2011

2006

Philippe Gilbert announces himself as a future star of the Classics by proving uncontainable in the �inal 30kilometres of Het Volk; he rides the last 7km to the line solo

2008

The young Walloon takes his �irst Monument podium in Milano-Sanremo. He forces the pace over the Poggio but is unable to match Fabian Cancellara’s late acceleration, �inishing third

2009

In a glorious autumn spell, Gilbert takes four wins in 10 days. This period culminates in victory in the Giro di Lombardia, with a photogenic attack over the �inal Fermo della Battaglia climb

PHILIPPE GILBERT

THE STORY SO FAR

C A R E E R H I G H L I G H T S

La Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. He became only the second rider ever to win all three Ardennes Classics in the same year. And that’s without mentioning the Tour of Belgium, the Belgian Road Race Championship, a Tour stage, Clásica San Sebástian, the GP de Québec or the other eight lesser victories that year which took his tally to 18. In the seven years since the modern, admittedly problematic, WorldTour ranking system was introduced, Gilbert – a one day specialist – achieved the biggest ever points haul in a single season: 718. It was Merckxian; a season of total domination.

YET THE AMBITION to become the first rider to complete the set of Monuments since Roger De Vlaeminck in 1977 remains. “I’ve been saying this for years now. My dream is still to win all the Classics. I won a lot of them and I know how hard they are.”

Among the active multiple Monument winners – of which there are just seven – he is the only one who still holds the belief he can win them all. Others in his generation

who once may have harboured the same hope of winning all five – namely Fabian Cancellara and, in the very earliest days of his career, Tom Boonen – have abandoned the dream and focused instead on honing their respective USPs in a hyper-specialised peloton. But not the omnivorous Gilbert. He insists today he still has the qualities and characteristics to be competitive among the heavyweights attracted to the northern French cobbles.

“When I see the races on TV, I’m sure even if I started in Roubaix I’m not less than these guys,” he tells us intently. “I maybe don’t have the experience but I think if you watch the last 10 editions on TV you can pick up a lot and if you go there a few times to practice I think you will get the technique quickly.”

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Philippe Gilbert

Below Gilbert took a spectacular win in the opening stage of the 2011 Tour de France

2011

Gilbert’s annus mirabilis. His e�fortless Liège-Bastogne-Liège victory against the Schleck brothers is only one highlight of an incredible year during which Gilbert sweeps all before him

2012

After a quiet 2012, Gilbert �lickers into life at the Vuelta a España where he takes two stage wins. He follows them up with victory at the Worlds on the Valkenburg course in the Netherlands

2014

Gilbert takes his third victory at the Amstel Gold Race and thanks to his victory on the same hill at the Worlds the year before becomes universally known as Mr Cauberg

2015

In pouring rain, Gilbert takes a highly impressive, not to say characteristic, win at the Giro on stage 12. On a steep 1km hill, Gilbert overhauls a lone leader and staves o�f a late move by Diego Ulissi

The surprising muscularity of Gilbert, his enormous aerobic fitness and an extraordinary ability to process and tolerate lactic acid could mean that morphology is not his limiting factor. Gilbert’s taurean neck and bulging biceps place him midway between Joaquim Rodríguez and Tom Boonen on the climber-rouleur continuum – and therefore making it a credible claim for him to be a contender.

What’s less convincing is his insistence that getting the necessary technique on the cobbles would be straightforward. He says, “I’m good on the pavé but I haven’t done a lot of it the last four or five years. But I’m sure if I did, I don’t know, 10 very specific training sessions I could be back there.”

At Flanders and Sanremo he has a proven track record, finishing twice on the podium at the former and once at the latter. His record across all Monuments is arguably the best in the active peloton: he’s finished on the podium in four of them. On the other hand, team-mate Van Avermaet averages higher finishes when Roubaix is taken into account. But whether ‘Gilbert, Paris-Roubaix winner’


THE

INTERVIEW

passes critical analysis these days is a moot point. His record in the Hell of the North is restricted to a single line in 2007, way back in his Française des Jeux days when he was 52nd. Nevertheless, he seems to honestly believe he has it in him.

So should we be preparing to see the Walloon lining up in Compiègne in 2016? As he admits, this “dream” requires the support of BMC management and there is no guarantee that he will get his way. “This is the wish for sure but I’m not the only one to decide. But for sure I will ask to go for this,” he says.

BMC are primed already. At the Tour of Britain, Valerio Piva, the BMC sports director, said he anticipated another discussion with Gilbert this winter about

his programme. “He dreams of going back to the cobbled Classics but honestly if you want to go you have to be more than 100 per cent. To prepare for Flanders you have to do the other races like Harelbeke and then you miss preparation for the Ardennes Classics. I think those races are better for him,” says Piva.

There’s an undeniable sense Gilbert’s once undisputed patronage at BMC – indeed his post-2011 status as arguably Belgium’s favourite and certainly most exciting rider – no longer carries the heft that would let him ride where and when he likes.

The team, twice this year, has dispensed its favour to the ultra-consistent, amenable, and, most crucially, three years younger, Greg Van Avermaet. Though the pair’s palmarès are incomparable, it was Van Avermaet whom the US team backed in the Flemish Classics this year and the man they took to the Tour as well – both of which Gilbert had expressed a desire to race.

THE TRUCE THAT exists between the two is often subject to speculation and intrigue, particularly in the Belgian press. The pair’s programmes seem engineered, Sporza commented earlier this year, to stop them racing together much. Yet in reality the delineation is nowhere near as stark as the thick black line drawn between Chris

Froome and Bradley Wiggins when both were at Sky. Gilbert and Van Avermaet rode four stage races together last year and there was crossover at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, Milano-Sanremo, Amstel Gold Race and elsewhere.

This year, the pattern is almost identical. But not since 2010, when they were at Omega Pharma-Lotto, have the pair raced a Grand Tour together: that year’s Vuelta.

Piva describes the relationship between the two riders as neutral. “Sure, they are not the best friends but nor are they fighting against each other,” he says, putting the separation down to the fact they are similar riders vying for supremacy at the top of the team. “They are two riders with the same characteristics: the same rider for the same race. It’s sometimes difficult to put them both in the race when they are both in top shape,” he concedes to us. “Then it is our job as sports directors is to find a good compromise.”

He adds, however, that the pair can complement each other on the same team. “If you have the two guys together, of course the team may be stronger, but that needs to be on the table and planned.”

TALK TO PIVA for long and the thumbnail portrait of Gilbert the mischief-maker is reinforced – this is, after all, the guy who used to play truant from school to go and watch La Flèche Wallonne on the Mur de Huy. “He likes to have a good spirit in the team and joke about and sometimes it’s a little bit overboard,” adds Piva, “but you know like school, sometimes you need to say ‘stop’. But that’s normal – they are young guys.”

However, Piva insists that he’s not perpetually dishing out discipline and says, “I don’t have a special relationship with him or that I am his best friend. But I think we have respect for each other and he listens to what I have to say. When he is focused in the race he is 100 per cent. He’s more relaxed and jokes about a bit when the race is not so important for him.”

Gilbert has not always played the joker. His long career and the sheer scale of his achievements have meant that when he speaks, people listen. In March 2011 he was elected to the UCI Athletes’ Commission, which was established to allow riders of all

Below Gilbert turned pro with FDJ, where

he spent six years, winning Het Volk

twice, and Paris-Tours


Peter Sagan

disciplines to communicate queries up to the governing body. Not that he hung around for long. When the email chains got too long and progress turned out to happen at a glacial pace he resigned the position. “I was spending a lot of time with Bernhard Eisel also and he was very involved in this but in the end I stopped because nothing changed,” he says. Bike riding comes first. “I’m a rider first and my job is to promote BMC, and help them sell bikes, hopefully!”

FOR HIS PART, Gilbert, at the start of his career, never thought he’d scale the heights he subsequently has; never imagined that he could win the Worlds, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Tour of Lombardy twice, Amstel Gold thrice and nine Grand Tour stages, as well as countless other events and a WorldTour title.

“I have a quite nice palmarès now,” he says, rather modestly. “But I was never hoping to get this when I was younger. Now I’m very proud of what I did but

I believe that there are still some nice wins to come. Then I’ll be happy – I always want more!”

Beyond the Classics there is one glittering prize that Gilbert has fixed his gaze on next summer: the Olympic Games Road Race. “You ask if I miss something in my palmarès,” he says gravely. “A medal in the Olympics. This is something special. You can meet people from other sports and I can say I was a medalist in Athens or London and they would realise you were more important but if you say I won Liège or Flanders the public doesn’t know what this is – it’s only for the big fans.”

The course in Rio is one that offers a sliver of opportunity, even if he perhaps secretly wishes organisers had drawn the

“I HAVE A QUITE NICE PALMARÈS NOW BUT I WAS NEVER HOPING TO GET THIS WHEN I WAS

YOUNGER. NOW I’M VERY PROUD OF WHAT I DID BUT I BELIEVE THERE ARE STILL SOME NICE WINS TO COME. THEN I’LL BE HAPPY – I ALWAYS WANT MORE”

finish line somewhere up one of the short sharp inclines that stud the course and not after 15km of flat beside Copacabana beach. But for someone who has created so much cycling history and is also acutely aware of his place in the annals of the sport, for him to become the first Belgian to win the Olympic Road Race since André Noyelle in 1952 might be just the spur he needs to defy the odds.

Time is short, both for Gilbert to fulfil his dreams and also our time talking to him. Before long, he was stepping into a canal boat to get to the Eneco Tour race presentation. With all his team-mates in the boat, the other side of Gilbert emerged: the perpetual jester, and he couldn’t help but rock it.

Above Gilbert has

rarely ridden the Giro,

but he did so this year

with distinction, taking

two stage wins

Left It’s not all smiles

at BMC as Gilbert is

vying for leadership

with Van Avermaet (L)

in the Classics


2 0 1 5


T

VUELTA A ESPAÑAR�� R��

Writer: Alasdair Fotheringham Photography: Tim De Waele

Fabio Aru won the 2015 Vuelta a España by being the strongest climber in the race when it mattered and by marshalling the vastly superior strength of his Astana

team. But he didn’t make it easy for himself

POWER SHIFTS

here was a single moment which symbolised the final shift in the balance of power between Fabio Aru and Tom Dumoulin on the penultimate climb of the 2015 Vuelta, the Alto de la Morcuera on stage 20. With Aru, followed by Nairo Quintana, disappearing up

the road, the penny collectively dropped that Dumoulin, in the red jersey, could no longer handle the pace. Suddenly the cloud of GC riders that had usually surrounded Dumoulin dissolved, and like rodents leaving a sinking ship, Joaquim Rodríguez, Esteban Chaves, Mikel Landa et al bolted up the road and across to the Vuelta’s new capo. The king was dead. Long live the king.

In the space of a few minutes, Dumoulin was left with just one rider for company – Sky’s Mikel Nieve, whose collaboration was half-hearted and self-interested. The image of Dumoulin’s isolation contrasted radically with the line of turquoise-clad Astana riders ahead, slowly but surely dragging Aru out of Dumoulin’s sight, and the Vuelta out of his reach.

Dumoulin, never a pre-race favourite, had come within 20 kilometres of Holland’s first Grand Tour win in 35 years, only to lose it in the last handful of minutes. But that late twist of fate concealed another major turn-up.

Until stage 20, Astana had shone colossally on an individual level, from the climbing strength of Landa and Aru to the immense bravery of Alessandro Vanotti and Paolo Tiralongo, injured but trying to continue. However, in terms of collective strategy Astana had been at sixes and sevens throughout the Vuelta, to the point where a Dutch outsider, with a strong team for the flat

but no out-and-out climbers, was on the point of defeating them. At least in the Giro, where Astana were by far the most powerful team in the mountains, they had lost to no less a figure than Alberto Contador. This time round, there would be no such excuse.

But with their backs to the wall, just 24 hours from the finish, in the sierras of Madrid, Astana showed they could pull out a faultless team manoeuvre, and it won them the Vuelta. It was an enthralling finale to a race which had seen one truly good, albeit chaotic, day for the team, at Andorra, where Aru took the lead and Mikel Landa the stage. But their Vuelta had also been overshadowed by an embarrassing PR disaster, when Vincenzo Nibali was kicked off the race for holding on to a team car on the second day.

That was just in terms of the team’s image. Nibali’s dramatic exclusion also left Astana bereft of one of its three key names. Aru and Mikel Landa, having not ridden the Tour, were surely fresher than Nibali. But as a former Vuelta

Tom Dumoulin,

dropped by all his

rivals, looks to an

unwilling Mikel Nieve

for help on stage 20


at La Ermita del Alba on stage 16, as Landa blazed up the ‘mini-Angliru’, Aru was to be seen hovering somewhere at the back of the favourites’ group, losing the lead by one second.

As soon as Aru was out of the lead, he seemed far more focused than when he had been wearing la roja. That evening, team manager Giuseppe Martinelli came to talk to Aru

in his hotel room in Burgos. But the 25-year-old Sardinian all but ordered Martinelli out, saying he had “no need for pep talks”. Just as in the Giro in May, the Italian quickly regained much of his traction in the Vuelta’s third week, starting with an excellent time trial, which kept him at a threateningly close distance behind stage winner and race leader Dumoulin. “Three seconds, three seconds,” the Astana staff repeatedly chorused at Aru as he warmed down.

But again, just when Aru seemed to have the Vuelta in his grasp, with three mountain stages remaining, Astana’s drive for victory seemed to lose its impetus. Rather than taking Dumoulin apart on the steeper slopes of an unclassified late climb on stage 18, Astana waited too long to up the pace on the much steadier gradient of La Quesera. The Dutchman hung on and even permitted himself a small attack some four kilometres from the line in Riaza.

summit finishes between stages 14 and 16, Astana failed to deal a knock-out blow to an unexpectedly tenacious Dumoulin in particular, and their rivals in general. At a fog-enshrouded Alto Campoo, after Landa, now toeing the line, had upped the pace to a ferocious rate, Aru’s subsequent attack proved premature and he was overtaken by Quintana and Rodríguez. At Sotres, Aru was outgunned again by Rodríguez, who came within a second of taking the lead. Finally

MARTINELLI CAME TO TALK TO ARU BUT HE

ORDERED MARTINELLI OUT, SAYING HE HAD “NO

NEED FOR PEP TALKS”

winner, Nibali could have played a key role and shared some of the pressure.

Then Fabio Aru’s close friend Paolo Tiralongo, one of Astana’s most experienced riders, packed during stage 3 after sustaining facial injuries on the previous day. This was followed by Mikel Landa turning in a disastrous performance at Cumbre del Sol on stage 9, losing 14 minutes.

At least this ensured that Aru was the undisputed leader and there would be none of the Aru-Landa power struggle that damaged their Giro. However, Astana’s team tactics were notable by their absence on stage 11 to Andorra, in theory the stage which was going to decide the Vuelta.

Yes, Dario Cataldo worked faultlessly to bring Aru back up to Valverde and Rodríguez when the Spanish duo tried to ambush the Italian and Dumoulin. But Landa, in theory Astana’s key support climber, was a man on a mission – his own, that is. The Basque’s refusal to drop back to help Aru, as ordered, won Astana the stage, but it also underlined the internal divisions at the team.

At Andorra, Aru had been the best of the pre-race favourites, as both Quintana and Valverde lost time and Froome crashed, while it was all Joaquim Rodríguez could do to hold on to second. Aru had 27 seconds on Rodríguez and 30 on Dumoulin but the Kazakh team managed to drop the ball in the mountains of northern Spain.

Astana’s failure to eliminate an ailing Quintana from the running was perhaps not just one team’s error, but several. However, on the three days of

Astana’s Mikel

Landa took a solo win

in Andorra, disobeying

team orders to go

back and help Aru

At Alto Campoo,

Aru �inished with

Esteban Chaves (in

green) but conceded

time to Rodríguez

Aru’s �irst stint in red

came between stages

11 and 15, before

Rodriguez, then

Dumoulin, took over



Quintana saved his best for last but his superb attack on Alpe d’Huez was too little, too late

2 0 1 5

For 19 and a half stages, Dumoulin was able to follow Aru closely in the mountains


Photography: ©

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2 0 1 5

Aru was the

strongest climber

in the Vuelta but

he lacked the

consistency to

dominate the race


IN RECENT YEARS, PERHAPS ONLY

CONTADOR’S AMBUSH AT FUENTE DÉ IN 2012

WAS COMPARABLE


Even on the crucial

climb of the Vuelta,

the Morcuera, it took

two attempts for Aru

to shift Dumoulin

Following three top

�ives in Grand Tours,

including second at

the 2015 Giro, Aru

�inally took a GC win

he closed to 11 seconds. But, crucially, team orders to Sánchez and Zeits to drop back gave a huge boost to Aru’s momentum. With three riders going flat out in front of him, the broad, fast drop away from the Morcuera was exactly what Aru needed to open up the gap on a lone rider. Then Katusha’s Eduard Vorganov, driving to help Rodríguez secure second place on the podium, further helped the Astana effort. Once breaking point had been reached, Dumoulin – isolated, ill, demoralised and at the end of his strength after 20 days of punching above his GC weight – sank like a stone. By the finish, Aru had an advantage of 3:52 over Dumoulin, more than enough to ensure the Vuelta was his.

After a Vuelta packed with more than its fair share of headlines concerning crashes, abandons, exclusions and protests, Astana’s collective performance meant a welcome return of sport to centre stage. “The finale of the Vuelta makes up for the setbacks,” claimed race director Javier Guillén, and Dumoulin’s last-ditch defeat was certainly one of the most memorable days the Vuelta has seen. In recent years, perhaps only Contador’s ambush on Rodríguez at Fuente Dé in 2012 was comparable for high drama.

Yet for those looking for a central narrative from the 2015 Vuelta, it might be that for all the organisation’s insistence on having spectacular, new summit finishes, Astana’s demolition of Dumoulin took place on a stage featuring four classic Vuelta climbs and which ended on a downhill. Secondly, Aru has become the first Vuelta champion with no stage wins since Nibali in 2010 – a reminder of how vital a role teams can play in Grand Tour wins, albeit in Astana’s case in the 2015 Vuelta, only at the very last moment.

Then the following day, Dumoulin gained three more seconds on Aru with a last-minute surge over the cobbles of Ávila. With one mountain stage to go, Aru’s deficit was six seconds. As if that was not bad enough, Aru had crashed and there was the worry of losing more time after an alleged handsling from a team-mate could have cost him a further 10-second penalty.

Staring fixedly ahead as he sat in an Astana people carrier at the Ávila finish, refusing to talk to journalists and with cuts and grazes oozing blood through his jersey, Aru had a real air of defeat about him. To make things worse, the people carrier half squashed a metal pole on its way out, and the driver had to sheepishly ask the journalists, all hungry for non-existent Aru quotes, for help. It was an undignified retreat. Dumoulin, on the other hand, talking long and calmly to the ever-increasing numbers of Dutch journalists on the race, was the picture of confident strength. “Majestic” was Dave Brailsford’s description of the Dutchman as the Sky boss confidently predicted Dumoulin’s victory.

Yet on stage 20, it all fell apart for one team, and it all came together for another. Astana played a tactical masterpiece and ripped Dumoulin’s lead to shreds, shoving him out of the race lead and off the podium altogether. But with the benefit of hindsight and a glance at the comparative team line-ups, it might just have been a simple matter of when, not if, Dumoulin and his team folded.

In Giant-Alpecin, with the exception of team captain Johannes Fröhlinger, the young Texan all-rounder Lawson Craddock and Dumoulin himself, the rest of the squad were mainly in Spain to drive Degenkolb’s sprint train. On top of that, Fröhlinger, a good climber, was sick, Frenchman Thierry Hupond’s better climbing days are behind him, Luka Mezgec and Koen de Kort are both lead-out regulars and Degenkolb himself, while cheerfully adopting a role as water-carrier, was never going to be a factor on a high mountain stage. It would be grossly unfair to say that Giant are still in the same position as when Alexandre Geniez quit a previous incarnation of the team in 2012, saying they did not have enough interest in Grand Tour GC, but of Giant’s current squad, perhaps only a rider like Warren Barguil could have matched Astana’s climbing power on a man-to-man level. And Barguil was in Canada, not Spain. Dumoulin himself even got involved helping Degenkolb in one of the mid-race flat stages, a questionable use of resources he’d later need.

Giant also made a serious tactical blunder when they were one of a few teams to fail to get a rider in the early, massive break of 38 on stage 20. Whereas Astana had both Andrey Zeits and Luis León Sánchez present and waiting for Aru to go,

if Giant had placed just one rider, Dumoulin could have had some support when he most needed it.

When the Astana team, spearheaded by Dario Cataldo,

accelerated in the main pack, they did so at exactly the right moment, the second time up the Morcuera – the hardest of the four climbs. Dumoulin was briefly distanced but managed to regain contact. Then on the second attempt, with Landa and then Aru himself ripping the gap open and Dumoulin said later to be ill, it was too much.

With just 15 seconds between them at the summit, a more technical descent might have given Dumoulin a chance to regain contact. And


2 0 1 5

For the first time since the Vuelta left Marbella over a week before, Chris Froome suddenly looked as if he was coming into the game on stage 9. Sky had constantly repeated that the Briton was riding into form, even though he was losing small chunks of time on most of the key uphill finishes in the opening week. But until the moment Froome all but claimed a stage win at Cumbre del Sol – a remarkably similar finish to the steep climb at Peña Cabarga, where he beat Juan José Cobo in the 2011 Vuelta – that was not confirmed. One ascent made all the difference.

Even before the Vuelta started, controversy had erupted over the opening TTT, which crossed areas of packed sand. Too dangerous, said the riders, although some quietly admitted later that it was more straightforward than expected.

The images of the teams riding along Marbella’s glamorous beach were stunning. Yet with times only counting for the teams classification, the end result was mostly meaningless. As one Spanish newspaper quipped, it was “a time trial without any time.”

Chris Froome’s broken foot, caused by a crash and which saw him ride to the finish of stage 11 then pull out that night, meant his bid for a Tour-Vuelta double went up in smoke. Early in the stage, he’d suffered an innocuous-looking ding that didn’t appear to involve anybody else but the chase back took a long time and it wasn’t long after he made the junction that he was off the back again for good. Froome’s popularity, following his bravery in continuing through the hardest Vuelta stage, skyrocketed in Spain. Even Oleg Tinkoff apologised for doubting him.

When Sergio Paulinho collided with the TV motorbike on the stage to Andorra and quit injured, with a dramatically bloodied leg, there was uproar, with the incident coming so soon after Sagan’s. The moto driver (a veteran of 17 Vueltas) was blamed but TV footage later showed that he’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time as Paulinho accidentally piled into him after a fast corner. But with the incident following similar ones this season, and the perceived increase in crashes with race vehicles, the UCI may have to make some changes.

FROOME: BACK IN THE RACE

TEAM TIME TRIAL AND ERROR

FROOME: OUT OF THE RACE

MOTO MADNESS

5

1

6 7


10VUELTA

TALES1

2

5

3

8


Mikel Landa’s decision to remove his earpiece as he ground away to victory in the Andorra stage of the Vuelta confirmed an open secret: that ever since the Giro d’Italia, he has resolutely gone his own way whenever he felt the need. In the Italian race, he’d appeared stronger than his team leader Fabio Aru on multiple occasions.

Had Landa stopped on his lone break and worked for Aru, the gap between the Italian and his rival, Tom Dumoulin, could have become unbridgeable well before the final week. Instead, Landa was on a different mission – his own.

If it had been a rider who didn’t count for GC and it hadn’t been so blatant, then it’s possible the commissaires would have turned a blind eye. But Vincenzo Nibali is not nobody and the TV images of his stage 2 misdemeanour as an Astana vehicle accelerated to warp speed with him hanging on to it were so graphic that it was impossible for him to continue. The Italian tried to play down the seriousness of his offence but his attempt to win a second Vuelta five years after his first one lasted only two days.

“The Vuelta has just become stupid,” said Mark Cavendish. “11 summit finishes. No one wants to go any more unless they crashed out of the Tour.”

Cavendish’s comments went down like a lead balloon in Spain, where the race organiser pointed out that Cavendish was a) inaccurate, there were nine summit finishes, and b) that neither Froome, Quintana, Valverde nor Nibali had crashed out of the Tour this year.

Cavendish has a point, however. There were only three bunch sprints in three weeks, in Málaga, Lérida and Madrid.

A crash causing concussion and facial fractures as well as a punctured lung left Belgium’s Kris Boeckmans in a life-threatening condition after his crash on stage 8, although he is now recovering. Three others – Tejay Van Garderen, Dan Martin and subsequent stage winner Jasper Stuyven were also forced to quit. But it was Boeckmans, whose Lotto-Soudal team-mates were in tears as they raced on and tried to take the stage win to dedicate to him, who paid the highest price.

Joaquim Rodríguez and Alejandro Valverde were at it again, even after the Vuelta had ended, as a fuming Rodríguez tweeted his outrage at Valverde ‘robbing’ him of the points jersey on the last stage. Rodríguez had gone into the stage with a two-point lead, overturned when Valverde took points in a mid-stage bonus sprint.

“This is how situations like the Worlds happen,” argued Rodríguez in a thinly-veiled reference to Valverde’s failure to cover his back in Firenze in 2013. Whatever happens in Richmond between the two, this was hardly going to help.

When he was struck by a race motorbike and knocked off during stage 8, Sagan’s fury as he lashed out at any organisation vehicles within sight earned him a fine of 300 Swiss Francs and an official reprobation but it’s hard not to feel sympathy. The motorbike had placed the Slovakian in danger, injured him, destroyed his excellent chances of trying for the stage win and compromised his preparation for the World Championships. Sagan was forced to pull out of the Vuelta with his injuries.

LANDA HOPE AND GLORY

CAR�MIC RETRIBUTION

STUPID VUELTA

CRASH CARNAGE

FEUDS CORNER

THE SAGAN SAGA

8

2

9

3

10

4

4

9

10

7

6

Photography: ©

Bet

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Tom Dumoulin’s breakthrough Grand Tour ride in the 2015 Vuelta saw praise flood in, while comparisons with

former cycling greats, Miguel Indurain in particular, echoed round the race. How does he feel about that?

STRIDESFORWARD

Expect to see

Dumoulin wearing a

Grand Tour leader’s

jersey many more

times in the future

GIANT


2 0 1 5

lot of time has passed since Tom Dumoulin and Miguel Indurain’s paths first crossed. A lifetime, in fact. Twenty summers ago,

Dumoulin was a small child on a family camping holiday in France. “Apparently we went to the Tour, although it didn’t make such an impression that I remember it,” he tells Procycling with a grin.

“We took some pictures,” he continues. “In one of them, I was on one side of the road and on the other you can see the line of bike riders, and one of them is Indurain.”

Fast forward two decades, to the press conference on the second rest day of the 2015 Vuelta a Espana, when Indurain’s old sports director Eusebio Unzue, still manager at the Movistar team which is a direct descendant of Indurain’s Banesto outfit, highlighted the similarities between the two. In Unzue’s opinion – and you could have heard a pin drop when he made the comparison – Dumoulin possesses the same gift as Indurain, of combining time-trialling talent in stage racing with stronger-than-expected climbing ability.

“Tomorrow [in the Burgos time trial],” Unzue continued, “we’ll see whether he’s lost any of his time trialling strength after progressing so much in the mountains.”

Dumoulin rejected the comparison. “I haven’t achieved anything compared to him,” he said. But his real response was his most Indurain-esque action of all: he let his legs do the talking.

Powering round the 39km rolling course in Burgos, the Giant-Alpecin rider gained over a minute on second-placed Maciej Bodnar and nearly two on his most dangerous GC rival, Fabio Aru. Even better, the leader’s red jersey was his again, a week after he’d lost it in Andorra. Adapting himself to climb with the best in the Vuelta had clearly had done no harm to Dumoulin’s time trialling legs.

Unzue’s point was not made, it should be said, in terms of what he felt Dumoulin could achieve. He was not predicting five straight Tours de France, as they did with Indurain, would fall the Dutchman’s way. Rather it was purely in terms of racing style and after Burgos, despite Dumoulin’s

reticence, it was hard to disagree.There are other similarities,

between the ‘Big Tom’ of now and the ‘Big Mig’ of the 1990s. Physically, both are toweringly

A

158.7km7.4km

21

BMC Racing 0:08:10

Tinko�f-Saxo +00:01

Orica GreenEdge +00:01

Esteban Chaves Orica-GreenEdge 3:57:25

Tom Dumoulin Giant-Alpecin +0:00:01

Nicolas Roche Team Sky +0:00:09

Esteban Chaves 3:57:15

Tom Dumoulin +00:05

Nicolas Roche +00:15

GENERAL CLASSIFICATION

PODIUM PODIUM

Alhaurín de la Torre

Caminito del Rey

Puerto Banús

Marbella

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tall. Like Indurain, Dumoulin is invariably courteous and engaging with the press, no matter the scale of his victory or defeat in what was a rollercoaster Vuelta for him.

The five-times Tour champion never wanted to move away from Spain to glitzy Monaco or other such tax-friendly havens; “One of my legs belongs to the Spanish Inland Revenue,” Indurain once joked. Likewise, Dumoulin has no plans to move from his home town of Maastricht. When Dumoulin wants a training ride with climbs, he gets up at 6am, drives to the Belgian border, unloads the bike and heads south into the Ardennes.

In fact, while their riding styles are very similar, the most striking parallel between

Dumoulin and Indurain is the huge value both place on staying normal.

“I really hope I can still walk through the city, because I’m not a fan of the little-bit-of-a-rock-star thing,” Dumoulin tells Procycling. “We’ll have to see. I hope I can still be the same Tom Dumoulin.”

As with Indurain, Dumoulin’s family are integral to all this. “They keep my feet on the ground,” he said with a grin in his own rest day press conference, where he also told us that his girlfriend was coming to Madrid. “Whether I finish first or 100th, she still likes me,” he said.

Dumoulin finally entered the Spanish capital on the Vuelta’s last stage in sixth overall, his slender six-second lead over Fabio Aru having been demolished in a single day of electrifying racing through the sierras of Madrid. Understandably, he has mixed feelings about how he ended the race and is, when interviewed by Procycling on the last day of the Vuelta, still in the process of coming to terms with them.

“It will take a while to put it all together and to also be proud about this Vuelta, because all I feel now is disappointment. But definitely in a few days or weeks I must be very proud,” he says.

Still, despite the setbacks, as a rider who started the Vuelta saying he had no interest in a top-10 finish, Dumoulin’s progress was impressive. He came with a reputation of being an excellent time triallist, and left as a potential Grand Tour winner.


209.6km158.4km

43

Alejandro Valverde Movistar 5:07:30

Peter Sagan Tinko�f-Saxo +00:00

Daniel Moreno Katusha +00:00


Tom Dumoulin +00:05


GENERAL CLASSIFICATION GENERAL CLASSIFICATION

PODIUM PODIUM

Estepona

Vejer de la Frontera

Mijas

Málaga

T�� A��M�� A��


Tom Dumoulin +00:05


Peter Sagan Tinko�f-Saxo 4:06:46

Nacer Bouhanni Co�idis +00:00

John Degenkolb Giant-Alpecin +00:00

As is so often the

case, the leader’s

jersey inspired

Dumoulin to reach

new heights



2 0 1 5

167.3km

5Caleb Ewan Orica-GreenEdge 3:57:28


Peter Sagan Tinko�f-Saxo +00:00

Tom Dumoulin 17:09:06

Esteban Chaves +00:01



PODIUM

Rota

Alcalá de Guadaíra

W�� A��

I’m really happy. I want to thank

all the team and staff again – they

are all amazing. Caleb Ewan won

yesterday but today he went for

bottles. This team is like a family

ESTEBAN CHAVES Dutch fans

swooned at the

prospect of their

�irst Grand Tour

winner in 35 years

Froome won the Tour, but Dumoulin had the better at the Vuelta, leading the race and coming sixth

Dumoulin’s hugely impressive bronze in the 2014 TT Worlds was overshadowed by the Wiggins-Martin battle


Against the clock, meanwhile, Dumoulin took second in the final TT of the Tour de France, a national title and TT stage wins in Eneco Tour and the Critérium International.

If Dumoulin’s one-day racing has not continued to progress so much this season, third overall in the Tour de Suisse indicated growing stage race consistency, while a victory in

a brutally hilly time trial course in Aia in the Basque Country this April confirmed what the wider world saw in the Vuelta: year on year, Dumoulin was going a lot faster uphill.

On the downside, he had a near miss in the Tour’s short opening time trial on home soil in Utrecht. He had been training, he said, “for weeks, for a specific 17-minute effort”. Then he suffered a brutal crash with a dislocated shoulder on the road to Huy, close to his Maastricht home. It was the lowest point of the season. “I spent a week at home, watching the Tour go on without me,” he says. “It was a bad moment.”

However, rather as Wiggins found when he came third in the 2011 Vuelta, after he broke his collarbone in the Tour, the condition Dumoulin had honed for the summer did not fade away. A two-week altitude training camp in Livigno, followed by a rapidly recovering shoulder injury, allowed the Dutchman to bounce back. When Nicolas Roche and Esteban Chaves powered out of the pack on stage 2 of the race at the steady ascent of El Caminito del Rey, Dumoulin went with them.

That little-known climb inland of Málaga was effectively the start of a massive voyage into the unknown for Dumoulin at the Vuelta, greater even than Wiggins’s own in 2011. The Briton’s breakthrough 2009 Tour served as a reference point. Dumoulin, as he battled into the lead in the first week and stayed within contention through the mountains stages, had none at all.

Three weeks later, however, and he had discovered his Grand Tour talents. Dumoulin deliberately repeats the phrase he used to describe that first time trial win in Portugal to describe his Vuelta: “This is something

It took Dumoulin a long time to settle into bike racing, though. Until he was a teenager his main interest in cycling, he says, was watching the helicopters circling above the finish of the Amstel Gold Race. But natural ability shone through when he dropped ice hockey and football and opted for amateur bike racing aged 15. In 2010, when he was 19, he took part in a time trial at the Trofeu Cidade da Garda, a Portuguese elite/amateur stage race, and won. In doing so he beat Nelson Oliveira, who won the silver medal in the 2010 U23 World TT Championship (and also took a stage win in the 2015 Vuelta), while Nairo Quintana was 10th. This alone was impressive but not so much as the fact that it was his very first TT.

“It wasn’t even my own bike. I borrowed it from a friend and adapted it a bit,” Dumoulin recalls with a grin. “I was maybe second overall before it, I didn’t know anything” – he emphasises the word – “about time trials, so I just went out. I’d done one team time trial but never an individual time trial, and I won it. When I found out who Oliveira was, I was like ‘Okay, this is something I can do.’

“It is still one of my nicest victories.”A year later, in his last season as an

amateur, Dumoulin was eighth in the U23 Worlds TT. And three years later, in 2014, Dumoulin had taken a bronze medal in the equivalent senior event, and found himself

sitting next to Sir Bradley Wiggins and Tony Martin in Ponferrada’s press conference.

Wiggins himself marvelled at Dumoulin’s youth, saying, “I won my first medal at the Worlds 16 years ago, so how old were you? Six, seven years old,” Wiggins said. He added mischievously: “Tom has improved over the past two years, he keeps getting stronger. He just needs to sign for Team Sky and he’ll go through the roof.”

But Dumoulin seems perfectly at home at Giant-Alpecin, where he has a contract until the end of 2016. If there has been a problem during his four years as a pro, it’s that he’s progressing on too many fronts. Take 2014: before that Worlds bronze, he was fifth overall in the Tour de Suisse at just 23, which hinted at an aptitude for stage racing. He gave the hilly Classics specialists a run for their money in the Canadian WorldTour races, with sixth in Montreal and second in Quebec, which suggested one-day racing was also a possible future career path.

“Next year the TT in Rio is my big goal and I’ll build my season around that, so I don’t know if I’ll go for a GC in a Grand Tour. It’s not like this has suddenly opened my eyes and I can see myself riding every year for a GC”

200.3km 191.1km

6 7

Bert-Jan Lindeman LottoNL�Jumbo 5:10:24

Ilia Koshevoy Lampre-Merida +00:09

Fabio Aru Astana +00:29

Esteban Chaves Orica-GreenEdge 4:46:16

Dan Martin Cannondale-Garmin +00:05

Tom Dumoulin Giant-Alpecin +00:05


Tom Dumoulin +00:10

Dan Martin +00:33


Tom Dumoulin +00:10

Dan Martin +00:33

GENERAL CLASSIFICATIONGENERAL CLASSIFICATION

PODIUMPODIUM

Córdoba

Sierra de Cazorla

Jódar

La Alpujarra

T�� A�� F�� A��

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

Adriaan Helmantel is Tom

Dumoulin’s coach at Giant-

Alpecin, and he told Procycling

how getting to know the rider

better has helped them �ind

hidden reserves of talent.

“When Tom survived the Andorra

stage well, we thought he could

do something special, but we

didn’t think he would be �ighting

for victory,” says Helmantel.

“But before the race, over the last

couple of years, we’ve been

analysing his results and we could

see that he was making progress

in the direction of someone who

could compete in the Grand Tours.

“After he crashed out of the Tour,

it was di��icult to predict how

stable his form would be. The

information we got from training

beforehand suggested it would be

good but it’s di��icult to know for

sure following an injury. And we

weren’t sure how Tom would ride

with the normal mental stress and

anxiety of racing.

“There is still room for Tom to

improve. It’s the third year that

we’ve been working together. We

know each other better and I have

more training input to analyse.

That means we can make the

training even more speci�ic to

Tom. What you need is a totally

personalised training programme,

but that takes time. The more you

work together the more

�ine-tuned you get.

“Tom’s only been riding for seven

years [nine, according to

Dumoulin] and natural

development is still happening. He

can handle more training at a

higher intensity and that makes

him stronger,” he said.


Despite losing some

weight to boost his

climbing, Dumoulin

remains formidable

against the clock

The sight of rouleur

Dumoulin besting not

only Froome but also

Rodríguez on an uphill

�inish was impressive


2 0 1 5

I can do.” But he is notably much more cagey about whether he wants to do it, at least in 2016. “I don’t know if I’ll be doing this every year,” he says, “or even riding twice a year for a Grand Tour.

“I’ll think I’ll just pick my goals. For example, next year [the time trial in] Rio is my big goal and I’ll build my season around that, so I don’t know if I’ll go for a GC in a Grand Tour next year. It’s not like this has suddenly opened my eyes and I can see myself riding every year for a GC from now on. In the future, I’ll definitely go for it more often but this winter we have to work it out.”

There is a huge amount of data for Dumoulin and his team to process. Until now, Giant have focused on the Classics and sprints. GC racing is (and it showed in the Vuelta) almost virgin territory for them.

“I’ve had some huge ups and downs this season. I’ve learned a lot, from my defeats but also from my wins,” Dumoulin reflects. “I learned a lot, for example, from my win at Cumbre del Sol. Actually, beating Chris Froome was where I learned the most.

“It was definitely a very hard finish, I don’t know how I did that actually. I’m still quite good in those 10-minute [uphill] finishes and now I’ve lost a little bit of weight, so I’m climbing a bit faster and apparently I still have the power to push.

“I had a good tactic because I took some time on the easier part and these climbers were going full gas, then stop, full, stop. If you see my climb, it’s a steady pace, because on the steep parts, I backed down a little bit.

“I didn’t have a power meter, because I was on my spare bike but I can imagine my power was always the same and that’s such

an advantage. Froome and Rodríguez were 10 seconds down on me in the last kilometre and to close down a gap like that on such a climb, that takes a huge amount of energy. I was just going at my own pace and that’s what helped me.”

You can almost imagine Wiggins and Indurain nodding silently in approval at his strategy, the same one they’d use. However, he is distinctly reticent when asked if he feels as if he could take the same approach to Grand Tours as Wiggins. “He’s definitely very special though I never want to compare myself to any other rider. We have some similarities but I don’t know how it will turn out for me. I’m only 24 and he was a bit older when that all happened.”

Dumoulin’s decision not to be drawn into the Grand Tour game too early may not be readily accepted by the Dutch media.

“They’ve just been asking me a lot about that,” Dumoulin says a little ruefully, ‘they’ being the huddle of Dutch journalists who had been interviewing him a few minutes

before Procycling. And that’s perhaps understandable, given Dumoulin was just two days away from becoming the first Dutch Grand Tour winner since Joop Zoetemelk in the 1980 Tour de France. The more it looked like the 35-year drought was coming to an end, the more the last week of the Vuelta was packed out with Dutch journalists, with the race press rooms needing more and more lines of extra tables and chairs to cope.

But the Dutch may have to wait, given how much Rio matters to Dumoulin.

“It’s the Olympic Games,” he says, aware that speaks for itself. “They only happen once every four years and I don’t know if there will be such a good course for me in the future. It’s something I’ve dreamed about since I was a kid. There will be more Tours.”

With the Tour lower on Dumoulin’s list of priorities in 2016, those eager to compare his style of racing with Indurain’s will have to wait to see if there is real substance behind the similarity. Or will they? It’s often forgotten that in 1996, the final flourish of Indurain’s career was to take an Olympic TT gold. In 2016, Dumoulin may follow in the Spanish star’s wheeltracks in a way that has nothing to do with Grand Tours or family photographs. Or as Dumoulin, down-to-earth as ever, would probably say about the Rio TT: “It is something I can do.”

“Froome and Rodríguez were 10 seconds down on me in the last kilometre and to close down a gap like that on such a climb, that takes a huge amount of energy. I was just going at my own pace and that’s what helped me”

168.3km182.5km

98Jasper Stuyven Trek Factory 4:06:05

Pello Bilbao Caja Rural +00:0

Kévin Reza FDJ.fr +00:00

Tom Dumoulin Giant-Alpecin 4:09:55

Chris Froome Team Sky +00:02

Joaquim Rodríguez Katusha +00:05


Tom Dumoulin +00:10



Joaquim Rodríguez +00:57



PODIUM PODIUM

Torrevieja

Cumbre del Sol. Benitachell

Puebla de Don Fadrique

Murcia

S�� A��S�� A��

Thanks to Valverde,

only Nairo Quintana

enjoyed anything like

the support Froome

had from Thomas


152km

10

Kristian Sbaragli MTN�Qhubeka 3:12:43


José Joaquín Rojas Movistar +00:00





PODIUM

Valencia

Castellón

M�� A��

Dumoulin’s

disappointment

was clear after the

Vuelta slipped away

on stage 20

It is a dream come true for me because it’s

been four times in this Vuelta that I’ve tried

to do my sprint and today when I crossed the

finish line, I still cannot believe it. It is a dream

for me and a dream for MTN�Qhubeka

KRISTIAN SBARAGLI


Writer: Alasdair Fotheringham Main image: Getty Images

Fifth place, two stage wins and a spell in the lead at the 2015 Vuelta have given Esteban Chaves big hopes for the future and much needed closure on a tumultuous early

career. Procycling meets the irrepressible Colombian

BACK FROM THE

BRINK

Chaves forces his

way to a second stage

win at the 2015 Vuelta,

on the summit �inish

at Cazorla


2 0 1 5

ay 30th was a date that Orica-GreenEdge’s Esteban Chaves always used to remember because it is his brother Bryan’s birthday.

But as of 2013, he recalls that day for another reason: it’s the anniversary of the nine-hour operation which saved his cycling career.

Three months earlier, Chaves, then an up-and-coming pro and Tour de l’Avenir winner racing for Team Colombia, had crashed during the Trofeo Lagueglia. How it happened, he cannot recall, Even now, the 30 kilometres prior to the crash are a blank.

The consequences, however, were crystal clear: a chillingly long list of injuries at first diagnosis, ranging from brain trauma to multiple fractures of his right collarbone, the petrous and sphenoid bones (at the base of the skull), and the right cheekbone, together with damaged sinuses and other abrasions.

Then with each subsequent diagnosis, the list got longer and grimmer: a fractured jaw, broken inner earbones and torn quadriceps. The blanks in his memory persisted. At the hospital he asked his sports director for a mobile phone to call his father in Colombia to tell him what had happened, and there was a long silence. It turned out that he had already done so several times.

Although the brain trauma thankfully eased, the worst was yet to come: doctors later found severe damage to two brachial

nerves, badly threatening the mobility of his right arm. Without a long process of recovery, riding a bike, not to mention many other everyday actions, was going to be impossible to do.

After months in which Chaves had seen hopes of recovery wither away almost completely, Colombian doctors Julio Sandoval and Gustavo Castro finally went for the most drastic option of all: an operation that was, as Chaves recalls, lengthy, intricate and deeply invasive.

“They had to open up the muscles and find the nerves, nerves as tiny as a hair on your head, and having located them, repair them,” he says. Some of the nerves were badly frayed. “They found a replacement nerve in my foot and inserted that in my shoulder,” he says. For the second damaged nerve, another substitute was taken from elsewhere in his arm.

“For the doctors, it was a risky operation, because the success rate was only 50 per cent and if they’d failed, their reputation would have been on the line. They took these huge risks because we are good friends and because they believed in me.”

The operation was a success, even though Chaves will never regain full mobility. “It’s at 80 per cent, we’d been hoping for 60 per cent, so that was a lot better. It has some consequences, though. If we’re

M

173km138km

1211

Mikel Landa Astana 4:34:54

Fabio Aru Astana +01:22

Ian Boswell Team Sky +01:40

Danny Van Poppel Trek Factory Racing 4:02:11

Daryl Impey Orica-GreenEdge +00:00

Tosh Van Der Sande Lotto-Soudal +00:00

Fabio Aru 43:12:19


Tom Dumoulin +00:30

Fabio Aru 47:14:30


Tom Dumoulin +00:30


STAGE RESULT STAGE RESULT

Escaldes-Engordany. Andorra

Lleida

Andorra la Vella

Cortals d’Encamp

T�� S��W�� S��


215km178km

1413

Nelson Oliveira Lampre-Merida 4:14:01

Julien Simon Co�idis +01:00

Nicolas Roche Team Sky +01:00

Alessandro De Marchi BMC 5:43:12

Salvatore Puccio Team Sky +00:21

José Joaquín Rojas Movistar +00:32

Fabio Aru 51:33:19


Tom Dumoulin +00:30 Fabio Aru 57:20:10


Tom Dumoulin +00:49GENERAL CLASSIFICATION GENERAL CLASSIFICATION

STAGE RESULT PODIUM

Vitoria-Gasteiz

Alto Campoo. Fuente del Chivo

Calatayud

Tarazona

S�� S��F�� S��


With two stage wins

and a ready smile,

Chaves was a crowd

favourite throughout

the 2015 Vuelta

Chaves and Tom

Dumoulin swapped

the race lead between

them during the

opening week


2 0 1 5

going through the feed zone at 40kph or more, I can’t pick up my musette. A team-mate has to do it for me.”

On 31 May 2013, the day after the operation, all Chaves knew was that he faced at least four months of rehabilitation, with no guarantee of full recovery. If he needed a reminder of the yawning gap between his predicament and professional bike racing, it was right there on television for him, every day. The operation coincided with what would have been the highlight of his career: racing the Giro d’Italia with Team Colombia. Promised a place in the line-up, all he could do was watch from the sidelines and cling hard to his support network.

“I had to grow up fast,” he recalls. “You really learn in those times, particularly about who the people are who count – my family, who I know would lay their lives down on the line for me, my girlfriend Natalie who stood by me all the way, and the medical team, who are like angels to me – and those whom you should ignore.”

There was also a document which acted as an emotional liferaft for Chaves – his contract with Orica-GreenEdge for 2014. “Signing for them was like the light at the end of the tunnel. It had been very, very complicated surgery, and the only thing that kept me going every day in such a hard year was that contract in the WorldTour,” he says.

“There were times when I’d wake up and my arm simply wouldn’t move. Or three months of physiotherapy would go by and there wouldn’t be any result. I’d wake up and think, ‘What’s the point in going on?’ and like a flash the other thought would come through: ‘You’ve got to go on because you’ve got a team that believes in you.’ So I’d go on. It pushed me to carry on working.”

His persistence paid off. Five weeks after surgery he began riding a bike again and the

next target began to loom slowly but steadily in the distance: his first training camp with Orica-GreenEdge in December 2013.

The comeback went well but only when he was riding the bike. “I didn’t understand a word of English,” Chaves says. “So I spent 15 days with them and for all those 15 days I didn’t communicate at all. Wherever they went, I did. If they laughed over the dinner table, I laughed too. But that was very tough.”

As an experience it sounds both tedious and stressful. But Chaves, whose English is now far better, says that as a way of

rebounding from the enormous setbacks of 2013, he would not have exchanged it for anything.

“It’s tough living in a different country, with a different climate, different culture, different food,” he reflects. “But if you have a dream and those objectives, then you’ll always have obstacles. And you can keep falling over those obstacles but you have to learn to move them some day.”

Chaves had already begun the sometimes tricky process for Latin Americans of adapting to European racing in Team

“I had to grow up fast. You really learn in those times who the people are who count – my family, my girlfriend, who stood by me all the way, and the medical team, who are like angels to me – and those whom you should ignore”

185km175km

1615Joaquim Rodríguez Katusha 4:33:31

Rafa¯ Majka Tinko�f-Saxo +00:12

Daniel Moreno Katusha +00:14

Fränk Schleck Trek 5:49:56

Rodolfo Torres Colombia +01:10

Moreno Moser Cannondale-Garmin +01:48

Fabio Aru 61:53:56


Rafa¯ Majka +01:24

Joaquim Rodríguez 67:52:44

Fabio Aru +00:01

Rafa¯ Majka +01:35


PODIUM PODIUM

Luarca

Ermita del Alba. Quirós

Comillas

Sotres. Cabrales

M�� S��S�� S��


Orica-GreenEdge had a superb Vuelta, taking three of the �irst six stages with Chaves and Caleb Ewan

Orica DS Neil Stephens �irst spotted Chaves at the Tour de l’Avenir in 2011 and was keen to sign him

brothers have identified our team as one where the climbers were our weakest suit and they’ve dropped themselves in there,” Stephens says.

“So we gave him moral support but he did all his

own work with the Colombian doctors. He did everything he could do that was under his control.”

THE WORLDTOUR classification rarely makes for gripping reading. However, after any Grand Tour or phase of Classics, the advances and fallbacks in the ranking always hold a few surprises. That Alejandro Valverde, seventh in the Vuelta, was forging remorselessly towards his fourth outright victory in the WorldTour wasn’t that big a surprise, nor that Vuelta winner Fabio Aru rose from 16th to fifth, nor that Chaves’s fellow Vuelta revelation Tom Dumoulin gained 15 spots, moving up from 29th to 14th. If one change stood out, it was Chaves, who had scaled the longest post-Vuelta rankings climb of all, moving up from 198th to 39th in one fell swoop.

Fifth in Madrid, just one place behind his far better-known compatriot Nairo Quintana, finally confirmed to Chaves that, as he puts it, “This isn’t the end of the line.

Colombia. He’d snared the Tour de l’Avenir, then the hardest stage of the Vuelta a Burgos in 2012 and the GP di Camaiore, before taking sixth in that autumn’s World U23 Road Race in Valkenburg.

“If you come to Europe and all you’re doing is regretting what you’ve left behind – your family, your food – you might as well shoot yourself. You’ve got to open up your mind and get used to where you are, which isn’t easy. But that’s what it’s about.”

Chaves’s adaption process was a learning process for both him and the team given he was the first, and to date only, South American to have signed with Orica-GreenEdge. But there were always some strong points of contact, like team director Neil Stephens. It was Stephens, a fluent Spanish speaker, who had talent-spotted Chaves at the Tour de l’Avenir and Burgos

and who first rang up Chaves shortly after his operation to negotiate bringing him in to the team.

“I talked it over with Whitey [Matt White] and Shayne [Bannan] and we decided to roll the dice with him,” says Stephens. The Australian has generally been a key factor in smoothing Chaves’s path in Orica-GreenEdge. He was also behind the steering wheel in the Vuelta this September and Chaves never forgot to thank both him and his team-mates for their assistance.

For Stephens, the benefits have been mutual. “I’ve no doubt that during his recovery we were kind of a light at the end of the tunnel but both Esteban and the Yates

P��: ©

Tim

De

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le G

etty

Imag

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204km39km

1817

Tom Dumoulin Giant-Alpecin 0:46:01

Maciej Bodnar Tinko�f-Saxo +01:04

Alejandro Valverde Movistar +01:08

Nicolas Roche Team Sky 5:03:59

Haimar Zubeldia Trek Factory Racing +00:00

José Gonçalves Caja Rural +00:18

Tom Dumoulin +68:40:36

Fabio Aru +00:03



Fabio Aru +00:03



PODIUM PODIUM

Roa de Duero

Riaza

Burgos

Burgos

T�� S��W�� S��

JERSEY BOY

NUMBER OF DAYS WORN

Chaves had the distinction of holding all four

leaders’ jerseys at some point during the

2015 Vuelta: red (GC), green (points), blue/

white (GPM) and white (combination).

6 9 71


Chaves was

particularly at home

on the short, steep

summit �inishes of

the opening week

Chaves’s e�forts

gave him six days

in the red jersey; by

Madrid, he’d conceded

only 3:10 to Fabio Aru


2 0 1 5

This is the start of a new chapter in my career.” And notwithstanding that final placing, Chaves certainly rode a far more spectacular Vuelta than Quintana, who sidled his way into fourth place overall with a surge in the third week.

While Quintana flew under the radar and rode a mainly defensive race, for the first week Chaves versus Tom Dumoulin was the GC battle. The winner of stage two at El Caminito del Rey, Chaves lost the lead to Dumoulin on the uphill finish in Alcala de Guadeira but regained la roja a day later with a spectacular driving attack, arguably his best exploit of the race, on the steep uphill finish at Cazorla.

Chaves was 14th in the Tour de Suisse this summer, then trained through July in order to hit his peak in Spain. “I’d had good feelings in the Tour de Suisse,” Chaves says. “And then when I went back to Colombia afterwards and got out on the training roads that I have been using for the last 12 years, I could see I was going faster. So I said to myself on the first day, and when I talked it over with Neil and the boys, that the important thing was to get in the right

position at the foot of the climb at the right time, and take it from there.

“But the most significant thing about this Vuelta, more than holding the lead or those stage wins, was getting through to Madrid in such a good place overall. As was getting a good result for me [20th] in the time trial, where I’m always very weak. To do that after 17 days was very important.”

“The Vuelta is the confirmation of his progression and what he’s been doing up to now,” says Stephens. “He had his crash, a year out, then last year we set a few goals and he achieved them.

“This year it’s been the same sort of thing. His first target was doing the Giro, then try to back it up at the Tour de Suisse, which was difficult there because he was very tired, but he did well and had a significantly improved time trial result. Then he went back to altitude in Colombia. We’d hoped for a top-10 or top-15 and he got what he hoped for and a bit more.”

With that GC leader role set out for him well before the Vuelta, Chaves had what Stephens calls a “little pocket of people to help him”, with the most important being Australian veteran Mathew Hayman. Hayman’s role was to keep Chaves out of the wind and to put him into position in the peloton. While Hayman was not needed by Chaves in the mountains, having a Classics rider used to the hurly burly of one-day races on the flat and hillier stages proved ideal.

“I said to Mathew before the start, ‘You’ve got zero chance of a race result’, and that was fine by him. He’d never had a GC person to look after in a bike race, it was a new role and very satisfying for him,” says Stephens.

After such a promising Vuelta, it’s almost obligatory for riders like Chaves to raise the bar and start looking at the Tour. However, Stephens insists that Chaves is not Orica’s sole GC rider for 2016.

Chaves is aware of how much the Tour de France – and the Vuelta and Giro – have mattered in the past to Colombia, given that his father is a huge cycling fan who got Chaves into the sport

SMELLS LIKE TEAM SPIRIT

“This is not a competition,” the trainer

sternly tells his young charges from the

Esteban Chaves Cycling Development Club

as they prepare for a training ride in Bogotá,

Colombia’s capital. And they duly pedal

away, trying (or maybe pretending to try)

to keep their pulse rates within the limits

their trainer has set them.

These images are from a short

documentary �ilm to be found on the

Facebook page of Chaves’s own cycling

club, co-founded by his father and with the

aim of getting 13 and 14-year-olds to “fall in

love with this sport,” as Chaves puts it. “At

the same time, it’s a way of keeping them

[away from] other stu�f that’s sometimes too

easy to do, like drinking or partying. It keeps

them healthier,” he explains.

“It’s nice because they turn up wearing

football shirts, mountain bikes and normal

shoes and we can give them kit we’ve got

from contacts in the USA.

“They’ve got no base when they come

in. But they learn team spirit and that’s very

important.” Riding among them right now

is Chaves’s younger brother, Bryan.

The Club de Formacion Ciclistica Esteban

Chaves starts with young kids and goes

right up to junior and elite levels, and as

the Facebook interview shows, it works

extensively with young female cyclists

as well as the boys, something which

apparently is not so common in clubs in

the Colombian capital after a certain age.

Indeed, one of their current ‘star’ riders is a

woman: Camila Valbuena, the world junior

points champion in 2014.

176km186km

2019Alexis Gougeard AG2R 4:19:20

Nelson Oliveira Lampre-Merida +00:40

Maxime Monfort Lotto-Soudal +00:44

Rubén Plaza Lampre-Merida 4:37:05

José Gonçalves Caja Rural +01:07

Alessandro De Marchi BMC +01:08


Fabio Aru +00:06


Fabio Aru 83:01:40


Rafa¯ Majka +01:29


PODIUM PODIUM

San Lorenzo de El Escorial

Cercedilla

Medina del Campo

Ávila

S�� S��F�� S��

P��: ©

Tim

De

Wae

le

Thanks to Valverde,

only Nairo Quintana

enjoyed anything like

the support Froome

had from Thomas


Yesterday’s stage was the most emotional one for me

because we did an amazing job as a team and we

showed that we were really united. Today I realised a

dream. I’m very emotional, very proud. I have to thank

my team-mates, they always believed in me and

I dedicate this win to them FABIO ARU

“Subject to discussions, I personally don’t think that’s the way we’d go,” says Stephens. “The three riders who have achieved their targets in that area this year are the Yates brothers and Esteban. The brothers showed they were resilient enough to finish a Grand Tour and in the case of Adam, do well and then go on to win San Sebastián. I’d never compare the three but they’ve all got what it takes to ride GC.”

Even if Chaves has set himself the goal of winning the Tour one day, he says that next year, if he goes, it would be as part of a learning experience.

Chaves is aware of how much the Tour de France – and the Vuelta and Giro – have mattered in the past to Colombia, given that his father is a huge cycling fan who got Chaves into the sport.

“I never really had an idol as a kid but I always remember the Grand Tours. I liked them all, particularly the ones with the Colombians. My father lived through the era of Álvaro Mejía, Fabio Parra and Oliverio Rincón. It was a very important era for the country because you know when people talk about Colombia, they often talk about bad stuff, they’re always pointing a finger at us. But in those days they were really superheroes, coming here with the bare minimum of support and winning the races they did here in Europe.

“For Colombia, which was going through a hard time at that point, being able to see such good things was very important for us.”

But you can’t help thinking that having fought so hard to get to where he is now, Chaves already has quite a few life lessons of his own to teach his compatriots. And if he continues to perform like he did at the Vuelta, a place among his country’s cycling greats could be on the cards, too.�

Chaves held all four of the

Vuelta’s leaders’ jerseys at

some point, making him a

regular visitor to the podium

99km

21

John Degenkolb Giant-Alpecin 2:34:13

Danny Van Poppel Trek Factory +00:00

Jean-Pierre Drucker BMC +00:00

Fabio Aru 85:36:13


Rafa¯ Majka +01:09


PODIUM

Alcalá de Henares

Madrid

S�� S��

Chaves versus

Dumoulin is a

rivalry that looks

set to continue for

many years



2 0 1 5

Photography: Tim De Waele

STAGE WINNERS

20152

1

5

6

8

7 9

11

10

34

COMBINED CLASSIFICATION

Joaquim Rodríguez Katusha

16

Fabio Aru Astana

23

Tom Dumoulin Giant-Alpecin

24

MOUNTAIN CLASSIFICATION

Omar Fraile Caja Rural

82

Rubén Plaza Lampre-Merida

63

Fränk Schleck Trek

30

POINTS CLASSIFICATION

Alejandro Valverde Movistar

118

Joaquim Rodríguez Katusha

116

Esteban Chaves Orica-GreenEdge

108


I cannot be unhappy right now. We won the stage and John deserved this victory because he worked so hard for me over the last three weeks. He made efforts that normally sprinters would never do. No, I cannot be unhappy today. TOM DUMOULIN

TEAM CLASSIFICATION

Movistar

256:44:38

Team Sky

+ 29:47

Katusha

+ 35:44

12

13

15

18

19

17

20

14

16

21

BMC Racing

Esteban Chaves

Orica-GreenEdge

Peter Sagan

Tinko�f-Saxo

Alejandro Valverde

Movistar

Caleb Ewan

Orica-GreenEdge

Esteban Chaves

Orica-GreenEdge

Bert-Jan Lindeman

LottoNL�Jumbo

Jasper Stuyven

Trek Factory Racing

Tom Dumoulin

Giant-Alpecin

Kristian Sbaragli

MTN�Qhubeka

Mikel Landa

Astana

Danny Van Poppel

Trek Factory Racing

Nelson Oliveira

Lampre-Merida

Alessandro De Marchi

BMC Racing

Joaquim Rodríguez

Katusha

Fränk Schleck

Trek Factory Racing

Tom Dumoulin

Giant-Alpecin

Nicolas Roche

Team Sky

Alexis Gougeard

AG2R La Mondiale

Rubén Plaza

Lampre-Merida

John Degenkolb

Giant-Alpecin

1 Fabio Aru Astana 85:36:13

2 Joaquim Rodríguez Katusha + 00:57

3 Rafa¯ Majka Tinko�f-Saxo + 01:09

4 Nairo Quintana Movistar + 01:42

5 Esteban Chaves Orica-GreenEdge + 03:10

6 Tom Dumoulin Giant-Alpecin + 03:46

7 Alejandro Valverde Movistar + 06:47

8 Mikel Nieve Team Sky + 07:06

9 Daniel Moreno Katusha + 07:12

10 Louis Meintjes MTN�Qhubeka + 10:26

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

MOST COMBATIVE

RIDER

Tom Dumoulin Giant-Alpecin

FINAL GC

1 1


Now, we’re getting towards the end of the season what are your emotions?I got some results that I wasn’t thinking of at the beginning of the season. My goal is to progress year after year and gain experience. Right now I’m really happy but the season isn’t finished and I have some big goals to come.

This year in the Ardennes you were about 10 years younger than the other riders on the podium. Does that give you pride? At the finish I didn’t think who I was standing next to but when I see the pictures I feel like a son with their father! They all had impressive palmarès and I take a lot of pleasure from that.

Did riders come up to congratulate you? A few, yes. Last year there weren’t many riders talking to me but now something has changed. It’s nice when you get a ‘chapeau’ here and there. However, I don’t ride for the compliments of other riders.

You have proved to be excellent at races above 200km – usually something that comes to riders as they get older. Why do you think you are so good, so young?I don’t know. I know a short race is more nervous and faster and for the long race you need to be fresh and save energy to be good in the final kilometres and, yes, normally it’s better when you have experience. Okay, sometimes I’m good for a long race but I train for that. It’s necessary to do hard training to be good for long races.

Julian Alaphilippe The young Etixx-Quick Step rider, who finished second at La Flèche

Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège, reflects on an excellent season and

how he copes with the pressure of being the next big thing in France

W��: Sam Dansie P��: Getty Images

How hard are those long days? Sometimes eight hours. I like it when I’m totally exhausted! When I do something, I either do it to the extreme or not at all. But I need to find the middle ground. When you’re a professional it’s really important to progress slowly.

Some might be surprised you didn’t turn professional with a French squad. Why did you choose Etixx-Quick Step? I didn’t have a lot of interest from the French squads. I was in the Armée de Terre, a French amateur team, but when I was 18 or 19, Johan Molly [a part-time soigneur and talent scout for Etixx-Quick Step] asked if I could test with the Bakala Academy. Afterwards they asked me to join the Etixx Continental team. Only this team believed in me so I was happy. I like the mentality here and also because it’s a Belgian team, it’s top for the Classics. I have no regrets. As a good cyclo-cross rider as a junior and amateur, what made you turn to the road? When I was younger, I never thought I could be a pro. I was simply enjoying what I was doing, messing around on my cyclo-cross bike [Alaphilippe is a two-time French U23

cyclo-cross champion]. I’d do a hard cyclo- cross season with the World Cups and a World Championships and after the season I’d continue on the road. When I joined Quick Step I preferred to focus on the road, which was better for my career.

Given your performances this year, do you hope to take on more leadership in 2016? I don’t know and I haven’t talked about it with the team. I have more ambitions but it’s not straightforward. Just because I was twice second does not mean I will win next year – it’s not as easy as that. The team has confidence in me without putting pressure on. A lot of people ask about next year and whether I will win but I don’t want to change anything about my situation. I like it when I do my job with pleasure. Any pressure I do feel comes from me.

Does anything stress you out?I’m never nervous. I feel confident. I never stressed about turning pro. I take everything as it comes. I work hard and I don’t stress myself.

Do you see yourself as a part of the wave of young French riders spearheaded by Thibaut Pinot and Romain Bardet? Not in the sense that I might become a Grand Tour rider – I’ve never ridden one. When I look at Pinot, Barguil and Bardet, they’re brilliant and have already done several Grand Tours, so I can’t be compared to them. But for the Classics maybe I’m a rider for the future. I still need to improve, to do more of the same but better.

I’M NEVER NERVOUS. I FEEL CONFIDENT. I TAKE

EVERYTHING AS IT COMES. I WORK HARD AND

I DON’T STRESS MYSELF

Q A

THE

20HARDEST

STAGES EVER


The Andorran stage of the Vuelta a España was hyped as

“the hardest stage ever” but it was just one of many brutal

stages in the modern era. Procycling picks out what we think

are the 20 toughest stages in the last 25 years, when the route,

the intensity of the racing and the conditions combined to

a deliver a test that still gives some riders nightmares

W��: Pete Cossins P��: Tim De Waele (unless stated)

Get

ty Im

ages


H�� S�� E��

19 2015 VUELTA A ESPAÑA ANDORRA LA VELLA�CORTALS

D’ENCAMP �� 138KM

IT WAS TOUGH but not the hardest ever. According to

Lotto-Jumbo’s Steven Kruiswijk, “Some were saying it

was too hard but the favourites �inished close together.

Race organisers are always looking for something new

and I think it’s nice to see a stage like this that people

want to see. I think the riders just have to accept they

have to do stages like this.”

18 1996 GIRO D’ITALIA CAVALESE�APRICA �� 250KM

THE GAVIA AND the Mortirolo were the main features

of more than 5,000 metres of climbing. Ivan Gotti

edged out Pavel Tonkov after eight hours of racing.

The gruppetto were out on the road for almost nine.

17 2014 TOUR DE FRANCE YPRES�ARENBERG

PORTE DU HAINAUT �� 155.5KM

“IT IS DEFINITELY the hardest cobbled stage we’ve

done recently in the Tour. I did one in 2004 and the last

one in 2010 and this was the hardest,” said Sky’s

Bernhard Eisel. Although only Chris Froome abandoned,

and he didn’t reach the cobbles, two sections were

pulled from the race that morning because the rain

made them too treacherous.

A MASSIVE 6,320 metres of climbing.

Thomas de Gendt claimed victory on the

Stelvio after seven hours in the saddle. The

gruppetto struggled in almost an hour later.

This stage was designed by fans who chose

their favourite elements of previous editions

via the Giro’s FaceBook page. Clearly Giro fans

like to see their heroes su�fer – this long day

featured the Passo del Tonale and the

monstrous Mortirolo before the iconic 22km

Passo dello Stelvio and a �inish at 2,757m,

then the highest in Grand Tour history.

162012 GIRO D’ITALIACALDES/VAL DI SOLE�PASSO DELLO STELVIO �� 218KM

20 2010 GIRO D’ITALIA CARRARA�MONTALCINO

�� 222KM

DAN MARTIN HAS described this day on Tuscany’s

white roads-turned-mud tracks as the toughest stage

he’s ever ridden, a view backed up by runner-up

Alexander Vinokourov who declared that, “The last

45km were worse than Paris-Roubaix. It was terrible

because we went hard right from the start.”

The sun seems to shine at the Strade Bianche event

every spring but the Giro’s version of that race was

made doubly tough by the conditions and the distance

of the stage, as well as the fact that the race pace was

relentless right from the �irst day.

Eventual pink jersey Ivan Basso lost over two

minutes, while Vinokourov was outsprinted at the

�inish by an inspired Cadel Evans, whose rainbow jersey

had turned a muddy brown.

“The weather has more of an impact in

making a stage brutal but it was

beautiful that day”CHRISTIAN VANDE VELDE


15 2015 TOUR DE FRANCE VANNES�PLUMELEC

TEAM TIME TRIAL �� 28KM

A PERFECT EXAMPLE of less being more. Coming

10 days into what had already been a tough and

stressful race, this took place on a rolling course

with a two-kilometre climb to the �inish. “That was

a brutal team time trial. I can tell you that after �ive

kilometres it was absolute agony,” said Sky’s Richie

Porte just moments after Chris Froome had been

forced to pace the team’s �ifth man, Nicolas Roche, up

the �inal section to the line after he’d been dropped.

14 2015 GIRO D’ITALIA CHIAVARI�LA SPEZIA �� 150KM

BEST REMEMBERED FOR the con�irmation of

Davide Formolo’s talent, this stage was far from

excessive in terms of distance and climbing, giving

more riders the possibility of success. The result? Lots

of attacks, including among the GC contenders, who

were split in the chase of Formolo. “Often it’s the short

stages that hurt the most because there’s no let up,”

Stef Clement con�irms. “If it’s on, it’s on all day.”

11 2005 GIRO D’ITALIA MEZZOCORONA�URTIJËI �� 218KM

IT IS HARD to choose between this stage with over

5,000 metres of climbing and the one the next day

over the Stelvio to Livigno that had a similar amount of

altitude gain and was almost as long. It took Colombia’s

Iván Parra more than six and a half hours to win each of

them but the day to Urtijëi gets our vote as it forced 10

abandons as opposed to just six 24 hours later.

10 1992 TOUR DE FRANCE ST GERVAIS�

SESTRIERE �� 254.5KM

BEST REMEMBERED FOR Claudio Chiappucci’s

astounding solo e�fort, which began on the �irst of �ive

categorised climbs. As well as the ascents of the Saisies,

Cormet de Roselend, Iséran, Mont Cénis and Sestriere,

the riders also had to contend with the duration of the

stage and the heat. Fourteen riders abandoned and

three �inished outside the time limit.

American climber Andy Hampsten, who �inished

�ifth that day, stopped just beyond the line to size up

potential rivals for the following stage to Alpe d’Huez,

which he went on to win. “I wanted to see what the

riders in the next groups were like. Every one of the

next 10 or 15 riders was absolutely knackered because

it had been such a tough stage, so that made me feel

better about how tired I was,” he said.

132010 TOUR OF CALIFORNIA PALMDALE�BIG BEAR �� 218KM

PETER SAGAN WON the sprint from a small group,

fuelling speculation that the then neo-pro might be a

GC contender as the stage climbed almost 5,000m.

After 28 riders either abandoned or �inished hors

delai, Saxo Bank coach Bobby Julich said: “That was

one of the hardest stages I’ve seen. It was solid

climbing right from the start and never let up. I think

the hardest aspect was that it was almost all at

altitude and was so long. That was truly a Grand

Tour-like stage, perhaps even harder than most.”

12 2014 TOUR DE FRANCE MULHOUSE�LA

PLANCHE DES BELLES FILLES �� 161.5KM

VINCENZO NIBALI won what was the third

consecutive day of racing in the Vosges. The Italian

declared: “It’s been a very demanding stage with

the fog and the rain after 10 days of hard racing.

This was the hardest stage I’ve ever done in a Tour,

with seven climbs and so many crashes.”


9 2015 CRITÉRIUM DU DAUPHINÉ ST�BONNET� EN�CHAMPSAUR�

VILLARD�DE�LANS �� 183KM

“THAT WAS MAYBE the hardest, de�initely the most

aggressive race I’ve ever ridden. Epic racing and none

of it in front of cameras. Typical.” That was Dan Martin’s

assessment of this stage that featured six climbs, heavy

rain, action right from the o�f, Vincenzo Nibali’s ousting

of Tejay Van Garderen from the leader’s jersey and the

abandon of no fewer than 14 riders.

“It’s been an incredible day. We rode �lat-out for

the whole stage,” said Orica-GreenEdge’s Simon Yates.

“We always had to stay tuned, at a high pace, almost

constantly under the rain. I’ve already had di��icult days

on the bike with rain and cold but at this speed with so

many moves, I don’t know…”

8 1999 VUELTA A ESPAÑA SORT�ANDORRA ARCALIS �� 147KM

THERE’S GOOD REASON for asserting that Andorra’s

“toughest stage ever” this year wasn’t even the hardest

stage in the principality. Sixteen years ago Igor

González de Galdeano won this short stage over three

�irst-category climbs before the �inal HC ascent of

Arcalis. The signi�icant di�ference between this stage

and this September’s test was that the GC contenders

started to harry each other from the second climb,

with race leader Abraham Olano the notable victim as

he lost seven minutes. Jan Ullrich took the gold leader’s

jersey at the �inish, where he’d won a Tour stage in 1997.

Underlining the pressure the early pace-setting put

on the rest of the �ield, 45 riders �inished outside the

time limit. However, the judges adopted a lenient

approach, �ining several for hanging on to cars but

allowing them all to start the next stage.

7 2012 VOLTA A CATALUNYA LA VAL D’EN BAS�CANTURRI �� 154KM

SCHEDULED TO RUN another 50km to the summit

�inish at Port Ainé, this stage was shortened due to

bad weather. Almost 40 riders quit the race, while the

commissaires decided to neutralise the timings and

organise a new �inish, although few riders knew – or

even cared – where it was.

This was a day that Dutchman Stef Clement has

etched in his memory. “We descended down into a

valley and because you didn’t need to pedal, everyone

got very cold. Laurens Ten Dam, Robert Gesink and me

were in the peloton, while Steven Kruiswijk was in front.

When Tom Jelte Slagter got into the car, I’ll never forget

our sports director, Adri van Houwelingen, a man who

has been in cycling for a very long time, telling us on

the radio, ‘Guys, share your misery with each other and

keep �ighting.’ For Van Houwelingen to say something

like that was really surprising. It must have been really

bad,” says the former Rabobank rider.

“I’ve had di��icult days on the bike with rain and cold but at this speed with so many moves, I don’t know…”SIMON YATES


H�� S�� E��

ONE STAT SAYS pretty much everything about

this stage: 54 riders abandoned. The day started

sunny but a rain-hit race quickly returned to type,

making the 27 per cent ramp of the Muro di

Sant’Elpidio close to unrideable. Even the best

climbers had to weave back and forth as they

ascended it in order to maintain traction.

Sky’s Christian Knees described it as “one of the

most brutal stages I have ever ridden,” while stage

winner Peter Sagan said it was “very hard indeed”.

Struggling for form but determined to �inish in

order to contest the time trial the next day, Taylor

Phinney rode four hours on his own only to be

eliminated for �inishing outside the time limit.

“Rules are rules and I respect that and I respect

[race organisers] RCS. Today was an interesting

stage. It was probably one of the hardest courses

any of us have ever seen and maybe even a little

too much, as [race director Michele] Acquarone

admitted afterwards,” said Phinney.

AMID THE HOOPLA about the 2015 Vuelta’s

Andorra stage being the toughest ever, some

observers pointed out that it wasn’t even the

hardest stage seen on Spain’s national tour.

According to expert consensus, that honour went

to a similarly short, mountainous stage in 1992 that

took the riders over the Portillon into France, where

they tackled the Tourmalet, Aspin, Peyresourde and

Luz Ardiden. The weather in the Pyrenees is often

unpredictable and in those days of the spring

Vuelta it could be vile. On that May day, rain, mist,

snow and hail produced a hellish cocktail.

Defending champion Melchor Mauri, who had

been second on GC, lost 34 minutes. Stephen

Roche lost seven minutes, Alex Zülle nine and Luis

Herrera 15. Robert Millar, who lost �ive minutes

but was still the eighth rider home, described

the conditions as “pretty diabolical”. He further

explained: “You could only see �ive metres in

front of you. You’d see the snowbanks suddenly

appearing but you were only going 10 kilometres

an hour anyway. I caught two guys because their

hands were frozen and they couldn’t hold the

brakes. I was okay because I had big gloves.”

IT BECAME APPARENT when canvassing riders’

opinions on the toughest stages that the Giro has

seen many hard days. This stage combined fatigue,

distance and �ierce heat. Carlos Sastre was �irst

home in 7:12. Bradley Wiggins trailed in 48 minutes

later with a 60-strong gruppetto. Gazzetta dello

Sport estimated riders got through 7,000 bottles.

Ex-Cervélo rider Dan Lloyd says, “It was more

than eight hours of racing. It was really hot and the

next day was a rest day with a 400km transfer.”

Now a TV journalist, Lloyd believes there is a

place for long stages but adds that they can be

counterproductive for thrilling action. “There were

quite a few stages that year that were over 220km.

They were trying to make it harder and still harder

at the Giro. But it’s often the shorter stages with

fewer climbs that produce more explosive racing.

“I think the result hanging in the balance until

the last moment is what makes racing exciting,

like those stages on the Giro when they throw in

a circuit with only a small climb on it but it makes

a couple of sprinters drop back or leaves them with

no team-mates. Everybody knows they can only

ride at a certain power on the big mountain stages

and you get very few attacks because there’s no

point. Wiggo set the bar for that. He said, ‘I know

what I can do and I know that if Nibali goes then

he’s going to come back if we go at the same

speed.’ But if you have the shorter climbs like we

saw in the Vuelta’s �irst week, where they do a 10�12

minute e�fort, then that’s a steady stage. You can go

anaerobic for that and still manage to make it to the

�inish, and that produces more exciting racing.”

6 1992 VUELTA A ESPAÑA VIELHA�LUZ ARDIDEN

�� 144KM

5 2013 TIRRENO� ADRIATICOPORTO SANT’ELPIDIO

�� 209KM

4 2009 GIRO D’ITALIA PERGOLA�MONTE PETRANO �� 239KM

“It was more than eight hours of racing. It was really hot day and the next day was a rest day with a 400km transfer”DAN LLOYD, CERVÉLO TEST TEAM


CHRIS BOARDMAN DESCRIBES this as the worst

day he ever spent on a bike and �ive-time Tour winner

Miguel Indurain would probably agree. There are plenty

of relatively straightforward ways to cross the Pyrenees

from France to Spain and this route took none of them.

It crossed seven passes, including the Soulor, Aubisque,

Marie Blanque, Soudet and Port de Larrau.

Designed in tribute to Indurain, the stage came the

day after his 32nd birthday and �inished in his home city,

where most predicted the Spaniard would all but wrap

3 2010 GIRO D’ITALIA LUCERA�L’AQUILA �� 256KM

THIS WOULD HAVE been a brutal stage on a benign

day given the rollercoaster ride through the Abruzzo

mountains, but heavy rain dogged this stage and riders

quickly found themselves negotiating puddles so deep

their pedals were submerging. The break formed after

20km and comprised no fewer than 46 riders. Evgeni

Petrov led in the strongest members of that break after

six-and-a-half hours of racing, 13 minutes ahead of the

maglia rosa group.

“I would say L’Aquila was the hardest stage I’ve ever

done, both because of how the stage unfolded and the

conditions,” explains BMC Racing’s Danilo Wyss, who

was then riding for Cervélo. “It was my �irst Grand Tour,

so I was already a bit afraid of this 260km stage. The

break went clear early on and I rode at the front of it for

the next 70 or 80km. There were still 120km to the �inish

with some climbs and a crosswind. I remember we even

had echelons in the front group because there were

that many of us, and that made it even more of a

struggle. The weather was terrible all day, incredible

rain. I didn’t have that much experience, and I think

when you get that you can cope much better with

days like that.”

up a sixth yellow jersey. Instead, Bjarne Riis, at his

drug-fuelled best, and the Festina team put Indurain

to the sword, continuing the Spaniard’s torturous

dethroning, which had begun in the icy cold of the Alps.

By the time the race had reached the Pyrenees,

the temperature was soaring but even the return of

the heat in which he usually thrived failed to revive

Indurain. He trailed in more than eight minutes down

on stage winner Laurent Dufaux, who edged out Riis

in the two-up sprint. Indurain’s agony continued when

he was cajoled up onto the victory podium, where

yellow jersey Riis handed him his victory bouquet

as a consolation, the gesture receiving not even the

slightest hint of a smile.

2 1996 TOUR DE FRANCE ARGELÈS�GAZOST� PAMPLONA �� 262KM

H�� S�� E��


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EPIC IN EVERY sense, this stage featured

4,700m of climbing including the fearsome

Giau and Fedaia passes, bad weather, gravel

sections on the �inal climb, and came on the

back of summit �inishes on the mighty duo of

the Grossglockner and Zoncolan. “It was a lot

harder in terms of the distance, duration and

the amount of climbing,” says Igor Antón, then

riding for Euskaltel, who had won the Zoncolan

stage. “After winning the previous stage and

all of the emotion tied up with that, I struggled

more than I ever have done on the one that

followed, which was won by my friend and

team-mate Mikel Nieve.”

IAM’s Stef Clement, then with Rabobank,

agrees with Antón. “I spent more than eight

hours on the bike. I was dropped after �ive

hours on the Giau when we’d covered 160 or

170km and still had to do another three hours.

When we �inished it was almost dark and we

were riding up a gravel road,” Clement recalls.

“I got dropped from the gruppetto because

I couldn’t stay with the pace but it ended up

coming back to me and I �inished in it.

“I was �ighting not to get dropped on the

Giau but lost contact near the top, and then

you have to �ight on your own. Luckily, a little

group caught me. I remember David Millar was

in it and we looked at each other and one of us

said, “Jeez, we still have to do two more climbs.”

It was the third day in a row like that. I think

we did six, seven and then eight hours on the

bike on consecutive days, and there was still

another week of racing to go. That’s the Giro

for you.”

Russell Downing, then with Sky, was also in

the gruppetto that day. “I remember we got

into the gruppetto after �ive hours. My climbing

legs had come back a little bit and I had been

wondering whether to stay with the bunch for

a little bit more or go with the gruppetto, and

I ended up dropping back. Everyone was like,

‘Thank God for that, the gruppetto’s �inally

formed,’ and then we worked out there were

still 60 kilometres and three more hours to go.

When we �inally got to the �inish, everyone was

asking, ‘Where are the buses?’ and they were

back down at the bottom of the climb. So we

had to ride back down again and by the time

I reached the bus I had eight hours and 20

minutes on the clock. It was dark by that point,

and I remember a journalist asked me what

I was thinking. I said: ‘A burger and a pint!’

“The Giro in general that year was absolutely

unbelievable,” the Cult Energy rider adds. “It

was my �irst and only Grand Tour. I remember

speaking to Yatesy [ex-Sky DS Sean Yates] and

saying I wanted a Grand Tour that year. He told

me that I wouldn’t ride the Tour and that with

the Vuelta you never know what will happen,

so he put me down for the Giro, telling me it

was the hardest for years. ‘Sounds good,’ I told

him but I’m still scarred by it now.”


CONEGLIANO�GARDECCIA �� 229KM

2011 GIRO D’ITALIA

“I was dropped after �ive

hours on the Giau when

we’d covered 160 or

170km and still had to do

another three hours.

When we �inished it was

almost dark and we were

riding up a gravel road”

STEF CLEMENT


H�� S�� E��


W��: Pete Cossins & Sam Dansie

P��: Tim De Waele*

BOSSING

The Tour of Britain is now a firm fixture on the calendar, with a varied route, exciting format and a worthy winner in 2015 in Edvald Boasson Hagen. Procycling

followed the event from start to finish, digging out the stories

behind the headlines and getting the inside track on

Britain’s biggest race

THE TOUR OF BRITAIN

*un

less

sta

ted

NOVEMBER 2015 PROCYCLING 83

he Tour of Britain may well be the most unpredictable race on the international calendar. A quick survey of pros

working their way down the media line at the team presentation in Colwyn Bay on the eve of the race produced consensus: there was no favourite for the yellow jersey. Six-man teams and tricky roads made predictions impossible.

There was, however, one team that could have controlled the race if its members had so desired. Seventeen riders strong, it was formed by graduates of the Dave Rayner Fund. Set up in the aftermath of Bradford pro Rayner’s tragically premature death in 1994 and now into its 21st year, the fund has supported around 200 riders chasing their dream of a professional career by competing on the Continent, as Rayner once did. Among their number at the start were

Sky’s Ian Stannard, Cult Energy’s Russell Downing and prospects such as Tao Geoghegan-Hart and Owain Doull.

“The fund gave me the money to go and live with a Dutch family,” explains Stannard. “It supported me to go there and race, the chance to fall in love with racing and get where I am. I think it’s an

awesome organisation which gives people a great head start. It showed me the dedication you need to become a professional, which you perhaps wouldn’t pick up on your own.”

Geoghegan-Hart, leader of a talent-packed GB team, affirmed that the Rayner fund has changed the landscape of British cycling. Backed by the fund in

2014, he said his presence in the Tour of Britain was partly down to it, as was the existence of the national tour.

“I think our generation has to be grateful to a lot of the British riders who have come before us, both recently and as far back as Dave, and also on the 50th anniversary of Tommy Simpson’s World

Championship win we need to look that far back, as well. I think they’ve changed the outlook on cycling in this country. It’s not considered a minority sport any longer, it’s not completely misunderstood,” said the young Englishman, who has the same

super-lean build as Rayner.When the race got underway, stage

one provided more evidence of the fund’s success. Rayner graduates Pete Williams and Conor Dunne made up half of the break of the day, while Doull claimed fifth in the sprint, offering further proof that good can blossom from tragedy.

T

“I think our generation has

to be grateful to a lot of the

British riders who have come

before us, both recently and

as far back as Dave”

1

T H E 1 7 � M A N T E A M

S T A G E W I N N E R R A C E L E A D E R

Elia Viviani, Team Sky Elia Viviani, Team Sky

Sky’s Ian Stannard (front) and Tao Geoghegan-Hart (in white) are Dave Rayner Fund alumni


tixx-Quick Step arrived at the Tour of Britain with a team packed with big names and potential winners. But even they

were surprised when the rider on the bottom rung of those potentials served up their first victory of the race. What’s more, Petr Vakoc’s solo win in Colne was hugely impressive both in terms of the way the young Czech carved out his opportunity and even more so in how he sealed it.

Away in the day’s break on a stage that bounced through the Pennine hills around Clitheroe and Colne, he went off on his own with 20km remaining as the bunch began to close and held them off for a win that delighted his illustrious team-mates and Etixx DS Brian Holm.

“They’re all really pleased for him, for the fact that he made his chance and took it,” said Holm. “He pulled off the same number last year in the Tour of Poland – got into the breakaway, went from the

breakaway, took the jersey and finished in the top 10 on GC.

“But that number he pulled out of his top hat today was a little bit unexpected. We left the tactics pretty open. We knew there would be about four guys in the break, that it would split up, so everybody got their chance, but we thought the finale would suit Styby [Zdenek Stybar] and Matteo [Trentin].”

Holm acknowledged that he didn’t think the 23-year-old Czech, who put his economics studies on hold in order to turn pro with the Belgian team last season, would stay out on his own to the finish. “I don’t think many people gave him a chance. My fear was that he would get caught on the small climb about 15km out but the roads here are pretty good if you are out on your own. He got out of

sight quite quickly. Of course, you need the legs to do it. Then we saw Tinkoff riding, then IAM, then Lotto, and he still won by a few seconds.

“I’m even more impressed because he was the only guy who worked yesterday. He spent 90km on the front. I said to him, ‘I’m sorry, because I know you’ve got ambitions here, but we can’t make Cav do it or [Mark] Renshaw, and we saved our two superstars, Styby and Matteo, for the final hilly part. But maybe that spell on the front was good

for him. He’s still got to develop but it seems like he’s getting slightly stronger every year. Let’s just say that I’m happy

he’s staying with the team next year. To attack like that with the whole bunch chasing you and to

win uphill, well, wow!”

E

V A K O C T H E M A G I C I A N

2S T A G E W I N N E R R A C E L E A D E R

Petr Vakoc, Etixx-Quick Step Petr Vakoc, Etixx-Quick Step

Etixx came to the

Tour of Britain with

a stacked team;

even domestiques

like Vakoc could win


he presence in the Tour of Britain of the likes of Bradley Wiggins, Mark Cavendish and Edvald Boasson Hagen

confirmed that the race has come a long way in the last few years. Wiggins quipped that the days when you could stay in the bar untill three in the morning and then sit comfortably in the bunch the next day are long gone. With that in mind, it was extremely encouraging to see how the coming wave of British talent fared. The pick of them was Welshman Owain Doull, whose top-six finishes on the opening three stages put him fourth overall and into the points jersey.

Leader of the Wiggins team for the week, Doull came into the race on the back of a spell of altitude training in Livigno, where he and his team-mates climbed 4,000 metres and more every day. It left him fatigued but well set for

his primary target of the U23 time trial and road race at the World Champs in Richmond. However, it quickly became apparent he hadn’t been affected by that training as much as he thought as he duelled with the race’s star names.

A key member of Great Britain’s team pursuit squad for the Rio Olympics,

Doull is also thinking of a longer-term future on the road, and came close to penning a deal with Europcar for this season before opting for Wiggins. “After Rio I’d like to follow what people like G [Geraint Thomas], Pete [Kennaugh] and Brad have done by going from the track to the road,” explained Doull, who looks every inch the Sky-rider-in-waiting.

His race room-mate Wiggins confirmed this. “Having spent six years in France, I don’t think Europcar would have been a great move for him. I think he’s got bigger fish to fry,” said the 2012 Tour de France champion. “He has the potential to get Olympic gold next year and get something bigger. I think Sky is where he

really wants to go and I also think that would be the best fit for him going forwards.”

Wiggins admitted he could see a lot of Thomas in Doull and compared their ability on both track and road. “He’s really on the ball. He was there on Google

Maps and Street View looking at the last corner the other day,” said Wiggins. “He’s put a lot into this and although he’s committed to the track programme he’s desperate for that pro contract. He’s a class act. You only have to look at him on the bike. It’s a travesty he’s not at Sky already, to be honest.” That may well change very soon.

T

Wiggins said that the days

when you could stay in the bar

till three in the morning and

sit comfortably in the bunch

the next day are long gone

T H E N E X T G


Elia Viviani, Team Sky Juan José Lobato, Movistar

Doull was the most

consistent rider,

�inishing in the top

11 on every stage,

and third overall

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he fuzzy helicopter TV images in the Blyth press room – an empty bank branch – meant it wasn’t immediately clear who’d

won the sprint. Given the Etixx kit, low position and sheer speed, one could have been watching Mark Cavendish. But it was his dynamic young team-mate Fernando Gaviria. Both riders came to the race hoping to win, and with five sprinter-friendly stages there was scope for both riders to fulfil their ambitions.

But only one of them would come away with mission accomplished. On stage 1, Cavendish left the door open for Elia Viviani to pass him on the inside. On stage 3 he waited for team-mate and yellow jersey Petr Vakoc who crashed near Kelso.

But on stage 4 Gaviria, the 21-year-old stagiaire who twice beat Cavendish at the Tour de San Luis, made it his turn. In a messy sprint, he romped past Greipel

with the same acceleration that was once, perhaps, the defining hallmark of Cavendish. Back in 13th, the Brit raised his arms in celebration.

In the press conference afterwards confusion reigned when Gaviria was asked to analyse the sprint.

“It was a victory for the team – Mark put me in the very good position and

then when I went, I just went,” he said.But TV pictures showed Gaviria had

been in front of Cavendish, so had they discussed a plan?

“There wasn’t really any talking,” Gaviria said through Tim Harris, the former British pro who was translating. “It was the positioning of the race and how it ended up and the circumstances.”

When Gaviria’s press officer intervened to end the line of questions it was a bit awkward. It was a relief when a local reporter asked whether he liked the Northumberland countryside. Yes, he said, “especially the wind turbines – you don’t get those in Colombia.”

With Cavendish poised to leave, Etixx boss Patrick Lefevere’s succession-

planning seems to be working out well. In Gaviria, he has a sprinter with the aggression and drive so characteristic of Cavendish. Asked whether Colombians will warm to a sprinter’s achievements in the

same way they do to those of their climbers’, Gaviria said yes, because “they appreciate a winner’s mentality.”

There are going to be gelling issues with the team, however. Gaviria doesn’t speak English and the squad even drafted in Harris to translate team meetings in the bus before stages. No doubt Gaviria’s English lessons have begun in earnest.

T

In Gaviria, Lefevere has

secured a sprinter with the

same drive and aggression

as Cavendish

S U C C E S S I O N P L A N N I N G A T E T I X X


Fernando Gaviria, Etixx-Quick Step Juan José Lobato, Movistar

Is it a bird? Is it a

plane? Is it Mark

Cavendish? No, it’s

Fernando Gaviria,

taking his �irst Tour

of Britain stage win


or years Tour of Britain race director Mick Bennett argued that summit finishes were unnecessary, that fans

would not turn out on some remote hilltop. It wasn’t until 2013 and the 10th edition of the modern race that Bennett included a summit finale. Simon Yates announced himself to the wider cycling public with victory at Haytor that day, and the huge turnout led to a repeat last year on The Tumble in South Wales.

This year, Bennett opted to look north for his most testing finish yet, Hartside Fell, 317m up on the road between Penrith and Alston. A Strava-best average speed of 27kph and a recce by NFTO’s Jonathan McEvoy on which he averaged 34kph behind a team car suggested the 8km ascent wasn’t that tough.

Stage five saw the best day of the week. The sun shone, the wind buffeted rather than roared

and thousands of fans came. Driving towards the finish on the race route, as the road disappeared in and out of the folds in the fellside and rose through a treeless landscape to a bare summit, the impression was of a Mont Ventoux in miniature, albeit with the white rock replaced by tussocky green grass.

One journalist pointed out that they would need to build a weather station to complete the comparison. However, locals might argue that in the radar station on nearby Great Dun Fell, they already have a weather-beaten technological outpost of their own.

If the climb didn’t disappoint, neither did the racing. The Sky-led peloton swept on to it and, for the first time all week,

the front group splintered. There were many memorable performances, not least Edvald Boasson Hagen’s, which would have netted him the stage if it hadn’t been for the strong wind blowing down the final 300 metres of ascent.

There were tales of woe as well, not least that of Tao Geoghegan-Hart. He had been shepherded into GC contention by his young GB team-mates over the first five days but was denied what might have been his Yates moment when Rasmus Guldhammer clipped his bars and sent him knee-first onto the road with 3km remaining. With good reason, he left the summit angered and unhappy. He may have been the only one.

“Thanks for coming,” said an old gent who’d ridden up from Alston. “It’s beautiful up here and it’s been wonderful having you all. We hope you’ll all come back.” No doubt plenty of other fans were saying just the same to Mick Bennett.

F

The impression was of a

Mont Ventoux in miniature,

albeit with the white rock

replaced by tussocky

green grass

T H E C U M B R I A N V E N T O U X


Wout Poels, Team Sky Edvald Boasson Hagen, MTN�Qhubeka

Sky’s Poels made a late surge to pass Boasson Hagen on Hartside Fell


hat was racing until you drop dead,” said Lotto-Jumbo’s Bram Tankink drily as he soft-pedalled on his

turbo at the Forest Recreation Ground in Nottingham. The riders’ instant reactions to stage 6 on the bucking bronco roads through the Peak District National Park were colourful and studded with superlatives. Stage winner, Etixx-Quick Step’s Matteo Trentin, said that it was the hardest stage he and 99.9 per cent of the peloton had ever ridden.

What served to make it so savage were the usual British factors: heavy roads, a profile like an erratic cardiogram and a whipping crosswind. And because the head of the race was being bossed about by Sky as they tried to simultaneously wrestle the jersey from Edvald Boasson Hagen and contain Gorka Izagirre, who had escaped, it was a was a recipe for a gruesome day. The results sheet

told a stark story: of the 30 riders who finished within 2:39 of Trentin, 23 were WorldTour riders and just four came from Continental teams and the GB development squad. As Rob Partridge of NFTO noted after a day in the break on stage 4, “when they [WorldTour riders] need to turn it on it’s just unbelievable.”

Tankink, looking utterly spent, gestured at the power meter on his bars and said his average power for the 195km stage was 295 watts. “I’ve never seen that before. Even after a day at Liège you have 240 watts, so this is way harder.”

But were the stage and the race in general too hard? Even Etixx-Quick Step’s Zdenek �tybar, who was using the

race to tune up for the World Championships and could be logically be expected to want the race to pile on the suffering, suggested the organisers might have over-egged the route.

Speaking the day after the demolition derby in the Peak District he told Procycling, “We’re six riders at the start. I don’t think it’s necessary to have four stages above 200km – even the neutralisations are 10km. Today we will have almost 240km and I don’t think that’s necessary.”

But there was another side to the brutality. For the 76 riders who rolled in 45:47 down on Trentin, the ‘laughing group’ certainly lived up to its name. Ed Clancy, riding for JLT-Condor, told media

that once the group had formed the pace was steady and the jokes flowed. “I figured they wouldn’t chuck us out as Brad [Wiggins] was in it, too. Most of the guys in the grupetto were chirpy, chatting away,” he said.

T

“We’re six riders at the start.

I don’t think it’s necessary

to have four stages

above 200km – even the

neutralisations are 10km”

T H E T O U G H E S T D A Y O F A T O U G H R A C E


Matteo Trentin, Etixx-Quick Step Edvald Boasson Hagen, MTN�Qhubeka

Matteo Trentin is

exhausted after

taking the hardest

stage of the race,

through the Peaks


e came back, he saw and he conquered. Six years after his last appearance at the race, Edvald Boasson Hagen all

but wrapped up the Tour of Britain in Ipswich. That he won largely on his own initiative against the focused might of his old team, Sky – in their own back yard no less – smacked of revenge. Boasson Hagen wouldn’t go in for anything as vulgar as that but it certainly reminded Sky just what an exciting rider he can be.

Boasson Hagen signed to Sky in 2010 and while the first three years with the team were successful, in 2013-14 his wings looked clipped as he lost both weight and the autonomy to use his coach, Fredrik Mohn. In 2014, he didn’t win a single race.

As the living, breathing embodiment of the couplet in Kipling’s poem If, about meeting triumph and disaster with

equanimity, Boasson Hagen was measured in his response to questioning about the significance of the result, where he stood compared to last year and his Worlds form.

Speaking in Norwich at the end of the stage he said, “If I win tomorrow it’s always good to have some good results

in front of big races and I feel the form is getting better now.”

So instead we spoke to his DS, Michel Cornelisse, who is as ebullient as Boasson Hagen is taciturn. After back-slapping staff and greeting the grimy riders home with a cheery grin and a gruff “good job”, he told us, “In our team he’s the man! The old Boasson

Hagen is back. In Sky, they also believed in him but here he’s protected and we tried to make him a winner again.

“His condition is unbelievably good – you see what he did yesterday all alone in the break? He was so smart and so strong at the end. For me it’s a pleasure to have a guy like that in the team.”

He said the re-connection with his coach had helped. “We have trainers but we let him go free, to use who he believes in, and I think that’s important. Even if he’s the worst trainer in the world, believing in them is important,” he added.

Joining MTN-Qhubeka looked like a gamble for Boasson Hagen. But as the season wends to a close the 28-year-old – he really is still that young – will surely look back on a season during which, even if he couldn’t quite reach the final destination of the upper reaches of the individual rankings, he did at least look like he was back on track.

H

That he won largely on his

own initiative against the

focused might of his old team,

Sky - in their back yard -

smacked of revenge

T H E S T R O N G , S I L E N T T Y P E


André Greipel, Lotto-Soudal Edvald Boasson Hagen, MTN�Qhubeka

Boasson Hagen has discovered a new lease of life at MTN, and was a con�ident overall winner


hen Bradley Wiggins tapped off on the last lap of the London stage, his work done, an aural Mexican wave of

hammered hoardings and applause followed the lone rider up Regent Street and across the finish line.

The crowds may have been cheering Wiggins’s last competitive act at the Tour of Britain. Or not. Earlier, he had told media that he might defer his retirement – planned for Friday, 12 August 2016, the night of the team pursuit final in Rio – to ride the Tour of Britain next year.

Perhaps racing in his team, on his terms and in front of such an appreciative home crowd was making him rethink.

Certainly it was a relaxed and open Wiggins on the road this year. “I’ve realised in the last couple of months just how much we had to put into that project trying to win the Tour,” he said

after stage 1, when his team-mate Owain Doull had taken fourth in the sprint. “It’s a day-in, day-out thing to win the Tour. But with this [Team Wiggins] you can afford to have a bit more fun because the results aren’t as important. On days like this when you get fourth, everyone’s bouncing off the ceiling.”

It was a good week for Team Wiggins. Doull won the points jersey and moved up to third overall in London through some clever riding for bonus seconds.

As other teams left central London, the corks started popping inside the jam-packed Wiggins camper. Outside, a large crowd waited – like they had done all week – for more than 45 minutes to catch a glimpse of Wiggo. While they

waited, the camper rocked and cheers escaped through the open skylight.

When Wiggins popped his head out the skylight and winked at the crowds for a split second, a hundred camera phones rose to catch the moment. He was too quick and the crowd too slow, but they all laughed anyway. And they laughed again when he signed a few autographs while half-concealing a wine glass behind his back. And they howled loudest when he opened a live Sky Sports interview with a ‘My name is Jeff’ impression. Vintage Wiggins.

“It’s been an enjoyable week,” he said. “It’s different to what I’m used to. I haven’t raced much with the guys in the team and this week’s been fantastic.”

Crowds are usually the ones who take most gratification from seeing the riders up close but Wiggins might have been moved to rethink his end-of-career plans after a successful and relaxed Tour of Britain.

W

When Wiggins popped his

head out the skylight and

winked at the crowds, a

hundred camera phones

rose to catch the moment

W I G G O ’ S L A S T L A P


Elia Viviani, Team Sky Edvald Boasson Hagen, MTN�Qhubeka

Crowd favourite

Wiggins inks his

name onto the

signing-in board

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www.ubyk.co.uk

Porn.

Oxford | Brighton | +44 (0)1865 596 112 | #bikeporn


file

During the autumn of 2012, the UCI Licence Commission stated that it was deferring decisions on three WorldTour renewals. The licence applications of Movistar and RadioShack were to be closely

scrutinised, and so too was that of Katusha, the team of incumbent WorldTour champion Joaquim Rodríguez. In December the bombshell duly arrived. Katusha – and Katusha alone – were out, and that was that. Of course, the team cried foul immediately and announced that they would be appealing to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).

The specifics of the decision weren’t forthcoming, so the press began speculating, blaming the Russians’ perceived ethical deficit. Many cited the proxy war (and long-standing personal enmity) between then UCI president Pat McQuaid and Igor Makarov, the team’s benefactor and head of the Russian Cycling Federation, although the Licence Commission was mandated to work independently of the UCI board and according to the regulations, McQuaid had no say in the matter.

A cursory glance at the team’s staff, however, was instructive. Andrei Mikhailov’s engagement as team doctor had hinted either at a lack of diligence or, more alarming still, just plain wilfulness. Mikhailov had been convicted of heading up the TVM drug procurement programme in 2001 and was regarded by some as a pariah. There was Denis Galimzyanov, later busted in an out-of-competition test for EPO. In a bizarre, handwritten confession, he went out of his

way to absolve the team of responsibility, and many speculated that he’d been assisted in writing the confession. Filippo Pozzato admitted having previously collaborated with now-banned doctor Michele Ferrari, while a handful of his team-mates were also implicated in the Padua investigation. The UCI cited the fact that Katusha riders had missed four out-of-competition tests and the team had made eight more filing errors with their riders’ whereabouts between 2009 and 2012.

Worse, Alexandr Kolobnev stood accused by the Corriere della Sera newspaper of having sold a win in Liège-Bastogne-Liège to Alexandre Vinokourov for �150,000 in 2010. Not content with impugning the reputation of one great race, he proceeded to test positive at another, the Tour de France. Kolobnev was a one-man public relations catastrophe, an accident waiting to happen. Meanwhile previous

dopers – repentant or, in the case of Danilo Di Luca, otherwise – seemed always to be given a second (or third) chance in the team. The sprint coach Erik Zabel had previous and likewise Christian Henn, his erstwhile sidekick at Telekom. Throw in a series of jaw-dropping book-keeping irregularities and Katusha appeared to be bang to rights.

And then, of course, there was Eki. Two months previously, Katusha had fired team

manager Hans-Michael Holczer. In his stead they’d employed Viatcheslav Ekimov, the Russian pursuiter who had become one of Lance Armstrong’s most loyal workers. He’d served the Texan for the thick end of a decade as a domestique and then, when he hung up his racing wheels, as a DS. Moreover, while Armstrong’s American cadre had either turned informer or caved in under subpoena by USADA, Ekimov and the rest of the European contingent had kept schtum, or hadn’t seen anything. Pavel Padrnos and Chechu Rubiera remained tight-lipped, while Ekimov was defensive almost to the point of appearing belligerent.

Two months prior to his Katusha appointment he’d been awarded his third Olympic title, albeit eight years after the fact. Tyler Hamilton, his former team-mate at US Postal, had won the time trial in Athens, but now found himself stripped of gold. Hamilton confessed to doping and, in gory detail, detailed the full extent of the team’s dependency. Ekimov was never one for soundbites but he placed on record his conviction that none of it was true, that Hamilton was a liar and that he’d never been

VIATCHESLAV EKIMOV

Cycling continues to purge the old guard but Katusha’s general

manager seems impregnable. Procycling assesses the significance

of the Russian’s presence in the WorldTour merry-go-round.

WRITER: Herbie Sykes ILLUSTRATION: David Despau

The Untouchable

Name: Viatcheslav Ekimov

Born: 4 February, 1966,

Vyborg, Russia

Age: 49

Pro career:

1990�2006

Managerial career:

2007-present

Passport Details

*November *2015

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*file The Untouchable Viatcheslav Ekimov

Ekimov (left) on the TT podium at the Athens Olympics

Ekimov was one of Armstrong’s closest allies

privy to any doping practices. His assertions seemed inconceivable but the fact that it was he who inherited Hamilton’s gong was simultaneously absurd and entirely consistent with the times. He’d been 38 when he’d finished second in Athens and yet he’d put over a minute into the likes of Jan Ullrich and Vinokourov. Now, at the age of 46, he was being rewarded with arguably one of the grubbiest gold medals in Olympic history.

Regardless, for all that his rearguard action seemed absurd, it was undeniable that it had paid dividends. While all around – Armstrong, Hamilton, George Hincapie, team manager Johan Bruyneel – had lost their heads, Ekimov had survived to tell the tale. He had his gold medal and now he was to head up Makarov’s dream team. Better still, Katusha convinced CAS that they were putting their house in order under Ekimov’s tutelage. By the following September McQuaid, Makarov’s nemesis, was out of office. A vicious UCI leadership contest saw him thumped out of sight by Brian Cookson.

Viatcheslav Ekimov’s early life was not remarkable but his cycling upbringing was. He grew up near Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and took up cycling at Aleksandr Kuznetsov’s legendary sports school of hard knocks. The regime was brutally hard but the upshot was a veritable production line of world and Olympic champions. The competition was ferocious but Ekimov was a sensation from the off. In 1985 he became world pursuit champion aged just 19, defeating the Lithuanian Gintautas Umaras at Bassano di Grappa. He smashed the amateur Hour Record two weeks later and, by the following autumn, had broken the magical 4:30 barrier for the pursuit. By the time the Berlin Wall fell, he’d set new marks at five, 10 and 20 kilometres, won Olympic gold in Seoul, and had lost count of his rainbow jerseys. Evgeni Berzin, four years younger than Ekimov, grew up in the same town. He too began life as a pursuiter under Kuznetsov, and would go on to win the Giro. For his generation, Ekimov was the gold standard.

“He was an example as regards ability but also the way he conducted himself. The communist cycling model was extremely authoritarian and it was all about the collective. Those who were in the sports schools were extremely privileged, because sport offered a better life. The flipside was that you didn’t question the methodology, because if you did you risked being thrown out. Ekimov knew how to keep his mouth shut and that was really important in the Soviet Union,” said Kuznetsov.

The writer Nikolai Razouvaev, another of the class of ’66, won World Championship gold in the team time trial. Razouvaev says: “Kuznetsov was able to

Emilia), Ekimov made for the bruising crosswinds of Flanders. He’d been courted by Peter Post, legendary boss of the great Raleigh team. Now bankrolled by Panasonic, Post had more money than Alfa Lum, and his management style – autocratic, hugely successful – mirrored that of Kuznetsov. Ekimov began learning Dutch and English, as planet cycling speculated on which of the eastern riders were most likely to make it. Considered opinion had it that there were four potential superstars. They were Poland’s Joachim Halupczok, the East German sprinter Olaf Ludwig, and the Russians Dmitri Konyshev and Ekimov.

Ekimov started well enough, winning time trials at the Tour of the Mediterranean and the Critérium International. At the Tour he rode in support of Ludwig’s successful green jersey bid but the step up to the pro ranks had come too late. The years as a pursuiter had blunted his speed and the climbing skills which had seen him defeat the Colombians as an amateur failed to develop. Though he won a stage at the 1991 Tour, it quickly became apparent that he didn’t recover well enough to challenge over three weeks. His time trialling was outstanding but in the end Ekimov was a diesel. He could win a handful of races each year but not ride away from the very best.

His biggest win came at the 1992 Championship of Zurich. There he shared a podium with an American stagiaire, a 20-year-old Texan named Lance Armstrong. By then everyone in America knew Armstrong was a huge talent but in finishing second at Zurich he crossed over into the European cycling mainstream. By 1994 Armstrong was

1985: Breaks Amateur Hour Record1988: Wins Olympic Gold (Team Pursuit)1991: Wins stage 20, Tour de France1997: Wins National Road Race Championships2000: Wins Olympic Gold (Time Trial)2005: Wins ITT, Three Days of De Panne2006: Completes 15th and �inal Tour de France2012: Lands top job at Katusha

Career Highlights

pump out great riders like cookies. Ekimov was a pursuit machine and a major figure. He was respected for his achievements, and also for being respectful of others. He had a ‘nice guy’ reputation.”

THE COLLAPSE OF communism left the Eastern Bloc riders exposed to the vagaries of the marketplace. Alfa Lum, a double glazing manufacturer from San Marino, bought up almost the entire Soviet road squad, but here again Ekimov distinguished himself. As the rest settled into a familiar existence (albeit in the sunshine of Reggio

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world champion and a major star. Meanwhile, Ekimov had evolved into a solid northern Classics rider and grand tour domestique. Sure, he was no champion but he had a reputation as a model pro. He was as hard as nails, did as he was bid, and was possessed of a massive engine. He’d earned the respect of his peers, among them Armstrong.

In June 1998 Armstrong returned to European racing, astounding the sport with a brilliant win at the Tour of Luxembourg. His new employer was the US Postal Service and Ekimov, too, was contracted to the team. Aged 32, however, he was headed for the exit door. He was still relevant as a cyclist but had agreed a one-year contract with Amica Chips for 1999. When, however, he rode two superb weeks in Armstrong’s service at the Vuelta, it was made clear that he’d be welcome back any time. Armstrong won his maiden Tour de France while Ekimov saw out his contract with Amica Chips, then they were rejoined for the 2000 season. At the ripe old age of 34, Ekimov added his horsepower to the commercial and sporting juggernaut which was Armstrong Inc.

That July he joined Hincapie, Bruyneel et al in the inner sanctum, and was rewarded with his first Tour de France win. Tellingly, Armstrong chose him as his partner for the GP Eddy Merckx, a two-up TT, in late August. They destroyed the rest and, when Ekimov eclipsed both his boss and Ullrich to claim time trial gold at the Sydney Olympics, even Lance declared himself delighted: “If you watched the Tour de France, he put it all on the line for me to win. As

because of the impact they had on the history of the sport in USSR.”

Though Ekimov has never displayed much of an ego, to click on his website is to be acquainted with his position as regards the US Postal years. The home page of eki-procycling.com proudly showcases the wins, the Tours and the records but also still, in 2015, Armstrong’s seal of approval. In paying homage to one of the cornerstones of the team, the American concludes that, “My career would not have been the same without him. He is a true living legend.” The site hasn’t been updated for four years but not for nothing does it remain active and not for nothing is Armstrong’s paean still present. While the others, their races run, have penned confessional books, Ekimov has remained true to his creed.

Many see in him the very personification of the sport’s age-old see-no-evil, hear-no-evil mentality, the so-called omertà. That partly explains why Armstrong enlisted his services for his ill-fated 2009 comeback and,

ultimately, why Ekimov alone among the US Postal foot soldiers is still operating at the top end of the sport. He has been well served by his reticence but also by the accidents of his birth. Had he been American he would have been hung out to dry by USADA. However, it remains a matter of fact and, rightly or wrongly, his stock remains extremely high both in his homeland and among those

whom he manages. In cycling, as in life, what comes around invariably

goes around. Ekimov’s innate professionalism and humility, allied to his refusal to spit in the soup, were instrumental in his having ridden out the storm. The qualities that served him so well through the EPO years – discretion, rigour, total fidelity – attracted Makarov just as they would attract any prospective employer. They continue to underpin his place in the cycling milieu because Makarov knows, just as Armstrong knew, that come what may he won’t let him down.

There are dozens of Ekimovs operating behind the scenes and, for now at least, they remain the bedrock of the professional sport. They are former riders, managers, doctors and race organisers, and they are the people who keep the show on the road. And therein, of course, lies the rub. They represent a history the new money doesn’t like to be reminded of but without them the WorldTour, cycling’s latest great project, would simply grind to a halt.

Viatcheslav Ekimov, one of the sport’s survivors, will survive for a good while yet.

upset as I am not to win a gold medal, I’m that much happier for him to win one. He’s a true champion and a true gentleman. He’s a special person, someone I know and love well.”

Ekimov would ride five of the Armstrong Tours, and 15 all told. That he finished all of them almost beggars belief, still more so when one considers that he was 40 when he called it a day. Former soigneur Emma O’Reilly bore witness to his stoicism and professionalism: “I can’t pretend I knew him that well and he didn’t say a lot. You could describe him as taciturn but he was always decent and he was always straight with me.”

The great track rider became a great domestique, then, though neither role truly captured the imagination of the wider Russian public. Razouvaev said, “It’s impossible to compare him to the great Soviet road cyclists. They tend to overshadow him

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Retro

Colin

Sturgess

A VICTIM OF CYCLING’S

OTHER OMERTÀIn February, Bradley Wiggins shared a photo of a young British rider in

a rainbow jersey, moments after winning individual pursuit gold at the

1989 Track Worlds. “A legend of the sport,” he wrote. Colin Sturgess was

that rider and his career should have soared but for bipolar disorder

Writer: Sam Dansie

Portrait photography: Chris Auld

ix weeks before the Track World Championships in Lyon, in 1989, Colin Sturgess felt like he’d been sucked into a

black hole. His energy disappeared overnight and he was barely able to get out of bed. It was strange, because the gifted 20-year-old had been going well on the tough kermesse circuit in Belgium. A few top-fives had shown his condition was good and that he was earning his stripes in his first year as a professional for the Belgian ADR team. When Sturgess did manage to lever himself out of bed and on to his bike, he rode à bloc for an hour, like it was a time trial, before limping back to his studio flat in Sint-Niklaas, where he’d shower, eat and slip back into bed, exhausted.

The slump passed and Sturgess recovered in time for the Worlds in Lyon. The high point of his career

came when he defeated Australia’s Dean Woods in the final of the 5,000m professional pursuit. The win was characteristic Sturgess. He started fast but his lead was pegged back, then Woods’s consistency put the Australian ahead. Sturgess had a trick up his sleeve, however: a warp speed finish that turned a 0.91 second deficit into a 1.66 second winning margin in the final two laps. There’s a moment in the race when Sturgess glances over the track at his opponent and turns on the afterburners. The

acceleration is so powerful that it’s visible. Woods didn’t have a chance. It was a ride of such portent and magnificence that even after the Olympic gold rushes in Beijing and London, it surely ranks as one of the all-time best track rides by a British rider in international competition.

In 1989, Sturgess had started living the cycling dream in Europe. Team- mates that year included the Tour winner and world champion Greg LeMond, Eddy Planckaert, who won E3 that year and the Tour green jersey in 1988, and the veteran Alfons De Wolf, who’d won Milano-Sanremo and Giro di Lombardia earlier in his career. Sturgess wasn’t a master of the cycling universe just yet but he was serving an apprenticeship next to some of the sport’s biggest stars.

Sturgess didn’t give the slump preceding the Worlds much thought; nor any of the others that occurred

S Sturgess in 1989 with the individual pursuit

gold medal and rainbow jersey he’d just won


Track star: as an amateur,

Crippa was a frequent

visitor to Milan’s Vigorelli

velodrome


around the time for that matter. Back then, it was as if he was bobbing on the open sea: the troughs were shallow and short – a few days at most – and he’d soon be on the rise again. Moreover, each dip was separated from the next by a couple of months and the periods between were crammed with all the excitement and promise a gifted young athlete on the path to a successful career could hope to experience. Surely, Sturgess’s time was to come.

SHARP RISE

To understand the depth of Sturgess’s talent, we must go back to the beginning. Colin Sturgess is the only child of Alan and Ann Sturgess, who were both accomplished racers in their own right. Ann was a contemporary of Beryl Burton and Alan was a member of the British team pursuit squad in the 1960s. When Colin turned six, Alan secured a telecommunications job in South Africa and the family emigrated to Johannesburg. The Sturgesses became central to the local sporting community when they set up a cycling association for the schools south of the city.

At home, under his father’s coaching, Sturgess’s strength matured. His regimen was based on an East German coaching manual that Alan had come by. It involved a lot of motor-pacing and flying kilometres, and Sturgess could often be seen

spinning a 52x17 on a 25km training loop behind his father’s motorbike. He quickly stamped his authority on the local scene.

Talent is talent, though, and when Alan Van Heerden, South Africa’s first Grand Tour stage winner, confirmed to Ann and Alan what they already knew – that their son’s potential was wasted in a country under sporting sanctions – the family returned to the UK and settled in Leicester. The move also ensured Sturgess wasn’t conscripted to the South African army, which was fighting a protracted war on the Angolan border.

Sturgess was a stick of dynamite on the British scene. Nine days after arriving back in the UK, the shy but quietly confident 16-year-old won national junior titles in the pursuit and kilometre, and took bronze in the points race. The results earned him selection for the Junior Worlds in Bassano, Italy, but he turned it down to settle in at school.

In 1986, his sharp rise up the order of British track racing continued. Sturgess earned selection to ride the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh on the strength of a performance in the kilometre time trial, a discipline he endured rather than enjoyed. At the Meadowbank Velodrome, the kilo was a race to forget for Sturgess but the selectors also entered

him into his favoured individual pursuit. Here, over 4km, the 17-year-old caused a stir by taking silver behind Dean Woods, the Australian who was two years older and already track royalty, having won team pursuit gold at the LA Olympics in 1984.

Year by year, the national medals and trophies piled up. Sturgess, however, wanted international

success. At the 1987 Track World Championships in Vienna, Sturgess broke the amateur world record with a 4:30 in the 4km pursuit. The following season, Sturgess’s road career took a big step forward when he won three stages in the Three Days of West Flanders. Watching from the roadside were the professional team managers Paul Köchli, Roger De Vlaeminck and José De Cauwer, all intent on offering him a contract. De Vlaeminck at Hitachi couldn’t wait and presented him with a contract to turn professional right away. Sturgess rejected it because he wanted to go to the Seoul Olympics later that year – a decision vindicated when he narrowly missed out on bronze in the pursuit. A far more favourable offer was presented to the Sturgesses in person at home in Leicester by De Cauwer, from ADR. He was prepared to wait until the 1989 season started and would also give Sturgess a month off in

AFTER HIS FIRST PROFESSIONAL VICTORY, ELATION TURNED TO MELANCHOLY OVER THE COURSE OF THE EVENING. THERE WAS NOBODY TO CELEBRATE WITH

mid-summer to prepare for the Track Worlds. Aged 19, Sturgess had realised his dream.

ISOLATION

He lived in a studio flat in Sint-Niklaas, halfway between Ghent and Antwerp. Here, the first signs of the nascent bipolar condition started to emerge. He wasn’t insular but nor did he socialise much. He went to the cinema a few times and he was on small-talk terms with the neighbours interested in his progress. But mostly he lived the quiet, hard life of a new professional abroad. The dirty jerseys piled up in his bombsite of a flat, a nagging reminder of how much easier it could be in Leicester where he was fed and watered and the endless sweaty kit was spirited into the washing machine. Sometimes the isolation started to bite, especially after races. When he won the GP de Haan, his first professional road race victory, in June that year, elation turned to melancholy over the course of the evening. Back in Sint-Niklaas there was nobody to celebrate with, just a muddy bike to wash. He phoned his parents

to tell them the good news but they were out, so he went to bed without sharing his good news with anybody close to him. The next day he raced.

Soon, however, Sturgess was back in Leicester preparing for what would ultimately be the high point of his career at the Track Worlds in Lyon. That moment on the podium, with his arms spread in a wide, confident V, capped a glorious five years – the best five years of his life. Five years of targets hit with a marksman’s consistency. Afterwards, his name would always be appended with the title ‘world champion’ and nothing could erase that. But also from that moment on, save some isolated high points on the road and track in subsequent years, there would be another appellation that would stick with Sturgess: unfulfilled promise.

BAD TEAMS, BAD TIMES

Sturgess remained in Europe for two more years as ADR morphed painfully into Tulip Computers. In year two he endured a messy break-up with a partner and the team endured a cash crisis. His

wages, along with those of many others such as LeMond, weren’t paid and there were rumours the team was a tax dodge. Indeed, one of the sponsors, a coffee brand on the riders’ shorts, didn’t exist. But despite the tragicomic subplot of the team, Sturgess did harvest some personal success, including a fine win in the British Road Race Championships on a wet and windy course in East Yorkshire.

By 1991, however, the slumps were lasting longer and they deepened, too. De Cauwer, concerned and supportive, thought the root of Sturgess’s persistent enervation was a virus. Sturgess disagreed because when he felt good he was great and could hammer the pedals with the best in the team but when he hit a slump he could hardly leave his room. What neither twigged or would admit to, was that Sturgess’s problem wasn’t physical at all but mental.

OMERTÀ AND TABOO

In the early 90s, manic depression, as it was then termed, or any form of mental illness, just didn’t happen to bike riders. In a sport idolising mental resilience every bit as much as strength of limb, even talking sympathetically about depression was taboo. There were few people Sturgess could confide in and certainly no one who would offer the single line of constructive advice he needed to hear and to heed: go and find help.

Sturgess, at 19, was also a naïf thrown into the big bad world of cycling, which was changing. EPO was coursing through the veins of riders at the cutting edge of doping and while that particular wonder poison might have been spoken of in hushed tones, plenty of other more traditional substances that formed the cheating cyclist’s arsenal were a frequent dinner table conversation. Sturgess never succumbed to swallowing an illicit tablet or supplementing his vitamin injection with something stronger but the abundance of stories passing through the peloton, and indeed his first-hand experience of stumbling across a team-mate taking amphetamines, all confirmed to him that drug use was commonplace.

In that final year in Europe, Sturgess’s self-esteem evaporated as it became apparent his contract with Tulip wouldn’t be extended into 1992. With his stay on the Continent over, he took up an opportunity to ride for a team called Snowflake in South Africa. It was a folly. Salaries weren’t paid on time and team bikes weren’t delivered. With bouts of depression becoming more frequent, his resolve soon faltered and within six months he had packed it in and bought a one-way ticket home. To all intents and purposes he was a retired bike rider at the age of 23. Back in England, he joined friends at Loughborough University and studied English and sports science.

Things were going well and life without high

Sturgess was a powerhouse

of a rider and his potential for

the Classics was clear to see



level racing seemed to suit Sturgess. In 1993, while out in Australia, he had met and fallen in love with a local girl, Sam. It was the ultimate long- distance affair. Sturgess nursed the relationship as best he could by spending every penny of his student grants on airfares to Australia. When he put the last full stop on his final exam paper he moved out to Australia for good, not even waiting for his graduation ceremony.

In Australia, he took up various jobs in the bike industry before landing a role editing a cycling magazine. He was still fit, and following a few good results on the local mountain bike circuit he was enticed back on to the road and track. He reconnected with the British team and his results were good enough to earn a berth at the 1998 Track Worlds in Bordeaux, a meet that was followed up almost immediately by a strong showing at the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur where England finished second to Australia in the team pursuit. Not bad for someone who had been a hobby rider for the past five years.

But Sturgess was living on a tightrope. His heart and his home were in Australia but he was racing for British teams and pursuing selection for Team GB at the Sydney Olympics. Something was bound to give. When his qualification times for team selection were declared invalid on a technicality in early 2000 – something he disputed – he walked off the team. His dream of capturing an Olympic medal, what he most coveted, was over for good.

So Sturgess retired a second time and dropped out of cycling completely. For a while, he filled the void by joining the Sydney party fraternity, where he dabbled with recreational drugs and threw off the yoke of an elite athlete. His prodigious stamina, combined with the extraordinary confidence of a bipolar man in a phase of mania, meant he would drink more champagne, take more drugs and stay

STURGESS FINALLY SOUGHT HELP AND WAS DIAGNOSED AS BIPOLAR IN 2006. THE RELIEF HE FELT AFTER THE

DIAGNOSIS WAS ENORMOUS AND IMMEDIATE


out longer than anybody else. Before long, though, he got tired of rolling out of clubs at 6am and a new, more genteel world emerged amid the wineries of the Hunter Valley, north of Sydney, when he and Sam bought a house. Sturgess got a job on a vineyard and soon showed he had admirable facility for making good wine as well as drinking it. Hospitality was the pulse of the industry and Sturgess was a bon viveur par excellence.

But around this time, the needle tracking his mood began to swing more wildly. Sturgess endured bouts of mania, when he felt at his most creative, euphoric and invincible, and spells of abject desolation, which confined him to his room for days on end. Mentally, the waves upon which Sturgess had been bobbing in the open sea in his early 20s were, now he was in his mid-30s, reaching the coast and about to crash upon the shore.

ROCK BOTTOM

In the aftermath of his son Jesper’s birth in early 2005, Sam ended their marriage. Sturgess’s wild

mood swings, vehemence and argumentativeness made him impossible to live with. What, she must have wondered, had become of the fit, sensitive and amusing young man she had met and fallen in love with 14 years earlier?

Sturgess finally sought help and was diagnosed as bipolar the following year. The relief he felt after the diagnosis was enormous and immediate; finally he could understand the fundamental pattern of the last 20 years of his life, a sine wave oscillating between extreme peaks and profound lows.

But even so, the wave still needed to break. In 2008, with impetus caused by the break up of his second marriage, the loss of his job and everything he owned in Australia, the wave he had ridden for so long finally met land. One night, after drinking a bottle of vodka, he drove his car off a 150ft embankment. Whether he saw the corner and was too addled to steer or tried to commit suicide, Sturgess doesn’t know for sure. Either way, he was lucky to survive and he was committed to a psychiatric ward where he resolved, somehow to overcome the condition.


COMING FULL CIRCLE

Today, Colin Sturgess is back in Leicester living in the same house, just around the corner from the now demolished Saffron Lane Velodrome where his career fired into life and for a while had looked so lustrous. Throughout it all, Alan and Ann have stood firm while their son has wrestled his demons. Following another wave crash in 2012 in Australia which left him homeless, they bought him a ticket back to the UK and a few steps back from the edge.

Slowly, he’s been learning to master the condition. He’s riding competitively again – his third comeback – and last year he won the League of Veteran Racing Cyclists championships after a 14-year lay-off, proving there was life and drive in the old dog yet. The result also brought a wave of congratulations and support from the wider British cycling fraternity, which proved what a popular athlete he had been. He was supposed to race for the domestic SportGrub-Kuota team in 2015, but a stubborn back injury kept him from training and sent him into a long bout of depression that lasted most of the summer.

“I’m in a better position than I was six weeks ago,” he tells Procycling on a soggy August Friday. “I was in a darkened room, curled up in a foetal position and I’d been there for days, weeks on end in a pretty bad place. Now it’s far more positive, I’m back on the bike, averaging about 40km a day. It’s small steps,” he says.

He’s not in the physical condition he’d like – he’s well-padded from not riding – but he’s busy. He works two jobs: one as a coach for Dig Deep

Coaching and the other in the shop of local bike clothing maker, Velobici. He’s saving for a trip back to Australia this winter to see Jesper, who’s now 10.

He’s not quite sure he ever will ever be in total control of the wave but what he hopes is that he can keep the peaks and troughs within manageable parameters. His prescriptions help the most, he

Going to extremes

“From a physical and athletic perspective,

Colin was an incredible human being, but I

think he perhaps missed out on application.

We rode in an era when we were caught

between tradition and the incoming ideas that

science was bringing to the sport,” recalls

Sturgess’s GB team-mate Simon Lillistone.

“That fourth place at the Seoul Olympics was

sensational for a 19-year-old. Colin winning

the worlds in 1989, it wasn’t just that he won

against Dean Woods, it was that he decimated

him in that �inal. Every time I come across the

race on YouTube I think it’s unbelievable.

“That’s not the most e�icient way to ride the

pursuit, but that was the Colin way: he played

with his opponents for a few laps and then

went for the jugular in the last two laps.

“I’m not sure how muddied this has got with

time, but I remember being in Colin’s room

before the �inal and he ate a whole packet of

chocolate biscuits. He’s always been a

character of extremes, whether it’s his

practical joking or his celebration after the

games in Seoul. He always went to extremes.”

says, but cycling through Leicestershire’s country lanes also plays an important part in his gradual convalescence. What would help even more, he says, would be access to talking therapies. He’s on the NHS waiting list but it’s six months long.

THE UNKNOWN VICTIMS

This is a version of the Sturgess story. Did bipolar disorder almost kill him? Possibly. Did it wreck his career? Certainly. Had he got the help much earlier, maybe his palmarès would include a Flanders or a Roubaix. He’s adamant that even as late on as 1998, had he recognised and managed his condition, he’d have stuck with the British squad and made the Olympic team pursuit line-up. �

Now, looking back over what might have been, he wants to add his voice to a chorus of athletes and ex-athletes from other sports who have spoken of their experience of battling mental illness, hoping to encourage other sufferers to get help.

In cycling, depression or one of its shades has often been found stalking its athletes: Mauro Santambrogio’s ‘goodnight world’ tweets in 2013, Graeme Obree’s two suicide attempts or Jesús Manzano’s addiction to anti-depressants are three examples amid many.

They’re the lucky ones. Many haven’t made it out of the mire. Whatever was written on the death certificates of Frank Vandenbroucke (died aged 34, in 2009), Marco Pantani (34, 2004), José María Jiménez (32, 2003), Dimitri De Fauw (28, 2009), Thierry Claveyrolat (40, 1999), Valentino Fois (34, 2008) and Luca Gelfi (42, 2009), some mental fissure played its part in their sad ends.

From his experience of living with undiagnosed bipolar disorder for 15 years and the macho culture of bike racing, Sturgess often ponders how many professionals of his era suffered in silence and might still be carrying the burden – and heaven knows what the consequences might be. Tales that a young Sturgess heard at dinner tables in race hotels about so-and-so’s bender were hilarious at the time. But they are now tinged with the queasy feeling that they may have suggested a flaw that, given the wrong circumstances or accentuated by taking the wrong chemical at the wrong time, may well have tipped that rider over the abyss.

“[I wish] I’d had more insight into the downs and not taken the ups for granted, which is what I did,” he says. “When you’re winning it blocks everything out and when you’re down in the dumps you can’t actually see how far you’ve gone down.

“I don’t tell people I’m bipolar but I make no secret of it either,” Sturgess says simply. “If I can make people aware that a high-class athlete can suffer the same as anyone else, then brilliant.”

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Wishlist

The world’s best cycling kit

Photography: David Caudery, Philip Sowels, Adam Gasson


Scott Foil Premium £8,999 ||| $11,999.99

The all-new Foil has been completely

redesigned. It’s even more aerodynamic

– 27 seconds faster over 40km, say Scott –

primarily thanks to a new one-piece cockpit,

in line with current thinking that prioritises

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given how sti�f the original Foil is, Scott have

made the frame 13 per cent sti�fer. The old

bike’s Achilles heel was comfort and Scott

have gone to great lengths to achieve an

89 per cent increase in vertical compliance.

We can’t wait to ride this one.

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Wishlist


PowerTap GS Amp 35 £1,899 ||| �2,299.99

The new GS power meter hub is made with

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Cycling Ceramic £95 ||| �110

The rear derailleur’s pulley wheels are the

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Birzman

Maha Apogee III £54.99 ||| $80

This pump is as clever as it is beautiful

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Birzman won an innovation award for

it. Best of all, this pump is much more

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looking products on the market.

www.birzman.com


Wishlist

Fizik Aliante 00

£279.99 ||| $400

This is the new top-of-the-range version of the recently repro�iled Aliante,

Fizik’s saddle for ‘Bulls’, or riders with below average spine �lexibilty. That

isn’t a pejorative term – Peter Sagan is a ‘bull’ and rides an Aliante. This ‘00’

version has a carbon �ibre hull and Fizik’s one-piece Mobius rail which looks

incredible and sheds a small amount of weight compared to the R1 model.

We weighed this one at 176g.

www.fizik.it


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Wishlist

Bontrager Ballista

£129.99 ||| $175

Not only is the Ballista claimed by Bontrager

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Impressively, the Ballista achieves this speed

without sacri�icing ventilation and it tips the

scales at just 258g for this small sample. The

Ballista comes with a second set of pads,

called NoSweat, which use silicon channels to

prevent sweat from dripping into your eyes. It

comes in white, black, �luoro yellow and also

a Trek Factory Racing replica, and in three

regular sizes plus Asian-�it versions of each.

www.bontrager.com


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Wishlist

Zipp Vuka Aero

£680 ||| $850

The shape of Zipp’s new time trial bar is

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used on the tops of their SL�70 Aero road bar.

As well as speed, user-friendliness was a key

design goal and the Vuka Aero features easy

cable routing and a centre cap to create aero

integration with a regular stem and allow

easier �itting and adjustment compared to

the one-piece Vuka Stealth. It’s also claimed

to boost sti�fness by �ive per cent. This bar,

including pads and uncut carbon extensions,

weighs 748g. The Vuka Aero is also available

without the extensions for £578/$722.

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S-WORKS VENGEIt took more than four years to create the S-Works Venge, and the result is

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ourselves to rede�ning the shape, structure, and theory of speed,

which led us to building our own Win Tunnel during its development. We

exhausted engineers and aerodynamicists as we tested hundreds of proto-

types. The payo�, however, is that every element of the bike is painstaking-

ly constructed to be faster. The zero-drag brakes, the Aero�y ViAS cockpit,

and the Rider-First Engineered™ frameset—they all work in harmony to

ensure that the Venge is not only the fastest road bike in the world, but

also the best handling, best feeling bike on the road.

specialized.com/5minutes

120 seconds over 40km

116 PROCYCLING DECEMBER 2014

The bikes of the peloton

PROCYCLING DECEMBER 2014 117

NIPAND

TUCKMarcel Wüst tests the new Cannondale SuperSix Evo Hi-Mod Team on an early morning ride in the Dolomites. Do all of

its subtle changes add up to a better bike?

W��: Marcel Wüst P��: Tom Bauser


The headtube is

slender and notably

unfussy compared

to many of the latest

designs on new bikes

The thin ‘Speed SAVE’

seatstays provide what

Cannondale call ‘micro

suspension’ for bad

roads and all-day rides

A great bike, perfect

weather, deserted

roads and even brand

new tarmac – it doesn’t

get better than this

The new SuperSix Evo

Hi-Mod has classic lines

and looks fantastic, so

long as you don’t mind

the green accents

I’D ONLY HAVE WANTED A 34T INNER RING IF I’D BEEN PLANNING TO DO PASSO FURCIA AND ON TO THE FEARSOME PLAN DE CORONES

ProRides

Let’s keep it simple: riding is good, riding in the Dolomites is better and riding the brand new Cannondale SuperSix Evo Hi-Mod in the Dolomites early

on a sunny morning is as good as it gets.When I spent a few days in the Dolomites

in early July for holiday, hiking and, of course, bike testing, it was peak vacation season, so the roads would quickly become pretty crowded were I to have stuck to the usual holiday schedule of waking late and enjoying a slow breakfast.

The Sella Ronda pass, especially, gets a bit busy with motorbikes past 10 o’clock, so one day I decided to get up with the first rays of sunlight and tackle the Sella Ronda loop anti-clockwise. From the fantastic Hotel Molodia del Bosco in Badia, it’s 17km, or about an hour’s ride, to the top of the Passo Gardena, so the morning coolness did not really matter as I’d be climbing from the start and until the sun was up fully.

I’ve ridden every top-end Cannondale presented in the last 10 years, so I was keen to learn about this new model. Of course, they claim it to be lighter, stiffer and more aerodynamic. The latter is always a tough one because aerodynamics and rigidity are

not friends when it comes to frame design and construction. Wisely, Cannondale do not put too much emphasis on aero and do not allow it to compromise other areas.

As I clicked in and set off towards Corvara just after 6am there was almost zero traffic and already a bright blue sky. The SuperSix was set up perfectly for my position and felt natural and smooth.

My test bike was the Team version of the new SuperSix Evo Hi-Mod and so it came with a Shimano Di2 groupset, Cannondale Hollowgram crankset and Mavic Cosmic Pro Carbon wheels. Like every version of this bike, the Team has a semi-compact chainrings and an 11-28 cassette, so I was

pretty sure that I would not run out of gears for the day. I’d only have wanted a 34t inner ring if I’d been planning to go the other way, to Passo Furcia and on to the fearsome Plan de Corones but there was no need to repeat the gravel road tortures which the Giro riders have suffered in the past.

The Passo Gardena is a joy to climb and I was enjoying my ride right from the first switchbacks out of Corvara. The bike is very light, though not super light; that’s the job of the 5.9kg Black Inc version and even that is a full kilogram above the latest crazy light bikes. From my initial reactions as the gradient began to increase, the stiffness of this new bike is as impressive as all of its


Seconds later

Marcel was left

pedalling in mid-air

like Wile E Coyote when

the road ran out

I RODE OVER THE GARDENA STILL FEELING GOOD, TAKING IN THE AMAZING VIEWS AND LOOKING FORWARD TO THE DESCENT

Frame: SuperSix Evo BallisTec Hi-Mod

Fork: SuperSix Evo BallisTec Hi-Mod

Groupset: Shimano Dura-Ace Di2

Crankset: Cannondale Hollowgram SiSL2

Brakes: Shimano Dura-Ace Chainrings: 52/36

Cassette: 11�28

Wheels: Mavic Cosmic Pro Carbon

Tyres: Mavic Yksion Pro

Headset: Cannondale SuperSix Evo

Handlebar: FSA K�Force Compact

Stem: FSA OS�98 OSI

Seatpost: Cannondale SAVE carbon

Saddle: Fizik Arione R3

Weight: 6.3kg (no pedals)

Price: £7,499 | $10,660

www.cannondale.com

Specifications

predecessors. No doubt, this one is stiffer than ever, and especially when compared to bikes from a decade ago, but what matters is that same feeling that I was riding one of the stiffest bikes I have ever ridden – it means that through all of these years, Cannondale are always at the forefront.

The choice of wheels on the Team version is good if you want an all-rounder but these aluminium-rimmed, 52mm Cosmics are not especially light, at a claimed 1,620g. Mavic’s R-Sys SLRs might better suit this bike and its mountain-focused gearing. Even so, the Cosmics are stiff and I was still able to gain speed quite quickly out of the corners, on the lesser gradients. Where the percentage was higher, though, I couldn’t help but wonder how good this bike might feel on some superlight tubular wheels.

With a three-hour ride planned, I wasn’t afraid of running out of energy and I tackled the Gardena at a good speed, with the chain

running quietly in the middle of the cassette and moving up and down as necessary with the usual smooth precision of Di2. At the front, it’s even better. The servo-powered derailleur glides the chain from the inner to outer ring quickly and perfectly, every time.

This frame also has holes for mechanical cables; perhaps next, since the launch of Sram eTap wireless electronic shifting, we’ll see frames with no gear cable holes at all.

As a prominent deviation from the Dura-Ace groupset, the Hollowgram SiSL2 crankset is really interesting. They help to lower the overall weight as the SiSL2 is said to be 58g lighter than Dura-Ace 9000, and


THE CANNONDALE IS BUILT TO BE AN ALL�ROUNDER. IT MAKES A LOT OF SENSE BECAUSE IT MEANS YOU ARE NEVER ON THE WRONG BIKE

The bottom bracket

shell is oversized and

has large junctions

with every tube

The familiar FSA

K�Force compact

carbon bar is a shape

that Marcel loves

ProRides

and didn’t invite fast cornering when the road was not perfect.

Both the Bianchi and the Cannondale are built to be all-rounders, combining the best of stiffness, low weight, comfort and a bit of aerodynamics, rather than trying to be the best in just one area. It’s an approach that makes a lot of sense because it means you are never on the wrong bike for the ride.

Visually at least, the new bike is closely related to the previous version. The thin seatstays, the very neat exit of the rear brake cable and the massive bottom bracket are all familiar. However, tweaks to all of these

parts – marginal gains, in Team Sky speak – mean this bike clearly feels superior to its predecessor, a bike that was already at a high level. The BB is said to be 11 per cent stiffer and the skinny, 25mm SAVE seatpost is 30 per cent more compliant.

Pushing past 80kph in the long, open stretches of the descent I felt completely safe and always in control, even when sat on the top tube in my favourite super-aero position with my shoulders on the bars and the fork between my knees. These days I wonder how I survived descending in this way on TVT lugged carbon and Otero steel frames in the early days of my career.

Of course, descending fast requires great brakes so you can attack the corners and the Dura-Ace callipers combined with the Mavic wheels really delivered this. The rims have machined and coated alloy brake tracks, called Exalith 2, which work great in all weather conditions. They are sensitive to set-up and can be noisy but this time they worked quietly. Knowing that I can trust

also way stiffer. We’ll have to let the test labs check this last point as I don’t think any rider can feel the difference between two high-end cranksets.

The SiSL2 is made from aluminium. Every time I ride one I am reminded of a conversation I had with Cannondale’s own carbon engineer at the launch of a Saeco team bike in the early 2000s. He said that carbon is great for a lot of things, but not for producing a crankset.

Shimano have always agreed while Sram and Campagnolo have chosen carbon for their top groups. All I can say for sure is that I like the Hollowgram cranks very much.

I rode over the top of the Gardena still feeling good, enjoying the new road surface and taking in the amazing views. I was also looking forward to the descent, as I know it quite well and it gets really fun lower down.

The new SuperSix Evo Hi-Mod has a lot in common with the Bianchi Specialissima that I also rode on this trip, though an elegant name is not one of them. Both are very light, stiff and responsive, without sacrificing comfort or handling. Many of the first super-light bikes were quite harsh

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Born: Cologne, Germany6/8/1967Residence: Frechen, Germany; Majorca, SpainPro Career: 1989 — 2001 First Team: RMOCareer Highlights: 14 Grand Tour stage wins 1 Tour, 1 Giro, 12 Vuelta

After winning stages in all three major tours, Marcel retired from racing in 2000 after a bad crash. He now works as a journalist, as well as running cycling camps in Majorca This is Marcel’s �inal bike test for Procycling and we’d like to thank him for years of sterling service. Cheers, Marcel!

RIDDEN BY… Grand Tour multi-stage winner

Marcel Wüst

THE IMPRESSIVE VIEW FROM ABOVE CORVARA MADE ME HAPPY I’D GONE OUT EARLY AND THE DESCENT WAS PURE FUN

The new fork is more aerodynamic, more compliant and lighter, but most importantly it steers very precisely

The colour-coded components are not to Marcel’s tastes but they do give the bike a very complete look

ProRides

the Yksion tyres, I really took advantage of the quiet roads. Especially on descents, slow drivers with hats and mobile homes can really spoil your fun.

The Sella and the Pordoi were savoured with the same high speed and fluid cadence as the Gardena, until a damp road on the last bit of the descent into Arraba nearly caused me some trouble. I was carrying more speed into the wet corner than I’d have chosen so I had to simply trust the tyres one more time – and it worked. The grip of the Yksion tyres in the wet is pretty amazing.

After stopping for a great crostata and cappuccino in Arraba, I was really tempted to go further and add the Marmolada lap across the Passo Fedaia to the menu. I’d been riding pretty hard though, so I took the direct route home over the Campolongo.

At the bottom of my last climb of the day I eased the pace and spun a light gear while digesting my snack. My legs appreciated the break, too. While I was riding slowly, I took the chance to have another look at the bike. The FSA components are all great and very

familiar, though for Cannondale they have been given matching green paint. These colours will never be to my own tastes and may be all the excuse you need to upgrade to the stealthy Black Inc version. At least then the ‘what to wear’ question would be answered easily.

While Cannondale only offer one colour per model, they do put a lot of effort into their size-specific construction. It requires more investment in tooling but ensures that the ride quality is consistent across all sizes.

I reached the summit of the last climb with ease and the impressive view from above Corvara made me happy that I had gone out so early. The last descent before entering the town has loads of switchbacks and was pure fun. The Cannondale has a really precise fork, which everyone can feel and benefit from. It is also, apparently, 1.5W more aerodynamic than the old one, which no-one can feel.

Just before 9am I cruised back into the Hotel Melodia del Bosco, parked the bike in the garage and headed upstairs, ready for a really big breakfast.

I encourage the Cannondale engineers to keep up the good work, the marketing people to one day let go of the green and everyone to get up early and beat the rush. And if you do so on a SuperSix Evo Hi-Mod, I know you will have a great ride. P

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expect with their lower weight and far superior aerodynamics, they really allowed the frame to shine. Of course, those are cutting-edge £2,500 wheels, but some well-chosen £700 50mm tubs for race days would still give you a big bene�t and bring out the frame’s qualities.

The alloy cockpit is a much more sensible compromise than the wheels. It doesn’t look or feel special but nor does it detract from the ride. It’s a shame the drops don’t feature Di2 sprint shifters, a bene�t of electronic shifting that I always enjoy. Wisely, the seatpost is a 27.2mm carbon unit and it helps to provide a good level of compliance. The ‘racing geometry’ is well balanced though the extra 15mm in the

headset cap on top of the 182mm headtube made this 57cm frame a little tall in the front.

The Orca may not be able to boast watt-saving aero or lightness like the specialist bikes but nor does it make any of their compromises. For most of us, with one ‘best’ bike, that still makes a lot of sense. Jamie Wilkins

PROS

Very sti�f; agile;

fun to ride hard;

quite light

CONS

Deserves much

better wheels

VERDICT

Rewarding

all-rounder that’s

up for the �ight

Below The BB shell is

one of the biggest we

have seen; cranks are

FSA on 2016 model

year bikes

harp

The Procycling Race & Test Team

is powered by

Above The wheels are

upgraded to slightly

lighter Vision TriMax

35s for 2016 bikes

Right There’s a lot

going on around the

headtube but it works

– the steering is fast

and accurate

from such shapes, especially in the rear triangle, in pursuit of lower weight, higher stiffness and great comfort.

This M10i has a complete Dura-Ace Di2 groupset with an alloy FSA cockpit and Vision T30 wheels to limit the price. The 2016 version switches to FSA cranks and brakes, and Vision TriMax 35 wheels. That it still comes in under 7kg says a lot for the frame; you could easily build it down to 6kg. Above this model is the M-ltd and M-ltdi with Dura-Ace in mechanical and electronic versions respectively and upgraded with Vision Metron 40 carbon clincher wheels and a lighter cockpit.

The beefy-looking frame doesn’t disappoint – it’s super-stiff and shrugs off 1,000W sprints easily. The front end has excellent �delity, too, with precise steering and lots of con�dence at high speed. All of this is obscured by the wheels, though. The Vision T30s are heavy, �exy and really dull the ride. For 2016 bikes they’re upgraded to

Vision TriMax 35s which are a bit lighter. For one long and fast ride we �tted Enve 4.5s and as well as boosting performance as you’d

THIS NEW ORCA is one of an increasingly rare breed, the all-rounder. As the Darwinian demands of pro racing – survival of the

stiffest, lightest, most aero – exert pressure on manufacturers, so the all-rounder �nds itself marginalised, rarely the perfect tool for the job.

Orbea claim that the new Orca is 20 per cent lighter. A 53cm frame is said to weigh 900g, so it still isn’t in the premier league of sub-750g frames but these tubes are anything but skinny, far from round, and stiffness is also claimed to be up by 24 per cent. The headtube is stout and mates to the toptube with the moulded equivalent of a gusset. The downtube starts out fat at the top, gets bigger in the middle and ends up enormous at its junction with the huge bottom bracket shell from which sprout girder-like chainstays. While everyone else is going aero, Orbea have moved away

Orbea Orca M10i CofidisPrice £5,279 | $7,599 � Weight 6.87kg � www.orbea.com

Pro kit in the real world

Roadtested

P��: J

ohnn

y A

shel

ford


Roadtested


NEW OUT A few months ago, Corima’s �agship S+ MCC range elevates the brand into the stratosphere of manufacturers making all-carbon, bonded, super-light wheels, alongside the likes of Lightweight, Reynolds and Mavic. ‘S+’ is the rim, available in 24, 32 or 47mm depths and both clincher and tubular form; we have the deeper tub here. MCC is the carbon construction, with Corima’s own unidirectional carbon �bre hub suspended in the rim on 12 carbon spokes which are bonded in place and arranged in pairs. The new hubs feature tool-less freehub swapping and Corima have their own brake pad now, too, developed with input from Astana, though it’s notable that the team only uses the conventionally-spoked and easier-to-maintain version of these wheels.

The claimed weight is 1,130g. That’s obviously very low and while it’s still a little way off the sub-kilo

�gures of the equal depth Reynolds RZR 46 and Lightweight Meilenstein Obermayer, this wheelset is over £1,000 less expensive (I won’t say ‘cheaper’) than those luminaries. Our test set came with Corima-branded tyres already glued on and weighed 40g less than a set of similarly priced Mavic Cosmic Carbone Ultimates �tted with Vittoria Corsa CX tubs, so the weight claim checks out.

The ride is a very interesting mix of attributes and not altogether what we anticipated. Acceleration, while certainly brisk, isn’t as snappy as we expected from such a light wheel, suggesting that these

wheels carry relatively more weight in the rims and less in the hubs than, say, the aforementioned Mavic Ultimates.

What’s more, they don’t feel particularly aero at speed and here we think the fat spokes are to blame. Spokes cause a lot of drag and even though the MCCs have just 12 each and they

Corima 47mm S+ MCC wheelsare pro�led rather than �at or round, their girth could easily outweigh their shape and number. My aero Ridley Noah SL feels faster on conventionally-spoked 35mm wheels than the MCCs. Their stability in crosswinds is good, though.

On the positive side, these wheels are as unyielding as North Korean foreign policy, as stiff as any we’ve ridden. If you’re an aggressive, powerful or less-than-�yweight rider, that will make more difference to your riding experience than a few grams off the headline weight �gure because the rigidity manifests itself in both power transfer and steering. The latter is especially interesting, the Ridley’s crisp turning heightened with tangible extra precision thanks to the more direct connection between the handlebar and the tyre. With strong braking as well, descending on these wheels is as much fun as smashing belligerently up punchy climbs.

We think this rim and spoke combination is likely to be better suited to a shallower wheel where aero isn’t a factor. We plan to test the 24mm version next to �nd out. Jamie Wilkins

PROS

Fantastic sti�fness;

strong braking;

very light;

well priced

CONS

Not especially aero;

don’t feel as light to

ride as they appear

on the scales

x

VERDICT

Strong wheelset for

puncheurs but

consider shallower

versions �irst

Left Some all-carbon

wheels can look rough

but the quality of this

�inish is �irst rate

Below Corima have

thoughtfully included

a magnet to save you

adding one to a spoke

Price £2,459.98 | $5,199 � www.corima.com

Corima’s 12-spoke

MCC wheels are likely

to o�fend purists…

but then so is the

rest of this bike


details and waterproof pockets. The slight stretch gives a marginal improvement in mobility, too, though it’s miles behind a softshell such as the race-�t Castelli Gabba2. We might still have been able to see a place for the NeoShell in your kit for torrential days were it not so colossally expensive.

If anything, the tight is even more of a let down. Rain got through it almost instantly and it isn’t even windproof. What’s more, the �t is oddly loose, almost like a Ron Hill running pant, which isn’t a great look. This version has no pad and is designed to be worn over a bibshort, so at least the short provided the necessary support. The padded version (£10/$20 extra) would likely highlight the odd �t further. The Sportful NoRain bibtight is the same price, very warm, totally windproof, very water resistant and �ts properly. Buy that.

We’ve rated plenty of LG products in the past and have no axe to grind but these items are far below what we expect. Jamie Wilkins

Louis Garneau NeoShell

jacket, Providence bibtight

Price £199.99, £84.99 | $279.99, $129.99 � www.louisgarneau.com

THIS KIT IS is claimed to be waterproof, windproof and breathable. The jacket is named after the Polartec NeoShell fabric which is a little softer than other shells and has a bit of stretch. LG say the tight is aimed at ‘moderate winter conditions’ with weather protection coming from the Light WindDry 2 fabric. It sounds promising for crappy days almost year-round.

The reality, though, is disappointing. The jacket is fully waterproof but has very little breathability so within 20 minutes you’re soaked inside anyway. LG say it’s cut for all types of riding and rider but on a road bike that means the �t is loose and it’s both too long in the front and too short in the back so it sits awkwardly and your backside has no spray protection. There are large, effective zip vents to prevent overheating but they’re no substitute for breathability because they let in a chilling draft. In its favour, the sleeve length is good and we like the tall, soft collar, re�ective

PROS

Jacket keeps

the rain out; good

re�lectivity

CONS

Jacket doesn’t breathe; tight

lacks wind- and water-

resistance; both �it loosely

VERDICT

This is not what you

need when the weather

turns bad

PROS

Very stylish;

great comfort in

most regards

CONS

A few quirks

necessitate

a base layer

x

VERDICT

Alluring alternative for

those who �ind skintight

�luoro a sartorial a�front

Right There is no

arguing with the water

resistance of the jacket

– nothing gets through

De Marchi Perfecta jersey, Perfecto bibshort

Price £149.99, £tbc | $198.95, $248.95 � www.demarchi.com

harpThe Procycling Race & Test Team

is powered by

P��: J

ohnn

y A

shel

ford

that probably applies best if you’re from Tuscany and think 18ºC necessitates full winter gear. We were �ne in this jersey on its own at 14ºC on a hard ride. It’s thin but only uses mesh under the arms and suits UK weather. The �t is slightly relaxed and the sizing isn’t as small as Castelli or Santini, for example. It says a lot for how accustomed we are to aero �t clothing that we regard this as a bit loose but not everyone wants to be

squeezed into their jersey. It’s well proportioned so simply drop a size if you want a tight �t. The details are good – a zip rear pocket, YKK camlock zips, a zip garage on the collar to prevent cha�ng and structured support down the back for the pockets.

The Perfecto bibshort looks subtle and stylish but is as technical as the jersey. The multi-panel construction has “targeted compression and springback” for support of your muscles and movement. The legs are longer than average, so keep that in mind, and the wide grippers keep them in place without feeling tight. The bib straps are also wide and sit lightly, though they could be softer. The front of the short

is cut high but, rather than supporting your abdomen like some do, it only makes �rm contact across its top seam (on a skinny type, at least). Between that and the straps, we always wanted to wear a base layer with it.

It’s worth doing, though, because the chamois is outstanding. It’s made by Elastic Interface and is an exclusive design for De Marchi using super high-density (120kg/m3) foam and a complex construction. It’s very comfortable and up with the best we have used. Jamie Wilkins

THIS ITALIAN BRAND is still relatively unknown in the UK but has a rich heritage dating back to 1946 and it’s all still made in Italy. This kit is from their techy Innovation line and, especially in this very cool olive green, it has a discreet and re�ned style that should remind David Millar that he doesn’t own the chic performance wear niche.

The Perfecta jersey is described as being for hot days of 22-30ºC, though

Right Re�lective and tricolore

trim plus a zip pocket – De

Marchi have nailed the details

Even a moderate pace is

enough to cause

moisture build-up in the

jacket on a cool day

Roadtested


For most, the

onset of winter

is imminent.

While this may

be a welcome

sign to those

of you that have been longingly

staring at your cyclo-cross rigs

throughout summer, I would

guess that most readers have

been dreading the moment they

have to pull out the tights and

winter layers.

Before you do that, take some

time to re�lect on your year. This

is the right time to review your

season because winter training is

the start of the next one.

Start with the good bits. Maybe

there was a particular race result

or event that you targeted and

succeeded in. Write down what it

was and look back at what you did

in the four to six weeks prior to it.

Whether that was your coaching

plan, training diary, or data log on

Strava or TrainingPeaks.

Next is the most important part.

Look at what you’d do di�erently

to improve. Remember that if you

always do the same thing, you will

always get the same results. Talk

with your coach or friends and

highlight the areas that could be

improved. Whether this is your

event speci�ic preparation, long-

term training into the event or

other factors such as managing

your time and sleep.

Last winter I wrote about

plotting your targets for the year

ahead. The importance of this

should not be underestimated.

Write down speci�ic, individual

targets that you want to achieve

in the next year. These could be

race results, a category upgrade,

a speci�ic power-to-weight ratio or

a personal achievement. Put them

on your fridge or next to your

turbo. Always consider these on

the cold, damp mornings when

motivation is lacking.

Get in touch with TrainSharp

for more training advice:

trainsharpcyclecoaching.co.uk

REVIEWING YOUR SEASON Jon Sharples, TrainSharp

LAST ISSUE I HAD the 3T Aerotondo bar �tted but I really didn’t get on with it. I’m not a fan of the classic round drop and it is sorely lacking in wrist clearance. And I do mean ‘sorely’ because when on the drops and out of the saddle your wrist can meet the sharp rear edge of the aero pro�le tops. The bar is stiff, looks cool and probably saves a handful of watts but I couldn’t live with it so it came straight off. Now in its place is the fantastic Enve Aero Road bar that I used last year – it’s equally rigid, has loads of wrist clearance, and the �are to the drops mean the hoods sit just 37cm apart, putting you in a really aero position once you drop your elbows. It’s very expensive at £350/$400 but it’s my favourite bar by a long way.

The main photo is from the Severn Bridge Sportive at the end of August. It

Ridley Noah SL20Month 8LONG�TERM TEST

Price £5,400 | $7,500

Distance to date 2,768km

ran from Castle Combe near Bath, across the especially closed bridge into Wales, over some very tough hills and then back. I’d planned to ride it with a friend but he awoke to �nd his garage had been broken into, so instead it was 163km solo. On the new Enve 4.5 clinchers (full test soon) the Ridley was �ying and I �nished in 4:49. The route was enjoyable and well signed, and there was some welcome hot pasta at the end. Check it out next year.

Halfords were very unhappy with last issue’s report of the poor service received at the new Cycle Republic in Bristol. Well, tough. I’ve no axe to grind but we write as we �nd – you can trust our reviews. The Ridley has since been to Cycle Surgery, who showed how it should be done.

Left The brilliant

Enve Aero Road bar

Below Super-fast

Cycling Ceramic

jockey wheels just in

Follow me on Strava:

Jamie Wilkins Procycling Mag

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is powered by

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Ponferrada, Spain Micha¯ Kwiatkowski’s pursuers are close, but the �inish line is closer. The Polish rider took advantage of an assertive approach to

the World Championships by his team, then took the race by the scru�f of the neck just as a late break was being shut down. While his rivals dithered,

he surged down the �inal descent towards the �inish line and took the gold medal by a single second ahead of Simon Gerrans and Alejandro Valverde.

28.09.2014Photography: ©

Tim

De

Wa

ele

06.11.15

A WORLDS APART

WORLD CHAMPS REVIEW

PROCYCLING BRINGS YOU ANALYSIS AND

INSIGHT INTO THE ACTION AT THE WORLD

CHAMPIONSHIPS IN RICHMOND, USA

NEXT ISSUE

O N S A L E

Hand assembled at Speedplay in San Diego, CaliforniaZero Aero Pedals include Zero Aero Walkable™ Cleats.

Pedals of the 2015 UCI Hour Record of 54.526 km

THE 2015 CASTELLI WINTER RANGEDon’t let cold and foul-weather stop you from riding.

CASTELLI-CYCLING.COM

Procycling - November 2015

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Transcript of Procycling - November 2015