Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog

Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog

Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog

Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog

Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog

Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog

Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog Pog

I was tempted to just put the paywall marker right here and leave it at that for all the freeloaders who refuse to subscribe - but I won’t. I’ll tease them out a little bit longer.

Look at all the Pogs there. I think if you stare at that wall of Pogs you lose your mind a bit and I think you actually begin to start to see Tadej Pogacar’s face.

That is the tally of wins that Pogacar has racked up every year from 2019 to 2026. Every one of those has been a Pogging. Some more so than others. He’s really ramped up it up a notch at this Vuelta. He attacked on stage-whatever-it-was and went solo with 50km to go. That was his longest solo win in a Grand Tour ever. Beating his record of 42.7km from Stage 6 of the Tour earlier this year.

I can attack you with stats if you like. All the things that Pog has just done or is just about to do. He’ll be the first rider to win all three jerseys at a Grand Tour since Laurent Jalabert at the Vuelta in 1995. He’ll be the first rider to lead a Grand Tour from start to finish since Tony Rominger at the Vuelta in 1994. He is now the most successful world champion since Freddy Maertens won 35 races after he won the Worlds in 1976. Pog has now won 22 races in this spell as world champion, surpassing Tom Boonen’s tally of 21 after he won in 2005.

Here’s one that isn’t really about Pogacar even though it involves him. Matt Brennan might be about to do something. If he wins a third stage of this Vuelta he would be the first rider to win three stages on their Grand Tour debut since… Tadej Pogacar in 2019.

A question for you. A puzzler. One to ponder.

Who was the last rider to win FOUR stages on their Grand Tour debut?

While you have a little think on that I will marvel at what an incredible achievement that actually is.

Grand Tours are hard. Really bloody hard. The usual saying that we all say is, I think, actually true - if they didn’t exist and someone suggested creating one now, there is absolutely no way that they would be allowed to exist. Grand Tours are preposterous. Three weeks?! Three?! It’s insane.

More often than not when a rider makes their Grand Tour debut, its like a toe in the water. There are zero expectations and the rider is just there to gain experience of what a Grand Tour is like. This is true of lowly domestiques but it’s also largely true of the great champions of the sport too.

To be good enough and fit enough and, I think most importantly, to be trusted by your team enough, even though a rider has never ridden one before, to be backed by your team in your own quest to win stages, even though most of the your teammates have probably ridden plenty before and you haven’t, is quite something. For a rider to be able to step into that arena and instantly deliver.

Matt Brennan has been making it seem routine. And his tick-the-box-thanks-to-all-my-teammates-look-forward-to-the-next-race answers are glossing over the fact that he is in the middle of something really quite amazing. (I know I’m being harsh, I know he’s still practically a teenager. I’m sorry).

Have you thought of an answer yet? Last rider to win four stages on their Grand Tour debut?

Did you think it might have been Eddy Merckx?

WRONG. That imposter only won two stages on his Grand Tour debut

Did you think it might have been Mark Cavendish?

WRONG. He actually rode and abandoned the Tour in 2007 before he started gobbling Grand Tour stage wins the following year.

Did you cheat?

Did you Google it?

Well then. Let’s see what Google’s AI sloppybollocksology search reveals.

I must admit at this point, I had prepared a smarmy response littered with smarm. Alas, I have made a bollocks of my own setup and I am refusing to go back and edit what I’ve already written. Also, I have just now typed in a slightly different search into Google which has revealed quite a different but equally sloppy response, which I find equally amusing. Let’s dig in. And I will course correct as we go.

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There’s usual no rhyme or reason to the choice. I just pluck something off the shelf and have a little look and see where my brain takes me.

I came cross this image of Mark Cavendish and I laughed to myself.

There was a period of time around 2010 to 2013 where I would be shocked to learn that I wasn’t the most frequent visitor and peruser of the UCI Rules and Regulations (actually this is not true, I believe the wearer of that crown is more likely to be Michael Hutchinson).

I would take great satisfaction in figuring out if anyone had been breaking rules and then going and being a smug twat about it on Twitter - as if anyone else cared. One of those times was about that particular jersey Cavendish is wearing.

He won the rainbow jersey in Copenhagen in 2011 and then moved to Team Sky that winter. He only raced in the rainbow jersey twice for HTC - Paris-Tours and Gran Piemonte - before he called it quits that year. This photo is from Paris-Tours where he finished in 42nd place, two places behind Dan Lloyd - pathetic.

Cavendish and Paris-Tours was also a source of amusement. I actually cannot find the quote now which is irritating but early on in his career, probably 2008 or 2009, he said something along the lines of “I’m not that bothered about Paris-Tours yet, I’ll win that three times in my career anyway, no problem”. I never forgot that quote, although I have literally forgotten it, which is embarrassing. I’ve never forgotten the premise of it - that all he had to do was show up at that race and he’d win it, which he planned to do eventually.

He ended up riding it only four times, that 42nd place in 2011, he was 6th in 2016, 56th in 2017 and DNF’d in 2019. In the latter years of his career the race had changed into something else with the dirt roads now a big part of it and it wasn’t really the sprintfest it used to be in most years.

Nevertheless, because I’m a bit of a cunt. I used to tweet something smarmy every year like this:

A juicy 18 likes on that one. Liquid content.

Not only did Cavendish embarrass himself by finishing behind Lloydy in that 2011 race but he did so in a jersey which he shouldn’t have been wearing. I remember working this out at the time and being delighted with myself. There are the regular UCI Regulations which your average rules nerds might frequent. But there are also all kinds of specific sub genre rules documents for the truly pitiable among us.

In those documents you get stuff like this, telling us all how not to use the rainbow stripes.

In one of those documents I found that the rainbow jersey had to be a continuous band around the jersey. It couldn’t be a broken one with a big white gap in it like Cavendish has on him in that picture. There are so many UCI rules that are absolute nonsense, just utter drivel. This one though, this one, I agree with. That Cavendish jersey looks shite. I don’t know why they ever made it. A collector’s item now no doubt, given that he only ever finished one race in it - Paris-Tours.

I had a dream back then that I would some day find a rule in the UCI’s own regulations which would result in the widespread banning of power meters being used in races. It became a large problem for cycling when the Skybots would control entire mountain stages of the Tour de France by riding to watts and not letting anything happen.

I don’t really recommend going back and watching some of those mountain stages in the Team Sky winning Tours de France - for most of them Team Sky were utterly successful in their task of controlling everything with watts. Nothing happened. Nothing. Perfect for Team Sky. Shite for the rest of us.

I still harbour this dream. One day I will find that rule. One day.

It reminds me of one of the greatest websites ever created.

https://chrisfroomelookingatstems.tumblr.com/

The opposite of this, the exact opposite of a rider who would just look at his power meter all the time, was Julian Alaphilippe.

(Yes! I got from a random picture of Mark Cavendish on the pages of a 2012 Cycling Weekly to the topic of the day in just a couple of jumps and you didn’t even notice. That’s how craftily I weave my textual web).

Julian Alaphilippe would look absolutely everywhere apart from at his power meter. His neck muscles must be as strong as his legs. He spent entire races wiggling his head around and around and around looking at everything apart from where he was going.

I re-watched the finale of the 2024 San Sebastian race recently. Alaphilippe was away with a bit of a gap with one kilometre to go. He was being pursued by Marc Hirschi. In the final kilometre Alaphilippe turned around to look where Marc Hirschi was, at least 21 times.

A couple of years ago, I briefly maintained a blog on a website excitingly named The Cycling Website. The first blog I blogged on there was about this very thing. About Julian Alaphilippe’s absurd mannerisms when cycling his bicycle.

Here is a bit of an extract from that:

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Backpedalling?

Yes

You bored?

Yes

Did doing this make you less bored?

Yes

Alright then, what have we got?

We have landed on Stuart O’Grady’s 2014 autobiography Battle Scars. This was around about the time when every cyclist in the world could have gotten a book deal if they wanted one. It was ghost-written by Reece Homfray, who I must admit I’d never heard of before looking at this book.

Look at Stuart O’Grady there looking very serious and battle scarred.

OK, so for the uninitiated, who is/was Stuart O’Grady?

Ah stop. I’m not explaining that.

What? Some people mightn’t know!

He fucking won Paris-Roubaix! A really really dusty version in 2007 when he was riding for Team CSC. And he won two Tour de France stages in 1998 and 2004. ANd wore the yellow jersey in 1998 and 2001.

Oh yeah! Hasn’t this book showed up doing this Backpedal thing before?

No, you’re probably thinking of the time I wrote about Giancarlo Ferretti getting hoodwinked by the guy from Sony Ericsson when he was trying to find a replacement sponsor for Fassa Bortolo. A story tinged with sadness now because Ferretti died last week, on his 85th birthday.

O’Grady was one of the riders affected by that fake team sponsor. He’d signed up to be part of it and thought he was great with his new team. But then like a couple of dozen other riders, he had to scramble in the winter to find another team.

He was a sprintery type without ever really being a full sprinter. Perfect for the green jersey, which he never won, he finished 2nd for the green jersey at the Tour de France four times - which is the most any rider has ever finished 2nd in that competition.

Go on then, what page did you land on?

Well it’s that famous 1998 Tour de France which visited Ireland when I wasn’t in Ireland. Pricks.

It is Page 62. Now I must admit I have never read this book. It does make me wonder what the chronology is like if he’s already on to 1998 by page 62. Seems a bit quick to have covered his entire childhood and early years and the first three years of his career.

What he’s focused on here is the day in 1998 that he took the yellow jersey and as he rightly says, he was only the second ever Australian to wear the yellow jersey after Phil Anderson did it in 1982.

Who is ‘Stevo’?

Stevo, using the complicated nicknaming conventions used by all Australians, is Neil Stephens. He wasn’t even on O’Grady’s team so strictly speaking shouldn’t have been helping him. This Tour would be a short one for Stevo though. A couple of days later, he was thrown out of the Tour along with his entire team before Stage 7. Unfortunately for him, he was riding for Festina, of the Festina Affair.

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Octave Lapize didn’t call anyone a bunch of assassins or criminals. We are meant to believe that Lapize came crawling to a stop during the stage in 1910 and on a route of 326 kilometres, he just so happened to stop in front of the only journalist around and then spat his vitriol at Henri Desgrange while the journalist scribbled it all down.

It’s one of the most repeated stories in cycling history and it is, in all probability, a load of bollocks.

I do wonder sometimes what else is just nonsense. On a much milder level, I am guilty myself of repeating something that I had always thought Christian Prudhomme had said. Around the time that he took over the reins of the Tour de France, I was sure he said something along the lines of wanting to have a Tour with no high mountains. That he wanted three weeks full of rouleur-y medium mountains stages. That this would encapsulate the essence of bike racing. That riders would then need to show they can win with the têtes as well as simply the jambes.

I’ve repeated this Prudhommeism many times on podcasts over the years. I’m sure I can hear in my minds ear Lionel Birnie also mentioning it more than once on The Cycling Podcast.

I have looked for evidence of this quote now and I can’t find it. I don’t think it’s a case of the internet just turning to shit and everything disappearing in a sea of broken links and 404s. I’ve tried looking back through magazines of the time. I thought I knew precisely where I had read it. I thought it was in the official Tour de France guide for the 2008 race.

It was never quite clear when Prudhomme properly took over from Jean-Marie Leblanc as the Tour de France guy. It seemed like a years long process but I believe 2008 was the year when Prudhomme actually got his mitts on the route itself. For instance, he cast aside the prologue time trial for the first time in 41 years.

There is an interview with Christian Prudhomme in that guide, but he doesn’t say anything regarding wanting a Tour with no high mountains. This is all he really says about the high mountains:

…which is kind of the opposite - taking the Tour to the highest possible place.

There is a more recent interview with him on Cycling News about the 2019 route where he said:

"Our desire is not to make things harder but more varied," Prudhomme said. "There will be less hors catégorie cols than in previous years but there will be more second category climbs. There will be more medium mountains, where the race is harder to control, and we take full responsibility for that decision.

Which is kind of, but not quite, what I always thought he’d said. But was more than a decade after I thought he’d said it anyway.

Whether he did or didn’t say that, he should do it. Now.

The Vuelta is about to be Poggified, Pogginised, Pogged. We’ve had to sit and watch Pog winning race after race after race. So I’m sorry but you’re also going to have to read through me repeating my position on Pog one more time:

There are two distinct aspects to the experience of Tadej Pogacar doing what he’s doing to the sport of professional cycling. There is the achievement itself. I can appreciate the greatness of what he is doing. I love that stuff. This is a large part of where my interest in cycling stems from - stats, facts, trivia, the first person in xx years to do yyyy. It’s what I’m all about. But this comes after the fact. After he has done it, I like to look back on what he has done and marvel.

The other aspect is watching the race unfold. And if you’ve set aside a nice 90 minutes for yourself on a free Saturday afternoon to watch the last 50 or 60 kilometres of a bike race, and you sit down on the couch to settle in, and you switch on and see that Pog is already a minute and a half clear solo. That’s shit. I’ll go out and cut the grass instead.

Of course there are exceptions to this. The Alpe d’Huez stage win was riveting. Milan-Sanremo was even more so. But more often than not, when Pog decides with 60km to go that he wants to win, the jeopardy is gone, the uncertainty no longer exists and the thrill of a racing finale has been robbed from us.

I made a spreadsheet.

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Like a cyclist. When Gino Mader died. Or Muriel Furrer. Or Antoine Demoitié.

I didn’t know these people personally. Of course I feel sad that they’ve died. I’m not a monster. But it feels faux or gratuitous or self-aggrandising to declare any of that sadness publicly. It’s declaring a false proximity and it feels like I would be diluting the feelings of those who actually did know these people.

I never felt that more than when Richard Moore died. Even though I did actually know Richard a little bit, I still felt silly at how much loss I felt. The relationship between a really great podcaster and their listeners does that to you though. They trick you into feeling like you’re friends. They are part of your life. They invite you in and share part of themselves with you, even when that mechanism is not reciprocated. You feel like the relationship is symbiotic, but it isn’t. It’s a feeling I still have not come to terms with.

This happened again today.

Not cycling related. You’ll have to forgive me this indulgence.

Glen Hansard died yesterday. He was the singer and guitarist from The Frames. He was 56 years old.

Musicians occupy that same space as a podcaster or broadcaster. If you really really like them and enjoy them, they make you feel like you’re part of something even when they have no idea you feel that way. They suck you in. In ways you’d never really think they could.

I thought of Glen Hansard only a few days ago when I re-released that podcast I had recorded with Peter Cossins about his Alpe d’Huez book.

When editing that for re-release I chopped off the bits around the chat with Cossins that I had recorded originally with my old Velocast chum John Galloway.

Even though I cut it out, I re-listened to it. In it, I made a point about Alpe d’Huez. I compared it to when Glen Hansard stopped at the top of Grafton Street one Christmas Eve. He’d just finished doing his shopping, ‘getting the last few bits’ as we all say in Ireland. And he took out his guitar and started busking. And a crowd gathered around and thought it was brilliant. Glen Hansard! From The Frames! Busking on Grafton Street on Christmas Eve! All the money he made he gave to a homeless charity.

Then he did it again the next year. But people had an inkling he might do it again so they were waiting around. The crowd was much bigger. Then the next year he did it again and a few others joined him - Sinead O’Connor, Damien Dempsey and Bono.

The next year he did it again and more musicians joined him - Imelda Mae, The Coronas and Damien Rice. The Gardaí asked him to stop doing it at the top of Grafton Street and instead move it into the park next door in St. Stephen’s Green. Then it became a bit of a problem for the Gardaí with crowd control and it all became a very different thing than it used to be when it was just Glen Hansard busking at the top of Grafton Street.

Alpe d’Huez has been the same. It was all well and good when Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond were holding hands having a lovely time sauntering up the Alpe. Then along came live TV and social media and Dutch corner and piss being thrown at riders and pleas from riders for roadside fans to give them respect and more piss being thrown at riders. And it had become something different now than it had when it started. More people, more trouble, more police.

That was my weird segue from cycling to Glen Hansard which I edited just last week. And now he’s dead.

I remember writing another article about cycling and Glen Hansard before. I’ve republished it in full down below. It was on my old Irish Peloton blog website, from 2010.

I often wince now when I read back over things I wrote that long ago. I particularly remember another, different article I had written about doping for the website Bike Pure. There’s a cycling blogger called Feargal McKay who remembered it too and has brought it up a number of times since as a stick to beat me with.

Feargal is a one-dimensional man who doesn’t seem to have the capacity to understand that someone can mature and/or change their opinion. He thinks I’m a fucking idiot who doesn’t know anything about cycling. And I think he’s the biggest cunt who has ever written anything about cycling. And I think if we both reflect and are honest with ourselves, we’d concede that we’re both correct.

Anyway, I wrote this particular piece about Glen Hansard 16 years ago. For some reason I made an effort to compare my relationship with him and his music to a rider’s relationship with doping. This was back when I felt much more strongly about doping than I do now and I thought it was important to write very earnestly about everything.

It made me quite sad to read back over it now and relive a lot of the feelings it triggered in me while writing it.

Irishpeloton.com - Dec 2010

Recently I came across an exchange between cycling writer Shane Stokes and former doper Joe Papp on twitter. The conversation was to do with the possibility of declaring an amnesty on doping in cycling. An amnesty such as this, which has been suggested before, involves choosing a day in the calendar, deciding that anybody who doped, or had been involved in doping, before this day can admit it and be exonerated, but anyone caught from this day on will be banned for life, or handed some other severe punishment, in order to finally move on from cycling's sinister past. The counter-argument is that exonerating former dopers and 'moving on' may put a stop to investigations into doping rings that may have been organised in the past, but a full pardon for everyone involved doesn't weed the bad guys out. The drug suppliers, the drug administers and the drug takers will all remain in the sport, as a result of which, all the ingredients will remain for further doping scandals to envelop cycling. As Shane Stokes said 'as long as they still have power and influence. They need to be removed from cycling, not pardoned'. Declaring an amnesty merely papers over cracks.

This brief twitter exchange got me thinking about my own life and in a roundabout way I arrived at the following series of thoughts:

I grew up with music. I started playing so young, I literally can't recall a time when I wasn't able to play the fiddle. My Dad, Paul, was a musician, still is. He used to be in a band called the Fleadh Cowboys who played the midnight at the Olympia slot every Friday during a period in the eighties. Some of my earliest memories are being in the Olympia Theatre on Dame Street during the day, running around the stalls and all around backstage, playing chasing with my brother, while Paul and the rest of the band did their sound check.

During this time, Paul also worked as a musical instrument repairman. He had a workshop on Capel Street, where all sorts of people would pop in with their wounded instruments for Paul to fix. I even remember a time when Father Jack came in with his fiddle! The workshop was amazing, there were hundreds of instruments. Some days, when I was off school, Paul would bring me in to town and I'd spend the day in the workshop. I'd crawl through the piles of abandoned instruments until I found one which had all the strings still on it and play around on it until it was time to go home. In addition, the sitting room at home was chock full of records, tapes, and later on, CDs. I couldn't have been more surrounded by music.

And yet, I never found myself listening to music. Even as I reached my teens I still played the fiddle, but I'd never stick on a tape when I got home from school. I wouldn't even really listen to the radio. I still don't really understand why. My brother Iarfhlaith was the music buff. He would always have music blaring from his room, and he'd constantly get given out to for having it too loud when he couldn't hear Mum calling that dinner was ready.

He'd be listening to bands like Green Day, Nirvana, The Deftones, Korn, Pearl Jam, all pretty heavy stuff. But then one day, when I was about 16, he came home with an album called Dance the Devil by a band called The Frames. By this stage, I couldn't help but be familiar with all the music that he'd be listening to by osmosis, but I'd still never find myself wanting to listen to it on my own time. But when he stuck Dance the Devil on, I remember sticking my head around the door and saying "who's that?", I wanted it.

This was an indie rock band, with a fiddle in it, a concept I'd never come across before, and I could so obviously relate to. I put the album on repeat for days and days until I knew every lyric, every sound effect and every note, I was hooked. I wanted more. So Iarfhlaith, who was busy becoming obssessed with them himself, unearthed more of their albums, a previous one called Fitzcarraldo, and a brand new one called For the Birds. I loved all of it.

Then Iarfhlaith told me he was going to see The Frames one night, in Whelan's on Wexford Street. "What?!" I said, "Surely they'd be playing bigger venues than Whelan's". He said "no, sure they're only a small Irish band really". Again I couldn't believe it, "They're Irish?". "Yeah of course" said Iarfhlaith, "sure the lead singer was in The Commitments". We had no internet in the house at that stage, so I had no way of just 'looking them up' and finding out about them. So I had simply presumed they were American, same as most of the other bands that Iarfhlaith would be listening to. So to find out this band I had learned to love were Irish and that they played gigs a couple of miles down the road from my house was music to my ears, so to speak. (Later I'd find out the band got their name from the numerous amounts of bicycle frames which would be hanging in Glen Hansard's garage, his house became known as 'the house with the frames').

I wanted to go to their next gig, which happened to be in Galway City. So myself, my brother and two of our cousins, who were also mad into them, took the train to Galway, booked ourselves into a hostel and went to see them in a big tent. The gig was incredible. Of course, the memory of it has been blurred by nostalgia, but it remains the best gig I've ever been to. They played for about three hours, at one stage the lead singer Glen Hansard bodysurfed into the crowd right in front of us. Then towards the end of the gig, he started calling fans up on stage to sing a song called 'Heyday' with him. So about fifty of us managed to make it up on the stage before security started stopping people from jumping up. We sang and danced with the band and I managed to nab a set of drumsticks and the setlist, before we were ushered off.

After that, to say I was hooked would be a gross understatement. I'd say in the next four years I went to see them thirty times. They'd play five night runs in Vicar Street and I'd go to as many as I could afford. The way Glen Hansard played songs was like nothing I'd experienced before. He'd start off with one song, then he'd segue into another, then on further into a cover version, then back into the original song he started with all the while he'd have the crowd singing over him perfectly with lyrics from a completely different song. I wanted to be him, I wanted to do what he could do. I wanted to be at parties and whip out the guitar and sing for hours and woo the crowd. But to do so, I had to learn the guitar, and sing.

So I did. I learned really quickly, and got fairly good really quickly. I remember getting sick of people telling me that they'd love to be so talented at music that they could be able to play the guitar so well in a few months. It used to drive me mad. Because for those few months, by God I practiced... and practiced and practiced. I didn't just pick up the guitar and by some 'God-given' right I was capable of playing immediately. I practiced so much during that period that my fingers bled and I failed my college exams.

The Frames would play plenty of covers, they'd get special guests on stage with them and they'd have a different support act every night. This led me towards discovering loads of other bands, I wanted to listen to the same music The Frames were listening to. As we now had broadband in the house, unashamedly, I frequented the likes of Ares and Kazaa on a regular basis to quench my thirst for new music. The Waterboys, The Pixies, Mundy, Damien Rice, Ash, BellX1, Kraftwerk, Deus, Bob Dylan, Jeff Buckley, Tim Buckley, the list was endless. The Frames, and particularly, their frontman Glen Hansard, shaped who I was as a teenager. The fact that I learned to play the guitar meant I'd sing at endless parties throughout college, and indirectly, this has led me to going out with my girlfriend now and doing the PhD I find myself in the middle of. All because of The Frames!

As the years passed and The Frames became more and more popular, amongst my peers it became rather naff to be a big fan. Then the band took a break and Glen Hansard went off and won himself an Oscar. My fandom waned. But when I heard The Frames were back gigging this Christmas, I couldn't resist. It had been years since I'd seen them. So myself and my brother went to see them last Thursday in Whelan's. The gig was great, and I enjoyed it hugely, but seeing the band now, it's almost embarrassing to admit that this one person could have had such an influence on my life. But it could have been a lot worse…

The guy that I wanted to be, played the guitar and sang. So to be like him, I played the guitar and sang. But what about the youngsters in cycling? They are also just impressionable teenagers. What did their heroes have to do to earn the adoration of the crowd? There are so many directeur sportifs (and riders) who doped in their past, who are now in charge of young riders and their futures. If there is an investigation in to one of these guys and it is discovered that he is now in charge of a systematic doping regime to boost his riders' performances, the basis of which he probably learned when he was a rider himself, then this person needs to be brought to justice. They cannot be allowed to be given a pardon just because doping investigations are long and arduous and bring bad press to the sport. These guys *have *to be investigated. I found a hero who I wanted to emulate and did all I could to do so. But I didn't have access to my hero. What must it be like for the young riders of today who have doper directeur sportif heroes who they actually see on a regular basis, and who can be more directly influenced by them than I ever was? Will they do whatever it takes? I know I did. I've got the scars to prove it."

With that in mind, it felt timely to excavate this one from the archives.

I think this is one of the very early episodes of the Velocast Reading Room that I did. We recorded it in June 2015. I do remember the first two episodes were with Matt Rendell about his Marco Pantani book and then with Daniel Friebe about his Eddy Merckx book. I think this one with Peter Cossins might have been the third one.

The earlier episodes involved me in conversation with John Galloway discussing the book before and after we cut to the interview with the author. The later ones were just me on my own.

It’s a strange feeling now going back and chopping them up and taking the bits with John out. No need to feel sympathy for him, he won’t give a fuck. And he definitely won’t be reading this.

Peter Cossins appeared on that books podcast more than any other writer. I had him on talking about Alpe d’Huez, his book on the 1903 Tour de France, his book on tactics called Full Gas and his book on The Monuments.

In this chat about Alpe d’Huez I mention a story in passing about a rider who used to ride for Rabobank and Lotto called Aart Vierhouten. I mention a really great anecdote from the book but then I don’t say what it is because I don’t want to spoil the book for people. I reckon 11 years is probably time enough where I won’t get accused of spoilers.

So if you listen to the podcast above and you get to just before 21 minutes and you’re wondering what that story is that I deliberately don’t say. Here it is:

In 2004 having struggled all the way up the climb, illness putting him through every kind of torture, Vierhouten rolled into the finish after taking almost fifty-four minutes when most of his peers were taking around forty-five to complete the 15.5-kilometre time trial from Bourg d’Oisans.

‘Jezus Christus!’ exclaimed the sweat-soaked Dutchman as saliva ran off his chin. A few hours later, as he lay on his bed looking at the ceiling of his hotel room, Vierhouten was told his effort had been in vain. He had been eliminated from the race after finishing outside the time limit established by Lance Armstrong’s near-record ascent of the Alpe.

Rather than shedding tears as many of those left by the Tour tend to, Vierhouten listened to his Lotto team leader Robbie McEwen. ‘Come on, Aart, let’s go and do some boozing in the village’, the Aussie urged him. Vierhouten had already knocked back a few when he remembered he had agreed to go on Dutch post-stage TV programme De Avondetappe. He stumbled onto the set and conducted an interview with beer in hand. During the course of it, his eye caught that of a woman in the audience. They chatted, got on and spent the evening dancing in the Igloo nightclub. Aart and Miriam Langedijk are now married and run cycling clinics together.

People who wrote books had always been just people who wrote books. They were names on tatty spines. They were abstract concepts from which words came from. They weren’t real people.

The emergence of Twitter coincided with the commencement of my quest to buy and read EVERY CYCLING BOOK IN THE WORLD. For a few months they were just names on spines - William Fotheringham, Richard Moore, Les Woodland, Jeremy Whittle. Then some of them started appearing on this social media thing and they became fully formed people.

I am a pedantic arsehole now. And I was a pedantic arsehole back then. I actually think I’ve toned down the pedanticarsholeism in recent years. I was way worse back then. I would read books and find mistakes in them. And now, oh my word, now… I could explain to the authors directly just how wrong they were.

My first victim was Richard Moore. In reading his book In Search of Robert Millar I remember I had found mention of ‘consecutive’ Tour de France wins by Bernard Thevenet - when of course, he won in non-consecutive years in 1975 and 1977. And I caught him writing that Stephen Roche held on to his yellow jersey at La Plagne when he nearly caught Pedro Delgado and collapsed and needed oxygen. But it was Delgado who was in yellow that day.

Of course I was delighted with myself. A less wholesome writer would have just ignored me. To Richard’s great credit he private messaged me, asked for email address and encouraged me to keep finding mistakes because he wanted to correct all of them for an upcoming reprint.

My second victim was also Richard Moore. In reading his book Slaying the Badger I had found him writing down that Bernard Hinault rode Paris-Roubaix once, won it, and never rode it again.

Again this real person who was actually real and wasn’t just a name on a bookshelf wrote back to me. Pro Cycling Stats didn’t exist back then so just looking this stuff up was not straight forward. I gave Richard all the details of the editions of Paris-Roubaix that Hinault did ride. Richard thanked me and said I should start charging money for this kind of stuff - which, looking back on 15 years later, has made me smile.

Richard’s explanation for this incorrect info about Hinault was that it had actually come from Bernard Hinault himself.

This, I find interesting. Either Hinault was utterly misremembering his own life or, more likely, he was purposely adjusting his own memories for the sake of a good story. Riders, sometimes, are very unreliable sources of information about their own careers. There is a reason that a person themselves is not considered an acceptable source for one’s own Wikipedia page.

I came across an example of this recently. Daniel Friebe has been doing an excellent podcast series throughout the Tour on the notion that Paul Seixas might finally win the Tour de France for France, if not this year then soon.

In one of the episodes, Friebos talks to a rider who was the first next Bernard Hinault - Jean François Bernard, who nearly won the very first Tour after Hinault’s retirement but the peloton rather ganged up on him and Stephen Roche won instead.

In that 1987 Tour, Jean François Bernard won two time trials - one up Mont Ventoux and another flatter one in Dijon on the penultimate stage.

Friebe said in that podcast:

Whenever anyone asks him about that 1987 Tour, ‘Jeff’ never fails to mention a curious fact - he’s the only rider ever to win two individual time trials in a single edition [of the Tour] but not win the general classification.

I’m a nerd. A geek. It’s at these moments when listening to cycling podcasts that I would tend to pause and have a little think to see if I can come up with a counter-example. If I do manage to think of a reason why someone is wrong, I tend not to Tweet it these days. Not because I have matured or anything like that. It’s just that Twitter is mostly shite now and nobody cares about anything on there anymore.

Well, here I am, storing up my own personal corrections corner for The Backpedal. What else to use this platform for other than to tell everyone else how wrong they are?

But Friebos beat me to it. Before I could shift my brain down a gear (or up a gear? nobody knows) and start thinking properly, he followed up immediately by saying:

Except Jeff is wrong. I have my suspicions when he tells me and sure enough I can think of two other examples no sooner has our conversation ended - Serhiy Honchar in 2006 and Jan Ullrich in 1998.

Damn.

I would have enjoyed trying to come up with those counter-examples.

“But hold on a minute” - I thought to myself. “There are more than just Honchar and Ullrich. What about Fabian Cancellara? He won about 50 Tour de France time trials. He must be one. There must be others”

So I checked.

Jeff wasn’t just wrong, as Daniel pointed out. Jeff was really really really wrong.

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Last week I worked out who the winner of the 2,000th Tour de France stage was. Quite fantastically, it was Floyd Landis when he performed the most notorious drug-fuelled act in Tour history at Morzine in 2006.

Of course I went back and also figured out the 1,000th Tour stage winner. Of course I did. I chose not to mention it in the same article because I dismissed it. I guessed it would have been in the early or mid 1960s. So I held it in my head that If it had have been Jacques Anquetil or Raymond Poulidor or Federico Bahamontes, then that would have been good and worth adding to the Landis article.

But it wasn’t any of them. I saw who it was and I dismissed him as boring and unworthy and so I left the stat behind.

I’ve checked myself. Took a good long hard look in the mirror at who I am and why I love cycling. Celebrating the under-celebrated is something I’m supposed to be championing on this Backpedal thing. I know I don’t stand for much on here… in fact, I do remember what my erstwhile DNF podcast co-host said about this Substack on one of our episodes last year:

You’ve really mastered the art of the highest of brow and the lowest of brow - both smashed together as violently as possible. Really rich information coupled with just gutteral bollocks

I think that’s the nicest thing Harry has ever said about me.

So I don’t stand for very much - but in among the gutteral bollocks I like to think I do appreciate the under-appreciated.

Ward Sels.

Ward Sels won the 1,000th stage of the Tour de France.

Again, I am almost certain this was not known at the time. This stage win passed without any fanfare related to the fact that it had been the 1,000th Tour stage. Nobody had thought to keep count from 1903. Or maybe nobody cared about big roundy numbers like this back then. Perhaps our stupid goober scroll goop brains only care about this stuff now because it’s the type of thing that goes well on an Instagram post.

The first thing to say about Ward Sels is that ‘Ward’ is not his name. His name is Edward. I was also just about the write there that his name was Edward. A subconscious assumption on my part because all of the other cyclists I generally think of from cycling in the early 1960s are dead now. But Ward Sels is still alive - he’s 84 now.

I did check who the oldest living Tour de France stage winner is. Up until late December 2024, it was Émile Idée who lasted until the absurd age of 104 and a half. He won a stage of the Tour in 1949, a Tour in which Fiorenzo Magni, Gino Bartali and Fausto Coppi all wore the yellow jersey. Imagine, living a life where you rode alongside all of those guys in yellow, and also lived to see Paul Seixas win a rainbow jersey.

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If you don’t remember that show, it was a sports quiz hosted by Nick Hancock with team captains David Gower the cricketer and Gary Lineker. It was like A Question of Sport but actually funny and with cursing. I was probably too young to be watching it.

I always remembered a really great joke that was on it. It wasn’t a dirty joke or a rude joke. The setup for the joke was a genuine story about a football fan whose Dad had died and been cremated. And the son continued to bring his Dad to football matches in an urn. Eventually, the son was stopped from bringing the urn into the stadium, so he started sneaking the ashes into the stadium in an old milk bottle instead.

The joke was “what’s the world coming to when you can’t even bring a bottle of pop into a football match”.

Perfect. Just a really great, well-formed, harmless joke.

I always remembered that joke. Then about 25 years later I was listening to a podcast about football in the 1990s - Quickly Kevin Will He Score, (if you think I enjoy and get nostalgic about cycling in the 1990s, you should see me go with football in the 90s). They had Nick Hancock on as a guest and he was talking about his time presenting They Think It’s All Over.

One of the podcast presenters was comedian Josh Widdicombe and he said to Hancock “can I tell you about the best joke I’d heard on that show” and Hancock stopped him and said “I know which one it is”. And he did. To Josh Widdicombe’s delight, and mine, Hancock just knew it was the bottle of pop joke.

He described the shape of the joke being perfect. It wasn’t uproariously funny. It just had a perfect shape which resonated.

Sometimes a stat comes along with a perfect shape.

It’s a beautiful thing. An undeniable fact that even if you don’t care for these types of things, you can appreciate it and be happy for the people who do. This happened after the first stage of the Tour de France.

Jonas Vingegaard was in the yellow jersey, Egan Bernal was in the green jersey and Tadej Pogacar was in the polka-dot jersey.

All former Tour de France winners wearing all three jerseys at the Tour de France.

Perfection.

And these three guys are the only three former Tour winners in the race.

If there was a tiny blemish on this perfect statistical sphere. If there was to be a little stain, it was that Chris Froome had technically still not retired. And so his absence from the Tour meant that he was the only other former Tour de France winner missing from this perfect stat party. But even that, even Chris Froome had the good grace to finally announce his retirement just the day before this Stage 1 of the 2026 Tour de France.

Vingegaard, Bernal and Pog - the only three current professional cyclists who have won the Tour were in all the jerseys of the Tour. And not just ‘wearing’ them. None of this keeping-the-jersey-warm because Vingegaard holds all of them or anything like that. Each of the three of them were actually leading each of the three classifications.

The stat that it reminds me most of is that at the 1989 Tour de France, the final podium consisted of the winner of the Vuelta (Pedro Delgado), the winner of the Giro (Laurent Fignon) and the winner of the Tour (Greg LeMond. That had been the only time that had ever happened.

Jumbo-Visma kind of ruined it at the 2023 Vuelta when they did it too , but the races are in the wrong order now and the riders didn’t appear properly in the order on the podium which reflected the order of importance of the races.

I threw another stat out there on the socials before the Tour started which was that this Tour is the first time ever, since performance enhancing drugs were banned, that there will be no rider in the Tour de France who has experienced a doping scandal at the Tour.

The responses on Twitter were really quite amusing. Getting all riled up on social media really is in the eye of the beholder.

Feel what way?

I think this one was my favourite. Despite not indicating any feeling whatsoever I was told my feelings were not welcome. I am being told we should just ignore anything to do with doping and enjoy the show.

And here is what is seemingly the opposite view:

That I am telling everyone we should just ignore anything to do with doping and enjoy the show.

A brilliant dichotomy of responses - neither of which reflect what I was actually thinking when I posted this. So let me clarify…

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1000 days… it doesn’t really mean anything. Why not make it hours? Then it’ll be a bigger, more impressive number. It’s 24,000 hours since this guy’s last win. What a loser.

Days just isn’t the currency of cycling. If it’s 100 races since a rider’s last win, then maybe. That’s more palatable and understandable and relevant. Days can fuck off.

However, I did find myself wondering about another arbitrary number recently which probably contradicts the lack of interest I’ve just described. Performing some shite mental arithmetic while I was out walking the dog earlier I figured that, currently, we mustn’t be too far away from the 2,500th Tour de France stage. Maybe it’s due to happen in the next few weeks?

Paul Seixas winning the 2,500th Tour de France stage at the age of 19, cementing his chops as the actual next Bernard Hinault and not just one of the non-Bernardhinault’s we’ve had before. Or Pog winning it in the rainbow jersey and taking the yellow one on his way to a record-equalling fifth Tour win. Or Julian Alaphilippe rolling back the years to take one last big wibbly-wobbly-looky-roundy-jumpy-uppy-downy-julian-alaphilippey victory.

There have been 112 editions of the Tour, I knew that in my head. Multiplied by 21 stages gave me 2,352. Close, but not quite. Aha! It hasn’t always been 21 stages though. There was that mad period in the 1930s and again in the 1970s when there were oodles of split stages. On the flip side, the first couple of decades of the Tour didn’t quite have 21 stages. It would be close enough. I would need to get my spreadsheet out.

One of my pet peeves is when I see the word ‘countless’ referring to something which is very definitely countable. Tadej Pogacar has won countless races. No he fucking hasn’t. Go and count them.

So I went and counted the stages from 1903 to 2025.

It turns out there have been, so far, 2,403 stages of the Tour de France, ever. So we’ll have to wait another five years for the 2,500th stage.

I don’t recall ever hearing or reading about the 2,000th Tour de France stage when it happened. It would have been in the pre-stats days when pedantic arseholes like me didn’t exist and you couldn’t just look this stuff up. Phil Liggett would have had to get his old road books out and work it out himself and let us know on the highlights show. But even Liggett didn’t do this.

Let’s do it in hindsight and celebrate the winner of the 2,000th stage of the Tour de France.

I always remember the fact that Les Ferdinand scored the 10,000th goal ever in the Premier League and thinking that was quite good - that it was Les Ferdinand, a Premier League legend and it wasn’t some shite nobody that we’d never heard of.

So who do we get if we reverse 403 Tour stages backwards from now?

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Not like cyclists. Cyclists are superior. When they crash and have broken bones and are covered in blood, do you see them rolling around theatrically? Do you fuck. You see them getting back on their bikes and trying to continue no matter what. They’re hard men those guys. Haaaaaaaard men. Not like those pathetic footballers who are so pathetic….

The World Cup is on. The football one. And whenever there’s quite a large football event happening, you don’t need to look around too long before you’ll find someone somewhere having this reaction to something one of the footballers did.

Oh look, here’s one.

I’ll stop being a sarcastic bastard now.

This opinion on footballers and particularly this opinion that cycling fans have on footballers versus cyclists, is wrong.

All sports are different. Cycling and football are very different. Nevertheless, there is one main thing that all sports have in common. One thing that pervades all sports more than anything else - winning. Every cyclist and every footballer is ultimately trying to win.

In a football match, rolling around on the ground complaining that you’re horrifically injured is not because footballers are ‘soft’. Have you seen footballers these days? They are incredible physical specimens with eight-packs, bulging thigh muscles and fuck all body fat. If an opponent happens to brush past them and they fall down, it’s not because they are physically and emotionally incapable of handling that sensation.

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There were 7 (seven) road races live on TNT yesterday.

I know people grumble about the price of a TNT subscription, but if you’d told me 15 years ago when I was faffing around trying to figure out what exactly the live offering was in Ireland via CyclingTV (anyone remember that?), that there would exist a service for 30-something quid a month where you can watch everything. I think I would have been quite pleased.

This, of course, is all the fault of GCN+ for destroying our expectations of what we should reasonably expect to pay for a service like this.

Definitely not sorry.

Despite the fact there are too many races to watch, it’s a bit of a lull now in my stat cave until the Tour de France. A couple of weeks at stat altitude, breathing in the rarefied information, just keeping the brain ticking over and doing some mental recces on what’s to come.

One of the facts that struck me during the Dauphiné was in relation to the possibility of Matteo Jorgenson winning the race overall. He didn’t in the end although right up to the final stage it seemed a not unlikely outcome. If he had won he would have been the fifth American to win the race. If we consider all 15 stage races that are currently on the WorldTour calendar - even without Jorgenson’s potential win that didn’t happen and even without Lance Armstrong’s actual wins which also didn’t happen - the Dauphiné is the race which has been won most often by American riders:

Greg LeMond (1983), Tyler Hamilton (2000), Levi Leipheimer (2006) and Andrew Talansky (2014)

It was LeMond’s win in 1983 which I found myself most interested in this week. I didn’t really know anything about it. It wasn’t his first stage race win or even his first stage race win in Europe - he had won the Circuit de la Sarthe in 1980 and the Coors Classic in 1981 - but at the age of still just 21, it was his first big stage race win in Europe. The circumstances in which he won it were not typical.

In a time before riders were quite regularly being stripped of victories this was indeed rather unusual. Well let’s straighten out a few things. Pascal Simon was not ‘stripped of victory’ - not explicitly. In those days doping was just a wee misdemeanour, a smack on the bottom and away you go. Pascal Simon tested positive for Prethcamide Micorene - a respiratory stimulant - and his punishment was a 10-minute time penalty.

So instead of finishing 2’12” ahead of LeMond in the final standings, Pascal Simon ended up off the podium in 4th place, 7’48” behind LeMond. Not stripped of any results, simply penalised some time.

What appears to have been lost across Wikipedia, Pro Cycling Stats and most other places where you would expect to find these things is that the Australian rider Phil Anderson, teammates with Pascal Simon on the Peugeot team, had also tested positive on the same day for the same substance and received the same punishment, which dropped him from a potential 2nd place behind LeMond, down to 6th place overall.

There was definitely an air of sheepishness in, say, the 2000s whenever a rider received a victory after the fact as a result of doping. Not so with Gregmond LeMond. This is what he said:

When you win a race that way, it’s a victory clear and simple because the guy who beat you probably wouldn’t have been able to do it if he hadn’t been taking illegal substances.

LeMond went on to finish 4th at the Tour of Switzerland shortly afterwards. This was back in the day when you could ride both the Dauphiné and the Tour of Switzerland in the same year and it was also back in the day when it was called the Tour of Switzerland rather than the Tour de Suisse.

Of course, riders were free to do that this year. For the first time since 2003 the two races did not overlap. This is primarily because the Tour de Suisse is a watered down five-day race now (that’s right Pog, it’s not even a proper Tour de Suisse win - us arseholes will remember this).

And three riders who rode the Dauphiné actually were on the startline of the Tour de Suisse - Michael Matthews, Finn Fisher-Black and Matthew Riccitello. Irritatingly, all three of them failed to finish the Dauphiné which rather takes the shine off the achievement of going to ride the Tour de Suisse afterward.

Coincidentally, the only rider who has ever won both races in the same year was one of our Peugeot pests from the 1983 race, Phil Anderson, who won both in 1985. Pog should concentrate on achieving these kinds of feats if he really wants to impress cycling fans. Enough faffing around at the Tour de France - go and win Paris-Tours and the Tour of Lombardy on the same weekend. Or if he does insist on riding the Tour de France, go to the startline of the Tour of Portugal the very next day and win that, just like Zenon Jaskula in 1997.

In that same Velonews magazine report of LeMond’s inherited win at the Dauphiné came some detail about his next plans:

Next came Hinault’s announcement and immediate pressure to have LeMond, who turned 22 on June 26th, take over as Renault captain in the Tour de France. But he was already riding in the Tour of Switzerland and his schedule had not been designed for the big French race.

In the end, coach Cyrille Guimard sided with him in saying he should stick to his career plan and not ride the Tour until at least next season.

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Andy McGrath has written a book about him. The first and so far only English language book about him, assuming you ignore the AI sloppy shite on Amazon - which of course you should.

We talk about all of this in the podcast - Pog, the book, is he ruining cycling, AI, cycling writing, cycling journalism.

I think I probably talk too much in it, forcing my opinions on the listener instead of allowing Andy more room to talk about his opinions.

Sorry about that. Although I obviously wasn’t sorry enough to edit out me doing that.

Hope you all give it a listen.

I ended up typing ‘this race’ a lot but still ended up just calling it the Dauphiné.

One of the stats that stood out while I was prepping for Stage 1 was that EF Education had never won a stage of this race (see, just like that… ). This is the 18th time they’ve ridden it and they’ve actually won it overall twice, in 2014 with Andrew Talansky and in 2020 with Dani Martinez. Both brilliant editions of the race where the eventual winner snaffled the race lead on the final day from under the noses of much bigger names, but neither rider actually won a stage along the way. And neither had anyone else from that team, ever - until today.

It’s nice when that happens. Preparing stats and facts ahead of time can be a bit of a mixture of stuff that has happened and stuff that might happen. When I present a nice fact which is relevant to something that might happen and then that something happens and Alex Baudin goes off and wins the first ever stage for the team - well, that’s a very tidy scenario which I enjoy. Jose Been was on the English commentary and, having just had it on in the background there, I don’t think she mentioned it. I hope it was used by some of the other language commentators.

One of the other things that stood out for me was that none of the final podium from last year’s Tour de France are taking part. Pog is off to Switzerland next week to continue his mission to complete cycling, Remco Evenepoel has been doing fuck all since Liége and Florian Lipowitz is approaching the Tour de France via the Tour of Slovenia.

This doesn’t happen very often. In the past 30 years, it’s only the fourth time. The 2024 edition didn’t have any of the previous year’s Tour podium either - Jonas Vingegaard, Tadej Pogacar or Adam Yates. And then it also happened in 2006 because Lance Armstrong had retired, Basso was going for the Giro/Tour double and Jan Ullrich was actually looking like a supreme bike rider again having won the Tour de Suisse. And it happened in the 2001 edition when Armstrong, Ullrich and Joseba Beloki were all doing other things.

It’s quite the change from last year’s race where we had Pog, Vinge and Evenepoel all going at it at the Dauphiné. It brings to mind again this ‘truism’ that gets pushed at us that we need all the best riders in all the best races all the time.

The Inner Ring posted this on Blue Sky earlier this week:

This whole project seems like it is one that will never die. It will just endlessly change names without anything ever happening. The goal, still, seems to be create a new set of generic races and make all the best riders ride them. The implicit assertion seems to be that the best riders do not race each other enough the way things are now.

I get invited to a pre-race meeting with all the TNT commentators before the bigger races - the Grand Tours - where plans are laid out and tactics are discussed for how different aspects of the live coverage are going to work for this particular race. I don’t really need to be there, but it’s nice to be invited and I go along when I can out of curiosity.

Last year this meeting happened about a week before the Tour de France. There was a special guest. Mr. Richard Plugge of Visma Lease-a-Bike and, more pertinently, of the One Cycling project.

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There have been a lot of shite cycling ads over the years. A lot. Anyone remember Ivan Basso and Vincenzo Nibali cooking a pair of Sidi cycling shoes?

Imagine the production meetings before, during and after that one. How many people had a chance to put a stop to it? How many people could have paused everything and said ‘lads, honestly, cooking the shoes? we have Basso and Nibali for a morning’s worth of filming and we’re making them cook the shoes?’

And they all just went along with it.

I don’t know why the Tyler Farrar one has stuck with me more than any of the others. A large part of it, of course, is because it was shown during every Eurosport ad break of every stage of every race for a full year. And I’m almost sure I’m not misremembering this part… that sometimes it was shown twice during the same ad break.

I cannot now hear or read the name Tyler Farrar with immediately following it in my head with “sprinter of Team Garmin Transitions”

The reason I, and you, might have been hearing or reading the name Tyler Farrar Sprinterofteam Garmintransitions recently is because of Sepp Kuss. The rider who is so good at doing domestiquing that he once accidentally won a Grand Tour has now done something else quite good - he has now completed the rare feat of winning a stage of all three Grand Tours.

The last American to do it before Kuss, and actually the only other American to do it besides Kuss, was Tylerfarrarsprinterofteamgarmintransitions. He did the most ‘America fuck yeah!’ thing ever by completing the hat-trick at the Tour de France on Independence Day, in 2011, wearing his Transitions sunglasses.

This is the point at which I’m going to do my equivalent of Colombo’s ‘just one more thing’. This Grand Tour stage winnning treble triple hat-trick thing - I typed out above that it is a ‘rare feat’. It isn’t. That was just me parroting every other report on Kuss’s achievement. Did you read that and nod your head and think ‘yeah, quite rare, yeah’ or did you think to yourself ‘IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME!!!’

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Conversely, the kids have been watching The Simpsons recently and it’s alarming how many of the lines I remember from it. I’m able to reel off full conversations between characters as they’re happening. I do this so freely and easily and so often that I have become so irritating to my kids that they don’t let me watch it with them anymore.

I told them I used to have a Simpsons album on tape. I asked Alexa to play one of the songs from it. It was called Deep Deep Trouble. I remembered every single word. And there are a lot of words. Instantly, I remembered it. I hadn’t heard it for at least 30 years. It was all still there, fully intact ready to be raised from the depths of my squelchy brain tissue directly into my mouth.

Similarly, I can’t really remember much about the first week of the Giro. I watched most of the stages live. And then I watched them again in highlights form, in the background as I pored through every detail of those stages harvesting them for information to present back to the Eurosport/TNT commentators for the next day’s coverage. I couldn’t have immersed myself more in these stages and yet I know they have only penetrated the most shallow glades of my brain forest. In another couple of weeks, it will all be gone completely as I move on and start thinking about the Dauphiné or whatever shite name they’ve changed it to.

And again, much like episodes of The Simpsons from the 1990s are so readily accessible to me, cycling in the 1990s is so much more vivid and available to recall than any given race in the past 10 years.

For example, one of the most visceral memories I have of cycling from the 1990s was watching Djamolidin Abdoujaparov slide shockingly along the Champs Élysées like a rag doll after he stopped looking where he was going and he smashed himself straight into a giant Coca Cola can.

I didn’t watch this live or anything. 1991 was a year or so before I began to get interested in cycling. Instead, I watched it on a VHS tape. A freebie that I believe was distributed with the first ever issue of Cycle Sport magazine in Spring of 1993.

I caught myself a couple of weeks ago having a pop off my own kids as I lectured them on The Way Things Were. I laughed at myself later. Only later though, after I had portrayed my pathetically stereotypical message with great seriousness. You see, they had had the audacity to tell me they were bored.

“Bored?!! You’re bored?! You two don’t know how lucky you are! You wouldn’t believe what things were like back in my day. In MY DAY! You don’t know what it is to be bored!!”

I tried to explain to them that in any given household there was a cupboard of 10 or 12 VHS tapes. And when there was nothing on telly, which was almost always, every child in the house watched these VHS tapes over and over and over again until they knew them off by heart. The particular tapes in any given house were generally random and they ended up shaping your entire personality. So whatever the videos were in your particular household, in hindsight, were really quite crucial.

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That’s interesting.

And he wore the yellow jersey a few years back too… I wonder…

(This is how my brain works, you see. Is yours not the same?)

I wonder are there many other Italians who have worn both jerseys in their career. Ah yeah but sure there are plenty who’ve won both races - Marco Pantani, Felice Gimondi, Vincenzo Nibali…

OK OK, maybe he’s the only Italian to have worn both leader’s jerseys but who has never actually won either race?

Is that a good stat? Let’s see how many there are…

And on and on I go. This is how I spend my evenings during the Giro, preparing interesting factoids for the commentators. They leave it up to me to decide what I consider interesting. And that can be quite tricky. I think I set quite a high bar for myself. Most stats are shit and not interesting.

This is Davide Ballerini’s 12th career win and before last week at the Tour of Turkey he hadn’t won a race for nearly four years.

Actually, maybe that is a bit interesting. And I think that’s the point I’m trying to make. My shit is someone else’s treasure… or something.

Sometimes I’m not overly satisfied with a stat or fact but I’ll include it anyway because I’ve been at it for a couple of hours already and I’m getting tired. And then I’ll hear it mentioned in commentary and that fact will garner more interest than I ever would have thought, as I was about to cast it aside on to the nerd cave cutting room floor.

I also have a habit of writing with Rob Hatch and Matt Stephens in mind. Those guys are the ones I listen to so this is only natural. But I have to remind myself that the group I send these facts to contains many many more people. The fact sheets get picked up and used by all of the Eurosport commentary teams (remember Eurosport?! Well it’s still a thing over on mainland Europe) in all of the different languages.

So a slightly interesting thing about an Italian mightn’t be that interesting to Rob and Matt. But it might be 5 minutes worth of excited conversation for the Italian commentary team.

I did eventually work out that Ciccone was the 14th Italian to have worn both the pink jersey and the yellow jersey in their career. The riders (and the year they completed this double):

Learco Guerra (1931), Gino Bartali (1937), Fiorenzo Magni (1949), Fausto Coppi (1949), Gastone Nencini (1960), Felice Gimondi (1967), Giancarlo Polidori (1969), Francesco Moser (1976), Mario Cipollini (1995), Ivan Gotti (1997), Marco Pantani (1998), Vincenzo Nibali (2014) and Fabio Aru (2017).

It would have been better if the list was smaller. When checking these things, the heart sinks a little bit every time I find another one and the impact of whatever the stat is gets diluted somewhat.

My heart really sinks whenever I receive a WhatsApp message from one of the commentators - a side WhatsApp, a sidey, so as not to embarrass me.

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Cyclists getting injured, for example. We’ve seen some bad ones this week at the Giro. Crashes. Broken bones. Plans ruined. Seasons interrupted.

Interrupted… not over. Just interrupted.

If I think back 10 or 20 years I (perhaps erroneously) conclude that a rider crashing and breaking a bone at this time of year meant their season was practically over. Sure, they might heal and start training again before the season is over. They might even sneak in a few races before everyone heads off on holidays. But they won’t be race fit. They can’t be expected to win. There isn’t enough time. They would have to race themsleves into form first.

This is one of the main reasons why Mat Hayman’s win at the 2016 Paris-Roubaix was so shocking and unexpected. He had broken his collarbone at Het Volk just a few weeks beforehand. You probably all know the story. He setup a weird ladder thing next to his home trainer so he could prop up his dangling useless arm on it while he kept on training.

The shocking thing wasn’t that he managed to recuperate in time to take part in Paris-Roubaix. The shocking thing was that he had maintained enough actual fitness to be capable of winning. I remember working out at the time that, unsurprisingly, no rider had ever won Paris-Roubaix before having not raced throughout all of March.

Another extreme instance of this scenario that I can think of is when David Millar was returning from his doping ban in the summer of 2006. Due to the timing of the ban and when it expired, the first race he could conceivably take part in was the Tour de France which started in Strasbourg with a prologue time trial.

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About 15 years ago I went through a frenzy of buying cycling books. I didn’t have very many of them. There were a few I’d inherited from my Dad - A Rough Ride by Paul Kimmage, the Greg Lemond book by Sam Abt, Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche autobiographies, a couple of Graham Watson coffee table books. That was about it.

I went bananas and bought all the cycling books I could find on eBay and evil Amazon. It was also around this time that a bit of a cycling book publishing boom was happening in the English language. It seemed like there was a new book being published every week.

A Race for Madmen by Chris Sidwells was one of them. I don’t think you’d find a publisher for a book like this anymore. A potted history of the Tour de France. There were already enough of them before and there have been plenty since - worse ones and better ones. I bought it anyway.

I gobbled up books like this at the time, wanting to fill my head as much as possible with as much as possible. Nowadays I think I’m a bit grumpier and more demanding. I don’t think such a broad topic would scratch an itch anymore. Give me a book on a specific race or a specific rivalry or one single controversy. I want detail and context and tangential diversions.

Nevertheless, this is the book we’ve landed on - Page 150.

150 pages into the book and we’d already covered nearly 60 years of Tour de France history… bringing us up to the Jacques Anquetil era. The passage on this page that stood out as most interesting was this one:

Anquetil announced that not only was he going to win the Tour but he would take the yellow jersey on day one and keep it until Paris three weeks later.

And he did it…

Did he say that?

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It’s not helping. Paul Seixas, you’re not helping. Dribbling towards middle-age is already making me feel older than necessary. The fact that young cyclists are actually getting younger and younger is accelerating this feeling and I don’t like it.

I did a Tweet last week that declared that Paul Seixas can possibly win the white jersey of the Tour de France seven times, assuming he starts now and rides them all for the next seven years.

Thankfully, I was actually wrong about this. Paul Seixas can only win the white jersey six times as several people quite rightly pointed out. Yes, he’ll still be 25 when he rides his seventh Tour in 2032, but in order to be eligible you have to be turning 25 in the year of the Tour, not simply be 25 or under. And in 2032, Paul Seixas will be turning 26 in September.

If, like me, you are struggling with the preposterous nature of Paul Seixas’s name, wait until you hear what they’ve gone and called the next next big thing in French cycling.

Of course what we all want to know now is will Paul Seixas ride the Tour de France. And of course the answer is that he will. Decathlon will not want to delay that party when we all know this will be their only chance - that the depressing news awaits that Seixas will not be able to beat them so he will join them at evil talent hoarders UAE Team Emirates.

This brings to mind a couple of incidents of younger riders of years gone by who rode the Tour de France when they were considered too young.

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