by Lionel Birnie

The question that has dominated the men’s World Tour for much of the past three seasons has been: could anything stop Tadej Pogačar from winning? The answer has been that, in a lot of situations, only a crash or illness (or the Paris-Roubaix pavé) could stand between him and victory.

And so it looked for the opening seven days of the Vuelta a España as the Slovenian won three of the first six stages, building a commanding overall lead and laying the groundwork for a seemingly inevitable Grand Tour career grand slam. Only the hailstones slowed his charge, but they brought the whole race to a halt.

That was until a crash around 33 kilometres from the finish of Saturday’s stage eight when Pogačar appeared to hit a piece of debris on the side of the road, apparently while he had one hand off the handlebars taking a drink. He crashed hard, suffering concussion and fractured bones requiring surgery – injuries that seem likely to end his season prematurely. It was Pogačar’s first major crash since Liège-Bastogne-Liège in 2023 when he fractured his wrist.

As a result, the Vuelta has been rebooted dramatically.

On Saturday morning, it was a case of wondering how many minutes Pogačar would win by, how many stage victories he’d rack up, and whether he could also add the mountains and points competition prizes. (My thoughts at the time were that he’d end up winning by nine minutes, would collect seven stages and take the KOM and green jerseys by default).

By Sunday morning, after Pogačar had crashed out, suddenly the race was thrown wide open and it looked to be a contest between three former winners – Primož Roglič, Richard Carapaz and Sepp Kuss – and three potential first-time champions – Enric Mas, Felix Gall and Oscar Onley.

By Sunday evening at Alto de Aitana, the list of most likely winners was whittled down to four – Mas, Roglič, Onley and Gall – as both Kuss and Carapaz lost a bit of ground.

The great paradox of this Vuelta now is that we have two weeks of one of the most open and intriguing Grand Tours in recent years to look forward to, and yet the colour has dimmed a little because races decided by crashes like Saturday’s automatically inherit an asterisk. Just as the major tennis tournaments are captivating viewing when the seeds are getting knocked out in the early rounds, there’s often a sense of anti-climax when it gets to the semi-final stage and none of the greats are involved.

So it may be with this Vuelta. We could be set for an intriguing battle for the red jersey while simultaneously accepting that, whoever stands on the top step of the podium in Granada, they have won somewhat by default.

Enric Mas declined to put on the red jersey when he went to the podium on Saturday afternoon as the new race leader, out of respect for Pogačar. However, on Sunday, he and his Movistar team rode like race leaders – perhaps conscious that they were only in this position because of the Slovenian’s misfortune and had to ‘earn’ the jersey. If so, Mas executed it brilliantly.

Mas is the archetypal Spanish Grand Tour specialist, an excellent climber whose super power is consistency. Years ago, my old magazine colleague Edward Pickering coined the phrase À la Zubeldia to describe a rider who finishes high up the general classification in a Grand Tour without troubling the TV cameras too often by riding almost anonymously. Always in the first or second group during the mountain stages, but usually at the back, just out of view.

It’s a term of endearment, really, but it does reflect the fact that conservative riding often pays off in the Grand Tours, especially for riders – like Mas – who do not have the weapons to win often. He is not especially explosive, he doesn’t possess a sprint finish, and his time trialling is not the best.

In ten seasons as a World Tour rider, he’d won six races before Sunday. And yet he’s been on the podium at the Vuelta four times (three times as runner-up) and has a handful of other top ten finishes to his name in the Vuelta and Tour de France.

On Sunday, he rode an uncharacteristically aggressive race, making all the running on the Alto de Aitana, dropping all but Oscar Onley and then finishing with such a flourish that the Scot could not come past him in the final hundred metres. It was only the Mallorcan’s second Grand Tour stage win – his last was in Andorra at the Vuelta eight years ago.

When the Vuelta last had a stage finish at Alto de Aitana, a decade ago, it came on the penultimate day of the race. Pierre Latour won the day but Nairo Quintana held firm to wrap up overall victory ahead of Chris Froome. That was the last time Movistar won a Grand Tour too.

No one would have wanted the Vuelta to be blown wide open in the way it has been but now we have a very different race to relish over the coming 12 stages there’s a lot to look forward to. Roglič is well poised to strike for a fifth Vuelta title, and will be a big threat in the time trial in the final week. Gall and Onley are in position to fight for the podium knowing that outright victory is not impossible. Carapaz has slipped back but isn’t completely out of the picture and won’t give up, especially as he tends to remain strong in the third week of Grand Tours.

Ask Daniel anything about the Vuelta

Send your questions about the Vuelta a España to Daniel via Speakpipe. Click the button below, record your question and press send.

Ask a question

Fundraiser For Fin to support young riders

Everyone at The Cycling Podcast was deeply saddened to hear that Finlay Tarling had been killed in an incident with a car while racing at the Volta a Portugal.

In 2021, a few of us from The Cycling Podcast’s extended family made a film called And So We Rode, based on the footage and audio diary recorded for the podcast by Larry Warbasse and Conor Dunne on their bikepacking adventures during lockdown.

The project was made by Cycling Podcast Productions, a spin-off created by me, Richard Moore, Orla Chennaoui, Rob Hatch, David Luxton, Simon Gill, and a very good friend of the podcast Alun Morgan, with the intention of making further cycling films.

Although we all loved making it, And So We Rode turned out to be CPP’s first and last film production, partly because Richard died the following spring. Recently we’ve completed the process of closing down CPP and found we had a sum of money left over.

Alun, who is from Wales, sponsored Finlay for a couple of seasons when he was a junior and suggested that we donate that money to the fundraiser set up to honour Finlay’s memory and we all agreed.

The fundraiser has been set up with the blessing of Finlay’s parents and the plan is to create a legacy project in Finlay’s name to help provide opportunities and support for future generations of young riders in Wales. All of the money will go towards the project and, so far, £95,000 has been raised from more than 2,000 donations. There are also plans to collect donations of children’s bikes, clothing and other equipment to help give young riders a helping hand when discovering the sport.

If you’d like to make a donation to the fund, click the button below:

GoFundMe - For Fin

Racing with the spirit of The Buffalo

The fifth and final round of The 2026 Richard Moore Youth Race Series was held at the West Lothian cycle circuit a couple of weeks ago, concluding another brilliant summer of racing for young riders. The six race winners on the final night represented six different clubs.

The series is named after our dear friend and co-founder of The Cycling Podcast and attracts young riders from far and wide to race at the circuit in Linlithgow, not far from Edinburgh.

Every week, there’s also a Buffalo Award, presented to the rider who created the biggest impression in each race. It’s not necessarily for the winner but is awarded to riders who demonstrate attacking flair by racing aggressively or a never-say-die attitude by refusing to give up.

Henry Sharp of West Lothian Clarion CC won the Youth A Open overall title and Sarah McCormac of Edinburgh RC took the Youth A Female crown. Henry Lockett of Falkirk Junior Bike Club was the only rider to win all five rounds in their category and that gave him the Youth B Open series title. Boo Williams of Clydesdale Colts won the Youth B Female category for the second season in a row. The Youth C girls and boys titles were won by Isla Slim of Johnstone Jets Youth Cycling and Euan McDonald of Stirling Bike Club / Wallace Warriors.

We’d like to congratulate all the series champions, race winners and Buffalo Award winners as well as everyone who pinned on a number and took part this season. Sometimes the biggest victory in bike racing is getting on the start line in the first place. A huge thank you to everyone who has run the series and the clubs and volunteers who have organised each of the rounds. We know Richard would be very proud to know his name is associated with the series.

You can find out more on the series Facebook page.

Advert: A new podcast by Lionel and Simon

Ever since we made the Tour d’Écosse series, Simon Gill and I have been looking for another project to work on together. A few weeks ago, we launched The Magic Roundabout, a weekly podcast recorded as we follow our home town football club, Hemel Hempstead Town.

Now, I know a lot of our listeners switch off at the merest mention of the beautiful game but the series isn’t just about football. There might even be some cycling at some point.

It’s been lovely to hear from some of The Cycling Podcast’s listeners who’ve already tuned in. Very good friend of the podcast Moyeen posted on Bluesky to say: ‘Listened to the first two episodes – it’s absolutely wonderful. Lionel and Simon’s extended story of friendship told via non-league football. Do yourself a huge favour, subscribe and listen. It’s magical, heartfelt, whimsical and entertaining. The characters in the club are delightful. Definitely gonna come to a game this season.’

The first four episodes are online wherever you listen to The Cycling Podcast. Search for The Magic Roundabout or follow the podcast here.

You can listen to the trailer below:

Coverage of the opening two stages of the Tour de France Femmes, recorded by Rose Manley, Denny Gray and Lizzy Banks on location at the Grand Départ in Switzerland, is online now wherever you listen to podcasts. To get every episode as soon as it goes live, follow The Cycling Podcast in your preferred podcast app.

by Lionel Birnie

This is the fifth edition of the Tour de France Femmes, and The Cycling Podcast has covered them all from start to finish, starting with the opening day of the inaugural event in Paris at the end of July 2022.

Before the men’s race arrived in the French capital that year, the women’s Tour kicked off with 11 laps of the Champs-Élysées – a stage won by Lorena Wiebes – marking a very symbolic passing of the baton before the women’s peloton headed east to Champagne country, the Vosges and La Planche des Belles Filles.

Rose Manley joined François and I in a noisy café not far from the Place de la Concorde to recap the opening stage of the women’s race before she was joined by Lizzy Banks and Anne-Marije Rook to cover the rest of the Tour.

It was a bittersweet moment because Richard Moore had died four months earlier and wasn’t there with us. He had been a firm supporter of the push to re-establish a women’s Tour de France and he had been looking forward to covering the first edition, having hosted the first episode of The Cycling Podcast Féminin with Orla Chennaoui back in June 2016.

Orla’s first appearance as a guest on The Cycling Podcast was in the very early days, during the 2013 men’s Tour, at Alpe d’Huez, after the double ascent of the famous climb’s 21 bends. We talked about how much better it was for the roadside spectators to see the riders twice in the same day, and then conversation turned to the prospect of a women’s Tour returning to the calendar.

There had previously been the Tour de France Féminin, which ran from 1984 to 1989, and it seemed absurd that women’s cycling had established something of a foothold almost three decades previously only to slip back to the fringes again. In the 1980s the stages were held on part of the same course as the men’s race, earlier in the day, before the passage of the publicity caravan. Orla made the point that it would be a better spectacle for the fans on the roadside to have a women’s Tour running at the same time as the men’s, which was undoubtedly true.

But the more we discussed it later, the more we realised that women’s cycling would be better off if the major races were not held in the shadow of the men’s events, acting almost as an appetiser for the ‘main event’.

In those years there was a sense of progress, albeit slow. The following year, the first edition of a standalone stage race – the Women’s Tour – was held in Great Britain and then ASO announced the creation of La Course.

We covered the first two editions of the Women’s Tour in our regular episodes and I went to the final few stages in 2015, not least because the race finished in Hemel Hempstead, just around the corner from me in Not Watford. Already there was a sense that shoehorning women’s race coverage into our regular episodes was not going to work longer term.

The first three editions of La Course amounted to little more than a critérium race up and down the Champs-Élysées and critics had a point when they said that it fell a long way short of being considered an equivalent to the men’s Tour. In hindsight perhaps we were a bit harsh on ASO at the time and should acknowledge that they did say it was a first step on a longer journey. At least they didn’t pretend it was a women’s Tour de France, and it is fair to say that although progress was glacial at times there was no doubt that women’s cycling was going to continue to grow.

In June this year, The Cycling Podcast Féminin marked the tenth anniversary of its first episode. Having covered La Course with stand-alone episodes of KM0 and including coverage of women’s racing in the regular episodes now and then, we were at a crossroads. What was the best way to increase the coverage of women’s racing? We decided a separate show was the answer and Richard proposed Orla come on board as co-host when the show launched in June 2016. My contribution to the early episodes was a short segment looking at the history of women’s racing and the first instalment explained our choice of title for the new show, which was inspired by the Tour de France Féminin in the 1980s. At the time there was very little women’s cycling on TV, much less live coverage, but gradually that began to change. We’d run rider diaries from women’s stage races, such as Alexis Ryan’s account of the Tour of California, and, in 2017, Richard and Orla went to the Women’s Tour to make a bumper episode of The Cycling Podcast Féminin.

Later that summer, Orla, Richard, François and I were all in the Stade Vélodrome in Marseille trying to make sense of the confusing second and final stage – a sort of reverse time trial where the top 20 riders were set off in GC order according to their finishing times on the Col d’Izoard two days earlier. The stage on the Izoard, won by Annemiek van Vleuten, had been brilliant and although ASO deserved some credit for trying an innovative new format it didn’t work. I can remember we were all willing it to be a success but had to admit that women’s cycling deserved better.

From 2018 to 2021 La Course reverted to a single stage and, although the races were good, it felt like the pressure to create a Tour de France for women had stalled and momentum was in danger of being lost.

In the meantime, the Women’s Tour in Great Britain was making great strides. Rose Manley joined Richard and Orla as a regular host and in 2018 we covered the race with daily episodes recorded on location for the first time. Who can forget Orla sneaking Shakespeare titles into every show?

The Women’s Tour survived cancellation due to the Covid pandemic in 2020, eventually securing live television coverage and justifiably staking a claim to rival the Giro as the biggest women’s race in the world.

Then, in May 2021, ASO confirmed that the inaugural Tour de France Femmes would be held the following year. In October, as Covid closed in again on northern France, Richard was unable to travel back to the UK for the rescheduled Women’s Tour, so I joined Rose and Lizzy Banks as we followed the race from Banbury to Folkestone via Atherstone, Southend and Clacton. I remember it being a real baptism of fire. Not only was I far less familiar with the women’s peloton but we were unable to see any of the racing live and I had to go back to the basics of reporting bike races from my early days covering Premier Calendar races. We had to piece together what had happened from a combination of race radio, updates from the commissaire’s car, and what the riders told us afterwards.

Shortly before Richard died, we created Arrivée, partly so we could react to the biggest one-day races while they were still fresh in our minds, recreating the energy of our Grand Tour coverage. But the other driving force behind Arrivée was that it gave us a vehicle to cover the major women’s one-day races too, bridging the gap between the monthly episodes of Féminin.

Since Richard died, showrunner Rose has been joined by Denny Gray at the Tour de France Femmes, with Lizzy returning this season, and TV’s Rebecca Charlton joining our monthly episodes too.

Women’s cycling has progressed a long way in the past decade but the unifying thread in our coverage – right from the first episode of The Cycling Podcast Féminin with Richard and Orla in 2016 – has been to talk about the sport, and the racing, in its own right, not as an addition to or as an adjunct to men’s cycling.

• Daily episodes covering the Tour de France Femmes continue tonight and through to the race’s conclusion in Nice on Sunday. Don’t miss the Mont Ventoux stage on Friday.

Send your questions for the Stage 22 Press Conference episode

Lionel and Graham will be recording the post-Tour de France Stage 22 Press Conference episode answering listeners’ questions tomorrow (Tuesday). We’d love to hear your questions, and you can do that really easily using the SpeakPipe link below. Alternatively, you can email contact@thecyclingpodcast.com

You can send your audio questions for The Cycling Podcast Féminin team at the Tour de France Femmes too.

Record your question

Join Lionel on MyWhoosh this Sunday

Lionel will be riding on MyWhoosh on Sunday after the final stage of the Tour de France Femmes.

1. Download the MyWhoosh app from your app store. It’s free to ride, you just need to create an account

2. Sunday, August 9 at 7pm (UK time)

3. France World > Paris Classic. It’s 18.6km to complete one lap but you can do as many as you like

See you there!

A big thank you to MyWhoosh for sponsoring our Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes coverage this year.

Check out MyWhoosh

by Lionel Birnie

Now for stage 22, which takes me from Paris to Not Watford. There’s still a few loose ends to tie up from the 2026 Tour de France before we hand over to Rose Manley and Denny Gray for daily coverage of the fifth edition of the Tour de France Femmes. There’ll be a race preview later this week before nightly episodes start on Saturday from Lausanne in Switzerland as they follow the peloton to Nice via Mont Ventoux.

Graham and I would like to say a big thank you to everyone for joining us over the past three weeks. Whether you’ve completed the The Cycling Podcast’s Tour coverage for the 14th consecutive July, or have joined our peloton of listeners relatively recently, it’s been great to have you along for the ride. The support of our Friends of the Podcast subscribers is vital too because, along with our sponsors and advertisers, you help keep the wheels turning.

Our producers work fast under pressure every night to get the episodes out on time and we are incredibly lucky to have such a great team who understand the podcast and the sport. They have all been with us for many years now – Jon Moonie edited our very first episode in 2013, and has been joined by Tom Whalley, Adam Bowie and Huw Owen, who each have at least a decade on the dials.

A big thank you to Simon Gill, aka Simon the Photographer, for his company over the past two weeks, and to François Thomazeau for inviting us to Cadaquès before spending a few days in Barcelona. It was great to welcome Daniel Benson of Daniel Benson’s Cycling Substack for a regular weekly appearance, adding the benefit of his experience and journalism to our coverage. And, of course, to Daniel Friebe for the sensational Seixcast series which has followed the debut of the phenomenal 19-year-old Paul Seixas, while telling the story of French cycling’s past, present and future. There’s one more episode of that KM0 series to come shortly.

A big thank you to MyWhoosh, and Rob Jarman, for their support as title sponsors of our Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes coverage.

And last, but by no means least, from me to Graham for his brilliant company, support, calming influence, good humour and enthusiasm on and off the mic over the past couple of months spanning Attitude Camp and the Tour de France. This year’s road trip has been a joy from start to finish, and Graham’s ideas and willingness to throw himself into every day with the same upbeat energy has swept me up and carried me along.

Let’s go back to the beginning of our journey in Cadaquès with a quote from the artist Salvador Dalí: ‘What I like most of all is the Tour de France. It is an epic and I paint my best works listening to the suffering of the riders. When it is over I feel a kind of depression, for the amazing enchantment of my summer is gone.’

Fortunately for us, there’s the Tour de France Femmes, the Vuelta a España and the end-of-season races to sustain us until autumn…

Ask us anything: The post-race press conference

This is the last chance to ask a question for our post-race press conference episode, which we will record later this week. If you have a question about the Tour de France, The Cycling Podcast or something specifically for Graham or I we’d love to hear from you.

Record your question on SpeakPipe or email us at contact@thecyclingpodcast.com

After we’ve had a chance to recharge our batteries, we’ll answer as many of the questions we didn’t get to tackle during the Tour in The 11.01 Cappuccino too.

Send us a question by voice note

Are you Team Napalm or Team Grizzle? Our teams of the Tour

In our stage 21 episode – From Moulin Rouge to Lanterne Rouge – Graham and I became sports directors and took turns to select riders for our own teams of the Tour.

The rules were simple. We were only allowed one rider from any single trade team. Riders had to have finished the Tour (so no place for Tim Merlier). And the teams had to work, broadly-speaking, as a coherent eight-man squad – you couldn’t just pick the top eight on GC.

I won the best-of-three rock, paper, scissors game 2-0 (which I’m sure everyone agrees worked brilliantly in audio) so I got to choose first…

Team Napalm-Chouffe 0%-Cassoulet

• Tadej Pogačar – UAE Team Emirates

• Mads Pedersen – Lidl-Trek

• Mauro Schmid – Jayco-Alula

• Davide Piganzoli – Visma-Lease A Bike

• Søren Wærenskjold – Uno-X Mobility

• Raul Garcia Pierna – Movistar

• Nicolas Prodhomme – Decathlon

• Richard Carapaz – EF Education-EasyPost

PodCompany-KanUReadAMap

• Mathieu van der Poel – Alpecin-Premier Tech

• Paul Seixas – Decathlon

• Ben Healy – EF Education-EasyPost

• Baptiste Veistroffer – Lotto-Intermarché

• Jasper Stuyven – Soudal-Quick Step

• Mattias Skjelmose – Lidl-Trek

• Isaac Del Toro – UAE Team Emirates

• Sepp Kuss – Visma-Lease A Bike

The question is, which team is the best? Vote below…

The Cycling Podcast x Escape Collective mash-up episode

The people demanded – well, some of them asked – for a mash-up episode. At Alpe d’Huez, we gathered in a car park (a typically glamorous recording location) to record a bonus episode, which will go out later this week.

The Cycling Podcast x Escape Collective. Or Escape Collective + The Cycling Podcast, if you prefer.

Graham and I joined Caley Fretz and Iain Treloar for a freewheeling, sometimes whimsical chat about life on the road at the Tour de France, this year’s race, and how the media landscape has continued to evolve.

Caley was an early guest on The Cycling Podcast way back in 2014, when he worked for VeloNews. In recent years, having established the Escape Collective, they’ve established their own podcast and have often joked about sharing the mic for a one-off episode. Midway through the Tour we found ourselves at the same hotel – the charming Saint Regis in Chalon-sur-Saône – and they were recording their episode as we were enjoying dinner. At some point, Caley shouted over and I joined them for a few minutes. Anyway, our people got together with their people, we thrashed out the terms and quibbled over the fine details and spent 40 minutes or so chatting about the Tour. We know that many listeners tune in to both podcasts so hopefully you’ll enjoy the exchange of anecdotes and ideas in the forthcoming episode.

Upcoming episodes

• The final part of Ça Revient / It’s Coming Home by Daniel Friebe

• The post-Tour press conference episode

• The Tour de France Femmes preview

• The Cycling Podcast x Escape Collective mash-up

Thank you to MyWhoosh

MyWhoosh is a virtual cycling platform that brings together riders of all ages and abilities from all over the world to share the joy of indoor riding. Whether you’re seeking to put yourself through your paces with a hard training session, or you just want to spin the legs for a recovery ride, MyWhoosh has a course and session for you. And, like the great outdoors, MyWhoosh is free to ride.

Once I’ve had a few days to recover from the Tour, I’ll be starting my own Tour de Birnie on MyWhoosh, coinciding with the Tour de France Femmes. It’ll be a series of short but enjoyable rides on MyWhoosh and I’ll share the details once the schedule has been set. In the meantime, we’d like to thank MyWhoosh for their support of our Tour de France and Tour de France coverage. You can download the MyWhoosh app from your app store.

And finally… with AI are we in danger of missing the point of everything?

I am a couple of weeks off the pace with my behind-the-scenes diary of life on the road at the Tour de France. The first part covered our journey up to the first rest day but the pace of life on the road and a significant development with Substack, the platform we use to distribute The 11.01 Cappuccino, stopped me in my tracks.

I will complete those instalments at some point but over the past year or so, I’ve been thinking more and more about professional cycling and its relationship with the mass media. Having seen the way the social media companies and their algorithms and now AI have begun to change the way we engage with everything, including sporting events, has made me ponder the future of the Tour de France and the WorldTour in general. Anyway, on the train from Lyon to Paris, I wrote a piece that may not be for everyone but, as someone who has worked in the media for 30 years it interests me and may potentially a starting point for a deeper look at the Tour’s role as a sporting event, a marketing vehicle and a content factory and how it balances those competing interests.

Over a period of a few years, The Cycling Podcast built an email list of thousands of listeners using Mailchimp. Richard Moore and I took turns producing the weekly bulletins and the emails became an outlet to write about the sport and update listeners on what was coming up on the podcast. In 2020, Alasdair Lloyd-Jones, a media professional who was advising us on a few aspects of our business, suggested we rename the email to better reflect the podcast’s personality, and so The 11.01 Cappuccino was born. It worked well because it suggested an entertaining read with a slightly tongue-in-cheek, rebellious title which rewarded listeners in the sense that if you knew, you knew.

When Richard died in spring 2022, all of our energy was committed to just keeping the podcast wheels turning. We went six months without sending out a single edition of The 11.01 Cappuccino until our bookkeeper explained that just maintaining the mailing list without sending any emails had cost almost $3,000.

So, in December 2022, I moved our entire mailing list across to Substack. The platform was free, easier to use, the emails nicer to look at, and there was even the potential to monetise our written content, if we wished. It was the perfect solution and even if we didn’t send a single email, our database of listeners was safe and secure and we were no longer spending money.

Substack rewarded people who could write well and had something to say. It still does. There was no push to dumb-down content to chase subscribers or clicks. It wasn’t playing the same game as social media platforms that had locked people in the ultimate scroll and wouldn’t let go. Substack wanted people to immerse themselves in the writing and engage with something altogether more nourishing.

Gradually, though, the platform began to push other offerings. A chat facility, a short-form message system similar to Twitter in the early days, then audio, then video because, well, it needed to keep growing by attracting more people. And the way to attract more people is to make content shorter and the engagement more fleeting and, on some level, less meaningful. Bubblegum for the brain instead of a good meal. We’re all in the attention industry and if all you want is attention there are quick ways to get it.

Substack is still brilliant in lots of ways – it offers a direct connection between the writer and their audience. It is a place that allows writers space to breathe, and rewards readers who can set aside a little time to delve deeper into the subjects that interest them.

But as Substack has become more popular it is showing signs of the same algorithm-driven chase for eyeballs that has turned the rest of social media into an almost unusable wasteland. When everyone is yelling for attention once one moment in the spotlight fades it’s often necessary to yell even louder the next time.

The eyeballs on X or Instagram aren’t actually worth very much. You can clock up thousands of likes but the reality is it’s the platform owners who are monetising your content, your audience and your ideas before you can. In a sense, every individual and media outlet that is pumping content into the social media platforms is working for Musk or Zuckerberg or Google.

A colleague whose work I admire greatly attended a Substack event for their ‘bestsellers’ a couple of months ago. They were addressed by one of the company’s bigwigs and midway through the speech, the penny dropped and my colleague came to a sudden realisation. ‘Ah… I’m working for Substack, really, aren’t I?’

Yes, Substack is helping him generate money from his hard work, contacts, ideas and decades of experience but it is also in a gloriously risk-free position. Unlike a traditional media outlet such as a newspaper or magazine which has staffing costs and travel expenses to cover, Substack’s involvement in the creative process is virtually risk-free. Yes, Substack’s cut is relatively modest but the risk is all on one side. If our colleague’s audience ebbs away, Substack doesn’t really lose out because it has a network of hundreds of thousands of other writers who are generating content and revenue.

Substack is not a major source of our revenue, but it’s a great way to connect with our listeners and usually, during the Tour de France, I like to write a couple of diaries a week, partly so I can remember the behind-the-scenes stories and incidents. It’s something I’ve done for 20 years, since writing a diary called Tales from the Broomwagon at the 2006 Tour. That evolved into a Gourmet de France blog focusing on the good (and bad) meals at the the Tour. The 11.01 Cappuccino has become the perfect platform for these sorts of informal reflections.

However, after posting my update on the first rest day in Clermont-Ferrand I have stalled. The main reason has been the introduction of an AI detector on Substack. This is not because I am like a 1990s pro cyclist avoiding the races because I don’t want to be dope-tested. I have not – and would not – use AI to write my words because, as far as I can see, there would be absolutely no point. The act of writing should be personal and imperfect. It should take time and energy to find the right words, especially if trying to convey tricky ideas or tackle difficult subjects.

The thought of Substack’s AI detector deciding that even one per cent of my work was AI-generated fills me with a sense of injustice. How dare they use AI to decide whether a person’s work is genuine or not.

Of course, some writers may be tempted, and I am not necessarily being judgemental here when I say that I can sort of understand the appeal, even if I fail to see any merit in the idea at all.

It’s ironic, really, I’ve spent 25 years covering professional cycling – a sport that has been shrouded in doubt and suspicion every time anyone produces an exceptional performance. Now the technology exists to evaluate our work and determine – without any actual proof – whether a writer has been engaging in a bit of light prose doping.

There’s a more fundamental point we’re all grappling with at the moment – one which stalks the quiet hours for anyone who makes their living in a creative field.

What if the public doesn’t care? What if the reader isn’t bothered whether a machine wrote the article they’re reading? What if the listener prefers AI-generated voices in a podcast instead of flawed real people who get things wrong and stumble to express themselves occasionally.

The greatest, and most damning, irony is that I’m sitting on a train to Paris for the final stage of the Tour de France. Next to me is Graham Willgoss, my co-host on The Cycling Podcast, who can vouch for me. I’ve spent the last 40 minutes or so typing this out and before posting it here I ran it through a free AI detector on the internet.

The result? This piece is apparently 82% AI-generated. Well, you can get in the fucking sea, is what I say to that.

So, my question now is, what’s the point of anything?

For the purpose of balance, I then used two other free-to-use AI detectors. One judged my work to be 95% human. The other said ‘almost entirely human,’ which is a hell of an endorsement. So it appears even AI can’t agree. At least Substack’s view is that this has been written by a human.

AI has scraped the internet to gather the sum total of human knowledge – in many cases this has been an egregious and untraceable infringement of copyright. Now it is feeding our own knowledge back to us as artificially generated ‘content’ while sitting in judgment of real writers, journalists and content creators too.

What does all this have to do with cycling? Well, in a multi-media landscape where content that is really marketing is increasingly better funded than journalistic outlets, the spectre of AI presents a critical crossroads. After all, is there a point where we could save thousands and thousands of pounds and use AI Lionel, AI Graham and AI Daniel to cover the Tour? There’d be fewer visits to Corrections Corner (or maybe more?), and no mentions of football, wine or grouchy anecdotes about bed bugs and sub-standard accommodation. Perhaps in the off-season I’ll get some of the sport’s key stakeholders together to see where all this goes next. Until then, I wrote this, and all mistakes and typos are mine.

The Rest Day Press Conference

We’re taking questions for tomorrow’s Rest Day Press Conference episode, which we will record in Thonon-les-Bains while the Tour de France enjoys a brief pause for breath before the race resumes with Tuesday’s time trial.

If you have a question about this year’s Tour, The Cycling Podcast, cycling in general or a specific one for Graham or me, we’d love to hear from you now.

It’s always great to hear your voices, so if you want to record your question you can do so directly using SpeakPipe. We will also take questions and comments by email – send them to contact@thecyclingpodcast.com

We’ll try to answer as many as we can in the one-hour time limit on Monday, and after the end of the Tour I’ll answer more in an edition of The 11.01 Cappuccino. Although we can’t answer all questions, we do read and listen to every one, and it’s always interesting hearing your perspectives on the Tour.

Record your question here

Spot the difference

Above is Simon Gill’s photo from the Grand Départ of the 2014 Tour de France in Yorkshire, England, as huge crowds flocked to the Côte de Buttertubs.

Below is Simon’s picture from the Col du Haag yesterday, as Tadej Pogačar made his way to a fourth stage win in this year’s race. While there has been a lot of talk about whether a Pogačar procession is a compelling spectacle, the Tour is still proving to be a massive draw when it comes to attracting people to the roadside.

by Lionel Birnie

The Tour de France seems to have been on fast-forward since the Grand Départ back in Barcelona. Perhaps it’s the fact that I am now the age of a veteran sports director (having first covered the Tour back when I’d have been eligible for the white jersey) but it gets more intense every year. This summer, the searing heat has become a metaphor for the race itself.

Stages start later than ever – often at 1pm or even 2pm – giving the illusion of leisurely, relaxed mornings, although it never seems to work out that way. The short, sharp stages mean the whole day flashes by in the blink of an eye.

The second Tour I covered as a journalist, in 2000, featured a stage from Draguignan to Briançon in the Alps. It was 249 kilometres, over the Col d’Allos, Col de Vars and the mighty Col d’Izoard, and the stage winner, Santiago Botero, spent four minutes shy of eight hours in the saddle.

The stage started at about half-past nine in the morning, and I remember my alarm being on for what felt like the middle of the night. The team buses and camper vans rolled into Draguignan before eight. It felt almost inhumane, and I remember David Millar making that point to the race director Jean-Marie Leblanc, only for the old-timers to recall stages in the 1980s lasting almost ten hours.

I’m aware that although the year 2000 seems like recent history to me, it’s also more than a quarter of a century ago, when the character of the Tour de France was evolving from the endurance epic of the 20th century into what is becoming an event more suited to today’s media landscape dominated by the instant gratification of the infinite scroll.

Right from the opening weekend in Barcelona, the general classification has had the feel of a typical middle week of the Tour de France, with time gaps establishing a settled order of things. Perhaps that has led to a race relatively free of crashes.

Stage one: Més Que Una Cursa

We picked up in Barcelona where we had left on in Paris last year, with a Lime bike ride – this time across the city to one of the most culturally important buildings in Catalonia. No, not the Sagrada Família, but Camp Nou, the home of Barcelona FC. There was a cycling link for the footballphobes among our listenership, which is that Barcelona Football Club had a cycling team between the 1920s and 1940s and one of their best riders, Mariano Cañardo, still holds the record for most wins in the Volta Ciclista a Catalunya, with seven. He also won a Tour stage in the Pyrenees in 1937, having finished sixth overall the previous year.

Later, we took the Lime bikes as far as we could, then parked up and hiked up to Montjuic for the individual team time trial, or should that be team time trial for individuals? We recorded the podcast sitting on the steps in the shade outside the stadium which had hosted the 1992 Olympic Games, enjoying the sunset.

At one point in the episode, noting Barcelona’s answer to the Parisian Arc de Triomphe I asked possibly the worst question in The Cycling Podcast’s history. ‘Which is your favourite Arc de Triomphe?’

Somehow we persuade a taxi driver to come out to pick us up and take us across the city in time for dinner with François. Not even the Saturday night entertainment, a holiday camp-style singer, belting out hits as diverse as ABBA’s Knowing Me, Knowing You and Eye of the Tiger by Survivor could spoil the perfectly cooked steak with spicy, tangy chimichurri sauce and patatas bravas.

We reflected on the team time trial, which seemed to suggest that Jonas Vingegaard was in good enough shape to make a close contest of this Tour.

Stage two: Barcelona!

I’d hoped to see the fabulous Roman amphitheatre at Tarragona but the stage started on the outskirts of town. As we walked to the team bus paddock, François pointed at the grey, concrete apartment blocks and said with his usual dry wit: ‘As you can see, the Roman architecture is quite magnificent.’

We then turned on our heels and headed back to Barcelona and Montjuic for a classic stage which was dominated by UAE Team Emirates, who seemed to have a point to prove after the previous day when Vingegaard beat Tadej Pogačar to the yellow jersey. They set up the finish perfectly, then Pogačar chaperoned his young teammate Isaac Del Toro to the line for his first Tour stage victory.

Dinner was another triumph – tapas style at a place François had visited before. He had set the bar high and now he was about to depart after a very brief cameo on the podcast, I feared for the quality of our feed stations for the rest of the Tour.

Stage three: Hollywood Blockbuster at Les Angles

The stage was impacted by wildfires near to the finish. Although the fires were not near to the race route, roads nearby needed to be kept clear to give the firefighters access, so we had a long detour to Les Angles and the roads, though not deserted, were eerily quiet as most people had heeded Christian Prudhomme’s request to stay at home and watch on television.

Six years ago, during the lockdown Tour de France, I made an episode of KM0 about the Tour de France and the climate. Going into the episode, my angle had been all about the Tour’s carbon footprint, the impact the race leaves on the environment and the measures we can all take to reduce that impact. When I spoke to the climate scientists, my perspective changed completely. The Tour’s impact on the environment was important, of course, they said, but the bigger concern was what sort of impact the changing climate would have on the race.

I remember Richard admitting to me that it was the only episode of The Cycling Podcast he had never listened to. As an optimist, he feared the message would be too depressing.

It’s startling that just six years after my conversation about the possibility of intense heat, the impact of high ‘wet bulb’ temperatures on athletic performance and health, and the potential for unpredictable weather events, the Tour de France is facing some of these issues already. You can listen to The Climate Challenge, made in 2020, here.

We recorded the episode sitting next to the ‘Les Angles’ town sign, an homage of sorts to the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles. However, Les Angles translates as ‘the angles’ – referring to the peaks of the mountains – rather than angels. As Graham headed back to the car to fetch some vital recording equipment we’d forgotten, a dog squatted no more than six feet away from me and did a large poo on the ground, side-eyeing me nonchalantly. The owner left the poo where it was, despite my intense stare of disapproval. As I once wrote after a day in a stunning corner of the Alps, ‘Only in France can you wheel your suitcase through dog poo while admiring the view.’

Stage four: Foix, What a Scorcher

Having predicted a victory for the breakaway two days running, it was a case of third time lucky for Graham. Having said that, is it really a success for the break if Mads Pedersen is in it and he wins the sprint by several bike lengths? Nevertheless, we sounded the breakaway klaxon to mark the occasion.

We wandered into Carcassonne from our apartment early to have breakfast as the Tour de France publicity caravan rolled into town. I ordered a cheese omelette, expecting a handful of grated cheese sprinkled in the middle. What arrived was a perfectly-formed omelette with a cheese selection that would grace the finest four-course meal. ‘The Tour de France is at its best when I’m doing things I’d do on holiday,’ I said to Graham.

There should have been two opportunities for cassoulet on this Tour but we’d arrived in Carcassonne very late the previous evening so had a simple meal in Les Angles, and we were staying at the Hotel du Lac in Foix and I’d already checked out the cassoulet-free menu.

I left Graham to get a lift to the finish with a colleague while I took a detour to Toulouse airport to swap our car, having hired a short-term replacement after our initial flight out to Perpignan had been diverted because of wild fires. On the way to Foix, I stopped at the motorway services and picked up two giant tins of cassoulet to see me through the winter. I asked if Colin, Graham’s schnauzer, would like cassoulet. ‘I’m sure he’d wolf it down, but schnauzers have very delicate stomachs so I’m not sure it’d be a good idea,’ he said.

Stage five: Pau, We Meet Again

On the way to Pau, we stopped at the Tour de France Pyrenees-themed motorway service station. I’ve stopped there countless times over the years but have never made a proper effort to look at the impressive sculpture celebrating the race in the mountains.

The Tour had a relatively quiet day, thank goodness, although we felt for Baptiste Veistroffer, stuck out there alone for most of the day, although he did at least have fresh water bottles from the team car whenever he wanted them.

Olav Kooij – whose nickname is apparently the Cheetah of Numansdoorp – won his first Tour de France stage and Graham coined a far better name. The Carp.

I indulged a few rest day memories of major doping scandals in Pau, including the 36 hours when Michael Rasmussen was tripped up by his own dishonesty in a rest day press conference and was eventually pulled out of the race by his Rabobank team while only a handful of days from almost certain victory.

We also checked in with Daniel Benson, the author of Daniel Benson’s Cycling Substack – to talk about the transfer market and way it has changed over the past few years.

Stage six: All The President’s Men

The Tour stepped on the accelerator again and my hopes of a race decided by seconds looked to be dashed. Okay, so it’s still a race of seconds, but there are now 162 seconds between Pogačar and Vingegaard.

At the top of the hill at Gavarnie-Gèdre, not far from the line – having driven it, I won’t call the final climb a mountain because there was enough downhill and flat to tempt the Eagle of Not Watford out of retirement – I was rather abruptly moved on by a private security guard in dark shades. I was, he said, standing in the car parking space intended for the car carrying French president Emmanuel Macron.

It was the end of the line of Torsten Traæn’s spell in the yellow jersey after a difficult day in the mountains. Dropped on the Tourmalet, he then crashed into his teammate on the descent. I waited for him and his Uno X teammate Anders Halland Johannessen to come past, a good half-hour after Pogačar, as did most of the spectators, who gave him very warm applause as they came in together. That also turned out to be the final stop of Traæn’s Tour too, because he did not start the following day.

We had dinner in Luz-St-Sauveur. Tartiflette is an Alpine dish, really, although François always points out it’s a relatively modern invention, dreamt up by a marketing man in the 1970s or 1980s to shift a load more reblochon. This version was at least made with Pyrenean cheese, and it was very good.

Stage seven: ‘If You’re Going Through Hell, Keep Going’

The heat is getting to everyone but Bordeaux was insanely hot. What made it worse was that the sky clouded over, seeming to trap the heat and crank up the humidity. Graham went out to the team buses to grab interviews and when he came back he looked like he’d been out in the sun all day.

Once we’d located our hotel – the gloriously air-conditioned Winston Churchill – we headed out to find a nice place to record. We ordered a couple of non-alcoholic beers and Graham, who had been very quiet on the walk into town, suddenly looked very pale. The little children’s bucket hat he’d snagged from the publicity caravan didn’t quite cover his whole head. I was a little concerned but he insisted he’d be fine for the recording, which he was, although once we’d finished the episode the colour drained from his face again.

‘We should get some dinner,’ I said.

We set off in the direction of somewhere to eat.

‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I think I want an ice cream.’ He didn’t even fancy one of ‘Mitch’s Sandwiches’ from the place opposite the bar where we’d recorded.

So dinner was one boule of coffee and one of pistachio and an early night with plenty of water.

Stage eight: A Ride On the Périgueux-Round

Sometimes France really does take your breath away, and the Dordogne has the capacity to render one gasping for air. There are so many pretty little places and we were very glad to return to Périgueux, where the stage started, to record the episode.

A couple of Friends of the Podcast said hello just before we recorded the episode and we realised they were staying in a first-floor apartment with a balcony overlooking the bar where Graham and I sat side-by-side in a wicker ‘love seat’.

Once we’d recorded, Graham went in search of a restaurant while I packed up our equipment.

As I passed, a voice from the first-floor window asked whether I was watching the England v Norway game nearby. ‘No, we’re staying in Brive,’ I said.

As our Friend stood up I could see he was wearing a Scotland football shirt. ‘Sorry, but I’m supporting Norway,’ he said. ‘It’s what Richard would have wanted.’

Sadly for Erling Haaland, Anders Halland Johannessen and his Uno-X teammates, England just about squeezed past Norway in the quarter-final. Graham and I watched on my laptop in our steamy Brive apartment, which – as if in an attempt to tease and torture us – had the remote control for a Beko air conditioning unit but there was no air conditioning unit to be found anywhere.

Stage nine: Don’t Take Away My Breakaway

My conversation with David Walsh of The Sunday Times about Tadej Pogačar’s dominance, included in Saturday’s episode, prompted a flood of reactions from listeners spanning, as you’d expect, both extremes and several points in between. Even many of those who disagreed strongly with David’s reasoning did at least acknowledge that it was good to hear a well-argued, eloquent point of view.

The stage itself was wildly aggressive, unpredictable, difficult to fathom at times. What were UAE doing riding so hard? How did Lidl-Trek mess it up? Did Netcompany-Ineos really think Filippo Ganna could win? No one – not even the protagonists themselves, it seemed – had any answers, which is what makes the Tour de France such a compelling spectacle at times. One thing was certain though, Mathieu Van der Poel was unbeatable in the sprint.

Dinner in Clermont-Ferrand was at a very reasonable Vietnamese place where Graham ordered what he thought would be vegetable spring rolls, only to find they had four large prawns tucked inside. He’s allergic to, or at least intolerant of, shellfish so he had to send them back with an apology. His replacement starter was also huge and so when his main dish arrived, he pushed it around the plate a bit and left half of it. I finished all mine and Monsieur’s demeanour towards me was noticeably warmer than towards Graham, who looked like he’d been sent to bed early for not eating all of his dinner.

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Next question please…

Yesterday in Clermont-Ferrand, we revived an old rest day tradition – The Cycling Podcast Press Conference episode. From a slow trickle of questions earlier in the week, we were suddenly swamped by both voice notes and emails over the weekend. The quality and breadth of questions was great, so thank you to everyone who took time to send one in. We decided to limit the episode to an hour, and ran out of time before we got round to tackling any of the written questions. We’ll try to answer some more in the nightly episodes, if they remain relevant to the race, and we’ll carry over others to next Monday’s rest day episode. The rest I will try to answer here in The 11.01 Cappuccino or we may do a Stage 22 episode after the end of the Tour.

If you have a question about the race, The Cycling Podcast or something specifically for me or Graham, we’d love to hear from you. You can either email us at contact@thecyclingpodcast.com or we’d love to receive your question by voice note. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology you can record your question on SpeakPipe. Just click the button below:

Ask us a question with a voice note

KM0: The 1986 trilogy

Forty years ago, I celebrated my 11th birthday. Sports mad, I’d video-taped every game of the 1986 World Cup in Mexico and was all set to spend the rest of the summer rewatching the whole thing in order. (I’ve still got a VHS of the brilliant quarter-final between France and Brazil in a cupboard in my office, long since our last video player went in a skip.)

There I was, one day after school when I saw something on the TV that made me sit bolt upright in my corduroy beanbag. It was a montage of the Tour de France – all vivid colours and beads of sweat, bobbing figures on bikes that looked like they cost a million pounds. Majestic shots of mountain peaks, riders descending like daredevils and crashes (of course).

The very British continuity announcer then said some words that arguably changed the course of my life. ‘Coming soon on Channel 4, the Tour de France,’

I was already interested in the Tour, thanks to my Dad. I’d seen snippets on ITV’s World of Sport, had read a book or two about the history of the race, but the chance to watch the stages every day was new, and beyond exciting.

Over the next three-and-a-bit weeks, I watched the stages as they were broadcast, then rewound the tape and watched the recording again when my Dad got in from work. I watched some stages so often I learned Phil Liggett’s commentary by heart. The race was a total bombardment of the senses from the opening electronic beats of Pete Shelley’s brilliant theme tune, to the calm, avuncular hosting by Nick Owen in the Soho studio, to the commentary by Phil and Paul, which took us on the best French exchange trip any kid could have.

The battle between Bernard Hinault and Greg LeMond was a high-octane daily soap opera. The couple of hours or so between getting home from school and the start of the teatime highlights dragged, such was my eagerness to see how the story had evolved. It’s no surprise the race left a lasting impression and propelled my interest from a mild curiosity to full-blown obsession. The more I learned from the coverage, the more I wanted to know. At the end of the Tour, my Dad brought home a copy of L’Équipe he’d bought at an international newsagent in London and its well-worn pages and smudged ink are tucked away in the same cupboard as that France v Brazil tape.

The rest of my World Cup recordings, and those 1986 stages, are long gone. You could just about get six stages of the Channel 4 coverage on one three-hour tape, so a whole Tour would take up four tapes. We weren’t made of money, so the 1987 Tour went over the 1986 recordings, then 1988 went over that, until the tapes were so worn and wobbly. Thank goodness for YouTube, which preserves so many of those old highlights shows to confirm, or correct, my own memories.

Our three-part KM0 mini-series indulges a lot of the nostalgia I have for that race, one which shaped to a great extent the way I see the Tour de France, which is something far more significant than a sporting event but a reflection of the way sport and media began to evolve in the late 20th century. That race undoubtedly inspired my career, although it still feels slightly unreal that just 13 years after watching the 1986 race on TV I was in France working as a journalist, realising that the Channel 4 highlights, which made the Tour so easy to understand had, in a way, lied to me. The Tour was not a neatly packaged half-hour of logical, linear storylines. It was a sprawling, confusing roadshow where you frequently felt something important was happening somewhere else and that you were missing it. The genius of the Channel 4 highlights was that it told the story of the Tour in such accessible and digestible bite-size chunks.

Years later, I felt a wave of professional envy, a sort of ‘I wish I’d written that’ when Richard Moore published the brilliant Slaying the Badger, which retold the story of a Tour I thought I knew inside out in such detail that reading it was almost like watching a film. Richard called it The Greatest Ever Tour de France, and when he, Edward Pickering and I covered the 2012 race together I can remember a spirited two-against-one debate in the car one day when Ed and I argued that 1989 was better.

Months later, Richard and I met up in London. The idea of starting what would become The Cycling Podcast was just fermenting. The paperback edition of Slaying the Badger must have just come out. Richard gifted me a copy.

‘Will you sign it?’ I asked.

For a moment, I think Richard thought I was taking the mickey.

‘Really?’ he said.

‘Of course,’ I said.

I looked at the signature on the way home on the train.

‘The Best Tour de France ever. Richard Moore.’

How I wish he was here so I could have the last word in that particular debate.

Like me, Ed Pickering’s interest in the Tour rocketed after watching the 1986 race. The first episode of our series features Ed, me and our host Graham Willgoss, talking about the lasting influence of that Tour and what the battle between the veteran Frenchman (still only 31) and his young American teammate says about the way the event was modernising. You can read Ed’s excellent daily despatches on his Substack, Cycling, the Universe and Everything.

Part two focuses on that groundbreaking Channel 4 show. Yes, we’d seen glimpses of cycling, and the Tour de France, on British TV before, but this was new. Nightly highlights, broadcast every day. Graham spoke to Phil Liggett, the commentator who explained the race and its funny customs to an audience back at home, while I found out how the Tour came to arrive on British TV in the first place from James Venner. His dad, Brian, was the man responsible and James followed in his footsteps as the producer of ITV’s Tour coverage for more than two decades.

The final part features a Canadian history-maker, Alex Stieda, who had the most incredible day on the Tour de France at the beginning of the race.

• All three episodes are available on our regular feed for a limited time, thanks to support from our Friends of the Podcast subscribers. They are also ad-free on our Friends of the Podcast feed, where they will remain.

Subscribe as a Friend of the Podcast

Ça Revient / It’s Coming Home

The third episode of Daniel Friebe’s series looking at the emergence of Paul Seixas continues with a look at whether the domination by Tadej Pogačar will delay the long wait for a French Tour de France champion still further. And could Seixas end up being a transfer target for UAE Team Emirates?

This series of KM0 is being released every few days throughout the Tour on our regular feed and ad-free for Friends of the Podcast subscribers.

A Bastille Day celebration by MyWhoosh

A big thank you to MyWhoosh for sponsoring The Cycling Podcast during the Tour de France and Tour de France Femmes, enabling us to cover both races with daily episodes recorded on location at the races.

MyWhoosh is a virtual cycling platform that brings structured training, immersive riding worlds, group rides, events and serious racing into one place.

It’s built for anyone who wants to ride indoors with purpose, whether that’s staying fit, following a training plan, joining a community ride, racing hard, or exploring virtual roads. And it’s free to ride, just like outdoors.

To celebrate the French national holiday, 14 Juillet, or Bastille Day as we call it, MyWhoosh is launching ‘France World’ to all users to ride for free. Ride the streets of Paris, cobbled classics, the countryside around the Camargue, the Toulouse Plains or climb the Tour’s legendary climbs, the Col du Galibier or Hautacam on the platform today. Also, ride the Vive la France mission, complete two stages and unlock the Colnago Master retro bike. More details here.

Download the MyWhoosh app and enjoy your ride today.

by Lionel Birnie

We are reviving, and streamlining, the old rest day Press Conference format tomorrow and Graham and I will be answering as many of your questions as we can, against the clock, in an hour.

It’s The Cycling Podcast’s equivalent of the race of truth!

We’ve already had plenty of questions and comments by email, but we’d love to hear your questions – if only to break up the sound of our own voices for a bit!

So, you can record a voice note very easily using SpeakPipe. Use the link below to record your question.

Send us your question by voice note

We will still welcome your questions by email at contact@thecyclingpodcast.com

If you’d like to ask about the Tour de France, The Cycling Podcast, cycling in general, or have a specific question for Graham or me, now is your last chance to get your comment in tomorrow’s episode.

There will be a regular edition of The 11.01 Cappuccino tomorrow recapping our first week on the road from Barcelona to the edge of the Massif Central.

by Lionel Birnie

First stop on our 2026 Tour de France journey was Cadaqués, a gorgeous little windswept town on the Costa Brava where François Thomazeau has a place. Ever since the Grand Départ in Barcelona was announced I had in mind to visit because the photographs I’d seen all looked stunning and François had said: ‘You’ll love Cadaqués – everyone does.’ He was not wrong. Cadaqués did not disappoint.

It was an appropriate detour on our way to Barcelona because it’s where Salvador Dalí lived, and Dalí loved the Tour de France. He had a Bianchi bicycle in his studio and once said in a French radio interview: ‘What I like most of all is the Tour de France. It is an epic and I paint my best works listening to the suffering of the riders. When it is over I feel a kind of depression, for the amazing enchantment of my summer is gone.’

A Tour de France sprint finish inspired one of his 1959 etchings, and a lithograph, Symphony Bicyclette, created in 1970 reflected a lifelong fascination with cycling. But the Dalí work that kept coming to my mind, especially with the team time trial in Barcelona tomorrow (Saturday), was The Persistence of Memory, perhaps more commonly known as The Melting Clocks. If the team time trial is the ultimate race against the clock, which teams will be on the verge of a meltdown tomorrow evening?

We had a great dinner in one of François’ favourite restaurants, Gula – delicate, salty white anchovies, and pork cheek croquettes so good we ordered a second plate, followed by monkfish in a beautifully light broth – and then rounded off the evening at a great little bar called Brown Sugar, tucked away in the corner of a charming back street.

It was the perfect end to a day which threatened to unravel when our flight to Perpignan was diverted to Toulouse because of wildfires near the airport. We scrambled to hire a car and, despite falling hours behind schedule, made it in time for dinner. All I could think of was the first day of the 1989 Tour when Pedro Delgado, the reigning champion, missed his start time in the prologue time trial by two-and-a-half minutes. Starting the Tour de France feeling like you’re already off the back can add an unnecessary tension to the opening weekend. Today, we’ll head to Barcelona, collect our credentials – a press pass on a yellow lanyard which will be worn almost everywhere for the next three weeks – and then we’ll head to an informal press briefing at the EF Education-EasyPost team hotel, just along the coast to the south of the city this afternoon.

And then we’ll be off and running… My 23rd Tour de France as a journalist, Graham’s fourth, Daniel (the Adam Hansen of the press corps) continues his incredible decade-long run of consecutive Grand Tours, and François joins us for a couple of days 40 years after his debut Tour. The Cycling Podcast team has a nice mix of experience and, if not exactly youth (sorry, Graham!), then eager enthusiasm.

We’d love you to join us for the ride over the next three weeks as we seek to capture the excitement of the greatest race on earth.

The XL Preview mini series is online now

The Cycling Podcast’s XL Tour de France Preview is split into three parts this year and they are online now for you to listen to as the Grand Départ approaches.

In part one, we have focused on the Tour’s two dominant figures – the men who have won each edition stretching back to 2020. Given their performances this season, it’s impossible to look beyond Tadej Pogačar and Jonas Vingegaard for the overall title in Paris. The score currently stands 4-2 in Pog’s favour and he’s aiming to join the five-time winner’s club. This season, they’ve won almost every race they’ve taken part in.

The SlovAlien™ has won Strade Bianche, Milan-Sanremo, the Tour of Flanders, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Tour de Romandie and Tour de Suisse. The only race he’s ridden but not won is Paris-Roubaix, where he was beaten by Wout van Aert.

Meanwhile, Jonas Vingegaard has won Paris-Nice, the Volta a Catalunya and the Giro d’Italia, beating Pog to one accolade by becoming the first of them to complete the Grand Tour ‘Grand Slam’.

They are a formidable pair, backed by equally impressive teams, and – for the first time – they appear to each be going into the Tour at their best, without any lingering setbacks, suggesting we could be in for a classic confrontation.

To get the lowdown on the two leading protagonists, Graham spoke to Andy McGrath, the journalist and author of the biography – or should that be biPOG-raphy, Unstoppable, while I checked in with a familiar voice to all of our listeners, Vingegaard’s fellow Dane, Brian Nygaard.

In part two, we took a deep look at the route of the 113th edition of the Tour, which takes the riders from the Arc de Triomf (more or less) in Barcelona to the Arc de Triomphe in Paris via the Pyrenees, Massif Central, Vosges, Jura and Alps, concluding with back-to-back stages to Alpe d’Huez, and a slightly rejigged finale in Paris with the unmissable circuits of Montmartre. Our guide is François Thomazeau, who delivers plenty of French flavour as we meander through the highlights of the next three weeks of racing.

While this Tour may well be dominated by the big two heavyweights (lightweight and welterweight, officially, according to the boxing weight divisions) there are numerous fascinating aspects to the race and in part three of our preview, we’ve got them all covered. There’s the fervour sweeping France at the prospect of 19-year-old sensation Paul Seixas making his Tour debut and, potentially, ending 40+ years of hurt for the host nation soon, if not this year. Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s leadership conundrum is fascinating. How will they balance the hopes of Remco Evenepoel and last year’s third-placed rider Florian Lipowitz? We weigh up the fast finishers and ask which of them will be left standing when the sprinters’ game of musical chairs comes to a halt on the Champs-Elysées, if not before.

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Thank you to MyWhoosh

Our Tour de France preview episodes are sponsored by MyWhoosh – a virtual cycling platform that brings structured training, immersive riding worlds, group rides, events and serious racing into one place.

It’s built for anyone who wants to ride indoors with purpose, whether that’s staying fit, following a training plan, joining a community ride, racing hard, or exploring virtual roads. And it’s free to ride, just like outdoors.

Download the MyWhoosh app and enjoy your ride today.

Ask us your Tour de France questions

If you’ve got a question you’d like us to answer in the show – whether it’s about the Tour de France, the sport in general or the podcast itself – email us at contact@thecyclingpodcast.com. We’ll try to answer one each day in the episode and if there are enough good questions we’ll perhaps revive the old Press Conference format on the first rest day.

Tour de Friebos

For the first time since 2015, Daniel Friebe will be a major part of The Cycling Podcast’s Tour de France coverage, focusing on a KM0 series that will follow one of the major storylines of the 2026 edition. (The first episode of Ça Revient will be online very soon).

Daniel is, of course, one of the founders and co-owners of The Cycling Podcast and joined Richard Moore and I on the daily Tour episodes from our debut in 2013 until 2015. Then, in 2016, he became Television’s Daniel Friebe when he joined the ITV team, dialling in a semi-regular Friebos File that first year, while Richard and I recruited a rotating cast of guests – including Caley Fretz, Andy Hood, Ciro Scognamiglio, Seb Piquet and François Thomazeau.

At the Grand Départ in Düsseldorf in 2017, François joined us as a permanent member of our Tour de France line-up, and he stayed until we dropped him off at his favourite second home in the Pyrenees, Le Viscos, early in the 2023 Tour (although he dropped in for a few days last year, and will be in Barcelona this weekend).

Since Richard died in 2022, we’ve been indebted to a number of people who have helped us keep the show on the road – François, Mitch Docker, Rose Manley, Ian Boswell, Lizzy Banks and Richard Abraham among them. When I took a year out in 2024, Graham Willgoss joined Mitch and Richard and then Graham and I teamed up last year, as we are doing again this time.

The 2026 Tour vintage

As is now traditional, Greg Andrews and the team at London’s DVine Cellars has put together a case of six wines celebrating the Tour de France route. The Cycling Podcast case is available to UK-based listeners now.

From the archive: Re-live the 1986 and 2006 Tours

Get into the Tour de France spirit by delving into our archive. We’ve bumped a couple of episodes of a mini series we made during lockdown, My First Tour, to the top of the Friends of the Podcast subscriber feed. François Thomazeau recalls his debut Tour as a journalist – in 1986 – and a startling first encounter with Bernard Hinault. And in my episode I look back at the 2006 Tour, which wasn’t the first I covered but it was the first I followed from start to finish. We travelled in a camper van that year, which added adventures and mishaps along the way. As we mark the 20th anniversary of the extraordinary Operacion Puerto doping investigation which led to all the pre-race favourites, including Jan Ullrich and Ivan Basso, being kicked out of the race before it even started, the episode tells the story through some of the blogs I wrote at the time.

Our 2026 Tour de France episode logos feature a photograph taken by Simon Gill on the final day of last year’s race. He captured the moment Tadej Pogačar, in the yellow jersey, was perfectly framed by the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. Simon will be heading out to France in his broomwagon to join us for the second half of the race.

The Podcast Postbag

That’s a wrap for the 2026 Giro d’Italia, completing a decade of daily coverage of Italy’s Grand Tour by The Cycling Podcast. Thank you for all your comments over the past three weeks. Here’s a recent selection from our postbag. If you have a question or comment email us at contact@thecyclingpodcast.com

Ciclismo! (What great Giro coverage!)

Well, I hope you’ve received many emails with this as the subject! Congrats to everyone at the Pod on a brilliant Giro. Had I just listened rather than watched when I could, I think I would have given it 4.5 wine glasses. (I think Daniel is right that it was a three-glass Giro).

The ‘Pelacci/Friebe in Italy’ combo is fantastic, and I loved the Baron’s stint too. Would have loved a bit of guest Lionel content on key stages to take me to five glasses, but we can’t have it all.

This Giro really felt like what The Cycling Podcast does at its best – expansive, erudite, and sometimes a little sideways, proper journalism – Adam

Loved the podcast. It was the best ever, thank you! – Tracy

I just wanted to get in touch to say a massive thank you for the Giro coverage. I’ve been a listener since the start of the Grand Tour coverage (and before) but this year’s pods hit differently for me. I spent almost all of the duration of the race in Italy, exploring places and eating things that I’ve picked up from your episodes and the TV coverage over the years.

Perversely I saw almost none of the actual race this year as we travelled round the country as a family (apart from the odd day when we had access to RAI), relying on procyclingstats for race results and the podcast for context. It was a unique way to follow the race but I loved it. The whole trip was inspired by pointers about areas, traditions, food that I’ve picked up from the podcast over the years. Your Grand Tour coverage is so much more than reporting on a race – it’s an introduction to a whole country and culture – and this year’s trip only started to scratch the itch. Thanks to Daniel and Pelacci for a fantastic three weeks’ work and the whole team for the body of work over a decade – Paul

Just a quick message to say a massive thank you to Daniel, Michele and Brian. You have really brought the race alive in a way you just can’t get from watching the TV coverage. Great to have Lizzy on the Giro Women episodes too. Looking forward to the Tour coverage – Andrew

Brilliant Giro podcasts. The on-the ground journalism is valuable, the travelogue enchanting. It multiplies my enjoyment of the Giro. Thanks to Daniel, Brian and Michele – Christophe

Grazie mille

To add to – or amplify – Daniel’s list of thanks at the end of the final episode from Not Rome… we’d like to say a huge thank you to all our listeners for tuning in, and especially to our Friends of the Podcast and those subscribers to The 11.01 Cappuccino who choose to support us financially. As an independent media company, the support of people who enjoy our work is not only vital, but hugely appreciated because it’s the ultimate vote of confidence in what we are doing. Whether you’ve been listening since day one in 2013, or have discovered The Cycling Podcast more recently, we’re delighted to have you with us.

A big thank you to Brian Nygaard and Michele Pelacci for adding so much depth, colour, fun and enthusiasm to our coverage over the past three weeks.

Our production team of Jon Moonie, Tom Whalley, Adam Bowie, Huw Owen and Elinor Terry perform heroics night after night, editing our episodes and getting them online so quickly after the stages. Without them we’d be talking to ourselves!

The support of Mike Newman and the team at Audioboom, as well as all our advertisers, is hugely appreciated for the part they play in keeping the show on the road.

And of course, I’m sure all our listeners will join in sending thanks to Daniel for once again being the ultimate tour guide to Italy, its culture, cuisine and customs as well as for the commentary on the race. And he didn’t have to put up with me ordering a cappuccino in the afternoon or pointing at a random hillside and asking whether it was the Dolomites!

LB

The Giro d’Italia Women is well underway

Of course, that is not the end of the elite racing in Italy. The Giro d’Italia Women started on Saturday – and what a wild start it was. Rose, Rebecca, Denny and Lizzy are taking turns at the mic, Madison hand-slinging one another into the action as the race evolves. The GC is set for a shake-up with the individual time trial today (Tuesday) building up to the big mountain stage to Sestriere on Saturday. No spoilers here in case you’re catching up with the episodes so far, but follow The Cycling Podcast in your preferred podcast app to ensure you get the episodes as soon as they go live.

Stage One of the Giro d'Italia Women

Was it a vintage Giro d’Italia? Probably not. I think our listener Adam was about right when he said that the podcast’s coverage was worth at least another wine glass on top of Daniel’s rating. Being there, following the race in real time, always gives a very different impression to the one gained watching on television so I can understand Daniel’s judgement but, having watched every stage from the comfort of the sofa, evaluating the race in terms of televisual excitement, racing dynamics, rivalries and simmering storylines it was lacking much drama. The race for the pink jersey was a formality. The battle for the ciclamino jersey and king of the mountains jersey bubbled for a few days. The highlight in the overall race was the dogged – albeit obviously doomed – way Afonso Eulálio defended his race lead, scrapped to cling on to a high overall position and the white jersey. The stages were spread between fewer than half of the teams. Jonas Vingegaard, Jhonatan Narváez and Paul Magnier won 11 of the 21 stages between them. The breakaways featured the same faces time and again.

Having said that, it’s impossible to take anything away from the precision with which Visma-Lease a Bike and Vingegaard set about their task. They were clinical, ruthless at the right moments, and utterly unflustered. As they say in football, you can only beat what’s in front of you, but it’s also fair to say that Vingegaard was almost unopposed so it is tricky to evaluate how his performance stacks up against that of Tadej Pogačar two years ago or whether it increases his chances at the Tour de France in July.

There was still plenty to enjoy, though. The stage wins for Alberto Bettiol and Michael Valgren were gripping. The break staying clear in Milan, where Fredrik Dversnes won, was one of the best moments of the season so far at the end of a stage that promised next to nothing on paper. Paul Magnier’s sprinting gives France a potential green jersey winner in the not-too-distant future. Felix Gall’s steady Eddie approach and sheer consistency in the mountains were strangely appealing (even if the angle of his knees drove me to distraction) but Vingegaard’s superiority did mean that once the GC hierarchy was set at Blockhaus the overall contenders settled into a formation.

Stage 19

• A short but very hard Queen Stage featured the Passo Duran and Passo Giau along with four second-category climbs, meaning a huge haul of points was on offer in the king of the mountains competition. Giulio Ciccone, who looked to have given up the fight for the blue jersey in frustration the previous day, went out on the offensive from the start, getting into the 24-man break and taking maximum points from the first four climbs to overtake Jonas Vingegaard’s total.

• The beef started at the Red Bull KM, where Ciccone’s Lidl-Trek teammate Derek Gee-West pipped Movistar’s Einer Rubio to maximum points. Had Rubio won that sprint he’d have wrapped up the Red Bull KM classification with two stages to go. Revenge was served cold, because later, on the penultimate climb, the Passo Falzarego, Rubio sprinted past Ciccone to take the points, which led to head-shaking and arm-waving from the Italian, who then took off solo on the descent, fired by his irritation.

• On the final climb Visma-Lease a Bike’s Sepp Kuss, who had been lurking quietly in the break all day, broke clear, passed Ciccone and completed the set of Giro, Tour and Vuelta stage wins. The consolation for Ciccone was third place on the stage and the king of the mountains jersey, which he had been keeping warm for Vingegaard, was now his.

• Jai Hindley of Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe climbed above Thymen Arensman and onto the third step of the podium, while Derek Gee-West rose to fifth place as the top ten was shuffled a little, with Afonso Eulálio slipping to sixth.

• EF’s Michael Valgren, who won the 17th stage to Andalo, and his teammate James Shaw, pulled out of the Giro ahead of the final two mountain stages. Hit by injuries and with two more Grand Tours to come, EF decided to prioritise rest and recovery, which strongly hints that Valgren will be selected for the Tour de France in July.

• Jhonatan Narváez, whose chase for the ciclamino jersey appeared to be ended by Paul Magnier’s stage win in Pieve di Soligo, withdrew from the race with a nosebleed and dizziness. It later emerged that the Ecuadorian had ridden into a team bus that braked unexpectedly while he was looking at his bike computer on his way back to his own team bus after stage 18. It remains to be seen whether the crash will jeopardise his place in the UAE Team Emirates line-up to support Tadej Pogačar at the Tour.

Stage 20

• An early break of five went clear and Manuele Tarozzi and Larry Warbasse then had a long, hard chase to bridge across to join Jack Haig, Guillermo Thomas Silva, Jonas Geens, Axel Huens and Andreas Leknessund.

• Later, Igor Arrieta and Ludovico Crescioli got across to the break and the Spaniard won the Red Bull KM to give himself a shot of overtaking Einer Rubio in the overall classification.

• The second ascent of Piancavallo saw the break reeled in so that when Jonas Vingegaard accelerated at the front of the GC group it wasn’t long before he was at the front of the race. As we’d seen several times, Felix Gall stayed on Vingegaard’s wheel briefly before settling into his own rhythm.

• Meanwhile, Vingegaard’s teammate Davide Piganzoli’s hopes of taking the white jersey from Afonso Eulálio evaporated when he was among the first of the GC riders to slip backwards. Arensman was also struggling and was grateful for the steady pacing from his Netcompany-Ineos teammate Egan Bernal to limit the damage to just a few seconds and keep hold of fourth place overall.

• Vingegaard’s fifth stage win, and Visma-Lease a Bike’s sixth, was a formality with around 10km to go, and the race behind him played out as expected too, with the riders reaching the top in form and (almost) general classification order.

Stage 21

• Jonathan Milan’s seemingly eternal wait for a stage win in this Giro finally ended in the Eternal City. While there was no win for Milan in Milan, he finally bounded across the line in first place in Rome to complete a very solid Giro for the Lidl-Trek team. They scored the second highest tally of UCI points (2,287 pts after Visma-Lease a Bike’s 3,287), with a stage win for Milan, a day in pink for Ciccone plus the king of the mountains jersey and fifth place overall for Derek Gee-West.

• The run-in to the line was intriguing because both Milan and Paul Magnier had teammates in the leading trio, which was being driven by Filippo Ganna. Matteo Sobrero and Jasper Stuyven were enjoying a free ride and barely gave Ganna a turn as they policed the move for their sprinters.

• Visma-Lease a Bike won their second Giro in a row, after Simon Yates’s win last year. Jonas Vingegaard clinched the Grand Tour grand slam – beating Tadej Pogačar to that particular milestone – and becoming the first rider since Chris Froome to complete the set. Two years ago, Pogačar did the Giro-Tour double, which many felt was an achievement that had been consigned to history by the intensity of modern racing. Vingegaard’s victory was not quite as crushing – five stage wins to the Slovenian’s six; a five-minute winning margin compared to Pog’s ten-minute victory – but he was never in difficulty. The question now is whether the Giro victory will help or hinder Vingegaard’s bid to unseat Pogačar in July.

• Igor Arrieta won the Red Bull KM to pip Einer Rubio to the overall title. Rubio must’ve been cursing Gee-West.

• Nelson Oliveira of Movistar completed his 23rd Grand Tour, keeping up a 100% record since his debut at the 2011 Vuelta a España. The veteran Portuguese rider has one stage win to his name – at the 2015 Vuelta – and a best finish of 21st in that same race. While it’s not a record for Grand Tour starts (that’s Matteo Tosatto’s 34), or even finishes, it is the joint longest 100% record without a single abandon.

• In terms of stage wins, 14 of the 23 teams ended up empty-handed, continuing a trend we’ve seen at a few Grand Tours in recent times. Of the teams that didn’t win a stage, Decathlon and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe will be happy to have made the final podium with Gall (who also finished second in five stages) and Jai Hindley. Tudor’s Michael Storer and Matthys Rondel were seventh and 11th, the latter riding his first Grand Tour. Polti-Visit Malta and Bardiani fulfilled the role of wild-card teams by getting in lots of breaks, with Polti’s Diego Sevilla enjoying the best part of a week in the mountains jersey. But looking at the haul of UCI points for each team, there were some worrying performances. Jayco-Alula (335 pts), Lotto-Intermarché (332) and Alpecin-Premier Tech (295 pts) all had mitigating factors. But Picnic-PostNL’s 67 points, with Warren Barguil’s ninth place at Chiavari their best result of the race, adds pressure ahead of the Tour de France.

The Cycling Podcast returns to regular weekly episodes as Lionel Birnie and Graham Willgoss build up to the Tour de France. Later this week they’ll preview the Critérium du Dauphiné, sorry, Tour Auvergne Rhône-Alpes.

by Lionel Birnie

Listening to Daniel’s latest KM0 One-Hit Wonder, which features Alexander Foliforov talking about his unlikely victory in the mountain time trial on the Alpe di Siusi a decade ago brought back a host of buried memories.

The 2016 race was the first Giro d’Italia The Cycling Podcast covered with daily episodes recorded on the road and I’d been at the race since the grande partenza in the Netherlands. The mountain time trial was my final day before heading home and perhaps I was guilty of mentally checking out and assuming that the short stage would be a logistical piece of cake, especially as we were staying in a little guesthouse just a few kilometres from the start.

One of my main memories of the day is driving our gleaming Maserati up and down the same stretch of motorway, through multiple tunnels cutting through the mountain side searching for an exit that didn’t seem to exist. It seemed that the road was too new for our GPS and after three or four pointless laps, Daniel called a colleague who explained there was a hidden back road that led us where we needed to go.

Later on, now running a little behind schedule, we took the cable car up into the Dolomites and were treated to an awesome birdseye view of the riders as the road switched back and forth beneath us.

My memory is that by the time we got to the top, Foliforov was one of two Gazprom riders occupying the top two places on the stage. Sergey Firsanov was the other, although he would later be pushed down to fourth place.

Foliforov’s time stood for the rest of the afternoon, although the maglia rosa Steven Kruijswijk pushed him very close, finishing in a time less than a second slower. It was a stunning upset by the 24-year-old Russian rider and, as the podcast’s resident sceptic, I have to admit my eyebrows were raised pretty high when we recorded our episode. The Gazprom team were a surprise wild card selection in the first place, picked at the expense of Gianni Savio’s squad. There were accusations that the selection was due to the fact that the man behind the team, the billionaire Igor Makarov, also held an influential position at the UCI. Anyway, Gazprom had barely made an impression in the race for two weeks and then Foliforov caused an almighty upset.

Was my scepticism well placed? Well, I won’t spoil the episode, you’ll have to listen to One-Hit Wonder for the accusation levelled at Foliforov and his account of the day. But what is equally remarkable is that two years later, aged 26, his professional career was at an end. His Giro stage win – referred to on social media, especially by the Dutch, as Foliforov Day – was by a huge margin the biggest win of his career, although he did win the king of the mountains at the Tour of the Alps in 2017.

As the Giro reaches the Dolomites today (pretty sure that’s right…) it’s well worth listening to one of the most remarkable stories of the 2016 race – the ultimate race of truth – and make up your own mind what happened.

One-Hit Wonder is on our regular feed for everyone to listen to now.

Listen to One-Hit Wonder

Giro d’Italia Women: Daily episodes start tomorrow

Join Rose Manley and Rebecca Charlton tomorrow (Saturday) as the Giro d’Italia Women gets underway with a stage from Marco Pantani’s home town, Cesenatico, to Ravenna. As the week unfolds, The Cycling Podcast Féminin’s team will rotate with Denny Gray and Lizzy Banks joining the coverage to analyse the race as it heads to Saluzzo via Sestriere.

Tune in to see if Elisa Longo Borghini can become the first rider since Fabiana Luperini in the 1990s to win three editions of the Giro in a row. Or can Anna van der Breggen equal Luperini’s record of five overall victories? Or perhaps Demi Vollering will add the Giro to her Tour and Vuelta titles after dominating the spring Classics.

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The first Giro

This episode of KM0 revisits the very first edition of the women’s Giro, which was held in 1988, when Italy’s Maria Canins was one of the top riders in the world. Tom Whalley spoke to Lisa Brambani, a member of the Great Britain team with an Italian name, who finished in the top ten of that first race. It’s a fantastic, colourful and upbeat listen about a race which broke new ground and veered from the dramatic to the chaotic, told in brilliant style by Lisa. The episode is available for Friends of the Podcast subscribers to listen to now and I’ve bumped it back to the top of our playlist so it’s easy to find. It’s the ideal way to warm up for the 2026 edition.

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With three stages remaining, there are still 15 teams without a stage win. Between them, Jonas Vingegaard, Paul Magnier and Jhonatan Narváez have won ten of the 18 stages so far meaning the rest of the peloton will be scrambling to salvage something over the final three stages – two of which are savage mountain days, and the final one in Rome should go to a sprinter. Here’s my armchair summary of the past few days from Pod HQ.

Stage 16

• A short, sharp day trip to Switzerland for the Giro saw a familiar cast of riders get into the breakaway. Giulio Ciccone and Jardi Christiaan van der Lee were hunting king of the mountains points in an increasingly futile chase for the blue jersey. Jhonatan Narváez was seeking to unsettle Paul Magnier in the battle for the ciclamino jersey and he was joined by his UAE teammate Jan Christen. Diego Ulissi and Einer Rubio were hunting for a stage win, and Chris Harper was looking to climb back into the top 10 overall.

• However, Visma-Lease a Bike once again maintained their iron-like grip, holding the break within a safe distance and then reeling them in at the bottom of the final climb. Ciccone, looking frustrated, more or less conceded defeat in his bid for a second Giro mountains title, but Narváez did narrow the gap in the points competition to just two points at the intermediate sprint. Harper was the last man to be caught and passed by the yellow train at the front of the peloton.

• Giulio Pellizzari, still suffering the effects of illness, was first of the GC contenders to be dropped, with 10.6km to go, and he finished 18 minutes down to tumble out of the top ten. Next to be distanced was Afonso Eulálio, whose place on the podium was in peril. He dug in but still lost three minutes and slipped from second to fifth overall. Ben O’Connor was another highly-placed rider in trouble while Visma’s Victor Campenaerts was still doing his mountain time trial effort on the front.

• After a short stint from Sepp Kuss, Davide Piganzoli – one of the stars of this Giro – took over to set Jonas Vingegaard up for the inevitable decisive blow 6.8km from the line. Felix Gall tried to react but, as has become customary, the Austrian rode a sensible race and settled into his own rhythm. Vingegaard pushed on to the line with the rest of the Giro sorting out the battle for the podium places behind him. It was the Dane’s fourth stage win of the race, and his first in the pink jersey.

• Felix Gall staked the strongest claim to second place, although his lead over Thymen Arensman is only 24 seconds. Jai Hindley also jumped above Eulálio into fourth and Derek Gee-West was the other big riser – climbing three places to sixth. Piganzoli looks on course for the top ten and, with Vingegaard more or less assured of overall victory, he may get the freedom to attempt to gain another couple of places over the final mountain stages.

Listen to our Stage 16 episode

Stage 17

• The 202-kilometre stage to Andalo was uphill from the start and, with chances running out for the numerous teams still searching for a stage win, there was an aggressive, restless start to the stage with 13 riders eventually getting away in two groups. However, it was one of those days when nothing seemed to settle. Even watching from the sofa was an exhausting experience and, with the UK basking in a heatwave, it’s possible my eyelids may have obscured some of the action in the middle of the day.

• Remi Cavagna of Groupama-FDJ carved out a good lead with 100km to go but with so many climbs ahead, it was a near impossible task to stay away without help. During the final phase of the race, it was no surprise that Igor Arrieta, Einer Rubio and Michael Valgren worked their way to the front. Rubio was especially aggressive, as Movistar have been throughout the race, and at times Valgren seemed to be hanging on for dear life, unable to go through and do a turn on the front. In the final couple of kilometres, Arrieta – who had been dropped – got back up to them, then Aleksandr Vlasov, Damiano Caruso and Andreas Leknessund caught them too. Caruso was the first to try something but everyone reacted smartly, only for Valgren to attack just inside a kilometre to go and there was a crucial few seconds of hesitation that allowed the Dane to get a good gap.

• Valgren, a winner of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Amstel Gold Race in the past, had endured a long road to recovery after a horrendous crash at La Route d’Occitanie in 2022 which almost ended his career. A stage win at Tirreno-Adriatico in March was his first victory in almost five years, and this Giro victory was his first at a Grand Tour, which seemed improbable given his quality. As he approached the line, victory safely in the bag, he reached into his back pocket for a green Pokémon disc made for him by his son. Valgren only carries the disc during Grand Tour stages when he feels he has a chance of winning and today was one of those days. Seeing Valgren acknowledge his son, and Vingegaard’s ritual of kissing the photo of his family on his handlebars, was a reminder of the sacrifice the riders make at the Grand Tours. They all spend weeks and weeks on the road. Bulgaria must feel a long while ago now for some of the teams, especially with the spoils being spread so incredibly thinly.

• Narváez took the ciclamino jersey but perhaps will have hoped to finish better than ninth to apply more pressure to Paul Magnier.

Listen to our Stage 17 episode

Stage 18

• The Prosecco Stage should have been perfect for the breakaway, especially with the steep Muro di Ca’ Del Poggio coming so close to the finish, but with Jonathan Milan still waiting for his first stage win of the race, Lidl-Trek were among the teams wanting to keep things together in the closing stages. As a result, the breakaway consisting of two Polti-Visit Malta riders Mattia Bais and Andrea Mifsud, who were later joined by James Shaw of EF Education-EasyPost and Jonas Geens of Alpecin-Premier Tech, had a fairly hopeless outlook. Mifsud, who was celebrating his 27th birthday, was perhaps trying to earn a glass of bubbles. Geens was the last man standing but the peloton was in no mood to let the stage slip away.

• The ‘wall’ was spectacular. Very steep and every bit as dramatic as its namesake in Liguria. And credit to Jonathan Milan, who rode front and centre among Vingegaard and the other GC leaders until the very top of the climb to stay in contact and give himself a chance of an unlikely sprint win.

• Eulálio had an incredible afternoon. He crashed with around 50 kilometres to go and faced a mammoth chase to get back to the peloton. Then, on the Poggio, he attacked near the top and forced a split in the bunch. When it all came back together again, Eulálio was the only rider to react when Johannes Kulset of Uno-X broke clear. They were caught with just over a kilometre to go as the peloton raced to beat the rain into Pieve di Soligo.

• Earlier in the day, there’d been a shot of two horse riders in a field alongside the peloton. One of the horses was reminiscent of Milan’s sprinting style. At the finish, he was unmissable sprinting through the middle but he didn’t quite have the pace to hold off Paul Magnier, who clinched his third stage win of the race and 50 points which – barring a disaster – should wrap up the ciclamino jersey for the Frenchman. Milan will now have to hope he can win in Roma on Sunday.

Listen to our Stage 18 episode

• Follow The Cycling Podcast in your preferred podcast player to ensure you get notification as soon as a new episode drops. Join Daniel and Michele as the Giro d’Italia comes to its conclusion and then tune in as The Cycling Podcast Féminin picks up the Giro d’Italia Women. There’ll be a regular episode next week looking ahead to the Critérium du Dauphiné Tour Auverge-Rhône-Alpes.

by Lionel Birnie

The penultimate weekend of the Giro d’Italia delivered everything we expected, and a stage in Milan that demonstrated cycling’s capacity to serve up a surprise even when the raw ingredients look anything but exciting.

Jonas Vingegaard finally moved into the maglia rosa and with his teammates having everyone suffering like a Piganzoli it is his race to lose now. The race for the podium remains alive, as does the contest for the ciclamino jersey.

And, with 16 of the 23 teams yet to win a stage, the battle to get into the breaks in the final week will be intense because so many teams are on course to leave Rome on Sunday empty-handed.

As the men’s Giro reaches its conclusion, the Giro d’Italia Women will roll out of Cesenatico. Don’t forget we have daily episodes covering the race starting at the weekend. In the meantime, here are our observations following the middle week of the Giro…

Stage 13

• XDS-Astana have got their mojo back since being involved in last season’s relegation battle to avoid demotion from the WorldTour. The way they reshaped their tactical approach to racing has rolled over into this season and they’ve raced with far greater belief and confidence.

• It was a classic end of the second week, eve of a big mountain day, transitional stage. An early break of 15 riders got clear and led by more than 10 minutes approaching the final climb, which is where Andreas Leknessund of Uno-X went clear on his own. Alberto Bettiol was clearly biding his time and waited until the final few hundred metres before launching an intense acceleration to blitz past the Norwegian.

• It was XDS-Astana’s third stage win of this Giro – following Guillermo Thomas Silva and Davide Ballerini. It’s been a fairly barren few years for the Kazakh squad at the Grand Tours. Their previous three stage wins span the 2023 Giro d’Italia (where Mark Cavendish won) to last year’s Vuelta a España – that’s three wins in nine Grand Tours. Now they’ve collected three in a fortnight. The last time Astana won three times in the same Grand Tour was the 2019 Giro.

• Bettiol has a lot of quality but a relatively slim list of race wins. His first victory as a professional was the 2019 Tour of Flanders, which perhaps set expectations too high. This victory was only the ninth of his career, and his first in XDS-Astana colours since a mid-season transfer from EF Education-Easy Post shortly after winning the Italian national title two seasons ago.

Listen to our Stage 13 episode

Stage 14

• Visma-Lease A Bike dominated the stage to Pila, taking control of the peloton more or less from start to finish and starting the final climb with intimidating numbers in front of Jonas Vingegaard. It was a show of strength that enabled the Dane to make the maximum gain for the minimum amount of time spent in the red. He went clear with 4.7 kilometres of the final climb remaining. Felix Gall was the only rider to stay close to him, demonstrating again his cool-headed style under pressure to limit his losses and then try to recover time rather than match the accelerations and blow up. Vingegaard soloed away to win his third stage by 49 seconds. Could he have gained more time? Perhaps, but it’s clear that he is racing with one eye on July and doesn’t want to go too deep here. Is it a swashbuckling, breath-taking display in the style of Pog in his pomp? No, but it doesn’t need to be. As golfers say – there’s no room for pretty pictures on the scorecard.

• Tim Rex – now nicknamed T-Rex by everyone – put in a ferocious, if slightly theatrical, turn on the climb before a turn of speed by Sepp Kuss spelled defeat for the break. Davide Piganzoli was the last man for Vingegaard and he was strong enough to mark Gall and finish fourth on the stage. Afterwards he said he’d been ‘suffering like a pig’. A new description is born – suffering like a Piganzoli.

• Afonso Eulálio put up a spirited defence of the pink jersey and managed to retain second place overall. While he will be vulnerable in the face of Gall’s consistency in the mountains, a top five place must be his target now.

• Decathlon’s steady evolution into a stage racing powerhouse is slowly bearing fruit. They were supporting Gall with good numbers until quite late on the climb, suggesting they will be able to provide Paul Seixas with some meaningful back-up at the Tour de France.

• Thymen Arensman faltered slightly in the heat but he dug very deep to limit his losses and kept his podium chances alive. The battle between Gall, Arensman, Jai Hindley and perhaps one or two others for the right to stand alongside Vingegaard in Rome looks to one remaining intriguing battle of the final week.

• The other battle is between Jhonatan Narváez and Paul Magnier for the ciclamino jersey. The Ecuadorian got in the break and took the jersey by winning intermediate sprint points – something he will presumably seek to do knowing Magnier is unlikely to be able to do the same when there are big hills in the way.

Listen to our Stage 14 episode

Stage 15

• On paper, Sunday’s 15th stage looked like a snooze. A flat stage and certain sprint finish in Milan was hardly likely to make appointment viewing for millions of armchair spectators. Of course, taking the Giro into the centre of one of Italy’s biggest cities is less disruptive at the weekend but if professional cycling is to exploit the rich seam of untapped TV viewers surely the organisers need to schedule the best stages on Saturdays and Sundays. The only thing worse would have been another time trial. But what a stage it turned out to be – in front of a big crowd too.

• When it became apparent that the GC riders, led by Jonas Vingegaard, were calling for the race organisers to take the times for the overall classification with one lap – 16 kilometres – remaining, it was tempting to wonder whether the point of a stage race is becoming lost. The Milan streets on a warm, sunny day were not as dangerous as some of the roads in Bulgaria or Napoli, so there seemed to be no compelling reason to give the GC riders any added breathing space. Back in 2009, the Giro peloton – led by Lance Armstrong and Danilo Di Luca – successfully argued for a neutralisation in Milan before Mark Cavendish won the stage, so it wasn’t without precedent. On that occasion, the riders were protesting about inadequate course safety following a terrible career-ending crash for Pedro Horrillo the previous day. The Milan stage, held on the same course as the one that started the very first Giro 100 years earlier, was disrupted by a rider protest at the end of the fourth lap and the organisers agreed to cancel the GC times.

• On Sunday, it was probably the right decision too – and it made me think that perhaps the UCI needs to reconsider the rules for all the flat stages because it wasn’t the decision itself that made the sport look shambolic it was that the rules of engagement were once again being negotiated while the race was playing out. The riders acknowledge that the presence of the GC contenders and their teammates is one of the aggravating factors during sprint finishes, increasing the risks for everyone. But the sprinters will also highlight the fact that they have to survive the mountain stages inside the time limit. So perhaps the answer is to have an equivalent time limit on the sprint stages. Take the GC times at 10 (or in this case 16) kilometres to go but anyone sitting up to stay out of trouble must finish within a certain time of the winner, meaning they can’t just coast to the line but have to carry on riding at a similar intensity to the front group, just without the jostling for position and danger. If they miss the time cut they get their actual elapsed time. This introduces a sporting element of risk and reward for the GC riders to consider and the best option would probably suit everyone – the GC riders sit at the back of the peloton without losing contact safe in the knowledge that if gaps open up they won’t lose unnecessary time. Perhaps this sounds too complicated to administer but continuing the way the sport is going, with discussions during the stage and the viewing public coming to the conclusion that the riders don’t want to race, is farcical. The Grand Tours are either a test to see who can complete a mammoth 3,500-kilometre course in the lowest aggregate time or they’re not.

• While all that was going on, the peloton seemed to forget that the breakaway quartet was out in front. They had ridden brilliantly all day to maintain a gap that was still a very healthy 1-30 with 25 kilometres to go. The break was packed with riders who between them had spent more than 1,400 off the front of the peloton before Sunday’s stage rolled out of Voghera. Mattia Bais of Team Polti-Visit Malti had been in six breaks, his teammate Mirco Maestri in two and Martin Marcellusi of Bardiani CSF had been in four. Frederik Dvernes of Uno-X, who kicked off the move in the opening kilometres, was in his first major escape in this, his first Giro d’Italia.

• The quartet rode incredibly well and co-operated brilliantly to give themselves the best chance. Although the gap was melting away in the closing 25 kilometres, the peloton did not get its act together sufficiently. With 20 kilometres to go, the gap was still 1-06. Ten kilometres later it was 45 seconds, and with five to go it was still 27 seconds and. Behind them, the sprinters’ teams realised too late the opportunity was slipping away. Lidl-Trek’s Derek Gee-West did a big turn for his sprinter Jonathan Milan. Unibet Rose Rockets were also working well for Dylan Groenewegen. But Decathlon (for Tobias Lund Andresen) and Picnic Post NL (for Casper van Uden) were reluctant to assist.

• A couple of the teams took the old adage that you have to be prepared to lose in order to win a little too literally. The panic was full on when Milan’s leadout man Simone Consonni was on the front with 2.6 kilometres to go but by that stage Lidl-Trek, at least, had realised the gap was not closing quickly enough.

• The sentimental among us must have been hoping for either a Maestri or Bais win. Maestri, riding his ninth Giro with a best stage result of second last year, has done his time in the breaks over almost a decade. Bais too is one of the first riders to jump out of the bunch on days like this. But in the end, Italy was to be disappointed when the only foreign rider, and the only one from a WorldTour team, proved strongest in the sprint. There’s often no room for sentiment in cycling.

• We were denied the sight of a Milan win in Milan. And Jonathan Milan’s wait for a stage win this year might now go all the way to Rome. It was a bad day for more than half of Milan too because a few kilometres away, later in the evening, the rossoneri lost their final Serie A match of the season to Cagliari to miss out on a place in the Champions League – very much the football equivalent of failing to catch the break in the final kilometre.

• The race for the ciclamino jersey came alive with Jhonatan Narváez showing his hand and making it clear he wants to win the points competition in Rome by going for the final point at the intermediate sprint in Pavia. Paul Magnier came past him quite easily to draw level overall, and then the Frenchman stretched his lead by winning the bunch sprint for fifth place behind the break. It’s a complicated final week for Magnier, who may have to watch helplessly while Narváez chips away at his lead but, if he can go into the final stage within 30 or 40 points of the Ecuadorian he will feel the jersey is his to take.

• Enrico Zanoncello of Bardiani CSF was rightly disqualified for aiming a headbutt at Jayco-Alula’s Robert Donaldson in the final sprint, which caused the British rider to crash. It was a moment of madness that doesn’t do the peloton any favours when they are arguing for safer racing conditions.

• Who would have thought there’d be so many talking points from such an uninspiring-looking stage? It just goes to show that the riders are the ones who make the race. Their decisions, their risks and their hesitation can deliver the drama in the most surprising ways sometimes.

Listen to our Stage 15 episode

Rest day listening: Viva Somarriba!

May’s episode of The Cycling Podcast Féminin is online now

Grab a round of agua con gas and listen in as Rose Manley, Denny Gray and Rebecca Charlton review the Spanish stage racing block.

With many of the big hitters away making preparations for the forthcoming Giro d’Italia, the short stage races of Itzulia and Vuelta a Burgos provided plenty of surprises and breakthroughs. On a rare opportunity from domestique duties, Mischa Bredewold led the charge for SD Worx who looked back to their old imperious best. But what does the win mean for a team that already have so many champions in their roster? Yara Kastellijn’s huge victory on the final day of Burgos cemented a phenomenal few weeks for the rider who has been without a win since her breakthrough at the Tour de France Femmes in 2023. Plus, did FDJ United Suez make the wrong call in Itzulia by not backing young British star Lauren Dickson?

In our mini feature we speak to the last Spanish rider (before Paula Blasi this year) to win a women’s Grand Tour. That champion is Joane Somarriba, a rider who twice won the Giro Feminile and three times won the precursor to the Tour de France Femmes, the Grand Boucle. She talks about her journey to the top, overcoming hospitalisation and prejudice to become one of the best riders of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

We also look ahead to this year’s Giro d’Italia Women which begins at the end of the month. The Cycling Podcast Féminin will bring listeners daily coverage of the race for the first time, starting on Saturday (May 30).

Also on the agenda: the ambience of shopping malls, virtual sangrias and Denny’s dream of being paid in cheese.

Listen to The Cycling Podcast Féminin

by Lionel Birnie

Every year during the Giro, we are asked about our theme and incidental music. It’s by a brilliant London-based pizzica band called Amaraterra. The theme song is called Cozze and so for Jordan, Alice, Neil, Richard and everyone else who has asked during the first couple of weeks of the Giro, here it is. I’m sure you agree that there’s something about it that combines so gloriously with the scenery and the weather to transport us all to Italy to join Daniel – and Michele and Brian – as they follow the race.

As the race heads towards the end of its second week, with a big mountain stage to Pila tomorrow (Saturday), the storylines appear to be written, the conclusion to the race known in advance. And yet it feels like a Giro of known unknowns. We know Jonas Vingegaard is the best climber in the race, but is overall victory going to come easily? Certainly at the moment he’s riding very conservatively, doing just enough but no more, and gives off an air of confidence that once he inherits the pink jersey the defence will be straightforward.

We knew Filippo Ganna was the best time trialist in the race, but can he or his Netcompany-Ineos team add another stage win or two, and support Thymen Arensman’s bid for the final podium?

We know Jonathan Milan is the fastest sprinter in the field but he’s not proved it yet. Will his time come in the city that shares his name on Sunday?

And Jhonatan Narváez is clearly the punchiest and most dynamic all-rounder. He must look at every stage profile and think he has a 7/10 chance in most of them. Can he add to his hat-trick of wins?

Stage 10

• No one was surprised that Filippo Ganna won the individual time trial in Tuscany. He was the hot favourite and a thrashing was on the cards right from the start when he caught and passed his minute man, Cyril Barthe of Groupama, after less than eight minutes of racing. Soon after that, he scorched by Paul Magnier in his ciclamino skinsuit and then carried on picking off riders until he got to the finish in Massa. As Ganna approached the line he almost caught Bardiani’s Filippo Magni, who had set off eight minutes earlier. Ganna’s average speed of 54.921kph was a Grand Tour record for any time trial over 40 kilometres in length.

• Ganna’s dominance meant the stage was largely stripped of drama until the GC riders set off. The Italian time trial champion was one of only three riders to get comfortable in the hot seat. Max Walscheid of Lidl-Trek set the early time to beat and then Sjoerd Bax of Pinarello-Q36.5 produced a brilliant ride to take a surprise lead. He kept it warm until Ganna finished.

• Sometimes, cycling history can be perplexing. The Giro organisers stated that Ganna’s seventh Giro individual time trial stage win meant he drew level with Eddy Merckx in the all-time list, though still some way off Francesco Moser’s record of 12. I’ve scoured the record books and can only find six individual time trial wins for Merckx at the Giro. Perhaps they’re counting the 1973 prologue in Verviers, which was actually a two-man time trial in which Merckx partnered his Molteni teammate Roger Swerts and crossed the line first to take the pink jersey.

• The course from Viareggio to Massa showed the Tuscan coastline in a far better light than the Tirreno-Adriatico stage a couple of months ago when the weather was grey and the towns were sleepy. While it’s still early and the summer season has not kicked off yet, there were more people around and the sea looked brighter and bluer. Forte dei Marmi’s designer boutiques had at least raised their shutters. One of the great joys of watching the Giro is vicariously soaking up the sunshine and holiday vibes knowing summer is not far away.

• Anyone who watched that Tirreno-Adriatico time trial in March would not have been surprised by Thymen Arensman’s ride. Ganna and Arensman finished first and second then too and although the Dutchman was a distant 1-53 behind his Netcompany-Ineos teammate on Tuesday, he is much better suited to a flat time trial course than most of the other GC contenders. Second place on the stage propelled Arensman up to third overall, still some way behind Vingegaard, but suddenly the final podium in Rome looks a realistic target for him.

• I expected Jonas Vingegaard to take the pink jersey in the time trial, not because the course suited him – it didn’t – but because it suited Afonso Eulálio so much less. While the Dane will have been relatively unconcerned about not assuming the race lead this early, the fact Arensman, and to a lesser extent Ben O’Connor and Derek Gee-West, had moved into his orbit will have given Visma-Lease A Bike pause for thought.

• Eulálio produced the time trial performance of his life. There’s not a huge bank of evidence to go on but he is not noted for his strength against the clock. Two years ago he was 67th in a time trial at the Volta a Portugal. In last year’s Giro time trial from Lucca to Pisa, he finished 150th out of 171. While 41st place, almost five minutes slower than Ganna and 1-57 slower than Vingegaard, was unremarkable it was far better than many expected and it meant the Portuguese rider kept the pink jersey by 27 seconds.

• With illness in the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe camp, both Giulio Pellizzari and Jai Hindley conceded time. Felix Gall slipped one place overall but the time loss to Vingegaard – 1-22 – dashes any slim hopes the Austrian might have had that he could somehow overhaul the Dane in the mountains.

Listen to our Stage 10 episode

Stage 11

• It was another day when everyone knew what was going to happen but no one could do anything about it. The peloton must be suffering a collective Narváez breakdown at this point (that play on words is courtesy of Friend of the Podcast Edward Pickering). Since being reduced to just five riders after three stages, UAE Team Emirates have raced aggressively whenever there’s been the opportunity. And while everyone must let out a sigh of resignation when they look around to find they’ve been joined in the break by Jhonatan Narváez the roads of Italy favour so many of his strengths it’s hard to know how to beat him on days like this.

• Not that he needed any further help but a crash on the final big descent of the stage tilted the odds even further in Narváez’s favour. Christian Scaroni, Lennert Van Eetvelt and Filippo Zana fell on the descent with the Belgian coming off worst. Although he finished the stage he was unable to start the following day, reducing his Lotto-Intermarché team to just four riders with half of the race still to go.

• Of the riders in the break, Scaroni was probably the biggest threat to Narváez, so as the Italian chased to get back up to the front the UAE Team Emirates rider made his move with Enric Mas of Movistar. It’s hard to picture a more mismatched head-to-head sprint than that. Mas, not noted for his turn of speed on the flat, put up a spirited fight but he was no match for Narváez, who clinched his hat-trick of stage wins.

• By getting in the break, Chris Harper of Pinarello-Q36.5 made big gains overall, climbing seven places to tenth. You could start calling it the Giro Down Under because that meant there were four Aussies in the top ten – Ben O’Connor (fifth), Jai Hindley (sixth), Michael Storer (seventh) and Harper. There have never been so many Australians to finish in the top ten of the same Grand Tour so they could be on for a record. At the Giro Cadel Evans and Richie Porte were fifth and seventh in 2010, and Ben O’Connor and Michael Storer were fourth and tenth in 2024.

• Erland Blikra of Uno-X finished about a minute and a half outside the time limit. He was suffering from the same illness that forced his teammate Martin Tjøtta to abandon. The Giro lost one of its stage winners – Italy’s Davide Ballerini, who triumphed in Napoli – crashed out, suffering a fractured finger.

Listen to our Stage 11 episode

Stage 12

• The Milano-Sanremo in reverse stage treated us to the same glorious coastline but bathed in the glow of warmer sunshine than earlier in the spring.

• The pace on the Bric Berton climb was fast enough to shed the big sprinters – notably Jonathan Milan, who is presumably waiting until Milan on Sunday to open his account at this Giro, Paul Magnier and Casper Van Uden.

• Ben Turner of Netcompany-Ineos suffered the misfortune of a puncture 23 kilometres from the end and had a lung-busting chase with teammate Jack Haig to get back up to the front group with 10.5 kilometres remaining. Unfortunately for the British rider the effort took its toll over the final small climbs and he was dropped with 4.5 kilometres to go.

• Eulálio is refusing to accept his spell in the maglia rosa is finite. He sprinted to take the time bonus in the Red Bull KM to extend his lead over Vingegaard to 33 seconds. While it’s likely that won’t be enough to keep the pink jersey past Pila on Saturday Eulálio is relishing playing the Juan Pedro Lopez role and looks set to complete 10 days in the race lead before passing it over. Mind you, I thought he’d relinquish the jersey in the time trial so perhaps the Portuguese rider has one more surprise in him?

• Alec Segaert did an ‘Alec Segaert’, flying out of the speeding peloton with 3.3 kilometres to go and holding off the field to take a brilliant win. In the spring, he did something similar – though not from as far out – to win the Grand Prix Denain. At Gent-Wevelgem he almost caused an upset when he flew across to Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert late on. The late break is becoming his signature move. I remember in the late 1980s a Dutchman called Jelle Nijdam pulled off a similar late attack to win a Tour de France stage. My memory is no doubt playing tricks on me here but after that it felt like Nijdam tried to pull the same trick every other day. Movistar tried to drag him back, then Uno-X took up the chase but left it too late to close the gap and the Belgian held on relatively comfortably. It completed a perfect day for Bahrain Victorious – their first Grand Tour stage win since 2023, and another day in pink.

Listen to our Stage 12 episode

Out next week: The Cycling Podcast Féminin

Tune in to the May episode of The Cycling Podcast Féminin when Rose Manley, Denny Gray and Rebecca Charlton recap the Spanish swing of the stage racing season. Itzulia Women and the Vuelta a Burgos Feminas followed the recent Vuelta España Femenina as the peloton prepares for the Giro d’Italia Women, which starts next Saturday (May 30).

The episode also focuses on Joane Somarriba, the last Spanish woman to win a Grand Tour before Paula Blasi took the Vuelta Femenina.

For the first time, The Cycling Podcast Féminin will have daily episodes covering the Giro d’Italia Women. Rose, Denny, Rebecca and Lizzy Banks will be your hosts on a rolling through-and-off basis as the race makes its way from Cesenatico to Saluzzo.

Follow The Cycling Podcast in your favourite podcast app to make sure you never miss an episode. If you follow us, you’ll receive a notification from your app as soon as a new episode goes live.

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The Dukes of Hazard

Rest day listening: Long-time regulars on The Cycling Podcast’s Giro d’Italia coverage, in this year’s edition Matt White and Max Sciandri are directing operations, together, from the front seat of the Movistar team car.

Australia and Italy, fire and ice, they make an intriguing duo, but can it be a successful one at this year’s Giro? We went behind the scenes on the day of their boldest tactical plan yet, on stage four of the Giro to Cosenza, to get a sense of how their partnership is galvanising the Spanish team at this year’s Giro. Daniel Friebe then summoned Matt and Max the following morning for a debrief and typically mirthful discussion of what they each bring to their roles.

Listen to The Dukes of Hazard

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Stage 7

• What did we learn after six hours of racing that we didn’t know already? That Jonas Vingegaard is the best climber in the race and the Giro champion-elect? Did we need six hours of racing to come to that conclusion? The stage to Blockhaus raised the question of whether there is really any need for a 244-kilometre stage in the modern era? It was the longest Giro stage since a 264km slog to Fiuggi won by Diego Ulissi in 2015 (although there were stages to Pinerolo in 2016 and Gualdo Tadino in 2018 that were also 244 kilometres long). Okay, so the route depends on a wide range of factors and any distance not covered on the bike usually means longer transfers by bus, but there was an old school pace to Friday’s stage. A few weeks ago on the podcast, Larry Warbasse and I were discussing whether Decathlon should select 19-year-old Paul Seixas for the Tour de France. A couple of decades ago the wisdom was that riders needed to mature and build up the required levels of endurance to cope with the workload of a three-week race. The Grand Tours are still an endurance test, of course, but they are far more intense these days and less attritional. The result is that cycling is becoming a younger person’s sport. But the stage to Blockhaus bucked that trend and the outcome surprised no one.

• Blockhaus is where Eddy Merckx won the first Grand Tour stage of his career in 1967 but Vingegaard’s approach to this Giro is not Cannibal-esque. Instead, he’s deploying salami tactics, putting together an ultra-efficient GC campaign slice by slice. By attacking with just over five kilometres to go, Vingegaard did more than enough to assert his supremacy but without going too deep. The strength of his teammates Davide Piganzoli and Sepp Kuss will have bolstered his confidence too.

• Afonso Eulálio saw almost half of his lead over the Dane evaporate but he remained in pink with a nice advantage of 3:17, although it is surely only a matter of time before he passes the jersey over. It was notable that Vingegaard made his move just as Eulálio was losing contact with the lead group.

• Felix Gall was the other big winner, plotting a sensible course to the top of Blockhaus without panicking when he couldn’t follow Vingegaard and Giulio Pellizzari. His deficit at the line was just 13 seconds and he has emerged as a strong candidate for the podium and has given himself a chance to improve on his best Grand Tour result, which was fifth in last year’s Tour de France. The time trial is likely to be his Achilles heel. He lost more than a minute and a half to Vingegaard over 33 kilometres in Caen at last year’s Tour. A similar loss over 42 kilometres in Tuscany on Tuesday would be a good result.

• Italy’s great young hope Pellizzari was quick out of the blocks to react to Vingegaard’s move but he stayed on the Dane’s wheel for a matter of minutes before he slipped back and was passed by Gall. Later he was joined by his teammate Jai Hindley and another Aussie Ben O’Connor, who may well find themselves locked in a battle for the podium with Gall.

• Hindley – who laid the foundations for his 2022 Giro win by taking the stage the last time the race went to Blockhaus – subtly re-asserted himself as the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe leader, crossing the line three seconds ahead of Pellizzari and moving ahead of him overall. Pellizzari deserves credit for reacting so promptly to Vingegaard’s move, and for trying to stay with him. If he’d been able to hang in there we’d be talking about him as a serious threat, but the way he faltered so soon reinforced the fact that the biggest mountain stages often reward caution over risk. Gall resisted the temptation to jump and worked his way back and was cutting his deficit the closer they got to the line.

• There are three other teams with a pair of overall contenders and these mini races within the race developed in intriguing ways. Matthys Rondel – who collided with the rear window of a UAE Team Emirates team car last week – showed no ill effects, finishing sixth on the stage, a little ahead of his Tudor Pro Cycling teammate Michael Storer. Giulio Ciccone remained ahead of Derek Gee-West in Lidl-Trek’s pecking order. And although Thymen Arensman’s performance for Netcompany-Ineos was a little disappointing, he was well clear of Egan Bernal, who later revealed that his ride on Blockhaus was his best ever 40-minute effort, and yet it was not enough to keep up with Wout Poels, let alone Vingegaard.

  Listen to Stage 7

Stage 8

• After the grind to Blockhaus, a short, frenetic stage shook up the rhythm of this Giro and exploited a few weaknesses. Early on, there looked to be a prestigious two-up all-Italian break on as Filippo Ganna and Alberto Bettiol got clear. They probably needed the company of another couple of riders of similar stature to make it stick.

• The eventual race-winning move came on the first of a number of small but tricky climbs in the jagged final third of a stage. UAE Team Emirates may be down to five riders but they are racing with the strength of eight men. Mikkel Bjerg was joined by teammate Jhonatan Narváez and then Andreas Leknessund of Uno-X. Bjerg did most of the work leaving Narváez to drop Leknessund and ride solo to his second, and UAE’s third, stage win of the Giro.

• Christian Scaroni of XDS-Astana gained more than a minute by joining the secondary escape that got clear over the closing climbs. That lifted him to fourth overall, the best placed Italian, although he’s not likely to remain that high through the big mountains.

• Vingegaard’s economical approach yielded another couple of seconds as he and Hindley opened a small gap over the rest on the way to the line.

• Giulio Ciccone deliberately lost almost five minutes, sacrificing his GC position in the hope he might be allowed more leeway in the hunt for stages.

• Jan Christen is the default winner of the Battle of the Brothers, as Fabio pulled out suffering from the injuries sustained in a crash earlier in the race.

Listen to Stage 8

Stage 9

• For a while, Giulio Ciccone’s strategy looked to be paying off. Having slipped out of the GC picture on Saturday, he waited until the road started to rise in the second half of the stage to go across to the break, then he formed a useful-looking partnership with Einer Rubio at the head of the race before going clear on his own with about 7.5 kilometres of the final climb remaining.

• Unfortunately for Ciccone, his gap was never big enough to hold off the chasers, especially once Felix Gall opened up hostilities and Vingegaard reacted. They reeled in the Italian and Vingegaard went clear of Gall just inside the final kilometre to eke out another few seconds. Eulálio lost another 41 seconds on the road, plus Vingegaard’s time bonus for winning the stage, means the Portuguese rider will be defending a lead of 2:24 when the race resumes with a time trial tomorrow (Tuesday). Eulálio is not noted for his strength against the clock – he finished 150th in the 28-kilometre time trial to Pisa last year. The Tuscan stage is 50 per cent longer, so unless the maglia rosa gives him super-human strength his spell in the lead could be coming to an end.

• Vingegaard’s efficiency and consistency are impressive, if not exactly thrilling. Gall aside, he gained significant time over everyone else in the space of three stages. Pellizzari lost 1-28 on Sunday, while not a final blow to his podium aspirations, it was enough to make Hindley Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s best bet from now on.

Listen to Stage 9

The Podcast Postbag

Drop us a line at contact@thecyclingpodcast.com

‘Jonas is not a great champion. Honestly, the man is a wheel sucker who seemingly never wants to share the work. He is the guy in your group ride who sits in the wheels until the very end of the climb and sprints to win.

He did this to Gall today, and he did it to Remco earlier in the spring. The man then kisses his handlebars and his ring and can barely do a proper champion’s salute showing off his sponsors’ jersey. I can think of no cycling champion with less panache than Jonas Vingegaard.

No wonder the Italian press and fans are disappointed. He doesn’t respect them enough. That said, the Cycling Podcast is doing a fabulous job bringing the race to life. I truly appreciate listening to all of you. Audrey’

LB: Tell us what you really think, Audrey! It’s a fair point but seemingly a deliberate strategy to ensure Vingegaard doesn’t stretch himself so far that he’s unable to mount a challenge at the Tour de France later this summer.

‘Every team talks about the importance of getting a ‘podium’ in Grand Tour stages, but is this even a thing? I’ve never seen the first three stage finishers on the podium, only at the final GC podium after three weeks, or in the Classics and other one-day races. Am I right? And, if so, should teams really be banging on about it, because in the eyes of the public, the third-place finisher is kind of no better than the fifth-place finisher, surely? Jonathan’

LB: I couldn’t agree with you more, Jonathan. Until race organisers start inviting the top three to the podium, finishing second or third on a stage does not count as ‘a podium’.

by Lionel Birnie

Sometimes the Giro d’Italia has to be seen to be believed. Ever since the race resumed in southern Italy after its Bulgarian grande partenza there have been moments where we’ve collectively gasped and wondered ‘did that really just happen?’

UAE Team Emirates – reduced to just five riders by crashes in Bulgaria – won back-to-back stages, the second in the most extraordinary fashion as two breakaway riders took it in turns to pick themselves up off the canvas.

And then came the cobbles at the finish in Napoli where it was hard not to ponder just what the race organisers were thinking.

Daniel, Brian and Michele are well underway and the nightly episodes will take you right to the heart of the Giro d’Italia over the next two and a half weeks. The 11.01 Cappuccino this year is a random assortment of observations from Pod HQ released after every third stage.

Stage 4

• The course profile didn’t suggest we’d see such an exciting stage but the aggression and commitment of the Movistar team and the fact several riders seemed to have ‘post-rest day’ legs – especially after three relatively undemanding stages in Bulgaria – made for a thriller. The Giro didn’t so much as wake up, it sat bolt upright in bed.

• Race favourite Jonas Vingegaard lost an important teammate for the mountain stages when Wilco Kelderman was a non-starter as the race resumed in southern Italy following the transfer from Bulgaria. The veteran Dutchman was really bashed up after a crash during the opening weekend.

• Two more sprinters dropped out on the road. Alpecin-Premier Tech lost their versatile Aussie Kaden Groves, stage winner on the skid pan stage into Napoli last year, with injuries sustained in a crash in Bulgaria. And Arnaud De Lie, dropped early on the big climb of the Cozzo Tunno, finally succumbed to the stomach upset he’d been struggling with after ingesting cow manure during a race in Belgium, which he won, shortly before the Giro.

• The six-man break, featuring the mandatory riders from Bardiani CSF (Marcellusi this time) and Team Polti-Visit Malta (Bais), was caught on the climb by a flying peloton led by five of the Movistar team. Their objective was to drop the sprinters, which they did one by one until their man Orluis Aular was one of the only fastmen standing.

• The maglia rosa, Guillermo Thomas Silva, was perhaps surprisingly dropped with 9.6 kilometres to go to the top, meaning the Uruguayan’s spell in the race lead was over and the jersey was up for grabs. Florian Stork (Tudor) must’ve been pinching himself as he was the best-placed rider in the lead group at that point.

• Sensationally, Egan Bernal was dropped 2.2 kilometres from the top – before his Netcompany-Ineos teammate Ben Turner, one of the best bets to win the uphill sprint among the riders left in the lead group. Turner sacrificed his own chances of winning the stage, dropping back to help pace Bernal up to the leaders. They regained contact with 16 kilometres to go. Derek Gee-West also found himself in that group when he had a mechanical issue and was grateful for Turner’s presence.

• Victor Campenaerts led out Vingegaard for the Red Bull KM but Jan Christen of UAE Team Emirates took the sprint, ahead of Giulio Pellizzari and Giulio Ciccone. That left the virtual GC position beautifully poised with four riders – Stork, Ciccone, Christen and Bernal – all tied on overall time as they headed to the finish.

• With 1.7 kilometres remaining, Jan Christen took a flyer from deep in the group and – despite looking over his shoulder multiple times – stayed clear until the final few hundred metres as the road rose to the line. Movistar’s Aular opened up his sprint a long way out – perhaps too far out – and was looking good until Christen’s UAE teammate Jhonatan Narváez came gliding past to win the third Giro stage of his career and give his depleted, injury-hit team a boost. Aular was second – perhaps a disappointing result considering the full commitment of his Movistar team. Ciccone was third and Turner was fourth, clearly experiencing fabulous climbing legs and left wondering what might have been had he not had to chase so long to bring Bernal back up. The question is, where were the other Netcompany-Ineos riders who might have been able to do that work and allow Turner to concentrate on the stage win?

• Ten years after his Giro d’Italia debut – when he won a stage at Sestola – Giulio Ciccone pulled on the maglia rosa for the first time thanks to the time bonuses won in the Red Bull KM and on the finish line. This time last year, I was touting Ciccone as an outsider for the final podium, to much derision, partly because his best Grand Tour result had been 11th in the Tour de France. He eventually crashed out while still just about in contention. The closest he’d ever got to the pink jersey at the Giro was in 2021, when he climbed up to fourth place, 36 seconds off the lead. Finally, at the end of this, the 150th Giro stage of his career, he took the coveted jersey. Could he become the first Italian since Alessandro De Marchi in 2021 to hold it for more than one day?

Listen to our Stage 4 episode

Stage 5

• The rain fell on and off all day, occasionally very heavily. Twelve riders made the break, including the previous day’s winner Narváez and his UAE Team Emirates colleague Igor Arrieta. Ben Turner was hoping to make up for his near-miss. Former pink jersey wearer Guillermo Thomas Silva and his teammate Christian Scaroni meant XDS-Astana were hunting in pairs again. Movistar had Lorenzo Milesi and Einer Rubio in there. Rubio was just 10 seconds off the race lead, which meant the bunch was never going to allow the gap to get out of hand.

• Having missed the break, EF Education-EasyPost’s Darren Rafferty braved the elements to power across the gap.

• On the big climb, the Montagna Grande di Viggiano, Arrieta broke away and was joined by Afonso Eulálio of Bahrain Victorious. That’s when the drama, and an episode of Wacky Races, began. With 13 kilometres to go Arrieta’s bike slipped from under him as he took a corner on a descent. Eulálio didn’t capitalise but he didn’t wait either, which was fair enough.

• With 6.5 kilometres left, Eulálio went down too, skidding into the kerb. He quickly got on his spare bike but his advantage had melted away and as soon as they reached the next steep climb, Arrieta was back on his wheel.

• The pair rode together, slightly cautiously, on the wet, slippery roads until, close to the finish, Arrieta misunderstood a marshal’s directions – the flag was pointing to the left, but the course went to the right – and the Spaniard took the wrong side, bursting through the red and white tape that was the race organiser’s attempt to close off the road. Adrenaline no doubt surging through his veins, Arrieta’s bike almost slid from under him again as he sprinted to catch up again.

• Astonishingly, Arrieta closed the gap to Eulálio and jumped past him to win UAE Team Emirates’ second consecutive stage. It came 20 years after his dad, José Luis, won a stage of the Vuelta a España for AG2R.

• Eulálio had a pretty decent consolation prize – becoming the third rider from Portugal to wear the pink jersey after Acácio da Silva in 1989 and João Almeida in 2020. The former mountain biker boosted the Bahrain Victorious team, who lost Santiago Buitrago to a crash in Bulgaria, and he knew his lead of almost three minutes would stand at least until Blockhaus, with all the GC favourites slipping more than six minutes back.

• Ciccone’s spell in pink was brief – and he spent most of the day with a dark rain jacket covering up the jersey. Oh well, he’ll have a pink jersey to frame and put on his wall.

Listen to our Stage 5 episode

Stage 6

• Another stage finish in Napoli – which brought back memories of my disastrous final day on last year’s Giro, when I persuaded Daniel it would save us time if I dropped my suitcase at my hotel on the way into the city. Unfortunately, we got stuck in a three-hour traffic jam – caused by the race – and missed the stage. The rain had made conditions treacherous and the stage was neutralised and chaotic.

• After last year’s farce it was bold of the Giro organisers to plan a finish on cobbles, with a U-bend around 400 metres from the line, gambling on the weather remaining dry.

• There were familiar faces in the break, which was kept on a tight leash. Tarozzi and Bais were in there, of course, joined by Marcellusi and Vergallito.

• In reality, the race was between the Giro peloton and the moody-looking dark clouds overhead. In the end, the rain won because it only took a sprinkling to make the cobbles slick. A crash seemed inevitable.

• Unibet Rose Rockets took the race by the scruff of the neck, looking to set up Dylan Groenewegen, but they went down on a right-hand corner, with Jonathan Milan and Tobias Lund Andresen also losing their chances in the crash. Paul Magnier was held up, got going again quickly, and managed to finish an incredible third.

• But it was Davide Ballerini who gave XDS-Astana their second stage win of the race, holding it all together and keeping Jasper Stuyven at bay on the short, cobbled rise to the line.

• The other notable incident was two idiots watching the race on a roundabout who seemed intent on causing a crash by stepping into the road and laying their hands on a rider as they sped past.

• So, after six days of racing, Soudal-Quick Step, XDS-Astana and UAE Team Emirates are all square with two stage wins apiece. Next up is today’s (Friday) mammoth 244-kilometre slog concluding with the first big mountain of the race, Blockhaus, where Jai Hindley won in 2022 and Nairo Quintana took the stage in 2017. Strap in, kids, it promises to be well over six hours in the saddle, with the stage getting progressively harder from the halfway mark onwards. It may turn out to be too long and too arduous, meaning the GC riders may exercise some restraint. Or it could be ridden aggressively before the stage blows to pieces on Blockhaus. Tune in tonight to find out which.

Listen to our Stage 6 episode

• Join The Cycling Podcast over the weekend as the real climbing starts and the Giro heads towards its second rest day. How many hams will be handed out of the coming days? Follow The Cycling Podcast on your favourite podcast app to make sure you never miss an episode. You’ll be notified as soon as a new show is live.

Online now for Friends of the Podcast subscribers

It’s ten years since Vincenzo Nibali delivered the host nation’s last Giro d’Italia victory. The decline of Italian cycling has been a recurring theme of The Cycling Podcast’s Giro coverage ever since, although the emergence of Giulio Pellizzari offers some hope of a reversal in fortunes beginning this year.

Depending on your point of view, last year’s Italian national championship road race represented either a new nadir or a fairytale pointing towards a better future built on new foundations. The winner was Filippo Conca, and his team, the Swatt Club, the dominant force throughout, despite their modest status and beginnings i.e. a semi-pro or ‘club’ team born out of… a blog on alpine skiing.

Conca’s national title earned him a place in the WorldTour with Jayco-Alula last summer but he was not selected for the Giro this month, meaning the red, white and green Italian champion’s jersey is absent from the race.

In this special episode for Friends of the Podcast, Michele Pelacci speaks to the architects and protagonists of a remarkable story. The day when a more or less unknown rider from a tiny team caused an upset by beating the best WorldTour riders Italy has to offer in Gorizia last June.

Subscribe as a Friend of the Podcast

by Lionel Birnie

The Cycling Podcast’s three-week, immersive adventure at the Giro d’Italia got underway on Friday. Following Hungary and Albania, it was Bulgaria’s turn to host the grande partenza. Our surround sound race coverage paused today as the Giro’s peloton, entourage – as well as our intrepid podcasters Daniel and Michele – made the relatively short hop across the Adriatic to Calabria, where things will resume on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, at Podcast HQ in Not Watford, I’ve barely moved from the sofa all weekend. I’ve been watching and listening as the race made a slightly unsteady start in unfamiliar territory and here are my thoughts on the opening few days of racing.

Stage one
• As expected, the first significant break of the Giro featured a rider from Bardiani-CSF (Manuele Tarozzi) and one from Team Polti-Visit Malta (Diego Sevilla). It has to be said, much of the course was far from inspiring – they seemed to spend three-quarters of the day on the same dual carriageway. It was like watching one of those old Road Runner cartoons where the same scenery repeats over and over in the background.

• It made me think that perhaps the Grand Tours need to be bolder, reinventing the format of these opening weekends on foreign soil. Bear with me – this is another suggestion from my collection of Wacky Race ideas. They could have made stage one a points race, with multiple sprints at suitable intervals on the dual carriageway – perhaps one every 20 kilometres – with double points at the finish, all adding up to crown the first maglia rosa of the Giro.

• I enjoyed the aerial shots of the Upside-Down House in Chernomorets, near the Black Sea. The roof is at the bottom, the car is parked (upside-down, of course) at the top, and everything inside is upside-down and it offers visitors the chance to take photos of themselves that make them look like they are standing on the ceiling.

• The finish was marred by a huge crash with about 600 metres to go. Only ten riders got through unscathed and Paul Magnier, the Texas-born Frenchman, burst through to win his first Grand Tour stage and take the pink jersey in the process ahead of Tobias Lund Andresen, Ethan Vernon and Jonathan Milan. A lot has been expected of Magnier since he burst onto the scene a couple of years ago. He won a handful of stages at the Tour of Guangxi last autumn but the Giro is another level. It also meant his team could breathe a sigh of relief. This is – by some distance – the longest they’ve had to wait in the season for a WorldTour win since the competition was created in 2009. It leaves just Groupama, Movistar, Jayco-Alula and Picnic Post NL as the four elite level teams still waiting for a WorldTour win this season.

• I was surprised to hear Michele award three prosciuttos for the opening stage given the trundling break, dual carriageway and crash in the finishing straight. Such optimism and an infectious sunny disposition from the young man. The Not Watford jury gave the stage a solitary Scotch Egg…

Stage two
• Several riders were nursing bumps and bruises after the opening day crash but the only non-starter was Matteo Moschetti of Pinarello Q36.5, who was suffering from concussion.

• Another day, another two-man break – this time a Team Polti-Visit Malta duo of Sevilla (again) and Mirco Maestri. The route was much more varied and interesting than the previous day, but the persistent rain made the roads slippery. Shortly after the Polti pair were caught, there was a hard crash involving around 30 riders on a wet descent. Shortly afterwards, the action was neutralised by the commissaires to let the fallen riders – or most of them, at least – catch up, but the race was back-on perhaps a little too soon because the Red Bull KM sprint was looming.

• UAE Team Emirates were worst affected by the crash. Jay Vine (fractured elbow and concussion) and Marc Soler (fractured pelvis) both pulled out of the race with their injuries. Adam Yates was given the all-clear as far as concussion was concerned but had bad abrasions across his shoulders. He was one of the riders who didn’t manage to rejoin the peloton before the neutralisation was ended and he was quickly more than nine minutes down, eventually coming in almost 14 minutes after the winner. He did not start stage three, meaning UAE Team Emirates were down to five riders inside 48 hours. Santiago Buitrago of Bahrain Victorious and Ådne Holter of Uno-X were the other riders to abandon. Derek Gee-West (Lidl-Trek), who was fourth last year, was the most notable GC contender to lose time, finishing in a group just over a minute back.

• Netcompany Ineos took control for the Red Bull KM and Egan Bernal won the sprint ahead of his teammate Thymen Arensman to take some very valuable seconds.

• Jonas Vingegaard – the Giro winner-elect, we all expect, although it may not be a cakewalk – made his first move of the race, attacking on the Lyaskovets Monastery pass and dragging Giulio Pellizzari and Lennert Van Eetvelt away with him. The trio were still away going into the final kilometre, when they were joined by Jan Christen – one of UAE Team Emirates’ five survivors. They were caught close to the line by a pair of XDS-Astana riders sprinting in tandem, as they did to great effect last year. It was a surprise win for Guillermo Thomas Silva, ahead of Florian Stork (Tudor), 2025 podium outsider Giulio Ciccone (Lidl-Trek) and the back-end of the XDS-Astana pantomime horse Christian Scaroni. Silva became the first Uruguayan to win a Giro stage and take the pink jersey.

Stage three
• Diego Sevilla (Team Polti-Visit Malta) was in the break for the third successive day, again joined by a teammate, this time it was Alessandro Tonelli, and Tarozzi again. This was the best stage of the three, with beautiful scenery, attractive Balkan towns, mountains and rivers and then huge crowds in Sofia.

• Arnaud De Lie of Lotto-Intermarché has had a torrid weekend and was dropped on the climbs, suffering from some sort of stomach upset thought to be the result of riding through something unpleasant – cow manure – washed onto the roads in the process of winning the Lotto Famenne Ardenne Classic in Belgium a few days before travelling to the Giro. His teammate Liam Slock was also affected and was too sick to ride so – as we heard in the opening night’s podcast – Josh Giddings was called up as a replacement. Then Milan Menten fell ill and delayed his departure for the Giro. De Lie began to feel ill on the flight and had been barely able to eat. On the big climb, Victor Campanaerts offered to take De Lie’s bottle to save him a few hundred grams. When I first saw this on the TV I couldn’t work out what Campanaerts was doing and for an awful moment thought he was going to take a swig from the bottle. De Lie has survived Bulgaria and must hope a rest day helps him to recover his strength before the next major opportunity for the sprinters in Napoli on Thursday.

• The three breakaway riders put up a tremendous fight on the wide roads approaching Sofia. The peloton had them in their sights for ages, so the suspense was heightened because they could keep them where they wanted them and complete the catch relatively late to deter any counter-attacks. They were finally swamped in the final kilometre. Jonathan Milan opened up his sprint so early he looked vulnerable to being overtaken and so it proved as Magnier, in the ciclamino jersey, came cruising past on the paving stones to win his second stage in three days. ‘Who was second?’ my daughter asked. ‘Was it bobby head guy?’ It was indeed… Milan may have to wait until Napoli – or perhaps Milan – for his first stage win of this Giro.

• After a fairly unpromising opening day, Bulgaria looked – and sounded – great, certainly better than Albania last year, but perhaps that’s not a surprise. There’s a real cycling culture in Bulgaria, for a start, which could not really be said for Albania. As an aside, the 2024 Tour of Bulgaria winner, Italy’s Matteo Malucelli, is riding this Giro for XDS-Astana. However, the crashes took the shine off to some degree. Yes, they are part and parcel of any Grand Tour, but, as ever, they heightened the familiar sense of relief that the race is returning to Italian soil.

Follow The Cycling Podcast in your favourite podcast app to ensure you get our nightly post-stage episodes as soon as they are released. Your app will notify you as soon as the new show drops.

The Giro d’Italia wine collection from DVine Cellars

Toast the Giro as it makes it way to Rome with a collection of six wines celebrating the route of the 2026 race. UK-based listeners can buy the case, curated by Greg Andrews and the team at DVine Cellars, here.

Online now: Arrivée and the Angliru

There’s plenty of racing and plenty of Spanish omelettes for Rose Manley and Rebecca Charlton to get their teeth stuck into in this special Arrivée episode on the Vuelta Femenina, which was released today.

With seven days of racing ranging from the pretty bumpy to the vertiginously mountainous, including a historic first summit finish on the Angliru, expect no shortage of drama from this first ‘Grand Tour’ of the year. With back-to-back champion Demi Vollering choosing not to compete this year, a brand new champion was set to be crowned, but who could it be? Would Tour de France Femmes champion Pauline Ferrand-Prévot back up her Grand Tour credentials in Spain? Could Anna van der Breggen show that she’s back to her stage racing best? Or might this be the crowning moment for a surprising young star?

Also on the agenda: free jazz race reportage, unwanted gifts and Denny Gray’s 4am McDonald’s order.

Listen to Arrivée

The Cycling Podcast’s Giro d’Italia is already well underway ahead of three weeks of coverage, which will mark a decade spent following the Italian Grand Tour from start to (almost) finish each year. (We’ve occasionally skipped Rome for logistical reasons). Get ready for the 2026 grande partenza in Bulgaria with our series of episodes designed to get everyone in the Giro mood.

Out now: The Preview
Daniel is joined by his Giro d’Italia teammates Brian Nygaard and Michele Pelacci to look ahead to what the 2026 edition has in store. Can anyone stop Jonas Vingegaard? That’s the big pre-race question but, as ever, there’s so much more to this Giro.

Out now: Girovino!! The Wines of the 2026 Giro
Discussing the collection of six wines celebrating the Giro route, curated by Greg Andrews of DVine Cellars. Cases are available for UK-based listeners to order now.

Out now: Meltdown: The Race to Escape Nuclear Disaster
A two-part KM0 telling the story of the 1986 Peace Race, which started in Kyiv just ten days after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Available for a limited time on the regular free-to-air feed, or ad-free and permanently for Friends of the Podcast.

Out now for Friends of the Podcast subscribers: The Foot Notes
Daniel’s annual conversation with Professor of Modern Italian History, John Foot, has become one of our pre-Giro d’Italia traditions. We usually say No Ciro, No Giro, but an edition of the Italian Grand Tour could not get underway without analysing the race and route through a cultural and historical lens.

The Foot Notes is available for Friends of the Podcast to listen to now. John’s book Pedalare! Pedalare! A History of Italian Cycling is highly recommended reading too.

Subscribe as a Friend of the Podcast

Starts tomorrow (Friday): Stage one, recorded in Bulgaria recapping the opening day’s action, kicks off three weeks of daily coverage. Who will pull on the first maglia rosa of the 2026 race?

Monday: Arrivée returns with Rose Manley and Rebecca Charlton covering all the big talking points from a week of racing at the Vuelta España Femenina.

Girovagando: the ultimate cycling journey

by Lionel Birnie

In an age of supposedly shortening attention spans, the Grand Tours prove that the greatest sporting adventures still prioritise engagement over impressions. The richness and variety of the storylines offered by cycling’s greatest stage races continue to amaze us. Interwoven with the unfolding landscapes and touching upon the history and culture of the country, the racing provides us with a prism through which to observe Italy and Italian life as spring gives way to the first intense rays of summer.

The Giro d’Italia, perhaps more than any other race, still captures the spirit of the sport’s early days, when people would devour the daily stage reports in the newspaper over their morning coffee, or tune their ears to frenetic radio commentary while enjoying an afternoon cappuccino. Okay, let’s not push it.

In a country somewhat starved of sporting success lately, it’s sometimes hard to marry our old impressions of the Giro as a race so intense it had the power to unite and divide a nation with its current incarnation. The Giro has such a distinct identity – pink everywhere you look, the deep blue of the sea, the white of the ice walls yet to melt in the mountain sun, smooth grey ribbons of road laced across vivid green fields and threaded through towns and villages so beautiful they take your breath away. And yet the Giro still seems to lack a certain confidence – desperate to embrace modernity and appeal to a global audience, yet often painfully conservative and reluctant to proudly embrace its Italian character and heritage and show them off to the world.

In a way, the Giro is like Italian food, always at its best when served simply, imitated, not always terribly well, elsewhere. A pizza cannot be beaten if the tomato sauce and mozzarella are the best. A drizzle of good olive oil makes it pure perfection. And yet, the modern Giro sometimes seems to be nervously wondering whether to add pineapple or sausage to attract someone new.

Unlike the Tour de France, which is a global phenomenon, the Giro remains just parochial enough to keep all of us outsiders feeling as though we are stumbling across something new every May. Some of the stories that unfold over the next three weeks will perhaps be more surprising than those we’ll witness later this summer, although the stunning drama of last year’s race may not be matched.

The Giro conveys better than any race the episodic, soap opera quality of the sport that captured people’s imaginations over a century ago. It retains a sense of mystique the Tour de France has perhaps lost to some degree. Today there’s a sense that we are about to set off on an adventure, a three-week holiday from ourselves, vicariously enjoying the country and racing in the company of friends. From the opening bars of Cozze, our Giro theme song by the brilliant Amaraterra, I feel transported to another world – one that is somehow brighter, noisier, more chaotic, bursting with flavour, and certainly more elegant.

I will no doubt experience a wave of FOMO when the race gets underway in Bulgaria tomorrow but I know we are in very safe hands and I’ll be watching, listening and providing another perspective on the race over an infuriatingly-timed cappuccino.

Before our first episode tomorrow, here is a selection of the things I am looking forward to seeing unfold…

Will it be a formality for Vingegaard?

Jonas Vingegaard is starting the Giro d’Italia for the first time in his career but he could complete the Grand Tour Grand Slam of Giro, Tour and Vuelta titles before Tadej Pogačar has the opportunity to do so. The Visma-Lease A Bike leader is the outstanding favourite, especially with one of his biggest potential rivals, Joāo Almeida, withdrawing after a spring disrupted by illness. Vingegaard is not the only former Grand Tour winner in the field – Egan Bernal, who won the Tour in 2019 and the Giro in 2021, the 2022 Giro champion Jai Hindley, both know what it takes to come out on top at the end of three weeks of racing. There’s Sepp Kuss – the winner of the 2023 Vuelta – too, but he will be riding in support of Vingegaard. Therefore, barring disaster, I expect the Dane to join Jacques Anquetil, Felice Gimondi, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Alberto Contador, Chris Froome and Vincenzo Nibali in the Triple Crown winners’ club at the end of May.

Pellizzari: the great home hope

It is ten years since an Italian last won the Giro d’Italia. That was Vincenzo Nibali, who went on to finish third in 2017 and second in 2019. The only other Italian to stand on the final podium in the past decade is Damiano Caruso, who was 33 when he finished runner-up to Bernal in 2021 and is 38, lining up for his final Giro before retirement, today. It is, by some distance, the leanest era in Italian cycling history, compounding the football team’s failure to qualify for the World Cup yet again. So, it is likely that the nation will get completely carried away by the possibility of Giulio Pellizzari challenging for Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe. And why not? He was sixth in both the Giro and Vuelta last year, and he recently dominated the Tour of the Alps. In our recent episode Larry Warbasse sounded a note of caution, wondering whether Pellizzari might have been a bit too good too soon. Last year Michael Storer was in rampaging form at the Tour of the Alps but fell a bit short of expectations at the Giro, finishing tenth. The tifosi will be desperate for the 22-year-old Pellizzari to stay in the hunt for the pink jersey deep into the third week and may not be patient enough to appreciate Rome wasn’t built in a day, but a place on the podium would be a huge step forward. He has former Giro champion Jai Hindley as a teammate to share the pressure to some degree.

The Italian Job

Jonathan Milan represents the closest thing to certain success for the host nation. The Lidl-Trek sprinter is aiming for his third points competition victory and will surely win at least one stage. He should be the favourite to win the first pink jersey of the race tomorrow too. Put your house on Milan winning in Milan at the end of stage 15. The stage 10 time trial in Tuscany has Filippo Ganna’s name all over it. Giuilio Ciccone looks more of an outside bet for the podium this year than he did last (but let’s not start all that again). Cristian Scaroni leads a handy-looking Italian contingent at XDS-Astana; Bardiani-CSF and Team Polti-Visit Malta riders will pack out the breaks. Look out, too, for Pinarello – Alessandro, the rider with NSN Cycling Team, rather than the Pinarello Q36.5 team – who won a stage and finished third overall at O Gran Camiño last month. The other talented Italian youngster, Davide Piganzoli, will be working for his teammate Vingegaard.

Unibet’s Rockets set for lift-off?

Unibet Rose Rockets have made the transition from YouTube curio to Grand Tour contenders. In Dylan Groenewegen they have a potential stage winner, even though the straightforward opportunities for the sprinters are relatively few. The Dutchman had a purple patch of form at the end of March, winning three one-day races in Belgium in the space of a week, culminating with the team’s first WorldTour success at the Ronde Van Brugge. It’s a couple of years since Groenewegen last won a Grand Tour stage – at Dijon in the Tour de France – but he is the best bet to help the Rockets achieve lift-off. Milan, Arnaud De Lie, Tobias Lund Andresen and Paul Magnier are the most obvious obstacles in his way. Maybe Groenewegen can win the opening stage, take the pink jersey and make them the Unibet Rosa Rockets for one day, at least.

Netcompany’s ‘first’ Grand Tour

We’ll see the new grey-green, or is it blue-grey, Netcompany-Ineos jersey in the peloton when the riders roll out from Nessebar in Bulgaria tomorrow. Egan Bernal was second at the Tour of the Alps and fifth at Liège-Bastogne-Liège so he’s clearly in good form and has the durability to improve on his seventh place in last year’s Giro. Whether he can worry Vingegaard and win another Grand Tour remains to be seen but he could form a very useful double-act with teammate Thymen Arensman.

Beam Me Up, Beloki

Talking of new jerseys, EF Education-Easy Post have to replace their vibrant pink because it clashes with the maglia rosa. They have opted for a design even the SlovAlien™ would approve. It’s a lime green extra-terrestrial face that takes centre stage. It’s a bold design, not least because of cycling’s history of ‘extra-terrestrial’ performances over the years. According to the PR blurb, the Assos and EF Global Creative Studio collaboration ‘hovers somewhere between space, time, and the Italian roads’. It goes on: ‘We made contact. A signal. A message: We ride in peace. Do you? Join us.’ Beam me up, (Markel) Beloki! It will take quite a rip in the space-time continuum to imagine EF Education-Easy Post making an impact on general classification, although they have a few handy stage-hunters, notably Michael Valgren. Their overall ambitions took a dent when Richard Carapaz, who was third last year and won the Giro in 2019, was forced to withdraw because he’s still recovering from surgery to remove a perineal cyst. Ouch.

Who’ll be best of the rest?

It’s not the deepest list of GC contenders we’ve ever seen. Assuming Vingegaard gets the job done, there could be quite a race for the podium, and the top ten because there’s a host of riders who will be looking to post a solid GC performance, either to make a step forward, or to confirm a previous result. Chief among them is Derek Gee-West, fourth overall last year, and among the stand-out names in a congested Lidl-Trek line-up, alongside Ciccone and Milan. Felix Gall of Decathlon-CMA CGM is starting his second Giro but has been fifth in the Tour and eighth in the Vuelta before. The Austrian is a very good bet for a high overall finish, a stage win and potentially the king of the mountains jersey. Ben O’Connor of Jayco-Alula will be aiming for another Grand Tour top five result. Enric Mas has been around a lot longer than his 29 years suggest but he’s been on a downward trajectory for a while so goes into his debut Giro d’Italia with relatively low expectations. Tudor’s Michael Storer should improve on his tenth place finishes in 2024 and 2025 because Santiago Buitrago has tenth place nailed on for Bahrain-Victorious.

Another Yates shock?

What about UAE-Team Emirates. No Pogačar, or last year’s sensation Isaac del Toro. Joāo Almeida was supposed to be the leader but he’s been ill on and off all spring and is not fit enough in time. So Adam Yates steps in. Could he ‘do a Simon?’ and win the race as his brother did last year with that audacious now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t move? Probably not but when he’s on form he’s very consistent and difficult to shake off. It’ll also be interesting to see how the talented and versatile Antonio Morgado does in his debut Grand Tour, although he does not have the profile of a GC rider, and we’ll be keeping an eye on the battle of the brothers between UAE’s Jan and Pinarello Q36.5’s Fabio Christen.

The Giro is no Picnic…

Team Picnic PostNL were the last WorldTour team still waiting for a victory this season until Casper Van Uden came to the rescue when he took a stage of the Tour of Turkiye last week. It has been a torrid opening phase of the season for the Dutch team, but they were in a similar position last year, with only two wins to their name, when Van Uden took a surprise Giro sprint win in Lecce. Can Casper do it again? Picnic will hope so, because otherwise they may be scrabbling for crumbs. Warren Barguil is their veteran who will be a danger in the breakaways, but the roster looks a bit thin otherwise. Picnic are one of five WorldTour teams still without a WorldTour level victory this season. The others are Groupama, Movistar, Soudal-Quck Step and Jayco-Alula.

Follow The Cycling Podcast in your preferred podcast app to ensure you receive notification of new episodes as soon as they are released.

Daily episodes recorded in Bulgaria and Italy start tomorrow, Friday, May 8.

A note from Lionel: Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed the original version of this email went out with a major typo in the subject header. Mistakes do happen – as we used to joke, we aim for 60 per cent accuracy here at The Cycling Podcast. Usually we can live with them but spelling the name of the hottest Giro d’Italia favourite this century incorrectly is not something I can let go. I apologise for clogging up your inbox with two versions of the same email but it would ruin my weekend knowing the error was still out there, uncorrected!

In The 11.01 Cappuccino today:

• Ineos unveil €100m AI sponsorship with Netcompany

• Hugo Coorevits’ five conclusions from the spring Classics

• Our Giro d’Italia coverage kicks off on Monday

• Ten years on from our first Giro d’Italia covered daily on the ground

• The Podcast Postbag – some of our listeners’ recent emails

by Lionel Birnie

On Tuesday morning, I headed to Via Atelier in London’s Coal Drops Yard for the corporate unveiling of the Ineos team’s new title sponsor. As had been rumoured for a few weeks, the Danish IT firm Netcompany was confirmed as a significant new investor in the team, although Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos will remain its owner.

Although the scale of the sponsorship was not confirmed, it’s believed the reported figure of €100m over five years is not too far off the mark. The big question is to what extent that has allowed Ratcliffe to scale back his spending on the cycling team but it seems likely that not all of Netcompany’s €100m will represent additional funds.

Nevertheless, it’s a significant boost for a team that has been overtaken and left behind since 2019 when Egan Bernal won their seventh Tour de France in eight years. Dave Brailsford talked about delivering an eighth Tour title within the five years of the Netcompany partnership – a target that doesn’t appear outlandishly ambitious until you consider that Tadej Pogačar and Paul Seixas may well have the next few editions sewn up between them.

Before the presentation was over, there were already rumours in the room that Netcompany-Ineos would be rivalling UAE Team Emirates in the pursuit of Seixas when his contract with Decathlon ends, if not before.

When the Giro d’Italia starts next Friday, we’ll have to get used to calling them Netcompany-Ineos, and recognising the team’s grey-green (or is it blue-grey) jerseys. It’s a curious choice – rather dowdy and downbeat – but Netcompany’s corporate colour is dark green, which would clash with the points competition jersey at the Tour de France.

Of course, the thing about the partnership that will spark the most interest – and perhaps the most scepticism – is that Netcompany is at the forefront of AI technology. It has huge contracts to run logistics at Heathrow, Copenhagen and Munich airports as well as for HMRC, the UK’s revenue and customs. Netcompany’s Pulse system will be adapted to run the cycling team’s logistics in the short term and the aim is to revolutionise every aspect of the operation with predictive AI in the longer term.

The influence of AI on professional sport is one of the great unknowns. It’s a subject I explored in an episode of KM0 for Friends of the Podcast early last year, but I must confess, it all felt very hypothetical then, as it still does now, even though we are seeing the influence of AI and machine learning in so many areas of our lives.

André Rogaczewski, the co-founder and CEO of Netcompany, talked about the blizzard of data in professional cycling, and how there are performance gains to be found if that data can be harnessed, analysed and understood in the right ways. Brailsford was in his element. The opportunities presented by AI must seem like the top one percent of marginal gains.

Rogaczewski said that in the short term, the Pulse AI system would help to streamline the team’s logistics. He was excited to get started gathering, analysing and streamlining the vast amount of data the team’s activities generate on and off the bike. Brailsford talked about the power of being able to make more correct decisions more of the time. Geraint Thomas, who joked that he’d only recently got a laptop and wasn’t the most techy guy, reminded everyone that cycling will always remain a human endeavour. After all, if they’d gone purely by the numbers Mark Cavendish would never have been offered a pro contract.

Where I remain sceptical is that AI can significantly influence the races in real time. I have no doubt AI could devise a tactic to defeat Peak Pogačar, but will there be an athlete capable of carrying it out? There is also a world of difference between the predictive AI models that sort through probabilities and scenarios in seconds and come to a best-case solution much faster than the human mind, and the sort of garbage-in, garbage-out regurgitation of existing information that we may associate with the browser-based AI engines. Predictive modelling and historical data can tell us a lot about likely outcomes but it will still come down to the old French directeur sportif mantra that the races are won by the head and the legs.

Tudor Pro Cycling’s Larry Warbasse joined me on this week’s episode and his insights from the point of view of a current professional rider were interesting. There’s so much data being recorded and not all of it is being used and some of it is not all that useful.

We haven’t yet delved into the ethical concerns about AI. The environmental impact, the cost, the ownership of the data or whether it will eliminate or reduce jobs. That will perhaps come as more people grasp the implications of the next phase of development.

In the meantime, Rogaczewski praised the Ineos team for its professionalism and focus, sidestepping questions about the presumably ongoing independent investigation into the allegations surrounding the team’s head carer David Rozman, who was linked to the convicted doping doctor Mark Schmidt. The team said last July that they had commissioned an external investigation in spring 2025. So far there’s been no update. Failing to grasp the importance of this issue is one of the team’s blind spots. Likewise, the lack of a women’s WorldTour team. For all the fanfare about aiming for an eighth Tour de France win, the team could have used the occasion to confirm plans for a women’s team targeting a first Tour de France Femmes victory.

After all, don’t women generate data too?

Listen to Ineos Turn to AI

Coorevits Corner: Hugo’s five conclusions from the spring

It was a sombre edition of Coorevits Corner in this week’s episode as Hugo paid tribute to 21-year-old Belgian rider Milan Bral, who was killed by a car while training last week. Bral, the nephew of former EF Education First rider Sep Vanmarcke, was a near-neighbour of Hugo’s and the incident shocked everyone who knew him and cast a shadow over the final Belgian Classic of the spring.

We decided to save Hugo’s five conclusions from the spring Classics for this edition of The 11.01 Cappuccino, and you can listen to that above.

It’s interesting to hear Hugo describe the Classics as predictable – which to some degree they were. Five big riders dominated the storylines and Pogačar almost completed a clean sweep of the Monuments. And yet, while the outcomes were not entirely unexpected – even Paul Seixas’ victory at Flèche Wallonne had been heavily anticipated – the racing was mostly excellent entertainment.

Having complained about Pogačar’s victory at Strade Bianche lacking drama, because it was almost indistinguishable from his other wins on the Tuscan gravel roads, I was heartened by the dynamic racing and edge-of-the-seat excitement of most of the other Classics. Perhaps it’s a fact that domination by a handful of superstars ignites interest in the sport? The audience for our Arrivée series of episodes covering the men’s races was significantly up year-on-year. Do we put that down to the calibre of racing or the calibre of the podcasting? Either way, thanks for listening.

Countdown to Bulgaria… a week of podcasts to come

The 2026 Giro d’Italia starts a week today with the first of three stages in Bulgaria before the transfer across to Calabria. Daniel Friebe will be there from start to finish and he’ll be joined by Brian Nygaard and Michele Pelacci for daily episodes released after each stage from Friday, May 8.

Before that, we have a week of episodes building up to the Corsa Rosa.

Monday: Girovino – the wines of the 2026 Giro, curated by Greg Andrews of D Vine Cellars. The collection of six wines – three reds and three whites, including a red from Bulgaria – is already on sale for UK-based listeners here.

Tuesday: The Girovagando Preview. Everything you need to know about the 109th edition of the Giro d’Italia. Can anyone stop Jonas Vingegaard from completing the Grand Tour set?

Wednesday: Meltdown: Part two. The story of the 1986 Peace Race, which started in Kyiv just days after the Chernobyl disaster, the worst nuclear accident in history. This episode of KM0 will be released for a limited time on our regular feed, and ad-free on our Friends of the Podcast feed. (More on that below).

Thursday: The Foot Notes. Daniel and John Foot, professor of modern Italian history, discuss the cultural and historical significance of the 2026 Giro route.

Friday: Stage one of the 2026 Giro d’Italia. Who will pull on the first maglia rosa of the race in Burgas, Bulgaria?

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Daily Giro d’Italia Women coverage also coming soon

For the first time in three decades, the Giro d’Italia Women does not clash with the men’s Tour de France, moving to a late May-early June slot on the calendar. We will have daily Arrivée-style episodes covering all the action, hosted by a rotating cast of The Cycling Podcast Féminin’s hosts: Rose Manley, Denny Gray, Rebecca Charlton and former double Giro stage winner Lizzy Banks.

The Giro d’Italia Women starts in Cesenatico on Saturday, May 30 and concludes in Saluzzo on Sunday, June 7. Will Elisa Longo Borghini win the race for a third consecutive year, or can Demi Vollering add a Giro title to her glittering palmarès after dominating the spring Classics?

Before that, there’ll be an episode of Arrivée covering the Vuelta España Femenina.

Our first Giro, ten years on

Ten years ago, Richard, Daniel and I got into Simon Gill’s Broomwagon and headed to the Netherlands for the start of the 2016 Giro d’Italia. We’d started The Cycling Podcast three years earlier with daily coverage of the Tour de France. At some point over the winter, Stephen Moon, a keen listener and CEO of Science in Sport, offered to sponsor the podcast on the condition that we delivered daily episodes from the Italian Grand Tour. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse.

We had covered Giro stages before – we all travelled to Belfast and Dublin for the opening weekend of the 2014 race – but 2016 was the first time we had the funds to commit to the whole race.

The opening weekend in the Netherlands was bathed in glorious sunshine, the crowds were enormous and Tom Dumoulin and Marcel Kittel delivered the stardust by winning the stages.

At the end of the weekend, Daniel headed home because he had a book deadline to meet, leaving Richard and I to head to Italy without his expert guidance.

We flew from Amsterdam to Lamezia Terme in southern Italy, landing well out of our depth. We were united with our luxury wheels for the Italian leg of our journey, a gleaming white Maserati Quattroporte. (How times have changed! I am still not quite sure how that sponsorship deal came about.)

No sooner had we been left to our own devices than Richard backed the Maserati into a large ornamental flowerpot on a narrow Catanzaro street. He did the same again when we arrived at our hotel in Praia a Mare the following evening. ‘Why does this keep happening to me?’ he said. A trilogy of mishaps was completed the following morning when we took a wrong turn on the way to the start and Richard had to execute a 15-point turn as a large crowd of middle-aged Italian men gestured, offered advice, pointed and laughed at us.

In Catanzaro, we found a little pizzeria where the beer of choice was cans of Tennent’s, the strong Scottish lager. ‘They must’ve known you were coming, Rich,’ I said.

In Benevento, we returned to the car park after the stage to find a group of youths surrounding the car. Some were sitting on the bonnet. Richard squeezed the remote key, the car beeped and the lights flashed. The youths leapt off the bonnet out of respect for the Italian icon, and the others parted to allow the car safe passage. Richard revved the engine – a deep, satisfying throaty roar – and the youths applauded as we pulled away. ‘Don’t stall it now,’ I said.

In Foligno, we ended up in a trattoria with a tasting menu of six or eight dishes, all bar one of them absolutely delicious. The one Richard and I spent most of the meal pushing back and forth towards each other was the tripe – slices of cows stomach in a pungent gravy. We demolished everything else and when signore came to collect the dishes he looked slightly disappointed that there were leftovers.

‘Did you not finish your tripe, Lionel?’ said Richard.

In Chianti, we saw Primož Roglič win his first WorldTour race and then were invited to a dinner hosted by the local winemakers.

‘I believe it’s your turn to drive,’ said Richard, as he poured himself a lovely glass of Chianti. What happened late that evening, as I drove us back to our hotel via a very twisty medium-mountain pass, is one of my funniest and fondest memories from all our years of podcasting but it’s one I’ll save for a future episode…

When Daniel arrived to join me during the second week, it became apparent just how much of a Giro novice I had been during the first week. Yes, it’s a bike race like any other, and the similarities to the Tour de France are obvious, but I didn’t really get Italy until Daniel arrived. The Giro has a rhythm and way of life all of its own. Learning those subtle differences over the next few years was one of the great joys of that phase of The Cycling Podcast’s evolution for me.

It’s hard to believe now it’s a decade since I first heard Cozze by Amaraterra, the music Daniel selected for our Giro theme. You can listen to that first episode of the 2016 Giro above.

The Podcast Postbag

Since Daniel and I made the slightly tongue-in-cheek comment about being uncomfortable receiving praise we’ve had a flood of very nice emails. I’m not sure how to take that – perhaps the senders are revelling in our discomfort!

Here are a few edited highlights from our recent postbag:

A short note from a long-time Friend of the Podcast (paid up member from the start) and a listener right from the very beginning... The Peace Race episode is brilliant. A reminder to not take what you produce for granted. The episodes keep coming. We keep listening. They’re all great. And then an episode such as the Peace Race drops and it stops me in my tracks, to just sit and listen. There’s very little that has me doing that these days. Magical stuff. Matt

I enjoyed the latest Arrivée Femmes. Great recap although sad to hear that Rose and Lizzy had the same problem we in the States had – limited coverage. Hope this changes soon. Bit hungry after listening to this episode. Looking for Victoria Sponge in the next startlist. Thank you for the coverage. JT, Chicago

Dear Lionel, You can choose whether to tell Daniel or not, but I just listened to the first part of his Peace Race special. Amazing. I don’t think anyone does it as well as you and he do – but this in particular was really great. Thanks as always for the work you do. Lachlan

LB: Obviously I won’t be passing that on to Daniel!

Just wanted to say I thought the Seixy Basque episode was really good – great story telling and although it was obviously great about Paul Seixas, it was also a nice insight into the Basque region. Also nice to have as a feature episode alongside the news analysis and intelligent debate of regular episodes, which also have been consistently great this year. I’ll also add I enjoyed the Roadbook specials – I’ve got no plans yet to visit the classics but a good listen anyway to better understand the cycling and race culture in those places. Regards, Dan, very happy long term subscriber!

Just sending a brief, squirm-inducing missive to say many thanks for creating something that keeps me entertained and up-to-date in the glorious Grand Tour season – I’m a painter and decorator so invariably miss all the daily action, but I genuinely look forward every morning at work to putting your podcast on first to get a breakdown of the action and minutiae from the previous day’s stage, and obviously most pressingly, the details of the evening’s repast. I’ve just signed up for the annual friend’s subscription, and frankly it’s long overdue, I get paid for my work and so should you. Already excited in anticipation of the Giro. May your travels be safe and your stomachs be full. Kindest regards, Kirsty

I have deep respect for you, firstly Lionel and Daniel, but no less for all the others you have recruited into the crew. I love your podcast, especially during the Grand Tours, not just because you’re there on the ground, but because the podcasts are so much wider, so meandering, sometimes on the fringe of cycling, but always worth a listen. You don’t just repeat what I saw on the TV coverage, you find so many other interesting themes and I often learn something new. Filip

Finally, Jannik got in touch to express frustration that the Seixy Basque and Meltdown episodes released on the free, regular feed contained adverts. As I explained in the recent episodes, we are experimenting with making some KM0 episodes available to all prior to moving them across to the Friends of the Podcast feed. Our subscriber episodes are always ad-free but when we put them on the regular feed they need to contain ad breaks. Jannik made the valid point that, as a Friend of the Podcast subscriber, he’d prefer to listen to the specials ad-free. So, we’ve already added part one of Meltdown to the Friends feed ad-free and part two will be added to the Friends feed without ads at the same time it goes live on the free feed with ads, giving subscribers the chance to listen ad free without having to wait.

A big thank you to Matt, JT, Lachlan, Dan, Kirsty, Filip (whose email was much longer than we could reproduce here), Jannik and everyone else who has taken the time to drop us a line. Feel free to get in touch – whether good or bad, as long as it’s respectful and constructive, contact@thecyclingpodcast.com

Seixy Basque – new episode of KM0 online now

Daniel Friebe was in the Basque Country to witness the week that changed pro cycling – the confirmation that 19-year-old Frenchman Paul Seixas is the real deal. Seixy Basque is an unmissable listen if you want to find out more about the latest sensation to arrive on the scene. This episode of KM0 is available on our free feed for a limited time, before it moves across to our Friends of the Podcast feed shortly. More on that decision below…

Listen to Seixy Basque

by Lionel Birnie

We saw the future on the Mur de Huy on Wednesday afternoon as Paul Seixas won Flèche Wallonne at the first attempt, something not even Tadej Pogačar was able to do. Pogačar had three unsuccessful tries before he finally conquered one of the toughest climbs in cycling and secured victory in the first of the Ardennes Classics.

Seixas is still only 19, making him the youngest ever winner of Flèche Wallonne – the previous youngest was Philémon De Meersman, who was 21 when he won the first ever edition of the race 90 years ago.

Of course, the Seixas Hype Train published its timetable a long while ago. There’s been a rumble on the tracks for the past couple of seasons and that rumble told us that a phenomenon was approaching sooner rather than later. So far, his arrival at every major station on the route to greatness has been bang on schedule. He impressed on the world stage at the Tour of the Alps this time last year, ‘gifting’ victory to his more senior Decathlon teammate Nicolas Prodhomme after an 85-kilometre two-up break on the final day. Then he looked more than comfortable at the Critérium du Dauphiné in June, and was expected to win the Tour de l’Avenir later in the summer, which he did with a flourish after a tricky week of racing against his peers.

He ended the season with a very fine 13th place in a tough World Championship road race in Rwanda, third behind Pogačar and Remco Evenepoel in the European Championships on another hilly course, and seventh at Il Lombardia.

So far this season, his development has continued apace, demonstrating Pog-esque consistency, durability, resilience and no shortage of panache. Victory at Itzulia was the first WorldTour level stage win by a Frenchman since Christophe Moreau at the Dauphiné in 2007 – almost a lifetime ago for Seixas.

We’ve been speculating since he took second place behind Pogačar at Strade Bianche whether Decathlon-CMA CGM will select him for the Tour de France and the team has said it will make a decision after Sunday’s Liège-Bastogne-Liège.

With the rumour mill already suggesting a move away from Decathlon may be on the cards when his contract expires at the end of next season – with UAE Team Emirates among the keenest suitors – it seems unlikely the French team will turn down what may be one of only two opportunities to go into the Tour de France with Seixas in their line-up.

The pressure will be immense, but when will that not be the case? France has been waiting for a winner of the men’s Tour de France since Bernard Hinault’s fifth and final title in 1985. Pauline Ferrand-Prévot’s victory in the Tour de France Femmes last summer captured the imagination and proved that, despite all those years of hurt, the country remains the spiritual and emotional heartbeat of the sport.

First, though, is La Doyenne – arguably the toughest one-day race on the calendar, the equivalent of a mountain stage with the all-or-nothing edge of a Classic. After his performance on the Mur de Huy on Wednesday, there are no doubts about Seixas’ ability to ride fast on steep climbs. There may still be a question mark or two over whether he can stay the distance right to the very end of a 268-kilometre race, but he showed at the Worlds and Il Lombardia that he was almost there and he’s developed further since then.

So, we can anticipate a barnstorming battle between Pogačar, Evenepoel and Seixas, even if there are question marks over Tom Pidcock’s readiness, despite a strong week in the Alps, and Mathias Skjelmose’s top-end.

Arrivée returns on Sunday after Liège-Bastogne-Liège

Tune in on Sunday as we recap the men’s and women’s editions of La Doyenne while the sweat is still drying on the brows of the winners. To make sure you see the episodes as soon as they drop, follow The Cycling Podcast in your preferred podcast player.

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Tolstoy for the TikTok generation

One of the recurring themes of our coverage lately has been professional cycling’s identity crisis and its seemingly perpetual search for a wider audience to help it unlock a rich seam of untapped revenue. For as long as I’ve been covering the sport, there’s been a sense that the stakeholders have been looking over the shoulders of hardcore fans hoping to attract the attention of other sports fans who might not have recognised the beauty and brilliance of cycling.

A couple of weeks ago, in Sweet Little Lies, as we discussed Remco Evenepoel’s April Fool’s Day announcement that he would be riding the Tour of Flanders after all – having told the media repeatedly that he wouldn’t be – we deviated into a discussion about what will, and what won’t, attract a new generation of fans.

The great Remco reveal was hailed by some as a triumph for a dynamic social media strategy, setting the agenda and owning the narrative without having to involve the fusty old mainstream media. Who reads newspapers, or websites, these days, grandad? (Setting aside cycling’s uncomfortable relationship with the truth in the past, it struck me that if lying – even if just by omission – is the best way to grab attention perhaps we all ought to re-evaluate what it is we’re doing.)

Anyway, it has been stated as a matter of fact for at least a decade that attention spans are shortening. Young people are not watching sport. TV audiences for live sport are getting older and many sports have been embracing ways to make their events shorter, snappier and more exciting.

A long-form sport in an era of shortening attention spans?

Road racing is the ultimate long-form sport. By the time Liège-Bastogne-Liège reaches its conclusion I’ll have spent 24 hours watching the men’s Monuments this spring, plus countless hours in the armchair watching all the other races, double-screening during ‘Paris-Adriatico’ week and watching the women’s races on catch-up because of the scheduling clashes. I am fortunate – I can stick the television on and watch all the cycling all the time and get to call it ‘work’.

No one needs to watch all six hours of Milan-Sanremo but the crucial and most entertaining parts of the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix were in the middle. The Hell of the North, especially, rewarded those of us who sat down to watch it from start to finish because the drama and tension heightened as the afternoon wore on. It was a truly fabulous race but, if you’d just switched on for the last hour or 90 minutes you might have wondered what all the fuss was about.

If attention spans are shortening and people won’t watch two or three hours of live sport in big enough numbers, the problem isn’t the promotion or the storytelling, it’s the format of the sport itself and if the product doesn’t match the adverts an awful lot of energy is going to be wasted trying to appeal to people who aren’t going to be won over.

Drawing people in via an Instagram Reel or a YouTube Short is only ever going to have limited success in converting interest into engagement. It’s like persuading someone to read War and Peace by showing them a 30-second video. In that sense, modern cycling is Tolstoy for the TikTok generation. Once you’ve grabbed the attention, what next? ‘Settle in, kids, there’s just four-and-three-quarter hours to go!’

This is the question at the heart of the sport’s marketing conundrum. Does professional cycling want exposure or engagement? Does it want ten million fleeting views, or two million committed followers? It can have a bit of both, of course, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that interest converts into a year-round commitment. The media landscape is already teaching us that views earn pennies and engagement earns the bucks, so shouldn’t the sport be seeking to deepen its connection with the fans it already has? After all, more people follow Lidl the supermarket on Twitter and Instagram than they do Lidl-Trek the cycling team.

The Tour de France is one of the most watched sporting events in the world. Millions of people tune in every July to watch the Tour. The race reaches the Champs-Élysées and there’s a sense of loss – like our best ever summer holiday has come to an end. People want the party to go on just that little bit longer. So, given all that, why don’t the same millions tune in to watch the Clásica San Sebastián a week later? Could it be that – like the Masters golf, the Super Bowl, the curling at the Winter Olympics, or the Ashes cricket – the biggest and best events will always attract a huge audience but for a large percentage of that audience, that’s enough?

The Paris-Roubaix paradox

This conflict between interest and engagement was highlighted starkly by Paris-Roubaix recently. From my point of view, moving the women’s race from Saturday to Sunday was a huge backward step. Roubaix ‘weekend’ had established itself in a very short space of time as a brilliant couple of days of racing. It offered spectators more opportunity to see the races up close from the roadside. It put the women’s race in the spotlight on the Saturday and meant we could watch both of them live, (more or less) in full. There are commercial pressures and costs of closing the roads two days running plus the benefits of being able to run the sportive on the Saturday (which doesn’t need the full road closures a pro race requires) but undoubtedly for the hardcore fans the Roubaix weekend has been diminished.

This year, the women’s race was shown live for around 90 minutes – deeply disappointing for engaged fans who wanted to see more of how things were set up and unfolded. Rose, Lizzy and Denny discussed this in depth in the latest episode of The Cycling Podcast Féminin, and it is well worth a listen.

The day after they’d recorded the episode, a French media website PureMédias reported that the French TV audience for the women’s race was up 70 per cent on 2025 when the two races were held on a separate days. In 2025, around one million people watched the women’s race. This year, 2.2 million watched the men’s race and 1.7m watched the women’s race which followed. So, does the sport want exposure or engagement? The fans want to see more of the action; the sport wants more eyeballs to see anything. Is it possible to deliver both?

Paywalls and participation

One question that rarely gets addressed in this debate about how to attract new viewers is that the best way to draw people in is to make the sport more easily available to watch. Paywalls are the ultimate barrier to engagement and so it seems contradictory that so much effort goes into creating free content for social media when the product itself is so difficult, and expensive, to for so many to watch. The sport needs money because races are expensive to host and broadcast. The sponsors want exposure and so there’s a tricky ecosystem of competing objectives and interests to balance. And perhaps this exposes the conceit behind the desire to ‘grow’ the sport. What the stakeholders really want is more money and they think the way to get that is to attract a large audience of people for free and then convert them into paying customers.

I was speaking to our producer Tom Whalley earlier this week and he made the point that participation is the key to all of this. The more people who ride bikes, the greater chance they will become curious about the sport. If the WorldTour teams united to campaign for safer roads, better infrastructure and greater respect for cyclists from other road users it would probably have a far greater and deeper impact than banding together to shuffle the race calendar around a bit or create some events in ‘new markets’. If the professional sport could help to make everyone a cyclist, they would create populations of people who might fall in love with the televised, competitive sport.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to see Paris Saint Germain play football and, thanks to the wonders of algorithmic social media engineering, on my way home I was served some adverts for the clothing chain, Zara. One of the ranges of T-shirts for children was a collaboration with PSG, designed to get kids wearing the club’s badge and brand before they’re even aware of who Ousmane Dembélé is – and certainly before they can spell Kvicha Kvaratskhelia.

It made me think that the WorldTour teams and their bike and clothing manufacturers should be investing in attracting the kids with things that will appeal to them as kids. Children’s bikes and leisure clothing. Imagine kids riding their Colnago-branded PogBike or the Specialized Remco. Make children’s cycling helmets featuring images of the star riders – turning them into cycling’s Messi and Ronaldo the same way football did. Create a range of children’s T-shirts similar to the PSG x Zara range and create fans of the brands years before they are ready to sit down to watch six hours of racing. There has to be some creative thinking because, let’s be brutally frank here, most of the brands associated with pro cycling are pretty uncool. How many kids have a favourite petrochemical company, supermarket or Middle Eastern state?

When all is said and done, cycling appeals to a type of person, not to a broad, lazily-defined age group. As I said in the podcast last week, when I was 12 I couldn’t stand the taste of coriander (cilantro for our US readers) but as I got older and my tastes evolved I grew to love it. Cycling is the coriander of sports. It’s there for people who like long-form entertainment, history, cultural context and nice scenery. Perhaps cycling isn’t even the most effective gateway to becoming a cycling fan. Perhaps Larry Warbasse was onto something when he mentioned LeBron James’s social media video in which he talked (rather haltingly, it has to be said) about Paris-Roubaix. Perhaps cycling’s most effective partnerships would be collaborations with the LA Lakers, Paris Saint Germain or WWE?

Flèche Wallonne: A teenage winner, and three minutes of action

I’m preaching to the converted here because if you listen to The Cycling Podcast, subscribe to The 11.01 Cappuccino, have opened this email and – astonishingly – read this far, you are already deeply invested in the sport but watching Flèche Wallonne did make me think that sometimes it’s clear the sport doesn’t know the power of what it’s got to offer.

Here we were, watching a teenager take everyone else to the cleaners. Seixas is 19, smack, bang in the middle of the coveted age demographic; the type of person we all have to appeal to, apparently, if the sport is to survive and thrive in this whizz-bang future that’s been imminent for a couple of decades.

The Mur de Huy is the ideal content for TikTok or Instagram Reels. It is three minutes of racing – the first rider to the top wins. Sport doesn’t get simpler or more easy to explain than that. Perhaps the broadcasters and stakeholders should work out ways to capitalise on the excitement of that. Otherwise, if the sport wants to reach different people it has to offer something fundamentally different, moving away from six-hour races and three-week epics because, in its current form, professional cycling will appeal to the next generation of the likes of me and you.

Personally speaking, I think that’s not a problem but, unfortunately, we’re trapped in a hellscape where team owners and marketing people have become convinced that there’s untold riches around the corner if cycling could just reach out and grab them.

Meltdown: Coming soon

Daniel has been busy making a two-part series called Meltdown telling the story of the 1986 Peace Race, which started in Kyiv a couple of weeks after the worst nuclear accident in history happened at the Chernobyl power plant. The fallout from the explosion blew all across Europe and Kyiv was particularly affected. They were washing down the streets to try to mitigate the nuclear material in the days before the race. The question of whether it was right to start the Peace Race, which was the biggest amateur stage race and hugely prestigious for riders from behind the Iron Curtain who were not allowed to race in the West. The first of two KM0 episodes will be released for all next week before it moves behind our own ‘iron curtain’ and onto the Friends of the Podcast feed.

A thank you to our Friends of the Podcast

The media landscape continues to shift and change and if anyone could tell me what the future looks like beyond a handful of Paul Seixas Tour de France victories I’d be very grateful.

For the past ten years, a significant chunk of the revenue we need to run The Cycling Podcast has come from you, our listeners, who have subscribed as a Friend of the Podcast. We have always made a programme of additional ‘special’ episodes in exchange for this support and we are very grateful to everyone who has supported us whether continuously since the early days or on a year-to-year or even month-to-month basis.

As journalists, it is somewhat frustrating at times to put so much time and energy into making a special episode knowing that only around 10 per cent of our regular audience will hear it because it’s behind a paywall. We also accept that for many people, the free shows are enough. For others it’s the round-table discussions that interest them rather than the documentary-style storytelling.

So, we’ve decided that some of our KM0 episodes will be made available on our regular, free-to-air feed for a limited time before moving across to live on our Friends of the Podcast feed. This will give everyone a chance to hear some of the episodes we’re most proud of making and our hope is that existing Friends of the Podcast know that it’s only possible to do this because of their continued support. I hope everyone who enjoys Seixy Basque and Meltdown joins us in thanking our Friends.

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It’s been a busy couple of weeks as the spring Classics hit top gear. This week’s edition of The 11.01 Cappuccino brings you up to date on what we’ve been up to. Here’s what’s online now – and what’s coming up soon – on The Cycling Podcast. To make sure you never miss an episode, follow The Cycling Podcast in your favoured podcast app.

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It’s Coming Home…

This week’s regular episode features Daniel, Lionel and Tudor Pro Cycling rider Larry Warbasse. After a puncture-hit Paris-Roubaix, Larry explains why the riders are prepared to risk flat tyres in favour of using the fastest equipment. Daniel has been in the Basque Country watching Paul Seixas become the first Frenchman to win a WorldTour stage race since Christophe Moreau took the Critérium du Dauphiné in 2007. Seixas was a nine-month-old at the time and despite the emergence of a talented generation in the meantime, including Romain Bardet, Thibaut Pinot and Julian Alaphilippe, France’s long wait for someone to succeed Bernard Hinault has never looked closer to ending. There’s also a visit to Coorevits Corner, and Daniel’s singing… but perhaps the less said about that the better!

Paris-Roubaix

If you want post-race analysis from the Queen of the Classics, Arrivée, is the place to find it. Daniel and Lionel reviewed the men’s race, while Rose and Denny took care of the women’s edition.

Hell of a Debut

The Cycling Podcast Féminin returns with Rose Manley, Denny Gray and Lizzy Banks telling the story of the Classics so far, while looking ahead to the Ardennes races.

Three very different Paris-Roubaix debutants share their stories in this month’s mini feature. We hear from long-time Classics stalwart Shirin van Anrooij, youngest finisher Jente Koops, and Alexis Magner, who comes to the race after recovering from a life-threatening crash last season.

They also delve into the decision by race organisers, ASO, to move the women’s Paris-Roubaix from Saturday to a shared slot with the men on Sunday. And explore in what ways the race’s limited TV coverage could have wider ramifications for the sport.

Also on the agenda: Lizzy’s many goats, cyclist ribs on the barbecue and, hold on, did Denny just quit?

The Unexpected World Champion

New for Friends of the Podcast subscribers, is Rose Manley’s conversation with reigning world champion Magdeleine Vallieres. The Canadian’s win was one of the stories of the championships in Kigali last year and in this episode, she talks about how a 1,000 kilometre bikepacking trip with her dad ignited her love for the sport, about a difficult time at the World Cycling Centre and a world title win that surprised many but not those who’ve watched her development.

Coming up on The Cycling Podcast

Next week
Daniel and Lionel will be back to discuss the Amstel Gold Race, Brabantse Pijl and all the latest news and racing as the spring Classics enter their final phase.

A Spectator’s Guide to… the Ardennes Classics
What’s it like to take a trip to the Ardennes to watch Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. We reveal all – perhaps too much – in the final part of our mini-series for Friends of the Podcast.

From the archive: Lionel of the Ardennes
Check out the two-part Lionel of the Ardennes mini-series, recorded in 2019 when Lionel and Simon spent a few days in the eastern half of Belgium, riding the Mur de Huy and the Liège-Bastogne-Liège sportive. It’ll be bumped to the top of the Friends of the Podcast feed for subscribers on Monday.

Wednesday
Arrivée returns with episodes covering the men’s and women’s Flèche Wallonne. Who will win the Uphill Cheese Roll this year?

Sunday
Arrivée covers Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Will Tadej Pogačar win the oldest of the men’s Monuments for a fourth time or can Evenepoel, Seixas, or someone else stop him?

Sexy Basque
The working title for a forthcoming episode revealing more about the latest sensation in men’s road cycling, Paul Seixas, recorded by Daniel at Itzulia in the Basque Country.

May
Girovagando. It’s ten years since The Cycling Podcast began daily coverage of the Giro d’Italia. It won’t be long before the 2026 edition of the Corsa Rosa kicks off. Join Daniel, Michele and Brian on the road in Bulgaria and Italy from May 8.

by Lionel Birnie

Paris-Roubaix is the ultimate one-day race – the only day of the year when riders will press on to the finish even if they know they are well outside the time limit. Just reaching the André-Pétrieux velodrome is an achievement in itself.

For cycling fans, the Queen of the Classics is an unforgettable spectacle. A day spent in the fields of northern France is dramatic and exhilarating. The things we’ve seen. Riders jolting awkwardly over the hellish cobblestones of Arenberg with two flat tyres, just hoping to make it to the end of the section so they can get a replacement bike. Riders with their faces caked in mud, two pinkish eye holes and vacant stares their sunglasses once obscured. Knees and elbows bloodied and muddied, skinsuits ripped exposing skin the colour of rare steak. The Hell of the North takes riders to their limits and beyond.

Of all the races, Paris-Roubaix is the one that demands a six-hour window in your Sunday. To watch from start to finish is to emerge from the couch late on Sunday afternoon emotionally spent. The tension increases as they ride the supposedly flat roads that lead towards the first sector of pavé and only when it’s over do you realise you’ve been clenching your jaw for hours.

The latest edition of Roadbook is a spectator’s guide, of sorts, for those who want to see the race up close one day. In truth, the rescheduling this year has messed with my ability to offer many practical tips. When the women’s and men’s races were on consecutive days, Paris-Roubaix represented arguably the best weekend of the cycling year. A chance to see different cobblestone sectors, and sample the atmosphere in the velodrome on back-to-back days.

With the women’s race now following the men’s, I am not certain how it will impact the ability to move around from sector to sector. There may be tighter restrictions on traffic.

So, my advice to anyone who is in northern France now is simple: it’s far better to see the races once or twice rather than attempt an overly-ambitious schedule and end up missing it. If you’ve set your heart on making it to Arenberg, Orchies, Pont-Gibus or Carrefour de l’Arbre, make a decisive plan and decide on a fallback if something goes wrong. Seeing the race once or twice on the cobbles and then heading to the velodrome to enjoy the atmosphere as the anticipation and excitement builds makes for an unforgettable experience.

Roadbook, a collection of memories from travelling over to watch Paris-Roubaix over the past 26 years, is available to Friends of the Podcast now.

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Arrivée returns this Sunday

As the dust settles, we will bring you the stories from Hell. Our post-race reaction show Arrivée is back on Sunday, bringing you full analysis of both the men’s and women’s editions of Paris-Roubaix.

Daniel and Lionel break down the chaos and drama of the men’s race as Mathieu van der Poel seeks a record fourth consecutive edition of Paris-Roubaix and Tadej Pogačar aims to become the first man to win all five Monuments in a row.

Then Rose and Denny will take you through every decisive moment in the women’s race.

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From the archive: Mat Hayman’s modern day miracle

Ten years ago, Mat Hayman was 37, a veteran of 14 editions of Paris-Roubaix, entering the twilight of his career but still dreaming of lifting the famous cobblestone trophy above his head in the velodrome.

The Australian had finished each of those 14 editions, albeit outside the time limit once, and the closest he’d come to winning was eighth in 2012, when Tom Boonen destroyed everyone.

Hayman thought he might have one or two last shots at glory and then, at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad in late February 2016, disaster struck. He crashed and fractured his collarbone. With just six weeks to Roubaix, his Classics campaign was in tatters.

But if you never stop believing, perhaps miracles can happen. Hayman was relatively lucky. He was able to train on the indoor bike and put together a programme to give himself a shot at taking part in the Hell of the North. After finishing a couple of races in Spain the week before, he lined up in Compiègne feeling he had nothing to lose. What unfolded that afternoon, when he outsprinted Boonen, Ian Stannard and Sep Vanmarcke on the track, was a sporting fairytale.

That winter, Hayman sat down with Richard Moore to talk through the whole story of how he clutched triumph from the jaws of disaster. We don’t hear Richard’s voice in this episode, just Hayman’s account of the race, but the way he tells the story is a testimony to Richard’s skill as an interviewer.

Ahead of Paris-Roubaix on Sunday, Hayman’s story is a reminder that the race has the capacity to surprise perhaps more than any other.

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Where are we, Lionel?

Paris-Roubaix is a poignant race for me. The 2021 edition, held in the autumn, was the last race I covered with Richard Moore. The 2022 edition, six months later, was the first race I covered since his sudden passing.

Paris-Roubaix had been postponed in April 2021 because of another wave of coronavirus cases and a short circuit-breaker lockdown in north-eastern France. When the re-arranged date was announced, Richard – who had moved to northern France during the pandemic – suggested we make a weekend of it, not least to witness the inaugural edition of Paris-Roubaix Femmes.

Simon Gill, Friend of the Podcast David Luxton, and I loaded our bikes into Simon’s Broomwagon, careful not to squash the collection of items Richard had asked us to bring over for him. I remember there was a haggis or two for him and a large box of Innocent smoothies for his young son among the comforts from home.

We stayed in Valenciennes, in a charming guesthouse called Le Grand Duc, which I’ve visited several times since, including last summer when the Tour de France started in Lille.

The day before the race we rode our bikes down to the Arenberg Forest, clattered across the cobbles there and then went in search of another couple of sectors, where Simon sent his drone up to film Richard and I in action. We had a pleasant lunch in a little cafe and then rode back to Valenciennes on a stretch of cycle path. Once we were half a dozen kilometres or so from home we started attacking each other, sprinting to close the gaps, generally messing about like kids without a care in the world. I launched an attack and as Richard countered, I immediately sat up and let him get on with it. Simon and I chuckled as we watched him power away from us, head down, thinking we were fighting to stay on his wheel. When we got to the next junction he’d stopped to wait for us and to catch his breath. ‘Where were you?’ he said. ‘Oh we couldn’t live with the pace, Rich.’

Back at Le Grand Duc over a beer, Simon showed the footage of Richard and I on the cobbles. At the time it had felt like we’d hit them hard, smashing our way across the stones like the pros. The video evidence was somewhat different.

‘Have you slowed this footage down?’ asked Richard.

‘I’m afraid not,’ laughed Simon.

We covered the historic women’s race, recording throughout the day, capturing the excitement and chaos as the riders hit the cobblestones. On Sunday we were up early to get to Compiègne and to the mixed zone where we wished Mitch Docker luck ahead of the final race of his career.

I decided to accompany Simon in his Broomwagon on a magical mystery tour across the countryside in search of the riders. Richard and David headed off in Richard’s car, their plans for the car suspiciously vague.

As Simon drove, I got the race up on my phone and we watched them leave the neutralised zone. Within a kilometre or so there was a crash. One rider down on the ground. An EF Education jersey.

‘It’s Mitch!’ I said.

Simon and I made it to Arenberg, and somewhere else, and eventually the velodrome in Roubaix, tired from a day of map-reading and schedule-checking and thinking three steps ahead. When we arrived at the velodrome, just in time to go into the track centre to see the riders hit the Carrefour de l’Arbre, I saw Richard and David.

‘What did you guys get up to?’ I asked.

Richard’s face broke into that mischievous grin of his. The one that says he knows he’s about to be rumbled but he couldn’t care less.

‘David?’

Richard started laughing.

‘Come on, what have you been doing?’

‘I’ve been working hard, watching the race, keeping on top of things while you’ve been gallivanting across the fields. It just so happens that we also stopped for a very nice lunch.’

After a pause, he said: ‘What did you have for lunch?’

‘Some crisps,’ I said.

‘Oh dear…’ he said, chuckling away as we walked into the track centre.

After the race had finished and people had started to stream away from the track, Richard and I stood on the pavement outside the Jean Stablinski velodrome, the modern indoor track just over the road from its more famous, outdoor cousin. We were recording some final links for our episode and as we did we both became aware, then self-conscious, of two middle-aged men staring at us as they moved ever closer. When they were invading our space uncomfortably, Richard cracked. ‘Excuse me? Do you mind, we’re working here?’

Richard very rarely cracked like this, but these two guys were drunk, lolling about unsteadily, and pretty irritating. They shuffled off, and Richard said: ‘I’ve completely lost my train of thought. We’d better do all that again.’

‘Really? Can we not just pick it up from where we got interrupted?’

‘No, it’s totally put me off my stride.’

In our unused take, we’d been talking about Florian Vermeersch, the young Belgian who’d sprung a surprise by finishing second to Sonny Colbrelli. We’d learned that Vermeersch was still studying history at the University of Gent and had been elected a town councillor in his home town of Lochristi. I had joked that he ought to have a nickname, The Mayor, or something. I was determined my joke would not end up on the cutting room floor and I was ready to deliver it again in our second take when Richard jumped in before me and stole my thunder.

‘What are we going to call him?’ he said, that same mischievous grin breaking out again. ‘The Mayor, perhaps? Is that going to be his nickname?’

‘That could be, Richard. I wonder where you got that idea? Sometimes the perils of having to do a second take means that my jokes get stolen!’

Later on, it was time to go our separate ways. We got into the Broomwagon, Richard got into his car and we were just about to get on the motorway when Richard called us. He’d forgotten to collect his haggis and smoothies, so we pulled over to the side of the road and he collected his goodies.

I did see Richard once more face-to-face, by a strange quirk of fate it was in Watford, my not-quite-home town the following February, when Richard was over in London but travel disruption and childcare arrangements meant he had to travel out to meet me because I couldn’t get into London. We recorded the podcast, with Daniel joining us remotely, and then Richard and I shook hands and said we’d see each other again at Paris-Roubaix in a few weeks.

Of course, tragically, that was not to be the case. Richard died the morning after Gent-Wevelgem, a race that has come to symbolise in the minds of many of our listeners his contribution to the podcast, the cycling media and even to the sport itself.

For me, though, it is Paris-Roubaix that most strongly resonates and reminds me of our friendship and working relationship. In those awful, uncertain weeks that followed the news we weren’t sure what the future would hold, although we were determined to return when it felt right. Having ridden round parts of Scotland with Simon – which was therapeutic in itself and helped to process the grief when it was at its rawest – I felt ready to go to Paris-Roubaix and see how it went. I’d already booked my travel, but I couldn’t face returning to Le Grand Duc – not just yet – so I booked an alternative place in Lille.

All weekend I was struck by the kindness of colleagues and strangers. The first person I saw when I arrived at the velodrome on the Sunday afternoon was Hugo, who gave me a big hug. Caley and others insisted I join them for dinner and, although I deeply appreciated the offer, I preferred to do my own thing. I lost count of the number of podcast listeners who approached me, all of them sensitively and almost tentatively, as if hyper-aware they would be encroaching on my grief, to offer a few words of condolences to everyone associated with the podcast and Richard’s family and friends. It was both touching and quite overwhelming, especially when I was in the media scrum, automatically scanning the crowd of journalists for the familiar figure that stood taller than almost everyone else even though I knew I wouldn’t find him.

If sport is about people and places, then the Roubaix velodrome will always remind me of Richard. We recorded there many times – including during the 2018 Tour de France, on World Cup final day, when Richard could barely contain his delight that England had been knocked out at the semi-final stage.

The episode we recorded that October day, which you can listen to below, was the final one Richard started with the words: ‘Where are we, Lionel?’ Those words, and Richard’s mischievous grin and hearty laugh, will come readily to mind on Sunday.

The 2021 Paris-Roubaix weekend

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by Lionel Birnie

Remco is no April Fool. And yet…

I can’t have been the only person who checked the date yesterday when news broke on social media that Remco Evenepoel planned to be on the start line in Antwerp for Sunday’s Tour of Flanders.

Only in cycling could one of the sport’s biggest stars make such an improbable announcement on April Fool’s Day.

Part of me still refuses to believe the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe rider is taking part until I see him in the peloton on Sunday but he’s there, on the provisional start list, number 111.

But why is it improbable when Evenepoel is undoubtedly a generational talent who increasingly seems better suited to one-day racing than Grand Tours? Well, because he is relatively inexperienced in the cobbled Classics.

He’s raced the cobbles since he turned to cycling, of course. You can’t race in Belgium without encountering them. He won the junior Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne and rode junior Paris-Roubaix, although he finished outside the time limit there.

As a professional, there were plenty of cobbles in the two editions of the Baloise Belgium Tour he won – including Haaghoek, Lippenhovestraat, Paddestraat and the Muur. The Brussels Classic he won in 2021 featured the Muur and Bosberg twice each, and Brabantse Pijl has a few cobbles too.

But he is yet to line up for the Ronde van Vlaanderen. In fact, he is the only Belgian man to have won the rainbow jersey in the World Championship road race who has not taken part in the Tour of Flanders. That will change on Sunday (unless we’re all victims of an elaborate hoax).

In this week’s episode – Double Whammy – Daniel made the point that although Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe have been aggressive and mob-handed in many of the Classics so far, they are lacking a finisher. Whether Evenepoel is that man remains to be seen, and I have my doubts, although it feels almost preposterous to say that a rider capable of winning the world title, the Olympic Games road race and Liège-Bastogne-Liège can’t be a factor in the Tour of Flanders.

However, his experience of the intricacies of elite level Flemish Classics is almost non-existent. As a neo-pro in 2019 he rode Nokere Koerse and Bredene Koksijde Classic but that, and the few races listed above, is more or less the extent of it. He’s never ridden Omloop Nieuwsblad, Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne, E3 Saxo Classic, Gent-Wevelgem (sorry, another euro in the jar, In Flanders Fields), or Dwars door Vlaanderen. And it’s a big step up from Nokere Koerse to De Ronde.

Can he match Tadej Pogačar or Mathieu van der Poel, or even Wout van Aert or Mads Pedersen, when it comes to the dizzying left-right-left-again of the Tour of Flanders? Evenepoel’s bike-handling and descending skills are often ludicrously under-rated – the way some people talk about him you’d think he’d won Liège-Bastogne-Liège on a bike equipped with stabilisers. And yet it does feel like the Tour of Flanders on Sunday might be a case of jumping in at the deep end and getting a noseful of water…

The Belgian drought

We’re so used to focusing on the 40-year wait for a Frenchman to win the Tour de France that it has perhaps slipped under the radar that Belgium is currently enduring its longest drought in the men’s Tour of Flanders. Lotte Kopecky has won three of the past four editions of the women’s race but you have to go back to 2017 for the last Belgian man to win. That was Philippe Gilbert and, although the Flandrians took him to their hearts, he’s a Walloon. The last Flandrian winner was Tom Boonen way back in 2012.

With Mathieu van der Poel seemingly cursed by the fact that he has already won Omloop Nieuwsblad – and no one has ever done the Omloop-Ronde double in the same season – it looks like Tadej Pogačar will be the man to beat on Sunday, although Wout van Aert’s return to something approaching his peak form in the past week will ensure the fanatical Flandrians have someone to cheer even if Evenepoel falls short.

What about Ganna?

We’ve been treated to three successive nail-biters over the past few days. Van der Poel’s bluff and double-bluff, combined with the hesitation among the chase group, saw the Dutchman win the E3 Saxo Classic for the third year in a row. Two days later, Van der Poel was away with Van Aert again – the George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley of professional cycling, as Daniel described them – until almost the last moment at In Flanders Fields, only to be caught as they went under the flamme rouge. And Van Aert was pipped on the line by Filippo Ganna in Waregem on Wednesday as the Italian clinched Dwars door Vlaanderen.

In this week’s episode we credited Ganna with putting in a mammoth turn on the front of what remained of the peloton to finally catch Van der Poel and Van Aert (and Alec Segaert) at the end of In Flanders Fields. Italian observers were aghast that Ganna would sacrifice himself for his Ineos Grenadiers teammate Sam Watson, who finished 17th, well adrift of winner Jasper Philipsen. We were somewhat puzzled too, given Ganna’s ability to catapult himself out of an already fast-moving group, as he did on Wednesday. It was an even more impressive win as he had to swap bikes when his handlebars snapped on the Eikenberg just as Van Aert was making his big move.

At the time of writing, Ganna will not be riding the Tour of Flanders on Sunday. Instead he’ll be at home in front of a giant television, enjoying lunch, and resting ahead of an increasingly realistic attempt to improve on his previous best sixth place at Paris-Roubaix.

It makes sense but it does also highlight the poor record Team Sky / Ineos Grenadiers have at Flanders, especially as they won the first ever Flemish cobbled classic they rode when Juan Antonio Flecha took Omloop Het Nieuwsblad in 2010. Since then, they have won Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne a couple of times (Chris Sutton and Mark Cavendish), another couple of Omloops courtesy of Ian Stannard, two editions of E3 (Geraint Thomas and Michał Kwiatkowski), and a pair of Dwars door Vlaanderen (Dylan van Baarle and now Ganna).

But the Tour of Flanders has continued to elude them. Van Baarle’s second place to Van der Poel a week before his Paris-Roubaix victory in 2022 is their best result. Luke Rowe was fifth in 2016, Magnus Sheffield sixth in 2024 and Ganna was eighth last year.

It’s a curious world where victory in a race like Dwars door Vlaanderen does not automatically confer at least four-star favourite status for Sunday’s big one, but in a world where Pogačar and Van der Poel have been taking it in turns to dominate, the smart strategy for Ganna may be to sit this one out and hope for a better opportunity in a week’s time.

Roadbook: A Spectator’s Guide to the Flanders Classics

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Next stop, the Ronde van Vlaanderen

The first time I went to the Tour of Flanders was in 1999, when the race fell on Easter Sunday, as it does this year. On Good Friday, I was in Vitré in Brittany for a relatively new race, the Route Adélie, where the British Linda McCartney team was racing. This is my account of that race written at the time.

by Lionel Birnie

Slumped in a plastic chair in Vitré is Chris Lillywhite, the rigours of his 188-kilometre slog around the rolling countryside of Brittany clearly visible on his face. The former Milk Race winner takes a slug of his drink while the Linda McCartney team’s soigneur, Eddie Wegelius, cleans the grime from his legs.

‘I blew on the last lap with about four kilometres to go. It was hard, we knew it would be, but it wasn’t incredibly hard,’ says Lillywhite.

Mechanic Carl Farrell is loading the team car, a smart, burgundy E-Class Mercedes. ‘Nice quiet day, we weren’t called up to the front at all. Just the way I like it,’ he says with a smile.

For the team’s German rider, Heiko Szonn – formerly of the same Telekom under-23 team which produced Jan Ullrich – it looks like it’s been anything but a quiet day. Szonn, the only McCartney rider to have finished with the peloton, makes his way through the crowd towards the car. Manager Sean Yates extends his hand to congratulate him. ‘My legs were like jelly on the last couple of laps. God, it was hard,’ Szonn says.

This is Britain’s Linda McCartney team acclimatising to racing in Europe, but it could easily be any other division two outfit taking its first tentative steps into professional cycling’s big time. The Route Adélie, round four of the Coupe de France, held on Good Friday at Vitré, is the first of two races the McCartneys will compete in during Easter weekend. It will be followed by the GP Rennes on Sunday, the same day as the Tour of Flanders, which may as well be light years away.

Preparing the troops

Yates has summoned his riders to a team meeting in his room at the Hotel La Grenouillère. It’s 11am, an hour and a half until the race starts.

First to arrive are a couple of the Australian contingent – David McKenzie and Ben Brookes. The others filter in and find space to sit.

‘This is the sort of race I like,’ says Matt Illingworth, who is not feeling well, ‘it passes the hotel 13 times.’

One of the most respected riders of his generation, Yates was a hard-working domestique deluxe who rode tirelessly for Peugeot, Fagor, 7-Eleven and Motorola. In his 15-year career, he has sat through hundreds of team meetings. This is his second attempt at preparing his riders for a race – following the GP Cholet in March – and he briefs his riders well.

The respect they have is evident; they listen to what he says.

‘It’s important we participate in the race and ride near the front,’ says Yates. ‘It’ll be hard because there’s a good-quality field but the course isn’t as tough as the GP Cholet. I know we haven’t had anything like the racing we should have but if you ride properly and professionally all the time you’ll know what to do when you do have the legs.’ Brookes and Julian Winn are told to police the early stages of the race and get in any breaks that go clear. Szonn and Illingworth will take care of the middle and Allan Iacuone, McKenzie and Lillywhite are to save themselves for the finale. ‘If we race properly for as long as possible I don’t mind if we get popped on the final few laps,’ says Yates.

Future looks bright

Chris Lillywhite is one of the most experienced members of the team and has ridden many races like this before. He looks more relaxed than some of the others. ‘I did the GP Rennes ten years ago with Raleigh-Banana,’ he recalls. ‘I remember it being tough.’ Now 32, he has realistic aims for the team: ‘We all know how hard it will be for a British team to ride the Tour de France, but the set-up is right.’

A former winner of the Milk Race, Lillywhite had written off his chances of racing in Europe again and spent 1998 racing purely for the love of the sport with the fledgling McCartney team. Then the plans for 1999 were unveiled, with a bigger budget, better riders and a stronger race programme, and Lillywhite was offered a contract. ‘I didn’t think any of this would come along again and I know I’ll never ride for a big team again, but maybe I can ride for a couple more years with the McCartneys,’ he says. ‘I know me and some of the other older guys are not the future of this team, but we still have something to offer.’

Lillywhite believes the way the Telekom team has evolved over a period of almost ten years is an example the McCartneys can follow. ‘Telekom are one of the strongest teams but they started as the small Stuttgart team and built things up slowly. Back then there were hardly any German pros but now they’ve won the Tour,’ he says.

Final countdown

With less than quarter of an hour until the start, Yates comes back to the team car far from happy. ‘The organisers have paid us the start money by cheque and the bank won’t cash it because we haven’t got an account here. It’s a real pain in the arse because we have to pay the hotel bill in cash, buy petrol and pay the motorway tolls. We haven’t got a credit card yet so we need to be able to use the start money.’ It’s a problem which faces all the foreign teams at the Route Adélie.

‘The Slovenian team [KRKA] has the same problem. At Cholet the organisers paid us cash and I thought they’d do the same here but the guy won’t budge.’ Yates will have to withdraw some cash to sort things out.

Cofidis rider David Millar is full of beans, chatting and joking with his friends, although he is still smarting from his defeat by Jens Voigt at the Critérium International the previous weekend. He turns to his teammate Bobby Julich: ‘You hear that Bobby? They say the time gap Voigt beat me by is the equivalent of two centimetres. Two centimetres!’

‘Forget it man, it’s over,’ replies the American.

Millar greets some of the McCartney riders and asks how things have been going. The McCartneys look pleased to see him: a friendly face in this intimidating milieu. Millar’s confidence – fuelled by his fine start to the season – is in stark contrast to the demeanour of the somewhat apprehensive McCartney riders. They are not joking as readily as they were earlier on; the start is just a few minutes away.

There is just time for adjustments to bikes, a quick check that they have bidons and race food, and the slow roll to the start line.

And they’re off

This is the third edition of the Route Adélie, the previous two having been won by Nicolas Jalabert and Jaan Kirsipuu. Following the success of the 1995 Tour de France’s visit to Vitré, when Mario Cipollini won the stage, the local council decided they wanted a race of their own. A sponsor – the ice cream maker Adélie – was found and the race was born, providing the riders who are spared the cobbled hills of Flanders with some meaningful competition. It also gives smaller teams an opportunity to make a name for themselves. Eight of the 17 formations are ranked in division two, and a further two teams are French semi-professional outfits.

The 129-strong field will tackle five laps of a 23.4-kilometre circuit around the undulating country roads around Vitré before eight 8.6-kilometre circuits of the town itself.

In the early stages, the yellow and black McCartney jerseys are at the front but when the break goes they are not represented. Brookes, the 19-year-old Australian, tries to marshal the move but is feeling the effects of a slight back injury and fails to stay with the group.

The big losers are the Polish MROZ squad and the McCartneys. Almost every other team has a rider in the 18-man selection. Nearing the end of the third big lap, MROZ go to the front of the peloton in a bid to pull back the break. The lead is never more than a minute but they manage to stay away. By the time the race reaches the finishing circuit it is clear the winner will come from the escape.

As the race nears its conclusion the crowd lining the narrow streets of Vitré swells, attracted by the prospect of seeing the riders every ten minutes or so. And as the crowd grows the publicity girls get to work, handing out free Adélie ice creams to all and sundry, despite the light showers which fall intermittently.

Daniel Mangeas’ commentary grows more fervent and the crowd cheers. At the back of the peloton, Szonn is hanging on.

Post-mortem

Szonn finishes with the peloton, Lillywhite just behind. The other six abandoned on the finishing circuit and were already back at the hotel.

Yates is pleased that two of his men made it but the frustration of not getting a man in the break is obvious. ‘I told the riders how important it was to show themselves at the front and I had hoped they would get in any big moves that went. I don’t want to be like those directeurs who sit in the team car shouting and screaming when our riders don’t get in the break, though. They know what I expect but I know it’s not as easy as that. I used to suffer like a pig for the first ten races of the year so I do know what it’s like.’

Julian Winn, a stage winner in last year’s Prutour, pulled out with a couple of laps to go. Back in the team’s wagon, parked outside the hotel, he reflects on the race. ‘This was only my second race of the year. The first one was the GP of Essex and then this. The difference is mind-blowing but I learnt a lot today.’

Farrell, the mechanic, is washing the team bikes ready for the following day. Four months ago he was working in a bike shop in Forest Row, Yates’ home town. Now he is preparing the bikes for a professional cycling team. “I heard the team needed a mechanic and when I was offered the job I jumped at the chance,’ he says. ‘Sean said it would be hard work and he definitely wasn’t wrong. Today went okay but I’m just waiting for my first cock-up. I know one day I’ll get it wrong but Sean is cool about it.’

The riders head to their rooms to relax. There is time to reflect on the race, before attending another lesson at the GP Cholet on Sunday.

* * *

Postscript: After the finish, Szonn put on a long-sleeved jacket and leg-warmers and announced that he would ride the few kilometres back to the hotel to warm down, perhaps throwing in a little loop to fully shake the lactic acid out of his legs. Later, I arrived back at the hotel to find Yates leaning on the bonnet of the team car. Szonn still hadn’t returned. ‘He should be back by now,’ said Yates, later still. This was before GPS cycle computers and Szonn didn’t have a mobile phone with him. It turned out he’d ridden in the wrong direction, got lost on his little loop, and spent the best part of two hours trying to find his way back to the hotel. ‘Ah well,’ said Yates, deadpan. ‘It won’t do him any harm!’

This article first appeared in Cycle Sport in 1999.