by Simon Crisp
Up until the Col de la Loze stage, the 2023 Tour de France seemed on track to be one of the closest ever. The gap between Tadej Pogacar and eventual winner Jonas Vingegaard had been measured in a few seconds, rather than the minutes we're often used to, and there was discussion about the race... Continue Reading →
A straw man often employed by the media is that cycling claims to be a green sport, but is nothing of the sort. They cite the team cars, air travel and plastic bidons as being indicative of hypocrisy, yet teams have rarely, if at all bothered to push any sort of environmental cause as part... Continue Reading →
Race charts for all Grand Tours since 1998
It's Oscars time, when arthouse cinema gathers together, thinks its popular, then is shocked when the films that win don't do particularly well at the box office. Whilst this years nominees are an eclectic mix of biographies, neo-westerns and god-awful climate change analogies, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, as it is officially... Continue Reading →
Thursday the 24th of June saw what is surely an unprecedented feat: during the Tour de France team presentation, no fewer than 8 teams, a stonking 35% of the total riding, unveiled what the graphic designers who had been wiling away during lockdown had come up with - new kits. For once, this wasn't simply... Continue Reading →
There is an argument that the most recognisable symbol of cycling is not, somehow, a bicycle, but a piece of clothing that when introduced was made of a colour that was traditionally associated with Judas Iscariot and had connotations of illness and duplicity, that has come to be the most coveted jersey a cyclist can wear. The history of the yellow jersey - the malliot jaune - is well documented elsewhere in terms of how it became such an iconic garment (I recommend Peter Cossins's "The Yellow Jersey" for it's brilliant mix of historic, symbolic and cultural research), so this is simply a look at how the famous golden fleece has been utilised for the purposes of capitalism - encouraging us to buy more stuff from the pages of ProCycling.
"We apologise in advance if our ads look like they're written by engineers. We figure you would rather read and add designed by an Engineer than ride a bike designed by a marketing department."
A nice idea from our editor in chief. In order to enable sportsmen to recognise the leader of our great trek without hesitation when he's within the Tour de France peloton, our editor in chief, Henri Desgrange, has decided that in the future the rider holding first place in the general classification will wear a... Continue Reading →
The Kazakhs had another highly eventful year in 2008, taking their 2nd and 3rd Grand Tours, but not without lashings of controversy. For the previous years, see 2006 and 2007 January 5th 2008 Johan Bruyneel insists that Astana is "not a copy of Discovery Channel" and claims to have "certain written guarantees" about the... Continue Reading →
Astana have recently begun celebrating their tenth anniversary, which is an interesting exercise in nostalgia. Given that ten years ago they weren't allowed to start the Tour de France because half their team was suspended due to doping allegations, meaning the team didn't have enough riders (and this was after they'd appealed to CAS to... Continue Reading →
Sicycle 