by Simon Crisp
This is one of a series of looks at advertising in cycling, mostly informed by looking back through past issues of Procycling magazine. The bicycle saddle inhabits a peculiar dichotomy of worlds - it is both the most important physical, and least important aesthetic, part of a bicycle. It is your primary contact point, yet... Continue Reading →
Having just gone through what was, in the most politest terms, a PR incident in having to effectively have crisis talks with riders to decide which one of them was allowed to win a Grand Tour, you would have thought the last thing Jumbo-Visma wanted to do was to create more controversy that might remove... Continue Reading →
Three US Presidents, six British Prime Ministers, 127 new riders, 298 Tour de France stages and 339 UK Number One singles after July 25th 2008, Cofidis no longer have to reference a rider who retired five seasons ago as the last rider to win a Tour de France stage for the team. Yes, Sylvain Chavanel... Continue Reading →
Not even the most ardent fan of Patrick Lefevere's Wolfpack would try and claim that the Belgian team has had anything other than a disastrous classics campaign. For a team with a manager who is usually unhappy if they "only" podium, a 7th place in the Tour of Flanders and an average placing of 16th... Continue Reading →
A win is a win, isn't it? You cross the line first, you outscore the opposition, you're more accurate than them, or whatever the requirement is in your particular chosen sport. In cycling, you cross the line first, or you win a stage race by accumulating the lowest amount of time taken to compete the... Continue Reading →
Yessss, more charts and graphs on the WorldTour teams for 2023, and how they break down. Aren't you lucky?Here's the 2023 WorldTour split by teams. You can see the breakdown by nation, and also sort the teams by their ProCyclingStats scores, number of stage wins, Monument wins and podiums, and the total career wins of... Continue Reading →
Cycling teams are famously dislocated from any particular home, in contrast to football and rugby teams which draw in a group from a surrounding geographical area. Cycling teams may have a loose affiliation to a nation, but lack any other real identity other than what can be conferred from their sponsors. Indeed, they often need... Continue Reading →
There is some precedent for teams announcing jerseys for the following year in July. Movistar have done it, for no particular reason (one less thing to get angry with on Netflix, perhaps), and Lotto Soudal once did, as part of a sponsorship extension announcement. Soudal-Quick Step started us off this July, but now we're in... Continue Reading →
As Ineos announce a Tour de France team with "only" one of their four Grand Tour winners present, and the race essentially being pitted as Tadej Pogacar versus the Jumbo-Visma team, it got me wondering: just how strong are the teams in GC terms? How many Grand Tour Top ten riders are there? I had... Continue Reading →
Rather than generate actual excitement, the current "relegation battle" between WorldTour teams seems to be creating lots of exercises for statisticians and data analysts in trying to explain the UCI's labyrinthine points system to cycling fans, who you'd kinda expect to know a great deal about the sport in the first place, but simply cannot... Continue Reading →
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