Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 29 i Cyclist Australia

Nothing is impossible, said an overwhelmed Chris Froome shortly after taking a historic Tour-Vuelta double – the first ever to win both grand tours in a single year since its current position in the professional calendar. We also think it’s a fitting quote to describe our emotions following the first-run Gravel Grit Central Coast. We wanted to create an event that brought together cyclists in all shapes and wheel sizes. Cyclo-cross, adventure, mountain, road and even e-bikes were seen excitedly awaiting the start gun. There are few events that truly cater for all, but we think our inaugural event got pretty closed – despite a few roadies not quite following the recommendations for the day. At least they’ll know for next. We must send a huge thanks not just to…

Only an hour and a half from Sydney’s CBD, it feels like we are many miles from the nearest traffic light or train station, and full-bar phone reception seems a distant luxury. Alex, Marcus and I set off from Tractor 828, a restaurant and general store in Ebenezer, on a chilly morning accompanied by threatening skies. I have no idea what to expect on the 96.5km loop in this undulating, bushy part of the country, and I’m feeling a little apprehensive. The nerves grow stronger when I notice my riding companions are wearing mountain bike shoes, their bikes fitted with SPD pedals – and they’d ridden around here before! I’m using road shoes. I hope I’ve made the right choice. Is this going to be classified as a road or…

According to anthropologists, it was about 200,000 years ago that the first modern human beings originated in Africa. Another 100,000 years later they set out to colonise the rest of the world, by all accounts starting in the Horn of Africa, in what is now Ethiopia. By 50,000 years ago humans were in Europe. It took another 49,800 years for mankind’s greatest achievement – the bicycle – to be invented (the original ‘Dandy Horse’ celebrates its 200th anniversary this year). Leap forward to January 2017 and Cyclist is packing a modern carbon bicycle into a travel case to make the journey back to where it all began: Ethiopia. The landlocked country in the north-east of Africa is not the first place you might think of when considering a cycling destination.…

As Ethiopia modernises and opens up more to tourism, so the big cities are seeing the infiltration of Western-style restaurants, with burgers and pizzas on offer. But travel to the remoter towns and villages and those options disappear. Luckily, the local Ethiopian food is truly delicious. Main meals in Tigray will almost certainly come with injera – a form of spongy flatbread, like a pancake, made from teff wheat, which is particularly suited to the dry conditions and high altitudes of Ethiopia. There’s no need for additional crockery or cutlery as the injera serves as a plate for various stews of spiced vegetables or pulses such as lentils (wat) or meat (tibs), which are eaten by tearing chunks of injera and scooping up the contents. Ethiopian tradition is to only…

THE SPEC Model Trek Émonda SLR Disc Project One Groupset Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 9170 Deviations None Wheels Bontrager Aeolus 3 TLR D3 Finishing kit Bontrager XXX OCLV VR-C handlebar, Bontrager Pro stem, Trek Seat Mast Cap, Bontrager Affinity Pro Carbon saddle Weight 6.65kg (56cm) Price $13,562 (as shown) Contact trekbikes.com/au When Trek launched its first Émonda SLR, just prior to the start of the 2014 Tour de France, it was at the time the lightest production road bike in the world. Since then much has changed in the bike industry, starting with the introduction of disc brakes, and so too has the Trek Émonda. The first thing to mention is the weight. It was a pretty big deal for the manufacturer to go sub-700g (690g) for a production road frame…

Protecting your head is only part of a cycling helmet’s duties these days. There’s also the toss-up between ventilation and aero performance: do you want to go fast or feel cool? Bontrager claims to have both covered with its latest Velocis MIPS, a race-level helmet currently being used by Trek-Segafredo at the Tour de France. Bontrager has borrowed some of the proven aero qualities of its highly regarded Ballista helmet, but has substantially increased the ventilation, claiming the Velocis MIPS moves 18% more air through the helmet (thanks to internal recessed channelling) than Giro’s rival Synth MIPS. Bontrager’s data also suggests the Velocis MIPS outperforms the Synth for aerodynamics, reducing drag across a yaw range of 0°-20°. Of course, we only have Bontrager’s word for this, and Giro’s test data…

It only occurred to me the morning of Gravel Grit that my Mazda2 might have been a terrible choice for a 67km off-road ride through the Watagans National Park. A desperate 3am phone call to a reluctant friend landed me with my weapon of choice for the day ahead, the VW Amarok, a ute so big it needed stairs to climb into. I struggled my way down the steepest, thinnest and all-round most janky road I could find, squeezing past riders and leaving a cyclone of dust in my wake to get ahead of the bunch. After scrambling up all the rocky vantage points, I tucked myself away in some ferns and played the waiting game. The first few riders in the bunch made easy work of the road I'd…

Cast your mind back to your teenage years and to your possibly-not-favourite subject of French, and you might – just might – have an inkling as to the translation of ‘Croix de Fer’. ‘Cross of iron’, anyone? Iron cross, in other words. You don’t need to be a language buff or wordsmith to reach said cross, which sits at the mountain’s summit: you just need to be hard as nails yourself to climb to the top of this 2,067m behemoth in the French Alps. The Col de la Croix de Fer – the Iron Cross Pass – has been making life difficult for riders on the Tour de France since 1947. Italian Fermo Camellini was the first over the summit that year, and he would go on to win the…

Dan Jones, mastermind of Orica-Scott’s viral video series Backstage Pass, is famous for his humour. The YouTube sensation that he created chronicles the adventures of Australia’s WorldTour team at races across the world, with a laugh-filled focus on the people and personalities as much as the actual cycling. But it’s not always fun and games. The docu-series engages viewers because it delicately balances Jones’ trademark humour with the raw emotions of sport. ‘Backstage Pass is a laugh, but every now and then Jonesy makes really emotional content,’ says veteran Orica-Scott rider Mathew Hayman. ‘I still have trouble watching the Backstage Pass of my 2016 Paris-Roubaix win.’ Just like his video series, the 35-year-old film-maker’s jovial exterior masks a soft centre. Jones admits that, at the 2013 Tour de France, when…

How much do most people know about Tom Simpson, beyond that he died one baking afternoon high on the barren slopes of Mont Ventoux in southern France? Well, at a time when British cycling was a downtrodden backwater, Simpson was a World Champion, a winner of Paris-Nice and multiple Monuments and a BBC Sports Personality of the Year. He was a rival to Eddy Merckx, Felice Gimondi and Jacques Anquetil, and was more of a star in Belgium, his adopted country, than he was at home. He dreamed of victory in the Tour. After years of near misses, he was determined to succeed in 1967 and so, despite being ill, he drove himself to race onwards… until his fatal collapse on the Giant of Provence. Simpson’s death shocked and appalled…

This is a point-to-point ride, as loops are hard to come by in Ethiopia, so be sure to have suitable back-up. Cyclist started out from the Agoro Lodge, about 4km outside the city of Adigrat. In the centre of Adigrat is a large roundabout – take the road heading west (Route 2) towards Adwa. Stay on this road (there is only one road) for the next 110km to the town of Adwa, stopping along the way in Bizet and Enticho for food and water. Pass through Adwa and, at the main junction, turn left onto Route 30 heading for Axum, which is about another 20km further on. ETHIOPIA…

The mid-priced GPS market is more competitive than ever before, but at a few notes over $300 and with a host of on-trend features, there’s no reason why Polar’s M460 shouldn’t gather up a fair share of the popular vote. Provided you can overlook one thing. Polar is sticking resolutely to sensor pairing via the Bluetooth protocol, which means any ANT+ device you have will not be compatible. That said, most peripherals these days will transmit in Bluetooth, plus Polar has brought the M460 right up to date regarding power meter compatibility, meaning it happily accommodates everything from PowerTap P1 pedals to Stages crank arms. The M460 is a standalone GPS unit, but it won’t do turn-by-turn directions so isn’t a navigational aid. For Strava lovers, Polar has added Live…

In a time when words like ‘adventure’, ‘explorer’ and ‘escape’ are being used more than ever when it comes to cycle travel, it’s fair to say that most, including yours truly, are looking for an experience that stretches farther than the weekday beaches loop. Those with the resources to do so will jetset around the globe in search of that next ‘road less ridden’ location, but for most, we simply long for a destination that brings friends, family and loved ones together – on the bike, of course. We live in a huge country that, thankfully, still has a few untouched gems most have yet to discover. Better still, some of the wildest spots are closer than you think. Introducing Flinders Island, a skip and a hop from the north-east…

Backstage Pass might have been an innovation when it first arrived in the peloton, but its success was certainly not due to a Hollywood budget: the series has always been produced on a shoestring. Jones is the producer, cameraman and editor, while the docu-series’ reach is entirely organic, with Orica-Scott spending no money on social media promotion. ‘We have no marketing budget,’ admits the team’s communications director Taryn Kirby. ‘If we have an idea, we price it and then pitch to management. Even for things like the inflatable guitars, Dan had to get approval.’ Produced for an AC/DC edition of Orica-Scott’s viral music video series, the guitars became ubiquitous at the 2013 Tour de France - even the famed ‘Devil’ roadside supporter was thrashing out imaginary tunes. There was only…

It’s safe to say bike computers have come a long way since Curtis Veeder invented the Cyclometer in 1895. A simple mechanical device, it counted wheel rotations and sent this info to an analogue odometer on the handlebars that then calculated distance using a formula based on the circumference of the front wheel. Fast forward 122 years and the bike computer has evolved into a truly sophisticated piece of hardware. Just as Veeder realised, few sports are as easily measured or quantified as cycling, and technology companies have sought to exploit this ever since. Today’s products can collect, plot and analyse just about any performance metric you can imagine while tracking you anywhere in the world. It’s hardly a surprise that the bike computer has become as essential to a…

The name says it all – the Endurace is an endurance bike with a bit a raciness thrown in. Or it could be a race bike with added endurance. Either way, it manages to blend the two elements pretty well. The geometry is fairly relaxed and it does a decent job a cancelling out the bumps, so is perfect for long days in the saddle where comfort is the priority. But the ride never felt sluggish or sloppy. The frame is stiff enough to be responsive when kicked into action, and it even has aero pretentions. At a smidgen over 8kg (size XL), it’s not a lightweight by today’s standards, but you’d be hard pushed to find something of better quality for under $2,200. DT Swiss’s R24 Spline wheels are…

While the likes of Trek and co dominate the headlines with their relentless pursuit to be the first, fastest and lightest in the game, it’s refreshing to watch newcomer Chapter2 find its place. Ridden by recently retired Alberto Contador at this year’s Tour and Vuelta, we have no doubt he’ll be sticking with Trek during his transition from racer to spectator – aboard a disc-equipped model, we’re betting. Why not? Wheel changes will be a thing of the past and with little weight penalty, it makes serious sense. Over at Chapter2, the Tere is for those who still love the art of building a custom project and want to do part of it from the comfort of home. And like Alberto, prospective owners will have the choice between calliper or…

There’s nothing quite like the sound of deep rim carbon wheels banging and crunching their way down a rocky gravel track, interspersed with the explosive bang and hiss of bursting tubes and the occasional shout as yet another rider has a near-miss or hits the deck. It was stage six of the Haute Route Rockies, a seven-day, 840km cycling adventure through the wilds of Colorado, and it was proving to be the gnarliest ride yet. By this point of the event, the 300-odd riders who’d fronted up to the start line in Boulder five days earlier had become used to the challenges of piloting expensive road machines over jarring corrugations and through treacherous drifts of loose gravel and fine-grain sand. But the descent from Sopris Creek Road, west of Aspen…