Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2022 i Cyclist

For years we’ve been used to seeing combative Cav, cocky Cav, contentious Cav, surly Cav, elated Cav, angry Cav, and after a particularly bruising Gent-Wevelgem in 2020, a despairing, tearful Cav as he contemplated an end to his career. At that time a combination of Epstein-Barr virus and mental health issues had robbed him of his powers, and it looked like he may never return to winning ways. But then came the 2021 miracle. Against all predictions, the stars aligned to see Cavendish return to Deceuninck-QuickStep and secure a place at the Tour de France, where he took four stage wins to equal Eddy’s Merckx’s all-time record. As he tells Cyclist in our interview on p76, he fully intends to return even stronger to the Tour this year, with a…

There has never been a better time to be a fairweather cyclist. Indoor training apps have developed to the point that they can get you an actual contract as a pro cyclist. The only thing that’s stopping you from never leaving the house again is the hardware. Elite’s new Rizer is literally turning the corner. Fixing onto your front fork, the Rizer lets you move the handlebars left and right, meaning you can control your Zwift avatar to make descending – and overtaking – a bit more interesting. Elite says it also provides a much more natural ride feel because it recreates the lateral motion you get riding on two wheels, so it should be more comfortable than a fixed frame and it works the same muscles as normal riding.…

There are lots of things to love about winter rides, but a filthy bike is not one of them. Of course there are measures that can be taken to protect a bike from winter grime, but even the best mudguards aren’t enough on their own. To keep things squeaky clean and running smoothly, what’s really needed is a specially formulated bike cleaner spray. ‘A bike cleaner spray is an all-over spray that’s safe for use on all parts of the bike,’ explains Rob Cook of Juice Lubes distributor VeloBrands. ‘Spray it on, agitate with a brush and then rinse off.’ Doing this on a regular basis will ensure your bike always looks its best, but keeping it sparkling clean is about much more than just appearances. It’s a vital part…

‘Yeehaw!’ Gaby dispatches a whoop of delight that echoes around the valley before she clips in and sets off in hot pursuit. Not far ahead is François, whose bonkers brainchild this ride is, and the enigmatic Nicolas, endurance rider extraordinaire. As the trio drops out of sight, I’m left to consider how I have come to find myself staring down a frighteningly steep Alpine footpath that might generously be described as a goat track, but only if we are talking about adrenaline junkie goats. We’re in Italy, I think, but it could be France. The border is around here somewhere but in this rugged landscape there are no signs or border posts. When Cyclist’s editor emailed me a month or so earlier, offering a big – very big – autumnal…

‘I will never be completely mentally the same – I don’t think anybody is after any mental health struggle’ Mark Cavendish seems different today. Reflecting on the past year, and looking ahead to another – perhaps final – year of racing, he appears calmer, more nuanced in his opinions. Gone are the brash, bold absolutes of his younger days. Nothing is 100 per cent certain in Cavendish’s world anymore, except that he loves his family and his bike. Some things haven’t changed. Cavendish is still strong, still passionate, still searingly honest, still wounded, still ready to shut people up. And still winning. The spiky boy racer who rocketed to four stage wins at his first Tour de France in 2008, aged just 23, is now a doting 36-year-old husband and…

If bikes revolve around weight and stiffness, espresso machines concern temperature and pressure. Take the Rocket R58, here lovingly painted by framebuilder Dario Pegoretti. It weighs 29kg and that’s largely due to the material – boilers are brass, chassis and casing steel. It’s all designed to get hot and stay hot, because consistent heat is crucial, say baristas. The R58’s brew boiler comes preset at 105°C, so by the time water flows through the group head it’s at 92°C. But brew temperature is subjective and so here it’s programmable via a digital controller (or in the case of the R58’s successor, an app). So too is steam temperature, because that’s the other thing: like all high-end machines, Rockets have twin boilers. After all, you don’t want your espresso losing its…

In the increasingly complex world of gravel bikes, the Cervélo Áspero-5 sits very much at the racier end of the spectrum. Its frame is lightweight carbon, the tubes are aero-profiled, the cables have all been hidden away, the geometry is fairly aggressive… in fact it is essentially a road bike with 38mm tyres. Which suited me fine, as the Cambrian Mountains are blessed with a near endless network of high-quality fire roads that are made for riding at speed, with few technical sections to worry about. And despite its racy nature, the Áspero-5 is remarkably comfortable thanks in part to its vibration-damping seatpost, but probably mostly due to those squishy Panaracer Gravel King tyres. If you’re planning a round-the-world tour, the Áspero-5 probably isn’t for you. But if you just…

I couldn’t have tested two more different breeds of bikes this issue. If the Spoon Vars is an Arabian thoroughbred, the Condor Bivio is a Hackney – a horse best known for carriage pulling and long-distance hacking. Like the Hackney, the Bivio is designed to go most places, to go all day and to happily deal with being laden. To achieve this, the bike has mounts aplenty. I should imagine the only thing you can’t bolt to the Bivio is another Bivio, albeit the most up-to-date frameset now has a third set of bottle bosses on the top tube, Condor having listened to customer feedback here. And while that might sound like a small point, it’s indicative of from where this bike pitches up. The tubeset is Columbus, coming from…

Coming Round The Mountain p60 Lazer Sphere Mips helmet, £119.99 freewheel.co.uk Gore C5 Gore-Tex Shakedry 1985 insulated jacket, £329.99 gorewear.com Altura Endurance jersey, £70 altura.co.uk Altura Endurance bibshorts, £90 altura.co.uk Altura Airstream Meryl Skinlife socks, £10 altura.co.uk Fizik X4 Terra Powerstrap shoes, £149.99 extrauk.co.uk Col du Soulor p92 Rudy Project Spectrum helmet, £169.99 bikeloungeonline.com Rudy Project Spinshield glasses, £119.99 bikeloungeonline.com Giordana FR-C Pro Lyte jersey, £114.99 bikeloungeonline.com Giordana FR-C Pro Lyte gloves, £34.99 bikeloungeonline.com Giordana FR-C Pro bibshorts, £119.99 bikeloungeonline.com Giordana FR-C Tall Solid socks, £15.99 bikeloungeonline.com Bont Helix Reflex shoes, €379 (approx £315) bontcycling.com Wilier 0 SLR bike supplied by tourmalet-bikes.com The Desert Of Wales p110 Giro Agilis Mips helmet, £99.99 giro.co.uk SunGod Velans sunglasses, £140 sungod.co Ashmei Signature Merino jersey, £128 ashmei.com Ashmei Signature bibshorts, £194 ashmei.com Ashmei Signature Merino…

Italian custom builder Sarto used to be the quality bike maker that no one had heard of. For decades the company made frames by hand at its factory near Venice, but for many of those years the names on the down tubes were mainly of other brands – some of them among the biggest and most respected of the Italian bike marques. Thus while Sarto’s highquality frames were being appreciated around the world, its house brand went virtually unnoticed. Not anymore, though. Sarto stopped contract manufacturing two years ago to focus on building only its own custom bikes, and the rewards of that extra focus are starting to show. Traditional values, modern materials The Seta is Sarto’s most versatile bike, promising a balance of top-level performance features with plenty of…

Lots of brands like to boast about how good their wheels are, but Vision can let its new Metron SLs talk for themselves. Since they debuted last year, they have carried riders to victories at the Tour de France, the Vuelta a España and Paris-Roubaix. The Italian manufacturer claims its goal was ‘to create the most aerodynamic and performance-enhanced wheels in the world’, and while we haven’t seen any wind-tunnel figures to back that up, there’s no denying the performances of Magnus Cort, Sonny Colbrelli, et al. Aero-bladed spokes pair with carbon rims – 60mm depth (pictured) or 45mm – that have an internal width of 21mm and are aerodynamically optimised for 28mm tyres. It’s not just any carbon rim though, because Vision says it has added ‘space-derived’ foam between…

1 PROLOGO AKERO T2.0 SADDLE £64.99, chickencyclekit.co.uk Thought-controlled air-freshener? It makes scents when you think about it. And a wide, stubby-nosed saddle with mountain bike roots? That makes all kinds of sense for gravel. It’s why the Prologo Akero is short, to allow forward rotation of the pelvis for a low descending position, and wide and flat to permit easy shifts in weight. Whatever will they think of next? 2 BROOKS SCAPE HANDLEBAR POUCH £60, extrauk.co.uk If we ever find out the name of the surgeon who messed up our limb transplants we’ll kill them with our bear hands. But if we ever meet the person who designed the Brooks Scape bag we’ll give them a bear hug, because this little fella is made from thermo-bonded waterproof material, has universal…

‘Gravel racing at a crossroads’ is too tempting a headline, even if the very idea of road infrastructure – junctions, roundabouts, rules and the rest of it – might jar with a purist’s definition of gravel racing and the appeal of riding on gravel roads. Yet the idea of a crossroads does seem apt in describing where gravel riding might be heading. The culture that has grown up around it is laidback, nonconformist and alternative, the emphasis more on the joy and the challenge of taking part than on the singular goal of winning. But over the last couple of years the scene has taken off to such an extent that it has become big business. The cycling industry is increasingly banking on gravel. Even traditional companies such as Campagnolo…

It’s an oldie but a goodie: a paper in 1979 on the influence of muscle temperature on performance concluded that across a range of 30°C to 39°C (that is, the temperature of the muscles, not environmental temperature), exercise performance improves 2-5% per 1°C rise. In other words, the colder your muscles, the worse you perform. That’s why warming up and staying warm is so imperative. But how do you keep warm in the cold? According to a more recent paper published last September, titled Practicing Sport in Cold Environments, fabrics play a crucial role. The paper suggests fabrics should have: ‘(1) Good “ease of wicking action”, (2) a high “rate of drying”, (3) a high capacitance for “moisture regain (the amount of moisture a material can absorb before it feels…

Mont Blanc is a special mountain, but it’s not obvious why. Sure, at 4,809m it’s the highest mountain in western Europe, but it isn’t the highest in all of Europe (that honour belongs to 5,642m Mount Elbrus in Russia), and by global standards it’s a bit of a molehill. Mount Everest, at 8,849m, is almost twice the height, and Mont Blanc would need to add a whopping 2,410m to its height before it even made the list of the 100 highest mountains in the world. As it turns out, the secret to Mont Blanc’s magic may be found by crunching two alternate metrics: topographic prominence and topographic isolation. Topographic prominence is a measure of height, and tells us how far below its summit is the start of the closest high…

I wasn’t meant to be on this bike. The Felt I was planning to ride suffered catastrophic damage during transit, but luckily for me, the people behind the Gravel Tour de Mont Blanc are also the owners of bike brand Wish One. It isn’t a name many people outside of France will be familiar with, partly because it was only launched in 2018, and partly because it has a very local feel. The founders, Maxime Poisson and François-Xavier Blanc, wanted to keep their environmental impact as low as possible, so the bikes are created in France using sustainable materials such as steel and alloy. This SUB is the brand’s all-road/gravel bike, made from Columbus Spirit steel tubing. Its geometry is fairly road bike-ish, making it great for speed over rough…

Marc Madiot said after one stage, ‘I think the sight of a woman on a racing bike is ugly’ Paris, Sunday 22nd July 1984. A jubilant American, Marianne Martin, stands next to an equally elated Frenchman, Laurent Fignon, on the podium of the Champs-Élysées, each holding their trophies aloft. Alongside them are the then Mayor of Paris, Jacques Chirac, and newly elected French Prime Minister Laurent Fabius, both keen to soak up the adulation of the crowds celebrating a momentous occasion – the first joint crowning of the men’s and women’s winners of the Tour de France. ‘It was fabulous; my name had been written on the street,’ Martin recalls. ‘The funny thing was that I was holding the trophy and the base was so large I was afraid I…

Two hundred metres into the northern ascent of the Col du Soulor is a large yellow sign decreeing ‘Route Historique du Tour de France depuis 1910’. It’s a claim to fame that requires little translation, but it does need a pinch of salt. You see, the race didn’t go up this climb until 1982 – 72 years later – and has only done so four times since. At 12.1km long and an average gradient of 7.7%, the Col du Soulor’s northern approach really should be more famous, especially considering how beautiful it is, but the reason this climb was overlooked for so long may have something to do with the climbs that surround it. From its 1,474m summit you can see its big brother to the west, the Col d’Aubisque.…

Hope you lads are prepared. It gets pretty remote from here on in.’ The farmer at the entrance to the Irfon Forest has a look of concern on his face, but little does he know that’s the very reason we are here – to escape the rest of the world and get lost, at least metaphorically speaking. Possibly literally too, because ahead of us lies a maze of gravel tracks that are knitted into the fabric of the Welsh countryside. Known as the Desert of Wales, the Cambrian Mountains are often overlooked as a cycling destination, in part due to being shoe-horned between more illustrious neighbours such as Snowdonia and the Brecon Beacons, but also due to the fact that the heart of the region is so remote that it…

Any adult who has ever nipped into the toilets of a primary school will know the unsettling feeling of being a giant. Everything looks familiar, but in miniature; the toilet bowls reach mid-shin and the basins are knee-level. Now imagine living life like this, as a modern-day Gulliver in a Lilliput world, where sitting on a plane requires leg origami and doorframes demand a limbo dance. As for finding a bike that fits… forget it. At 6ft 6in tall, David Folch was all too aware of these problems. The 47-year-old Frenchman, based in the USA, spent years trying to build a bike to suit his lanky frame without success. Extending tube lengths led to ‘scaffolding’ projects that perched him high over the rear hub, ruining his weight distribution. The bikes…

In past years I’ve tried to predict what will happen in the upcoming race season, and I have invariably been proved wrong on most counts – thank goodness I don’t have a gambling addiction. This year I’m going to spell out how I would like the 2022 season to unfold. So, if the gods of cycling are reading, I will begin… Sam Bennett dominates the early sprint showdowns in the UAE Tour before rubbing salt into Patrick Lefevere’s wounds by outfoxing three of the Wolfpack en route to Omloop Het Nieuwsblad glory. For the first time in history there’s a sprint finish at the Strade Bianche with Wout van Aert and Mathieu van der Poel tied for the win in Siena. For the first time in history there’s a sprint…

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To download this route go to cyclist.co.uk/123montblanc or scan the QR code. The route follows the ‘two person relay’ option of the upcoming Gravel Tour du Mont Blanc. Starting in Megève, an off-road climb to Col de Véry is followed by a road descent to Beaufort and a climb of the Cormet de Roselend. A huge gravel climb takes you into Italy via the Col de la Seigne and a descent to Cormayeur for an overnight stop. Day two starts with a gravel climb to the Grand Col Ferret on the Swiss border. A series of ups and downs around the canton of Valais is followed by crossing back into France and a lumpy return via Chamonix and the Col de Voza back to Megève.…

TRAVEL Getting to the start is remarkably easy. Either take the Eurostar from London to Paris (2h 20min, from £52e/w), then the TGV-Lyria to Geneva (3h 5min, from €29e/w), or fly to Geneva. Transfers to Megève are readily available in the form of private taxis or shuttles, taking about an hour door-to-door. ACCOMMODATION Both Megève and Courmayeur are well served for hotels. Before the start of the ride we stayed in the Novotel Megève Mont-Blanc (all.accor.com), which was big, comfortable, reasonably priced and right in the middle of town. On the following night we stayed at the Hotel Vallée Blanche (hotelvalleeblanche.com), a couple of miles outside Courmayeur. This rustic hotel is cosy, and perfectly set up to cater for skiers in the winter and cyclists in the summer. THANKS Many…

Geraint Thomas is making coffee on Instagram. By his own admission the latte art needs some work, but at least the equipment appears fitting. Sitting on G’s countertop is a seriouslooking contraption of mirrored steel and shiny pipes, a telltale ‘R’ on its left-hand knob. It’s the R58 model, because as Alex Dowsett once tweeted, ‘Are you even a pro cyclist unless you own a chrome Rocket Espresso machine?’ Of course Dowsett was being tongue in cheek, but only a bit. Check a pro’s social media feed over breakfast and you’re all but guaranteed to see a Rocket machine in the background. Cavendish, Alaphilippe, Matthews, Niewiadoma… the list goes on. Yet apparently, unlike with their kit, these pros are coughing up their own hard-earned cash to own one. Which begs…

Do you need a custom bike? Maybe. Do you need a Spoon Customs Vars Disc? I certainly do. Because I reckon this is the only road bike you’ll (currently) ever need and, like a 1990s televangelist, I’m here to give you the good word. And like a televangelist, the good word’s gonna cost ya. We trade in souls, although £12,900 should also do just fine, just text the number below… Design and technology Yes, brothers and sisters, this bike is £12,900. I would normally be loath to mention money in a review – bike pricing is what it is – but I will say that 13 grand isn’t a million miles north of the £10-12,000 many mainstream brands now charge for top-tier bikes. And with the Vars there’s more than…

ACE Steel. It sounds like the troubled frontman of a 1980s hair metal band called Eagle Explosion. Or maybe a legendary overweight 1960s baseball pitcher from the Milwaukee Brewers whose ‘lightening curveballs were as sharp as his finely trimmed handlebar moustache’. What this all-American title actually refers to is the proprietary lightweight steel tubing used by Minneapolis-based All-City Cycles, developed in 2016 and finessed since to create its flagship road bike, the Zig Zag. Although don’t discount there being a band called Eagle Explosion. Steel is real The United States is a proud steel nation so it makes sense that All-City not only relies on this material for its range of bikes, but has even gone to the lengths of developing its own in-house tubing and techniques. In the past,…