Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2022 i Cyclist

These were results from August, and one wonders how the death of the Queen will have affected things when Ipsos collates its data for September – will the two in three people who think the UK is heading in the wrong direction increase or decrease? Who knows, but what we can say at Cyclist is that you will be sorely missed, Ma’am. We remove our cycling caps to you. Chapeau. Curiously, what is not on the list of worries is the rise of the machines, and yet there is a case to say it should be. The robots whisper through the internet that other people’s lives are better than ours but that new clothes and craft beer subscriptions would probably help; they prevent us from booking our bikes onto trains…

Rainbows form when light shines on raindrops. Each ray of white light splits as it hits the water droplet, reflects off the back of the drop and exits again, the different wavelengths of the colours on the electromagnetic spectrum creating the aesthetically pleasing phenomenon we call a rainbow. Water likes colour, so it’s only right that your water bottles aren’t black or white. Of course, colour-matching can be a tricky business. Should you match socks with jersey or socks with shoes? And should we introduce coloured bibshorts to the mix or just stick with black? What if your favourite jersey clashes with the colour of your favourite bike? And even though we’ve firmly ditched The Rules, can mismatched bar tape and saddle ever look right? Whatever your preference, there’s one…

The concept has been around for an age, but is there any truth in the claim that compression clothing positively impacts performance and recovery? It’s the question posed by researchers of the 2021 scoping review entitled ‘Putting the Squeeze on Compression Garments’, published in Sports Medicine. The review analysed 183 studies and results were mixed. In the ‘yes’ camp, studies did back up the idea that compression clothing has an impact on ‘muscle oscillatory properties’. So as an example, a pair of compression socks worn by a runner will diminish the vibration ripples through the muscles as the foot strikes the floor, with the inference being this reduces microtrauma and hence helps prevent injury and fatigue. However, there was then a lack of evidence that this had a knock-on effect…

Bike-fit has come a long way Once upon a time you set your saddle height so your leg was straight when your heel was on the pedal at 6 o’clock, tightened up the bolt and off you rode. Then, ten years ago, Phil Burt wrote a book that changed everything: Bike Fit. In it, Burt detailed how to tailor bike setup not by rules of thumb but tuned to the individual’s needs, drawing on his experience as a physiotherapist working with Team GB and Team Sky. But a lot can change in a decade, so this year Burt released a revised edition. ‘I’ve learned a lot more since I wrote my first book in 2012 [published in 2014] and the second edition reflects that, but also it reflects how the…

Back in January 1986, two cycling adventurers sat down in a London boozer to brainstorm ideas for their next project. Cousins Nick and Dick Crane had recently ridden bikes around the crater of Kilimanjaro and wanted to top that with something even more audacious. They came up with a plan to cycle to the most remote place on Earth, which they calculated to be a spot in a desert in northwest China, 5,000km away from the nearest ocean. They would eventually cycle to ‘the Pole of Inaccessibility’ from the Bay of Bengal, crossing the Himalayas, Tibetan plateau and Gobi Desert in 58 days (including four days detained by Chinese police) and accumulating 26,680 metres of ascent. At the time, ‘adventure cycling’ was highly competitive. Their main rival was another Nick…

Ah, it’s been a while, and if I’m honest with myself, I knew this was coming. It’s every bike journalist’s biggest nightmare: trying to explain how Trek’s IsoSpeed damping works. So here goes: Get a cheap biro. Hold it horizontally, one end in your hand. Now bend the other end and see it arch its back in the middle. Now imagine you are sitting on the biro and it has wheels. This is IsoSpeed, sort of, in that the seatpost is fixed to one end of the biro, and the biro is really a carbon strut housed inside the top tube, bolted at one end of the top tube and allowed to pivot (and so bend) at its middle. It’s like an internal leaf spring, and it is different here…

Seven years is a long time. In 2015, David Cameron was Prime Minister, Leicester City began their Premier League-winning campaign and the Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Choir was Christmas number one. In cycling, John Degenkolb won two Monuments, Alberto Contador won his final Grand Tour, Chris Froome won his second Tour de France and the fourth generation of the Canyon Ultimate was released at the end of the year. And it is only now that its successor is taking over the reins. Considering how the industry has changed, that’s one hell of a run. ‘We don’t see it as a revolution. We see this bike as an evolution, and we see it as the most wellbalanced road bike in our portfolio,’ says Canyon product manager Matthias Eurich of the fifthgeneration…

Those Venetians were a clever bunch. Not satisfied with building an entire city of marble on a boggy lagoon that served as the epicentre of world trade for over 1,000 years, in the late 16th century they decided it was high time to flex their engineering muscles elsewhere. Having conquered the sea, they turned their attention to the sky. The city of Bergamo at the base of the Val Brembana valley was under the control of the Venetian Republic at the time, and one of the city’s major trading partners was the Swiss Canton of Grisons, which sat in the parallel Valtellina valley. The issue was that for the houses to reach one another to trade, they had to cross the Duchy of Milan and therefore pay a hefty levy…

It was the rarest of sights: Tadej Pogačar was struggling, the two-time Tour champion weakened in the face of sustained attacks from Jumbo-Visma and a brutal summit finale in the form of the Col du Granon. With 7km to go of Stage 11 of the 2022 Tour de France, a leading group of Romain Bardet, Jonas Vingegaard, Pogačar, Rafał Majka, Geraint Thomas and Adam Yates formed on the slopes of the Granon with its average of 9.2%. Bardet made the first move, punching away on the narrow road to disappear up ahead. Then came one of the most memorable attacks in the Tour’s history: Vingegaard saw his chance and launched himself up the road with just over 4km to go. And Pogačar couldn’t react. The Col du Granon took no…

Up in the Ayr What to expect at The Girvan sportive What The Girvan Where Ayrshire, Scotland Next one Saturday 6th May, 2023 How far Lang (78 miles/125km) and Wee (49 miles/79km) Price £25 More info thegirvan.co.uk On the eve of The Girvan sportive, organiser Scott Maclean sends me a photograph that dates back to the early 1930s. It shows members of Ayr Road Club (since renamed Ayr Roads CC, hosts of today’s ride) lined up two abreast at the start of its weekly club run. The bikes all have shallow drop bars, mudguards and saddlebags, and appear to be fixed or single gear. Nearly everyone has a bell on their bars, though this is the only concession to health and safety: no one is wearing a helmet. There isn’t…

The advantage of aerodynamic efficiency is undeniable, but often that extra speed comes at the cost of other desirable attributes. In a road bike that can mean higher weight, reduced comfort and, although their bulky forms might not make it obvious, aero profiles can be worse in the stiffness stakes. The need for integrated everything makes setup and adjustment a practical pain too. The Giant Propel has long been a fast bike but this latest iteration attempts to make it fast without the usual drawbacks. The Propel claims to be around 6 watts more efficient than before at 40kmh, while the frameset is 9.2% stiffer, 85% more compliant at the saddle and 225g lighter. Elsewhere, the cockpit design is simpler and better looking than the brutalist assembly of the previous…

I once spent 24 hours living at the whim of the dice. I was covering the Edinburgh Fringe for a newspaper and, in homage to Luke Rhinehart’s novel, The Dice Man, decided to let the numbers determine my actions. The highlights were performing a oneminute, one-man play to a succession of one-man audiences in a telephone box on the Royal Mile; asking assorted comedians for their autographs in the bar of the Assembly Rooms; and sleeping on the sofa of the rented flat of the latest generation of Cambridge Footlights, one of whom happened to be Claudia Winkleman’s sister. Twenty years later I still haven’t managed to escape the tyranny of numbers. Mont Caro in Catalonia is a brutal climb. But that’s a purely subjective description so here are the…

A recent study by data analysts and behavioural scientists found the happiest jobs have two things in common, and neither is based on salary. Instead, the secret to contentment in the workplace comes primarily from being given a degree of autonomy and from the satisfaction of seeing a job finished. This means decorators and tilers are typically more cheerful than call centre staff, for example, because at the end of the day they can stand back and admire their neat wallpaper hanging or flawless grouting. All of which ought to make the role of a bespoke framebuilder the most joyful of occupations. Unfortunately the work also comes with its own pressures, says Ben Yarnold, the man behind Teme Frameworks in Burford, Shropshire. He points out that most of a bike…

1 MAURTEN SOLID C 225 BARS £2.50 each, maurten.com Do you want to hear a great joke about construction? Well you can’t, we’re still working on it. Something that isn’t still being worked on, though, is the recipe for Maurten’s latest bars. The key ingredient is cocoa, to offer a taste reset after all the sugary sweetness riders consume early in endurance events. Each 225g bar contains 44g of fast-acting carbs. 2 HUTCHINSON CHALLENGER TYRES £29.99, windwave.co.uk You’d think the Dewey Decimal System would be slightly wet, but it isn’t. Likewise, you’d think Hutchinson’s new premiumlooking Challenger tyres would be slightly expensive, but they aren’t. They’re billed as high-mileage all-rounders and at £30 they’re half the cost of many similar tyres. Plus every size – 25, 28 and 30mm –…

We started a few months ago with our theoretical neophyte cyclist breathlessly fighting their way off the sofa to take the first baby steps towards athletic transformation. Early physiological adaptations created a slipstream effect that has both bolstered their nascent performance and elevated their mood. But now they have hit the inevitable plateau as they start the lifelong ascent of the Col de Diminishing Returns. Can an understanding of complex biology and sports science help them improve their power and efficiency to meet the new challenge? It seems as amateurs we need all the help we can get if we are not to be detoured into the blind alley sports scientist Dr Jon Baker describes as ‘a whirlwind of doom’: a situation where we are riding too hard to elongate…

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Klas Johansson is a mechanic at Belgian team Lotto Soudal. Like many of the WorldTour’s backroom staff, in a former life the Swede was in the spotlight himself during a respectable racing career. He won his national championships in 1993 – a race won by Paris-Roubaix winner Magnus Backstedt in 2007 – and was on the precipice of riding onto the global stage. But life conspired for a different outcome, and although still chiselled and youthful-looking – only the creases in his forehead give away his 55 years – Johansson finds himself at his ninth Tour de France as a mechanic, wrench in oil-stained hand. ‘I’ve been a mechanic since 2009. I started with women’s teams and the national team before moving to the WorldTour and Garmin [now EF Education-EasyPost].…

1 Trek Domane SLR p128 The fourth-generation Domane features a new take on Trek’s IsoSpeed damping. It works, but does the extra weight blunt performance? 2 Giant Propel p134 The Propel was always fast, but the latest model aims to be fast without compromise – and it balances speed and stiffness with handling and comfort. 3 Forme Calver Pro p138 This British bike has its roots in cyclocross and aims to fill the gap in the market between road and gravel. Does that make it a jack-of-all-trades?…

The rise of gravel bikes caused confusion in many cycling communities. ‘It’s just a mountain bike with drop handlebars,’ said the mountain bikers. ‘It’s just a road bike with wide tyres,’ said the road cyclists. ‘It’s just like what I used to ride when I was young,’ said everyone over 35. ‘We’re literally already riding those bikes,’ said the cyclocrossers, pointing to their wide-tyred, drop bar bikes with road-type geometry. So it comes as no surprise that classic cyclocross bikes are being marketed as do-it-all cyclocross and gravel bikes, and that’s precisely where British brand Forme has now positioned the Calver Pro. Originally a die-hard cyclocross racer, the Calver is now described by its maker as a fourseasons bike, equipped for gravel as well as allweather road riding and normal…