Unbound Gravel has become the biggest day on the gravel calendar. For many of us, it’s bigger than US Nationals, bigger than Worlds. I decided to skip the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:US Pro Road Championships in West Virgi💖nia to focus on Unbound G🐬ravel this year.  

Once in Emporia, it’s rubbing elbows with other riders and industry leaders, checking weather forecasts, a๊nd finishing the weeks-long 'Unbound training block'. It feels like a professional road race with bigger tyres, less sleep and pancakes at 3:30 a.m.

Earlier this season, I lined up at the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tour of the Gila, one of North America's few remaining UCI-sanctioned road races. A👍nd honestly? Aside from the missing caravan that supported the peloton across five days of racing in New Mexico, Unbound Gravel felt just as tactical and intense. But while gravel racing has evolved, the infrastructure is 'off the back&ap𒁃os;.

Gravel has changed so much in the past few years, especially at the🐼 pointy end of the race. We must keep building race structures that reflect the level of competition. Right now, we’re still trying to squeeze elite-level athletes into a format originally desigღned for mass participation. There’s a strong pull to preserve the "spirit of gravel", but that spirit keeps cracking under the weight of the pro field.

The vetting issue

Let’s talk about the elite field. Technically, riders have to apply. Life Time, owners and organisers of Unbound Gravel and the array of five ride distances across two days, say they review past Unbound participation and results from other gravel races, plus the categories across other disciplines. Athletes in the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Life Time Grand Prix are automatically included, which, going into this year's Unbound Gravel🦋, was 22 women, myself included, and 22 men before adding wil🃏dcards. On paper, that sounds fair.

On race day this past Saturday it felt too loose from the start. The front group was fast, but the skill gap was wide. Emily Newsom went down and hit her head when someone crashed in front of her just four miles from the start, she said. There were others, too. I had to navigat😼e multiple crashes on Divide Road, one of the more technical sections of the course. 

Hannah Shell had a rider abruptly braked and she crashed, then flatted. Sarah Sturm crashed on Divide Road too, though she said it was a rut that got her🍃 and not another rider, and came up to me mid-race asking for concussion advice. Unfortunately, I’ve had plenty of experience in that department, like many others in the peloton.

I asked Sarah if she had a headache or brain fog. She just said her head felt "weird". She couldn’t tell if it was the "normal" kind of🧔 weird you get from racing 200 miles or the "bad" kind that comes from a concussion. She pulled out of the race around mile 70 at First Aid, probably her first DNF in a major race. It’s crazy to think that in a pꦛrofessional sport, we’re still self-diagnosing brain injuries mid-race. This shouldn't be the standard.

It was on Divide Road that there was a great divide in the women's field✨, where the winning move got away. I was out of position, caught behind chaos. The risk environment felt higher than it should have.

Rewind to two weeks earlier, I met a rider in a sauna during heat training. She wasn’t sure whether to start in the elite field or the mass start. She chose to start with the elites. That should not be a choice. It’s like le🎃tting a cat🦋egory 5 rider decide whether or not they’d like to start with the amateurs or pros. This is unheard of in other disciplines. 

A separate women’s start is a huge step forward, which organisers provided for a second year in a row. However, that only works if the elite field is truly 'elite'. Vetting should consider results, safety, skill, and 🥂whether an athlete has the support to race 200 miles of🐎 tactical gravel, safely and competitively.

Aid station escalation

Let's stop pretending this is still self-supported racing. Aid stations now look like F1 pit stops - labeled coolers, musettes and hydration packs, a procession of te💃am tents and endless clipboards. The top riders show up with serious infrastructure. It's no longer a luxury, it's now required to 𝓰stay competitive.

My 'team car' is my 🥂Honda CR-V hybrid. There are many bigger vehicles, vans and other setups. Even I know that if you don't have someone ready with bottles and calories at aid stations, you're not racing.

Aid Station 1 was in Alma, after 70 miles of racing. I stopped for 10 seconds to get a new hydration bladder and my pockets stuffed with gels. By the time I💞 got rolling, I was already off the back. The field had split in two, and my group rotated hard to close the gap to those in the chase who didn't stop. 

Aid Station 2 was another 78 miles later. I knew I had to roll it, and so I did. I grabbed a mussette with food and two bottles from my crew﷽ - husband, coach and female mechanic Deb. People were everywhere, searching for thei🌱r support crews among a sea of tents and confused volunteers. It felt more like an expo than a pit lane.

Maybe it's time to mark elite hand-off lanes or separate pro-only zones so we don't collide with age-groupers mid-race. The 100-milers had joined the 200-mile route just 18 miles before, so it was crowded. I always fear that somehow I will miss my people and neeওd to ride back through the chaos, essentially marking the end of my race.

Drafting meets the parade

Then there’s the anti-drafting rule. Quick recap: Elite women can’t draft off men or amateurs, and vice versa. If 🍌you do, you’re relegated toꦫ the bottom of the elite results and the LTGP points list.

It worked well at Sea Otter. Why? Because we had separate days. The elites raced on Thursday, and the amateurs raced on Friday. T▨he elite women started 20 minutes behind the elite men. The course wasn’t very conducive to drafting anyway. That was the soft launch and Unbound was the real test.

In Emporia the elite men rolled out at 5:50 a.m. local time and the elite women followed 15 minutes later. Amateurs, close to 1,500 strong, left at 6:30 a.m.🌺 and that 25-minute gap between us and the amateurs sounds like enough, butಌ it’s not.

In the end, our chasing group of four, Sofia Gomez Villafañe, Rosa Klöser, Cecile Lejeune, and I, caught the 100-mile riders in the final 20 or so miles of the race. Moꦑst wer💛e lovely. Some cheered, some stopped to film us. Flattering? Sure. Dangerous? Definitely.

I got pinched behind an amateur rider and had to burn matches to chase back on. A race car honked repeatedly as🌊 we passed♑. It felt less like a race and more like a parade, with recreational riders pulling off the course for selfies.

We were pushing 22 mph through groups going 12 mph. In addition, TT bars are still legal for amateurs but banneꦰd for elites, so we’re weaving past unstable aero setups in the closing miles of the sport’s biggest race. We took risks because that’s w𝄹hat it takes to win. But in those moments, the risk wasn’t just ours. It was theirs too.

Sea Otter showed us how it can work: separate days, separate fiel༺ds. Copy and pas🐟te.

What needs to change

If gravel wants to g𝓀row without losing its soul, it needs standards, not red tape. I love this sport, and I want it to grow. But I also want it to be fair, safe and pro🐻fessional.

Gravel grew up fast. It’s not 𒀰the quirky cousin of road racing anymore. It is truly its own discipline, and it deserves to be treated like one.

We don’t need to go back to the past. But we d🌟o need to be honest about where we are and start building a better future for where gravel is headed.

What needs to change:

• Vet the elite fields. Don’t let people decide between elite and non-elite. Things should be more cut and dry. 
• Acknowledge skill gaps. Safer races start with realistic entry criteria.
• Separate starts and separate days. Elites and amateurs don’t belong in the same bunch.
• Protect the women’s start. Period.
• Set support expectations.
• Standardize (or expand) aid. More structure = less chaos = fewer trips to the ER.

When you’re in the midst of a three-week tour, you feel the fatigue. Your legs are heavy, there are permanent bags under your eyes, and each morning it gets a little harder to get out of bed. It’s not until you re-enter the normal world, however, that you realise how tired you really are. Then you have “normal” human beings to compare yourself to. Until you leave the Grand Tour bubbl🔜e, you don’t realise the true extent of your fatigue. 

Trying to keep pace while walking next to my girlfriend, I constantly get dropped. Just this time, there’s no gruppetto to catch me from behind. Navigating normal daily life, going to th🌠e grocery store, cooking breakfast, everything is s🔯lower. 

I sat down on a chai൩r yesterday… and then I woke up a꧒n hour later. 

When you’re at the race, everything is scheduled to the minute, everything is go go go, you have no time to stop or think. You wake up, brush your teeth, pack your suitcase, go to breakfast, get on🧔 the bus, go to the race, sign in, race, get back on the bus, go to a massage, unpack your suitcase, go to dinner, go to bed. Rinse and repeat. It’s only when you exit the cycle that you realise how structured everything is for you, that you really don’t need 🔯to think about anything. You just follow the schedule, unpack and pack your suitcase, and pedal. It’s a simple life, luckily, as the racing is taxing.

Breakaways and bangs

This last week, the racing was especially taxing. It seemed that the Giro saved its greatest challenges for the final days, and I think they got what they were hoping for with some exciting racing. We saw pre-race favourites drop out of contention, with crashes and sicknes𝕴s, as well as other mishaps, we saw the race go one direction and then totally turn on its head. 

The week started with a rainy day on Stage 16, which we would normally complain about, but seeing our absolute meteo🌼rological fortune this Giro, no one seemed too upset. Yes, racing in the rain sucks, but one or two days out of twenty-one, we can definitely manage. Anything was better than 2023, where it rained nearly every day for two weeks straight. 

There was an extremely long fight for the breakaway, a common theme in this Giro, which I believe was made even longer by the conditions. You see, when it꧅’s cold and rainy in a Grand Tour, most guys are scared to take off their rain jackets. You can’t risk getting too cold – if you freeze, that could be the end of your race. And for some reason, even in this day and age, we don’t yet hav✤e the technology to make aerodynamic rain jackets. 

Sure, a couple of attempts exist, but most guys are racing with a glorified garbage bag on their backs, flapping in the wind. I mean, these things are literally sails. A friend of mine on another team did aero testing on their rain jackets this season and at race speeds, he lost 50 watts. FIFTY! So you can then imagine t🐲hat if you essentially have a group of guys attacking with their brakes on, no♏t many of them get very far. It’s quite the sight. 

As we often saw in the rain this year, the roads were slick. Once the break finally went, we rode easy up a climb, before descending into a town. Even as we went through the corners gingerly, in one roundabout, I came through mid pack to see a number of riders on the ground to my right, one of which being 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Primož Roglič, who wouldn’t be able to restart the race. 

It’s a shame that even while we are careful, sometimes these things are unavoidable. Half the peloton proceeded to stop for a nature break in the town, and as we hit the next climb, there was a feed zone. I was on our GC leader 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Michael Storer’s wheel as we entered it. I looked to my right to search for our soigneurs. I heard a l𒀰oud “BANG” to my left, only to also hit something with my foot. It was a temporary traffic island, which somehow we hadn’t noticed, and Michael rode straight into it. He knocked the sign clean off its metal post, the blue arrow, rol🧸ling down the road in front of me. 

I was lucky to stay upright, but pulled off the side of the road to wait for him with another teammate. And just as we started to ride back to the group, Ineos started to push hard at the front of the pack. It was carnage. Gu🧸ys were getting dropped from the front, while others were trying to return from their pee stop off the back. There were people everywhere, and while Michael made it back on the climb, I only caught back on the descent. 

As we were chasing back, going what I thought was rather quick for a wet descent, a rider passed me from behind going maybe 15kph quicker than me. He entered the next corner in front of me at an impressive speed. When he attempted to go through the turn at 6𓄧5, his bike leaned, but his body just kept going straight. I never saw him again. A few turns later, I caught the cars, and as I proceeded to move up through them, I saw Egan Bernal lying 🎉in the middle of the road, rain jacket stuck in his rear wheel. All this in a period of maybe 20 km. It was a bloodbath.

The next day should have been easy, with a big breakaway going up the road and no big mountain in the last꧙ 50km of the stage, but as we often saw this Giro, the biggest gaps came on the days we least expected. While I believe the breakaway normally would have fought for the stage win, one of the ot🐼her invited teams, Polti, missed out on the group up the road. In what appeared to be a punishment from their team director for having missed out, they had to pull with their entire team behind. 

After burning a few guys in a rapid sequence, they proceeded to pull really hard for the entire first climb. Which then kept us close enough to the breakaway that other teams decided to ride hard on the second climb, which ended up ex💮ploding the whole race. It’s crazy to think how one small circumstance can shape an entire stage, or even change the outcome of the GC in the race! 

Stage 18, I was fortunate enough to make it into the day’s breakaway with one of our sprinters, Rick Pluimers. It was our plan to have the two of us in the group before the day’s stage, so it’s always nice when you are able to make it happen. It’s also easier to “sneak” into when the group is more than 30 riders. After a stout tempo on the first climbs of the stage, we hit the flats before a technical finishing circuit. There were a few attacks, but nothing crazy, and on one of the accelerations, I just followed the wheel in front of me. Shortly after, in the radio, they shouted that there was a group off of the front. I looked in front of 🔥me to see if there was anyone there a🔜nd couldn’t see the aforementioned group. I then realised that I happened to be in it. 

Seeing as we had someone from each of the teams who had numbers in the group, no one chased behind. Even though no one pulled especially hard, our gap continued to grow… And it quickly became clear that the 11 of us would fight fo🐟r the win. It’s a cool feeling when you are in a breakaway and you realise you’ll have a shot at playing for the victory, as it doesn’t happen all that often. You can try and try to get in it, and then once you finally get there, you never really know whether or not it will work out on the day - maybe the sprinters want to r🅺ide behind, or the GC teams on a mountain day. So it’s a relief when you finally get your shot. 

I was certain that it would come down to the last 10km as everyone in the group was doing their turns, and we were rolling fluidly. Until Nico Denz hit us with ♕18km to go, and after a moment of hesitation, we never saw him again. I was a bit disappไointed as my legs were strong and I felt good, and it’s not often the case that you have the legs to fight for the win on the day you have the opportunity to fight for it - too often you have the opportunity on a day you don’t have the legs, or the legs on the day you don’t have the chance! Either way, I was glad to get up there, even if I totally botched the attacks in the final AND the sprint. Guess I’ll have to wait for the next one.

The moments of the Giro

After my day in the break, we hit the real mountains. And with the majority of the group having an “easy” day out the day before, the pace was high. Personally, I didn’t have a whole lot to write home about, but all I can say is how impressed I was by 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Simon Yates on stage 20. Not exactly for what he did on that stage, but on how he rode the whole race. He was so calm. So chill. He just rode there, consistently, every day, not wasting his energy, while guys were sprinting for mountain tops, Red Bull Sprints, sprint sprints, hell, they even seemed to be sprinting for town signs on the side of the road of some of the𓄧 random villages that we passed through. 

For 20 days𒅌, non-stop sprinting, non-stop attacking. And then, on stage 20, on one climb, Simon attacked them. He saved his sprint for𒊎 when it counted, and then didn’t stop. And he won the whole damn race because of it. 

I find his ability to stay so calm and collected while everyone else felt the need to exert their dominance day in and day out impressive. And it paid off. I gues🅺s that’s Grand Tour racing.

We finished with an amazing lap of Rome. We got an audience with the Pope. That was perhaps the coolest. I think the entire peloton had goosebumps as he spoke, and then after, as we got to do a lap of tꦡhe grounds of the Vatica൩n. I’m pretty sure our Strava KOM will stand there for life.

Sometimes this sport provides you with experiences even money can’t buy. And I’m grateful for that. There are a lot of ups and too many downs, but I’m just glad to have had the chance to take part agai🎀n. And I’m glad that - as one of my old directors used to say - us cyclists seem to have amnesia. Because I’ve already forgotten the suffering. I’ve forgotten all of the moments I was dying out there, just wishing I was home sitting in my garden with my dog between my legs, sun wa🍎rming my skin, sipping on my coffee and hammering away at my keyboard rather than my pedals.

Guess I’ll just have to wait until next time.

168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Unbound Gravel is widely accepted as the biggest gravel bike race in the world, despite T🍎he Traka nipping at its heels, and as I learned this week, it's fast earning i🐲tself a reputation for being the biggest new tech launchpad too.

The tally of new, never-before-seen ᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚbikes I found in Emporia this week totals seven. That's four more than we had at the 2024 Dauphine (generally considered the pre-Tour de France proving ground for new bikes), and that's without counting the new Campagnolo groupset we spotted here too.

With over 250 images in my longlist, and around 150 after 🦹a brutal cull, I made thꦆe decision to split the gallery into two parts.

Part one saw the first of two new Factor bikes, a new Wilier, a new Pinarello, a stunning road bike from No. 22 Bicycle Company that I found in the expo, as well as a handful of cool hacks, some fun stuff, and most importantly, a five week ol💞d kitten.

• Check that out here: Unbound 2025 Tech Gallery - Part One

None of the photos in part two are as good as the kitten, I'm afraid, but if you like bike tech I'm hoping you'll stick around, as we've got💝 another new Factor, a new Specialized, an Orbea, the aforementioned Campagnolo groupset, another groupset from TRP and Classified, and about 30 different cle♎ver tricks and hacks from the 200 and XL races, and the lemur - I think - that was promised in part one.

If you like what you see, do me a favour and share it with your 🧸friends so my bosses let me come back.

And that marks the end of Unbound 2025 for me. 

The 'it's brekky time' phrase on Cromwell's for𒁏k leg there is rather apt, since that's next on my agenda. It's currently 6:35am in Chicago, and I write this from a hotel room after missing my cไonnecting flight back to London. 

Thank you for reading the past two galleries, and I really hope you've enjoyed all the coverage - both tech and race - that the Cyclingnews team has pulled together for this race. If there's anything you'd like us to do differently or better, please email me.  

And just as importantly, thank you for being a Cyclingnews subscriber. Your support allows us to cover these r🐼aces as thoroughly as they deserve to be covered, and while tech is my role within that, it is just one small part of a much bigger machine. With our first ever Unbound live report alongside the usual results, reports, 🏅reactions and news, a huge shoutout must go to my colleagues too.

If you subscribe to Cyclingnews, you should sign up for our new subscriber-only newsletter. From exclusive interviews and tech galleries to race analysis and in-depth features, the Musette means you'll never miss out on member-exclusive content. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Sign up now.

This new PRO RS naming convention was chosen to differentiate the new pedal from its stablemates and intended use. The ‘PRO’ moniker helps distinguish it from the Assioma Duo (a model that utilises an external pod), while the RS acronym indicates it's a ‘Road’ pedal with Shimano compatib🐎ility.

The Assioma PRO RS range comprises three distinct models: The Assioma PRO RS-2 (dual-sided power measurement), the Assioma PRO RS-1 (single-💝sided power measurement) and the Assioma PRO RS-UP (a kit that upgrades the PRO RS-1 to PRO RS-2 pedals).

Read on to learn all 𓄧about the new Favero Assioma PRO RS pedal range and why you should consider upgraꩵding to a power pedal system.

The lightest pedal power meter on the market

Are you a weight weenie and pride yourself on meeting the UCI’s minimum bike weight limit? Well, Favero has you covered. While Favero Electronics 🉐is broadly known for its lightweight pedal systems across road and off-road disciplines, the new PRO RS mo𒈔del takes things to another level, focusing on keeping the pedal as light as possible while maintaining durability. 

With the Garmin Rally RS200 (160g), Wahoo Powr♕link Zero (138g) ✱and SRM X-Power Road (140g) weighing significantly more per pedal, the Assioma PRO RS is the lightest road power meter pedal currently available at 123.5g per unit. 

All the electronics, strain gauges and rechargeable battery are safely stored within the spindle

A big focus for Favero Electronics when designing the Assioma PRO RS pedals was to ensure durability and reliability of the highest order. To achieve this, the decision was made to use the same stainless steel spindle architecture as the Assioma PRO MX pedals. This spindle configuration - with strain gauges, electronics and rechargeable lithium-ion battery packaged inside - has proved robust and has been rigorously field tested to withstand mud, dust and moisture, and rock strikes (the latter in an off-road setting). Packaging all the electronic components within the stainless steel spindle ensures reliability, durability, accuracy and absence of power dropouts.

The entire system also boasts an IP67 waterproof rating for peace of mind riding, and a rechargeable battery with a run time of at least 💦60 hours. The rechargeable batteries are directly welded to the circuit, ensuring a more stable and durable connection. Charging is carried out using a magnetic cradle system to ensure the cable remains secure. The rechargeable lithium-ion battery has been designed for 500 complete recharges from empty and more than 25,000 hours of use. After this period, the capacity is reduced by only 20%.

Aerodynamic electronic-free pedal body

The Shimano-compatible pedal body is totally electronic-free and constructed from a carbon-fibre-reinforced technopolymer; a lightweight material resistant to impacts, cracking and deformat🅷ion over time. Weighing just 123.5g per pedal and with a stack height of 10.5mm, the Assioma PRO RS pedals are not only aerodynamic but also the lightest power meter pedal on the market. 

As for the Q-factor – well, it’s much improved over the Favero Assioma Duo-Shi power meter pedals it replaces. Now measuring 53mm, the Q-factor ♔is on par with most꧑ contemporary road pedals.

The spindle utilises needle-roller bearing꧟s and axial washers that can support loads of over 400kg, providing maximum durability in all riding conditions. These roller bearings are the same as those used in the Assioma PRO MX model.

Can transform from a road to off-road power pedal with ease

Versatility best describes what these power pedals off💮er the user. Are you a multi-discipline rider who wants power for both your bikes, but don’t have the means to fo❀rk out on another set? Fret not – because the Assioma PRO RS pedals can be converted from road to off-road and back with relative ease, thanks to their modular design and spindle they share with the PRO MX pedals.

The electronic-free pedal body of the൲ PRO RS and PRO MX can be replaced using a standard hex key – no proprietary and complex tools needed here. The beauty of all the electronics being stored safely inside the spindle means intricate parts and connectors won’t g♒et damaged.   

Whether you’ve damaged your pedal structure or want to switch them to PRO MX pedals, pedal bodies can be purchased on Favero Electronic’s onlin🌳e store for around £50.

Accuracy and reliability that is second to none

Known throughout the cycling world for its accuracy and reliability, the Assioma PRO RS p𝔉edals build on this fundamental tenet of Favero Electronics, offering a maximum accuracy deviation of 1%. Using Favero’s proprietary Instant Angular Velocity (IAV) Power System, the integrated three-axis gyro𝄹scope in each pedal accounts for irregular pedalling when calculating power, resulting in accurate readings – even when using oval chainrings.

IAV Cycling Dynamics are additional metrics transmitted via the ANT+ channel and can be viewed live on the Favero 🐠Assioma app. These readouts include Platform Center Offset (PCO), which measures force distribution across the pedal surface, Power Phase (PP), identifying the section of the pedal stroke that generates positive torque, and Rider Position (RP), which detects the time spent pedalling seated versus standing. Torque Effectiveness (TE) and Pedal Smoothness (PS) are also measured.

The Favero Assioma PRO RS pedal range is priced as follows: Assioma PRO RS-2 (£649), Assiom꧑a PRO RS-1🍌 (£399) and Assioma PRO RS-UP (£389).

Subscribers to our members-only 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Musette newsletter will know the a🐽rduous journey I took to get here, and while I've ridden a wave of caffeine-fuelled Emporia euphoria to get me through on very little sleep, it's been the sea of new bikes and clever hacks that have really kept my eyes open. 

There has been so much tech here that, for the first time in a very long time, I'm splitting the gallery into two parts. With over 130 photos on the final list (from a longlist that was close to 250), I'm 𝐆genuinely concerned that the page would be too big to load if we didn't. 

This is part one. Both galleries will feature a mix of new bikes that I've seen, the tech hacks I've di🐼scovered, ꦚas well as the cool bikes, gear, and accessories I've spotted during my endless meandering around downtown Emporia.

Unbound bingo cards at the ready?

• Disc wheel
• Tyre plugs
• MTB tyres with no clearance
• Illegible stem notes
• Faster, lighter, more compliant
• Aero matters
• Mud!
• Spirit of gravel is dead
• Electrical tape

You'll also spot a kitten, a dinosaur, and what I think was ཧa lemur in part two – you'll have to tell me on that! – Enjoy!

And with that, part one is over. 

Stay tuned for part two, which should be with you tomorrow! I can't promise any of the pictures will be as goodꦑ as the kitten, but it wil🦹l feature a new complete groupset from Classified; new bikes from Specialized, Orbea and another Factor; a load of hacks from the 350-mile XL; and loads more puncture-repair-quickening tricks and tips.

F☂or now, I'm going to go and f𒊎ind coffee and buy a gift for my wife before heading to the airport for the long journey home. 

If you subscribe to Cyclingnews, you should sign up for our new subscriber-only newsletter. From exclusive interviews and tech galleries to race analysis and in-depth features, the Musette means you'll never miss out on member-exclusive content. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Sign up now.

But – and yes, there is a but – I also think it's fair to say that in the current era of cycling, a lot of the big men's races are lacking some sense of unpredictability. We have riders like Mathieu van der Poel and 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tadej Pogačar who are in the peak of their careers, an⛦d are so strong that when they want to win a race, they often do. It's not unimpressive, but it's not always thrilling – certainly I have been missing some of the spark for some time.

I covered the Spring Classics earlier this year in Belgium, and whilst there were some exciting days – that 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Dwars door Vlaanderen finale was such a thriller, for example – there were also days where, when it came to the men's races, we almost already knew what stories we would write befo﷽re the race had even finished, such was the inevitability of Van der Poel and Pogačar.

When I came to the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Giro d'Italia this year, I thought it could be a bit more of the same. This time last year, I arrived in Italy at the same point – at the start of the second week – and the race was pretty much already decided. Tadej Pogačar had been in pink since the start, had a 2:40 lead, and looked unstoppable. As it turned out, he was, and he won by a huge margin. There were some great stages and stories, but as fo𒈔r following and reporting🦩 on the GC race, there was fairly little to be excited about.

And so as I made plans in the spring to head out toꦦ Pisa to join the race for its second two-thirds this year, there was part of me that thought this year's edition could be something of the same. No Pogačar to dominate, but ജit was going to be Primož Roglič vs Juan Ayuso by the time I arrived, wasn't it? Well, no, it wasn't.

Instead, we were treated to two weeks of a tense, hard to read, and climax-building GC battle, that saw intra-team friction, the big favourites fall away, and some gutsy riders step into their place and ultimately win the Giro. Pre-race, I never thought 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Simon Yates wou🍸ld be the rider who won in Rome, but being proved wrong was a privilege.

The thing that this Giro brought that maybe the Classics didn't, or the Tour hasn't in recent years, was that tension and thrill. Standing at the finish line, watching on the TVs set up for the media, we 💟were all enthralled in what was happening on stages 16, 17, 19, 20 and beyond.

We weren't just waiting for the obvious winner to arrive; we were witnessing a real battle play out, and then, fuelled by excitement and adrenaline, speaking to all the key players to pick apart what had happened and why. It brought an excitement I haven't felt about the biggest men's races f𒆙or quite a while.

Stage 20 was the biggest high of the race, and came close to the most exciting stage I've ever reported on – the final stage of the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tour de France Femmes last year. Of course, the Giro's climax wasn't quite as exciti🧸ng as that race, which came down to second𓃲s on the line, but it was a big fight on a big climb, where a rider who was not the favourite proved they were the strongest. As a journalist, telling stories like that will always be fun.

The𓆉re is also, whether we like it or not, an undeniable romanticism in seeing an underdog or an athlete who has endured s💮etbacks finally achieve their big win. We're told fairytales don't exist, and lots of athletes don't get that dream win, but a lot do, and that's why we love sport.

Simon Yates' win was the perfect example of that, the way he overcame the very climb that undid him in 2018 to win the Giro in 2025, and the way he just wept and wept at the fin✅ish. It was so different to when we see Van der Poel or Pogačar winning, and the emotion and the backstory absolutely added to the spectacle.

Even if Yates hadn't won, though, and it had been 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Isaac del Toro or Richard Carapaz, I'd still be feeling more excited than I have in a long time about Grand Tour racing (it's not just the pat⛄riotic Brit in me, I promise). What was exciting is that every rider in the top three had to fight the whole race, had to go on the attack, had to play the game. Even Del Toro, with his dominating UAE Team Emirates-XRG support squad, got stuck into the race.

The Finestre, with the gruelling fight that occurred between all the top four, with riders attacking, getting dropped, and coming back on multiple occasions, was the kind of cycling I love, and🐼 the kind I've not always seen in the men's races during the recent Classics and Grand Tours. It was great, and I just want more.

Rating the Giro

At dinner, we journalists will often still be talking about the racing, there's just no getting away from it when you're in a Grand Tour bubble. On Sunday night in Rome – sit꧋ting down for 11.45 pm, because that's how these final days go – conversation turned to rating the Giro.

We were all in agreement that the racing had been ไgood, but one argument my colleagues posed was that we weren't watching all the very best athletes go head-to-head.

Which may seem insulting to Yates, Carapaz and Del Toro, but does have a grain of truth – riders ꦦlike Roglič and Ayuso have looked to be on a higher level in the past, and with so many abandons, there is an argument that the Giro came down to who survived, and the field was not as stellar as it could have been.

But my question is: are huge performances from the top athletes reall💟y the measure of a good race? I🐎sn't that what we see with Pogačar and Van der Poel, and what we sometimes deem as predictable and lacking excitement?

In an ideal world, maybe more athletes would be on that super high lev♍el, and we would see two Pogačar-level riders contesting the Giro, but for me, there was no excitement lost from the fact that Yates wasn't pushing as many watts per kilo as Pogačar. That's not what makes racing thrilling to watch.

Next for me is the Tour, and sure, you might be reading this thinking 'well, that's just going to be Pogačar vs Vingegaard again', but after this Giro, I'm not so sure. These last two weeks were a clear and necessary reminder that anything can still happen, and the peloton is full of riders who are super strong and want to race, whether they're the favourites or not. It's a good reminder for all of us, anꦉd I know I'll go to the Tour with an open mind and looking for more of this excitement. 

In a typical pre-race briefing, someone suggests the ideal scenario, ev🀅er💫yone scoffs and the discussion moves on to reality. For the guy racing the overall, it’s just -  stay with the GC leaders and hope one of them cracks. Get in the break if there is one for the teammates. Even in the era of big data, it’s not rocket science.

For Yates and Visma, the unlikely ideal scenario of attacking Carapaz and del Toro and relying on neither of them💯 being willing to close the gap is just that. Unlikely but it might happen.

Then perfection would be to hook up with a teammate for the descent and crucially for the valley towards the last climb whilst there is more hesitation behind. As all the team directors know that one, they also plan a helper to thwart any isolation for their side. It’s unl♚ikely, but it might happen.

Therefore the ideal Visma scenario before they even get to Colle delle Finestre is a rider in the break and if that rider is Wout van Aert then even better. That UAE would allow that to occur without covering the possibility with one of their riders is also unlikely. But, and this is where it all started to un𓃲ravel on the road, they failed to do that very thing the day before. WvA was in the escape and potentially of use if Yatesඣ had been let loose.Yates couldn’t do that but the option was there and it was undoubtedly noticed by those in the Visma team car.

Remember the Primož Roglič and Vingegaard against Pogačar on the Col du Galibier? Jumbo (Visma) versus UAE, and the latter made the tactical error of having their man isolated. Surely they wouldn’t make the same tactical errors again. On that occasion by g💦iving out the wrong instructions to Pogačar, he ought to have let Roglič escape and then wait for teammates in the next group, but longer term in how they had already used up the team in the previous stages, which led to the situation being out of control. Letting Wout van Aert be in the stage 19 break with no one from UAE to cover potential GC moves suggested otherwise.

Theories and (best) practice

There are lots of theories on what occurred on the slopes of Colle del𒅌le Finestre: redemption for Simon Yates after the Froome attack in 2018; Isaac del Toro should have collaborated with Carapaz;  the EF leader ought to have ridden even when he knew he couldn’t drop the Maglia Rosa because second is better than third. It seems to be coming down to 🎀attaching blame to individuals' choices at the crucial moments but that’s missing the point.

Yes, we could say del Toro should have ridden with Carapaz. Or why didn’t Carapaz ♏just close the gap when he had the chance before the gravel💮 section? He was strong enough, maybe del Toro could have done so too. But he chose not to either. 

The tactical errors of the moment were apparent. Carapaz wasn’t prepared to drag del Toro along and do the chasing for him, even though the race leader would have 💯been far from comfortable. 

Del Toro had obviously been told in his ear that he was to stay on Carapaz’s wheel no matter what, fearing a surprise attack. That seemed sensible, however, what wasn’t so good were the moments where they both slowed dramatically and gave free time to Simon Yates. In the Visma car, they wouldn’t have bel♔ieved what they were seeing as all the pieces from the ideal scenario pieces all fell perfectly into place. They were taking advantage of a UAE race leader being isolated again, and even better Wout van Aert was on hand to guide Yates down the descent and blast up the valley to Sestriere. They had planned for the eventuality and ev🐻en though it was unlikely, it paid off.

Meanwhile, at EF Education their plan hadn’t worked out and toys were being thrown out of the pram. It doesn’t matter who decided not to chase Simon Yates out of Carapaz and the directors in the team car. They are going to get criticism because they appeared to be willing t lose their chances as long as🗹 del Toro lost too. Graceful in defeat is a rare thing at this💞 level.

The biggest questions

However, the biggest questions are for UAE Team Emirates and not only for their decisions on the day. The malaise goes deeper and extends further in the planning than just these final stages. They haven’t learned the lessons of Pogačar and the Col du Granon defeat. They made the wrong calls then and they made dubious ones again on the way to Sestriere. Del Toro could have ridden with Carapaz on the gravel section, even if the Ecuadorian escaped over the top, it was likely the maglia rosa could have come back on the descent. The last climb wasn’t hard enough to be distanced by a large amount, which theyꦐ all pro♛bably knew. If they didn’t then Carapaz'  frustration ought to have been a clue. That’s the on-road errors. 

The long-term ones became apparent in the final week as increasingly their riders got more and mo🎃re tired. Del Toro found himself without teammates too often and it was only luck that there were no incidents. Losing Juan Ayuso was a blow, but realistically, he wasn’t going to outclimb Carapaz in the big mountains. The hesitation to clarify the sole leadership would have added to the internal stress of the riders, as looking after two leaders takes a lot more concentration than just one. 

Then we come to the main problem of how did they plan for the final week, not only identifying possible challenges and how to cover them, but also rider management. Who were they going to save for the mountain stages, and which days could those rider♊s be spared from domestic duties? 

Controlling the race every day is all very well, however, there needs to be a constant evaluation of resources available to the team leader. Who can be rested, who needs to recover because they will be vital on certain stages, who can they put in the break that the team can rely on if something critical happens, and so on and so on.
There doesn’t seem to have been enough thought put into how UAE have used their riders. Just to spotlight them, Rafal Majka, Brandon McNulty and Adam Yates may be top class riders, but even ꦯthey require easier da🦋ys if they’re going to be present during the crucial moments. Data would have indicated how they were and in which direction their form was heading and with that knowledge a plan has to be decided. That’s why race leads are often passed on to another team, and it becomes someone else’s responsibility to control and take the pressure. 

History is going to look back at this 108th Giro and see that Simon Yates won because he produced the goods when he was given the opportunity. Visma Lease a Bike put the pieces in place and seized their chance by having their men in the right 🎐place at the right time. It was an unlikely outcome at the start of the day, but then so was Pogačar cracking on the Col du Granon at the𒉰 ’23 TdF.

In terms of tactics, what happened to UAE Team Emirates on the 🧔Colle delle Finestre, and what finally led to their losing the Giro d'Italia at the last possible minute, wasn’t inconceivable. It was going to take a combination of factors to occur, and for reasons only known to them -  they weren’t ready with the solutions.  

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more

Well, that point in the future is now thไe present, and King's comments are particularly fascinating in hindsight. Some of his predictions have proven to be bang on the money. Others have turned out to be som𓆉ewhat wide of the mark.

"Oh wow," he says when we remind him he said there wouldn't be a 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:UCI Gravel World Championships within five ꧋years – this autumn will see the fourth set of rainbow jerseys handed out.

King was something of a pioneer in making the switch from the straight-jacketed WorldTour to the freewheeling world of gravel, where races, riders, money, and just about everythi𒊎ng else has skyrocketed in the past decade. The question that has troubled him is what impact that's having on th🐼e so-called 'spirit' of gravel.

In the build-up to gravel's premier event, Unbound, we got in touch with King to see if he'd like to revisit the predictions h🔯e made back in 2020, and if he'd like to venture any more for 2030. The ni꧂ght after he was inducted into the Gravel Hall of Fame, and the day before he was due to set out on the Unbound XL course, he kindly obliged.

UCI gravel

"I don't picture a World Championships in five years but probably there will be movement in that direction – the very controlled side of things, I mean." (Ted King in 2020).

Cyclingnews: Let's start with that World Cha🐻mpionships quote, as it's one of the things that has happened a lot sooner than you were expecting. We've had three Worlds already, you've ridden one of them…

Ted King: I'll be honest, I really enjoyed the UCI Worlds. I think part of my hesitation was having the organization of the UCI, a governing body, and so on and so forth, whereas I like the cavalier nature of gravel, how it's sort of this counterculture. The reality is that as much as we think that&ap🍎os;s the case, it has professionalized, and with that level of professionalization, of sponsorship, of industry support, it needs to move forward and it needs to have rules, governing bodies and, quite frankly, World Championships.

I sort of wanted to keep gravel separate from just the fittest person♉ winning, and when you look at the World Championships results and the top 20 are just current WorldTour pros, it is a bit of a bummer. But then again, if Matthew van der Poel with his f𓄧an base is going to win the world title and draw more attention and sponsorship dollars and more people onto bikes, maybe that's not such a bad thing.

CN: Ho𓆉w do you feel about the UCI's involvement in gravel and the brand of gravel racing it has produced?

TK: I feel like North America is th𒐪e birthplace of gravel, but the UCI has the ability to lead the charge to introduce Europe to gravel and quite♔ frankly introduce the world to gravel because when you look at the UCI Gravel World Series it's all over the global map. The UCI races are very controlled and people are there to race, whereas a lot of the North American races are still very participatory. 

I don't know how many people are going to stumble upon a UCI race and say, 'oh, I'm going to get into this thing that seems really fun'. It's more like 'I'm going to do the UCI race because I'm competitive and I want to go to the World Championships'. So the UCI races certainly lend themselves more towards a road race field. It's a whole other conversation but road racing is dead in North America, and I think it has a lot to do with the sort of hyper-competitive cultu💦re. So are we prematurely witnessing the end of gravel?♑ No, not yet, because there are still so many people who just love rocking up and having a fun time.

Professionalization

"What's nice is how few rules there are, but that becomes a double-edged sword. As races get more competitive, at what point do you have to eliminate team tactics, aero bars, and points systems?"

CN: Even in the US, the racing is being taken far more seriously, and we've already seen some of the things you mentioned – aero bars have been banned at Unbound, who also have a no-draft rule. How do🔴es that double-edged sword feel now?

TK: We're in the midst of it shaking out. Gravel now is not what it was five years ago, and it's not what it's gonna be in five years, so my hope in all of these predictions is that we're making the right decisions for the long run. I think what I was probably alluding to five years ago was like, we've got to keep it a little more loosey-goosey, just, you know, have an all-out race. What I still love about gravel racing, and this hasn't changed, is that the ones that I seem to enjoy the most are the ones that feel like a massive group ride – you're out there with your buddies, you're riding really hard, and whether you finished first or 15th, you're perfectly happy. When there is such a hyper-focus on where you are in the overall standings and points, it&𒅌apos;s not as interesting.

CN: That said, your 2024 was all about trying to bring your old WorldTour regime into gravel, working with a ra🥃nge of coaches and nutritionists, steering clea💟r of the beers, trying to be as fast as possible. That was sort of surprising.

TK: I recognize that it could be seen as very contradictory. I did that because I didn't want to be a stick-in-the-mud saying '⛄gravel needs to be old school' and 'you need to drink a beer before the race' and 'you need to stop training'. That's literally what I've done since 2016, just ha🐼ving fun with it. But there was also a personal itch of like, I want to show these kids, who are literally half my age, and see where I could stack up if I went back into this perspective. I'm in a very different place than I was in the WorldTour, being a father of two, being a husband. I also wanted to show what could be done for dads and parents.

CN: How did that work out?

TK: A good summary is I was fitter in 2024 than I'd been in probably the previous six, seven, eight years. My times were way faster, my FTP was better, yada yada yada… across the board things were better. But that included the competition. So I wouldn't call the year lackluster – I won a race, I was in the party a few times, but yeah, you show ꦛup ꦉat the big races and it's just a sea of people who are capable of winning.

CN: But did you enjoy it as much?

TK: I really enjoyed the process. It was a fun throwback to a lifetime ago of being focused and disciplined. It was a good sort of reality check. There'🍌s so much that I'm saying over this whole conversation that I recognize can be very contradictory.

Teams and wages

"I don't know if we'll ever get to the point where individuals on teams are paid."

CN: I'm not super well versed in the economics of gravel, but Greg Van Avermaet has a gravel team, Thomas De Gendt is on a grꦜavel team, and multiple bike brands have gravel teams.🐟 There are teams everywhere.

TK: Yeah, and I remember thinking that from the ✅perspective of what a pro road team is, so I guess my point is I didn't think we were going see teams of 25 riders, because what I still like about the competitive side of gravel racing is we're still characters, right? People like to follow the characters. The life of a domestique is pretty anonymous and so I was predicting that we're not going to see teams of 25 guys showing up with Greg Van Avermaet as team leader and then seven domestiques around him. Maybe I worded it poorly five years ago, but geez, I certainly also would not have guessed we'd have the priority of teams we have now.

There was a Cycling Weekly article recently where the headline was Van Avermaet saying you can't win Unbound alone, implying that you need a team behind you… and I'm like, I hate that, to be honest. I hate that mentality. I'm such a fan of the privateer na𝔍ture of the sport. I want people to be able to show up. I mean, come on, how can that be in any way incentivising to an 18-year-old kid who wants to get into the sport? 'Oh, I need a team? Why am I gonna show up?' I'm sure Greg wasn't saying it negatively, but I just really don't like the message it seems to send.

TV coverage

"To be left in the dark is better than a helicopter overhead and a motorbike in front. That's just a world I don't think needs to come to gravel."

CN: That quote is less a prediction and more a 'please god no'. But this year Unbo๊und is getting the full live streaming treatme💃nt… From your quote, I𓆉 guess that's still the way you f𒐪eel, or is it not?

TK: I think I should recognize that, you know, don't bite the hand that feeds you. People want to see this sport. That said, I would describe the television coverage in gravel races as not highly polished. So much of the best content is still athlete-produced – riders with cameras on their bikes or phones and literally sort of live streaming on the go, creating stories mid-race. I still like that element. It's funny, actually watching gravel racing is not appealing to me. I will watch every stage of the Giro but I don't really want to be abಞle to turn on Max or HBO or TNT and be able to watch a gravel race, even if I feel like there's also an inevitability to that when you have the likes of Van der Poel showing up – he could ride a unicycle and people are gonna tune in.

Consolidation and races

"We live in a world of consolidation. It's rare that events exist in perpetuity small and independently. I would not be surprised if there was some consolidation in five years. I don't think it would be a coast-to-coast series, but maybe a pocketed series in the US. I also think there'll be a lot more events outside the US."

CN: You sp♔oke a lot about consolidation last time, and this was pretty much bang on the money...

TK: Yeah, that one seems to be fairly accurate. Life Time coming into the sport in 2021 consol♛idated the scene here in North America in a major way. Then Gravel Earth was born around 2022, which brought pre-existing events into a series, and the UCI has done a similar thing. From the perspective of the North American scene, it's harder and harder to create a grassroots event because the calendar is so busy, it's hard to get the attention, the right athletes, and the notoriety to draw people in and make it worth in the first place. 

In a way, gravel is a victim of its own success in that there are so many events to choose from tha♉t you see a downtrend in a lot of individual registration numbers. There was a weekend recently where, man oh man, there were two UCI races – there are only three UCI races in North America – as well as the Whoopie 50 and BWR California. No wonder that every event saw lower registrations because athletes were all over the US map.

'350 is 🤪the new 200' – A fu𒆙ture of ultras, bike packing, and FKTs

CN: You're doing the XL Unbound this year. We've seen headlines recently that the 350 is the new 200, that the flagship distances have become s💎o competitive that the ultra dis🐷tances are where that original spirit of gravel has gravitated towards. Was that the reason behind your choice?

TK: Yes, to a degree. I love coming to Emporia. I love being in this community in the birthplace of gravel. If I look back at 2024 as a year in which I poured everything ☂into it and got a🔴 respectable finish in the high 20s, I recognise I'm not there for the win anymore. But I still love being competitive.

CN: The logical extensio♛n of that is multi-day events, and then you're into the realms of bikepacking. You've done more of that recently and I wonder whether that world of solo multi-day riding and FKT-chasing might be a future for the cavalier brand of off-road cycling you speak of.

TK: That seems to be the case. Those events are great because they're so self-reliant, as gravel was a number of years ago. These days we're creating how-to videos about going through the Unbound feed zone most efficiently. That's crazy. Bikepacking is completely self-reliant, it has a huge element of adventure, it's just you and the challenge ahead. So yes, there i𒉰s a very strong link in ethos to OG gravel of 10, 20, 30 years ago. Who knows? Are we going to make bike packing super duper competitive? I wouldn't be surprised if we see more and more fast people show up.

CN: The whole FKT thing is a bit of a wild west, isn't it, in terms of who is the official gatekeeper🐎, and how you govern something as it grows – as with gravel. Lachlan Mo♉rton's Great Divide record didn't technically count in the eyes of some, as he had a film crew following him…

TK: That was really interesting. The old-school bike packers have a very passionate culture, it's a stick-to-your-guns, OG ethos, and I can't disagree. I've been on the knife's edge deep into a bikepacking race, totally emotional, completely ragged. I remember being 970 miles into a 1000 mile race, leading it by hours, and I was thinking at the time, 'if my wife drove by me right now, I would quit in a heartbeat'. The point is that the emotional support you gain🌺 from a phone call, from knowing somebody's there, knowing that you have a potential bailout, it's completely legit. So as much as it seems antiquated, that's a thing. That said, what Lachlan did is extraordinary. So it's a funny balance to which I don't have any correct answer.

CN: One of my questions was going to be, where does the sport go from here? What 𝓡does it look like in 2030? Have we already sort of answered that? What else miᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚght happen next?

TK: I think so – exactly as we were saying, more attention to the longer events, perhaps as people age up or lose competitiveness in the gravel races that are becoming more like road races. I mean dot watching I think is really fun. It's like watching paint dry, but it's watching🎉 fun paint dry, you know. More generally, I think the trend that we see now is a good short-term prediction, which is more competitive events and an ine𒁃vitable inevitable consolidation, as people are having to really divide their time, choosing which events they need to focus on as a result of the importance of these points systems. I recognize I'm talking about the, the very front of the race and not the masses, but that being said, the masses follow where there are popular events.

The optimist

"The optimist in me says that gravel will stay a gritty, different independent sport rather than bowing to the knees of dollars."

CN: That was one of more striking quotes from last time. Does that optimist in you still livᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚeಌ on?

TK: I would still say something to that effect. I want nothing more than for gravel to succeed in drawing more people into it. Here's a funny aside, which might also make something of a point. Last night I was indﷺucted into the Gravel Hall of Fame. Five years ago, I never would have guessed such a thing would come into existence. And as much as we think of gravel as young, one of the inductees last night was creating off-road graveཧl races in the Flint Hills in Emporia in the 1980s. 

The amount of excitement and enthusiasm and passion of this group is completely deserving of a Hall of Fame. So it's neat to see that that exact thing that makes it unexpected to ever have a Hall of Fame, is the thing that makes it worꦅthy of a Hall of Fame. It's a tremendous honor for me.

CN: You're clearly still v𒈔ery in love with the sport…

TK: That I am. I want to see it succeed, right?

CN: Thanks very much for your time today.

TK: See you in 2030.

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our coverage of Unbound 2025. Don't miss any of the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from the biggest gravel race of the season, reported by our journalists on the ground in Kansas. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more.

Cyclingnews and a select group of other media were allowed into the protected anti-doping and technological fraud compound at the finish of stage 18 of the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Giro d'Italiaꦚ in Cesano Moderno to see how the UCI carry out their check♈s.  

The UCI appointed former US 168澳洲5最꧟新开奖结果:Homeland Security Investigator Nick Raudenski a ye🧸ar ago to lead the strategy for the fight against technological fraud. It was seen as a bold appointment by UCI president Davd Lappartient and perhaps a sign of the need to ensure hidden motors are not used to falsify results. Lappartient has admitted that a high-profile mechanical doping case would "destroy the sport."

Raudenski is using his experience inꦇvestigating match-fixing and corruption for FIFA and UEFA, and more recent work as Head of Intelligence & Investigations at the anti-doping International Testing Agency,ꦗ to combine bike checks with intelligence and whistleblowing.

"We're in a technological arms race," Raudenski admitted to Cyclingnews in an interview after the backscatter x-ray device presentat⛎ion.  

"Components are getting lighter and smaller and so easier to conceal and harder to detect. We're up against the challenge of trying to stay out in front or at least not so far behind in the cat and mouse game of what is the new way that people could potentially try to chea𒐪t."  

It is not only equipment. Raudenski, like many people, is often suspicious of riders' performances in ꦏcertain races. It sparks the natural investigator in him.    

"It's about looking at the overall 🉐picture, watching how performances happen, watching biomech🐭anical behaviour, watching how riders are acting and how they react to us when we do a bike check," he explained.

"Most a෴re actually happy and thank us because they want to be sure they're not riding against somebody that i𝐆s trying to cheat."

Cyclocross rid𓃲er Femke Van den Driessche remains the only athlete ever to be caught ♛and sanctioned for motor doping back in 2016.

British journalist Chris Marshall Bell has investigated mechanical doping a length for his  podcast and also written about 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:motor doping for Cyclingnews on the subject. There a꧒re suspicions that hidden motors and even magnetic devices in wheels may have been used in major professional races, as far back as 1999, but no cases have ever been irrefutably proven or a diℱsciplinary process opened.

"I and my team challenge ourselves to ask where we are at now and why we aren&apos▨;t finding anything," Raudenski said.

"We question if our tools are up to date, is the process right, is there new technology out there or new components that we are not seeing. It's a continued evolution to make our test and technology better. To make sure we💝're not missing something."

Inside the UCI  technological fraud tent

T♛he UCI has bike inspector technicians and the backscatter x-ray device at a number of major cycling and mountain bike races, to 𓃲check bikes and create a strong sense of deterrence.

The UCI has three of the devices, which cost €45,000 each, with a considerable budget allocated to w🐻hat the UCI prefers to call 'technologica🎉l fraud' rather than mechanical doping.

Based on specific information and intelligence, suspicions or just a randomly selected process, riders are stopped beyond the finish line, a special red UCI tag is attached to their frame, and th🃏en taken to the anti-doping area for ♎inspection. Riders who are selected for anti-doping testing usually face a bike check alongside random and targeted tests.  

The UCI still uses the tablet device to check bikes at race starts, despite doubts about its ability to 🙈detect magnetic activity. They now combine that with between seven and 15 backscatter x-ray checks per day.  

In the black UCI tent in the protected Giro d'Italia anti-doping compound, Cyclingnews saw how the UCI technicians weigh the bikes to detect any extra hidden equipment and then s🌊lowly scan the bike with the backscatter x-ray device.

The screen captures an X-ray image and clearly shows' inside the frame and wheels. The technicians are𒐪 trained and experienced in differentiating between the batte🎶ries and wires of electronic gear systems and any hidden devices.

"We can see everything and ever🤡y aspect, and we can look at specific areas and zoom in on details to highlight certain things," Raudenski said, insisting the process and technology are robust.

Riders and team ♏staff are allowed to watch the process and then sign an official document saying the bike was checked on a specific day and time. The UC🌼I keeps records of bikes tested and cross-checks that with bikes and frames registered with the UCI.  

When David Lappartient was elected as UCI president in 🐠2017, he said he didn't want technological fraud to continue as 'a hot topic' an🀅d he personally presented a mobile X-ray cabinet in 2018.

The use of the backscatter x-ray🍒 device is the latest step in the 'technological arms race.'

Cyclingnews has seen Raudenski at major r🐭ace finishes aღs he supervises the bike check process. He keeps a low profile, but most teams already know who is and the vital work he does.

At recent Giro d'Italia stage finishes, Cyclingnews saw Raudenski point a handheld device, perhaps a heat gun of some kind, at riders' bikes slowing beyond the finish line. However, he refused to comment on the dဣevice or other technologies he and the UCI may use in the future.

The UCI are also apparently considering the use of power and cadence data, combined with AI, to produce a rider's "power passport" similar to the A💛thlete Biological Passport that is used to fight blood doping after the EPO era.

Raudenski admits that the UCI's work is mostly about acting as a deterrent. However, he is not afraid to investigate previous suspicious performances and equipment. They will be hard to prove but could help in the future to understand mechanical doping.  ꦚ  

"People understand that if I cross the finish line ꦏwith a motor on my bike, there's a high probability that there's going to be a check. So there is a deterrent effect," Raudenski said.

"We're making sure that we have robust processes, that our legal frameworks and the regulations are up to date, that the equipment regulations are up to date, and that we're staying ahead of what c♔an and what can't be used."

Last September, the UCI launched a specific mechanical doping whistleblower rewards programme, saying that information to help target testing and♈ investigations would be “facilitated through financial motivation, assistance, and/or reward for information".

Raudenski sees and studiꦺes all the rumours♛ about hidden motors but focuses on the facts.

"Do I wake up sweating in the middle of the night, fearing that I'm missing something? Not at the moment," he told Cyclingnews.

"Yꦍou have to separate fact from fiction, evi🥀dence from rumours. That's where I spend the majority of my time.

"It's not about what I think. It's about what I can prove. I'm driven by evidence, by things that I feel we take tangible actions 🐠on.

"Of course, we're n🎀ot blind, we're not deaf to rumours and allegations that have happened in the past. I'm not shying away from  anything 𓆏that I feel is going to continue to promote the credibility of cycling."

While all the details are available in the✃ official , we’ve condensed and refined everything in an easy-to-digest format so it’s easier to understand.

Here’s everything you need to know about the MyWhoosh ♔SRC.

 How to participate in the MyWhoosh Sunday Race Club 

As the name suggests, the Sunday Race Club takes place every Sunday, with each category kicking off at a dedicated start time (start times may change slightly from week to week). First off are the Category 6 riders; Category 1 goes off last. Ther🧸e’s quite a lot to discuss here, so we’ve broken it down into three sections to make it easy to understand. 

 1. Registration

Before you can start racing, you must register on the . Registration for each SRC event opens every Monday at 7am (GMT) and closes on Thursday at 3am (GMT). After registering, you'll receive a confirmation email,🌟𒊎 but you'll only be notified of your assigned category and start list 24 hours before the race. Your racing category for your first event is assigned to you based on your performance data from the Power Passport Test. New riders must complete the Power Passport Test to be eligible to race.

Riders can ride for individual prizes in each weekly event, however, to be eligible for a team and team prize money, a rider must have completed two races without an annulment during the calendar month.

The finaဣls are considered the pinnacle of the month's weekly races and have a bigger prize p🍷ot for individual and team competitors. They take place on the last Sunday of each month.   

2. The Power Passport Test

MyWhoosh requires each rider to complete a Power Passport Test before they can race – this ensures riders are categorised based on ability and physiology. The Power Passport Test is a comprehensive and dynamic assessment that goes beyond traditional Functional Threshold Power (FTP) testing, evaluating multiple performance metrics, including anaerobic capacity and recovery. The Power Passport Test is divided in൲to four individual but challenging intervals: 2 x 6-second max sprints, 3-minute max, and 12-minute max. Each interval targets different energy systems, providing crucial insights into your VO2max and FTP capacity. 

It’s mandatory for all riders to video record the Power Passport Test. This vi💖deo should be a single, unbroken reco൲rding that covers all aspects of the test. You will need to clearly show the date and time, record your height measurement, equipment setup (bike, smart trainer and power meter including serial numbers) while ensuring your entire body, equipment and game screen are visible during the test, as well as complete a weigh-in after the test concludes. Once this is completed, the video must be uploaded to YouTube as ‘Unlisted”. It’s worth reiterating that this should be one continuous video. 

The accepted protocol for weigh-in, height, and equipment videos can be found in the . In a new update, Category 1 has a maximum in-game weight loss capped at 1kg per week. The remaining categories have a maximum in-game weight loss capped at 2kg per month. Category 1 riders have to submit a weigh-in video every week, while the rest of the categories will need to provide this every month.

Riders must re-test their Power Passport on request from the MyWhoosh Race Control Team. It is advised that riders test every 6-8 weeks or as their fitness level changes.

Pro tip: Get everything ready the day before. Test your camera setup, organise your room and space, and ensure your weight scale is working and the batteries are charged. It’s also worth doing a height and weight test video to ensure that the correct protocol is followed.
 

 3. Pre-verification form

The MyWhoosh pre-verification form needs to be completed before you can participate in the Sunday Race Club. Once all your metrics are verified, the results will determine your race category, so this form needs to be filled out carefully. The form collates details such as a height video, equipment video, Strava link and detailed information about primary and secondary power sources. This form is used to verify that participants are using pre-approved equipment and that everything aligns with the MyWhoosh ruleset, ensuring a fair and accurate competitive environment.

SRC race categories

The Sunday Race Club racing format is available to cyclists of varied abilities, not just elite-level riders. It uses a six-category system that organises riders based on many factors, including in-game power-to-weight ratios, SRC results, and the data from the Power Passport Test. The field is split between women and men, using the same Category 1-6 system across both genders.

The collected data is then used to benchmark rider ability for placement in an appropriate category. Category placement is based on factors such as route profile, power profile, and historical performances, to ensure equal ability and fair racing. Category 1 is for the strongest riders, and Category 6 is considered the entry level.

New riders will not be eligible for prizes until at least two SRC events are completed without an annulment. An annulment is issued if the verification team cannot verify your performance for any particular reason.
 

SRC prize money 

The overall prize purse is a whopping $320,758 per month, which is equally distributed across male and female riders. The prize money is now available to the top ten riders (previously the top five) in each category and top seven teams (formerly the top three) in the finals. This new structure encourages greater teamwork and collaboration between the riders.

MyWhoosh has also introduced a Sprint and King/Queen of the Mountain (KOM/QOM) prize purse for segments and overall standings, to stimulate dynamic, entertaining racing and greater earning potential among riders.

Prize money is split on a sliding scale from Category 1-6. The largest weekly monetary prize on offer is $2,170 for a win in Category 1 – for reference, a win in Category 6 is worth $170. The monthly finals offer even greater earning potential, where teams can compete for a portion of the prize pool.

The detailed prize money table for Categories 1-6 can be viewed in the offiꦿcial SRC Race Book and Technical Guide. 

SRC team structure 

Teams are formed by riders within the same category and consist of three to five members. They compete as a unit, with the combined times of the top three riders determining the overall ranking and subsequent prize money eligibility.

While teams can compete every week in the MyWhoosh SRC, they can only win prize money in the monthly finals, which take place on the last Sunday of every month.
 

 SRC race routes and formats 

Each MyWhoosh Sunday Race Club event is a scratch race, where the first rider to cross the finish line wins. With 12 different worlds on offer, the diverse set of courses allows riders of varying physiologies to compete for prize money and segment rewards.  All categories will race on the same course, ranging in distance between 40 - 55km for the men and, for women, some courses will be a shortened version of the men’s routes, while others will be a custom 35 km route.

Each race has sprint and climb segments, where points can be earned by finishing in the top 5, as the fastest time through the segment (FTS), and not necessarily the first to cross the line – every sprint and climb has different points based on difficulty. At the end of the race, the rider with the most cumulative points from all the segments is crowned the Sprint Winner or King or Queen of the Mountain.

Early additions of the Sunday Race Club were known for their challenging, relentless climbing courses, but this has changed considerably in recent months. The amount of climbing per race varies significantly depending on the course. Some courses feature punchy climbs with short, intense efforts, while others have longer, steady climbs requiring a more measured approach. For instance, the Bruges course in Belgium is known for its climbs, which require high-power efforts for a few minutes, followed by easy riding in between. Other courses, such as the notorious Jebel Hafeet or the Bogota Climb, demand steady power outputs upwards of 20 minutes. 
 

 SRC post-race verification 

To ensure fair play and transparency across the board, MyWhoosh performs stringent verification measures. While we’ve already detailed the pre-verification protocol, post-race verification takes things to another level, comparing race results with data from the MyWhoosh Power Passport Test, historical data, including heart rate and power ratios, weight changes, and equipment, to verify performances further. It’s a very thorough process.

In cases where results are marginal, additional investigation is applied, including reviewing historical Strava or TrainingPeaks statistics. If needed, MyWhoosh may even invite riders for further testing at the company’s headquarters in Abu Dhabi.

All r🃏esults and classifications are provisional until post-race verification is completed.

In this article, we’ll explore the details of MyWhoosh, cov💛ering everything from how it works and the best way to get started to 😼hardware requirements and understanding what all the numbers mean.

What equipment do I need to get started on MyWhoosh? 

Starting with the basics, you’ll need a modern device to run MyWhoosh. The platform uses the Unreal 4 engine (UE4), which is known for its high-fidelity graphics that require significant processing power a♍nd memory. While it’s always worth investing in a powerful laptop or gaming PC to ensure an immersive experience, MyWhoosh has adapted the specifications to ensure a smooth experience on low-end devices, too. The app will automatically adjust its settings depending on your device (many users are running iPads, Apple TV, and on their mobile phones mirrored to a TV), which users can tweak in-game to suit their preferences.

The app runs on various devices and operating systems, including iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows. The download size is large and requires significant storage space to run it – around 1.1GB for Windows and Android, and 1.2GB for iOS and macOS. (This can vary from device to device, and it’s worth noting that additional updates can require upwards of 7GB of disc space.)

In addition to the device, you will also require a bicycle and one of the best smart trainers or smart bikes. If you are seriꦇous about your training and want to enter the My🌌Whoosh Sunday Race Club or Classics Races, investing in a secondary power source (power meter) is a requirement.

A comprehensꦆive list of and can be fouꦕnd on the MyWhoosh website.

There are also a couple of optional extras worth investing in, such as a heart rate monitor (with ANT+ and Bluetooth connectivity) and a good fan. If you’re a brand loyalist, most smart trainer providers such as Wahoo and Elite manufacture an indoor-specific f🍎an, but a traditional♕ electric fan will do the job just fine.

As a bonus, it’s also worth noting that MyWhoosh offers a “Data Migration” scheme, allowing users to transfer their profile rating⛎ and player level from any other indoor cycling platform to MyWhoosh. This step requires the user to provide all relevant data from their current profiles, along with supporting proof.

Where to find and download MyWhoosh

Like most apps, you will need to visit the native app store on your device to download MyWhoosh. This includes the Apple App Store (iOS) or Google Play Store for Android. For Windows PCs, you can download the app from the Microsoft 🦋Store.

If you’re unsure, you can always visit the and click on the ‘Download’ tab, which will take you to a page with every download option available, complete with recognisable device iconography. Here, you’ll easily identify which particular download you’ll need, including download links t♉o the Link app (companion app) for iOS and Android.

MyWhoosh Link is the platform’s companion app designed to streamline the user experience. Here you can message and interact with other MyWhoosh users, use your phone to manage your ride and workout, or browse for extra insight into your MyWhoosh ride data, stats, upcoming events and personal records.
 

Creating an account, device connection and homescreen interface 

Like most indoor cycling apps, creating an account on MyWhoosh is an easy and intuitive exercise. After downloading the app and installing it on your device, you will be greeted by a screen with a ‘Plus’ icon, requiring you to select and create a new account. You’ll need to input the usual detai⛎ls such as name, surname, email address and gender before receiving an OTP via email to validate your account and login details. Your device should remember you every time you open the app, and present a🦋 personalised graphic showing your level, mileage and total riding time.

Clicking your graphic will present another menu asking whether you want to Ride or Run. Selecting Ride will take you to the pairing screen to connect your power source, controllable, cadence, hea🥃rt rate, virtual steering, and secondary power source. After sorting all your connections (virtual steering and secondary power source are not mandatory), you’ll be directed to the ꦑhome screen, complete with a navigational layout that controls the entire MyWhoosh experience. 

Let’s look at the MyWh🌠oosh home screen in detail. 

On top is a series of graphics running the length of the screen including your profile (denoted by your name, surname, flag and jersey)🍷 a Power Gem and Coin counter (in-game currency to buy kit, components and bicycles), your Wallet (housing in-game Treasure Hunt Winnings), a Device Connection tab, Information tab (update reminders) and the Settings tab denoted by a gear cog. In this tab, you can tw🎃eak your equipment, display, sound and graphic preferences, and in-game notification settings.

Below this are eight options complete with corresponding graphics. These options comprise Event and Workout selection, Free Ride and MyBunch 24/7 pace partners, Training Plans, Live Coaching, a personalised Calendar and the Garage. Your FTP (listed in Watts and w/kg) and weight are also displayed. Dominating the right side of the screen is your avatar and bike (clicking on your avatar is a shortcut to the Garage).

Let’s look at these options in more detail.

Events

In the Events Hub, you’ll discover all the events (group rides and races) in chronological order; you can also toggle between days and months to see what’s coming in advance. The top control panel lists a tab for Upcoming, Live events, and Group Workouts. Premium races are listed on the left of the screen and require a secondary power source to c🦩ompete.

Workouts

The Workout Hub features a comprehensive assortment of workouts for both beginner and elite-level riders. You can choose from a pre-selected list or create your own using the workout builder. You'll also be able to manually input your FTP (you 🌄can reduce or increase it depending on how you’re feeling) and start your workout. 

There are over 720ಌ workouts, including the notorious MyWhoosh Power Passport test, and 30 Video-On-Demand (VOD) sessions.

Live Coach

The Live Coach feature is unique to MyWhoosh. It allows you to train with an expert﷽ coach or cycling celebrity during virtual workouts. These are conducted in real time and provide personalised feedback and guidance, which helps you maximise your training experience with other riders in the MyWhoosh community. 

Free Ride

As the name sugges♋ts, Free Ride allows riders to select any world and route and ride at their own intensity and leisure without any restrictions. If you’re a racer, it’s a good way to learn a course and recon various routes, but also gives you the ability to enjoy one of the 87 courses spread over 13 worlds, if they’re available – the worlds are on rotation with five open to ride at any giv𓃲en time.

MyBunch 24/7

Like the RoboPacers found on Zwift, MyWhoosh offers a similar experience where you can jump on a group ride with bots at a specific speed and w/kg, to keep a steady tempo and wattage. MyBunch is available 24/7, and these groups differ in intensity by speed and jersey colour. Once you’ve selected a MyBunch group, you will be teleported directly to the group with a 60-second power assist to get up to speed. You can choose from a leisurely pace o🅠f 1.4w/kg at 28km/h up to 4.6w/kg at 40km/🤡h.

Training Plans

Available for beginners and experts alike, the MyWhoosh Training Plans are designed around scientific principles that boost FTP (Functional Threshold Power). Variousꦉ plans are available to improve climbing, sprinting, and endurance, each lasting four weeks and with the possibility of being extende♕d to a 20-week training plan. There are also several individual workouts to try, designed by Tadej Pogačar and his coach, Javier Sola. 

Calendar

The MyWhoosh Calendar is a management tool for scheduling workouts. It works a lo๊t like the TrainingPeaks calendar and can integrate MyWhoosh's training plans, workouts and racing events. It tracks all sorts of metrics such as training stress score (TSS) and total weekly duration, and ke🦂eps you abreast of all upcoming sessions.

Garage

The Garage is the creative hub of MyWhoosh. Here you’ll have free rein to design and dress your avatar with jerseys, helmets, socks and shoes – and select your bike and wheels. If you’re after a realistic look, you can tweak your avatar's hair, skin colour and clothing to match your appearance. While the stock equipment is pretty comprehensive, a range of bikes and components can be purchased in-game using MyWhoosh coins.
 

How many MyWhoosh worlds are available? 

One of MyWhoosh’s unique selling points is the 13 virtual worlds rendered in exquisite detail. These worlds are accessible in Free Ride, Workout and Event mode. Most worlds have a minimum of seven routes (save for Endurance Climb, Switzerland, Supertri and UCI) and offer a variety of landscapes and routes, including Arabia, Australia, Alula, Belgium, Colombia, California, Endurance Climb, Hudayriat Island, Japan, MyWhoosh World, Switzerland, UCI and Supertri.

Below, we’ll outline the wor𝔍lds and routes in more det♔ail

1. Alula

Alula, one of the oldest cities in 🅰the Arabian Peninsula, has been replicated in vivid detail. Eight challenging routes, often used in the Sunday Race Club, are available in this virtual world. 

Routes: 8
Total distance: 173km
Total elevation: 2,007
Longest route: Heritage Climb (38.91km/679m)
Availability: Tuesday, Wednesday, Saturday, Sunday

2. Arabia

The Arabia world is one of the popular options on MyWhoosh, offering diverse ✅routes inspired by real-world locations in the Middle East.

Routes: 17
Total distance: 388km
Total elevation: 5,277m
Longest route: Arabian Knights (100.5km/1,936m)
Availability: Monday, Friday, Sunday

3. Australia

Australia has been modelled on the Outback region and offers sights and sounds from Wollongong city to the relentless climbs o🌱f Mount Pleasant.

Routes: 7
Total distance: 115km
Total elevation: 1,453m
Longest route: Aus Outerloop (37.5km/598m)
Availability: Tuesday, Wednesday

 4. Belgium

Inspire💖d by the Belgian Classics, the Belgian world takes in some of the country’s most historic landmarks, such as Brussels Town Square and the Muur.

Routes: 7
Total distance: 118km
Total elevation: 358m
Longest route: Kluisbergen (20.4km/99m)
Availability: Tuesday, Friday, Sunday 

5. California

Californiಌa is one of the newer worlds on MyWhoosh, taking riders deep into the iconic roads and features of Los Angeles, Hollywo🍷od Hills and San Francisco.

Routes: 8
Total distance: 153km
Total elevation: 1,645m
Longest route: Coast and Country (57.82km/815m)
Availability: Monday - Friday

6. Colombia

Designed for th♏e pure climber, the Columbia World takes riders through the mountainous regions of the South American country, home to WorldTour riders such as Egan Bernal and Nairo Quintana.

Routes: 11
Total distance: 258km
Total elevation: 2,642m
Longest route: El Limonar (15.8km/1,037m)
Availability: Monday, Friday, Sunday 

7. Endurance Climb

The Endurance Climb is the steepest, longest and most challenging climb on the platform, and the only route available in thi♍s particular world.

Routes: 1
Total distance: 57km
Total elevation: 5,637m
Longest route: Endurance Climb (57km/5,637m)
Availability: Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday

8. Hudayriyat

Hudayriyat Island is another real-world creation located on the shores of Abu Dhabi. It comprises a selection of small routes, with a longer option an🌃d mild elevation c🙈hanges.

Routes: 7
Total distance: 108km
Total elevation: 535m
Longest route: Hudayriyat Ascend (33.2km/234m)
Availability: Monday, Wednesday, Saturday

 9. Japan

Newly relea🌱sed Japan is easily the platform’s most beautifully designed and detailed worldꦛ. It features several detailed routes, including the infamous Mount Fuji.

Routes: 10
Total distance: 156km
Total elevation: 3,520m
Longest route: Noboru (56.67km/1,584m)
Availability: S✤ꦍeason Pass only (unlocked using Power Gems that are available for purchase)

10. MyWhoosh World

MyWhoosh World is a fantasy land comprising crazy climbs and some of the biggest ascents in the game💞. It also features the longest route, Everesting, which takes in 239.4km and 8,854m of vertical ascent.

Routes: 8
Total distance: 334km
Total elevation: 10,808m
Longest route: Everesting (239.6km/8,854m)
Availability: Monday - Friday

11. Supertri

This world came about as a result of the partnership between MyWhoosh and the Supertri E World Triathlon Championship. Only two routes are availab🃏le: a ride and a run. Designed exclusively for the Supertri ♒event, it offers seamless bike and run transitions with a dual-login system for triathlons.

Routes: 2
Total distance: 3km
Total elevation: 20m
Longest route: Ride (2km/20m)
Availability: Tuesday, Friday

12. Switzerland

This particular world only has one dedicated route, but what makes it special is that the 2024 UCI Road World Championships inspired it – rendered in accurate detail, riders can ri🎐de the same roads as the current UCI Road World Champion, Tadej Pogačar.

Routes: 1
Total distance: 26km
Total elevation: 446m
Longest route: Zurich (26km/466m)
Availability: Tuesday, Thursday

13. UCI

Built to offer a unique three-stage format for the 2024 UCI Cyclin🙈g eSports World Championships, the UCI worlds are all about strategy with a sprint (Stage 1), climb (Stage 2) and endurance (Stage 3) route designed to test riders to the max.

Routes: 3
Total distance: 14.6km
Total elevation: 278m
Longest route: Stage 3 (8.9km/203m)
Availability: Thursday, Sunday

 What do all the numbers mean? 

The in-game Heads-Up Display (HUD) is detailed and comprises handy metric readouts to keep 𝐆you well informed of what’s happening from a personal performance-monitoring perspective and those around you. All these numbers and infographics can confuse and intimidate the new user, so let’s go over what everything means.

To start, it’s worth looking at the top and moving down. The🍃 main graphic and most important element is your personal performance metrics, arra꧙nged centrally at the top of the screen. This graphic comprises elapsed time, heart rate, power and cadence, followed by speed and distance. When riding in groups or drafting an individual rider, the power readout measured in watts will change from white to green and back to white if you lose the draft.

The graphic on the left of the screen is the se♋gment leaderboard, which ranks riders based on their time through a specific segment. This graphic is only visible once you’ve passed through a segment; it will disappear after a few minu💝tes, but it’s fully functional and updates in real time.

On the top right is the route mini map, elevation profile and power zone chart colour-coded in grey (Z1), blue (Z2), green (Z3), yellow (Z4) and red (Z5). The map shows your location within the current route, and the profile provides insights into the upcoming elevation changes, allowing you to plan your energy expenditure carefully. This is followed by the rider list showin🅰g near𓆏by cyclists (including their w/kg and total distance) and the virtual shifting box. If you wish to hide any of these individual displays, merely tap on them – this is also the case if you want these metrics to become visible again.

The chat, microphone, emotes, and the sub menu, which allows you to change your in-game camera angle and completely hide the HUD, are on 🧸the bottom left of the screen.

The HUD in workout mode operates very similarly to Free Ride but has💙 more data screens and no rider list. The bar located under your power, heart rate, and cadence shows you how much you have left in the current workout block. The stats graphic on the top left represents the🃏 workout details, and the workout progress bar takes residence at the bottom of the screen.

Pro tips to maximise your MyWhoosh experience 

To ensure you nail every ride, workout andܫ race, we’ve compiled a list of pro tips to help you tackle anything that comes your way.

1. Calibrate your smart trainer
It goes without saying, but many riders, from beginners to elite, forget to calibrate their smart trainer and equipment. While the newer options, such as the Elite Justo 2, Wahoo Kickr v6 and Tacx Neo 3M, have built-in auto spindown functionality, older models require you to regularly perform a calibration or zero-offset to maintain accuracy across the board. We suggest calibrating your smart trainer every time you move it or change rooms – even if it’s got the auto spindown feature.

2. Invest in a powerful fan
The m🐻ost important part of indoor training is staying cool on the bike. Unlike outdoor riding, the stationary riding positio⛦n on the smart trainer means there’s a dearth of moving air, which interrupts and completely inhibits convective heat loss. It also negatively impacts performance and speeds up dehydration. To counter this, we’d suggest a normal electric fan with various modes or investing in a smart fan that uses your heart rate data and in-game speed to slow or speed up air circulation. These include the Elite Aria Interactive Fan and Wahoo Kickr Headwind.

3. Prepare your bottles, nutrition and towel the day before
Often overlooked, on-the-bike nutrition is as important indoors as🎃ꦉ it is outdoors. While indoor training is convenient, sometimes, when pressed for time, it’s easy to forget your bottle, gels and towel, forcing you to get off the bike mid-ride and ferret around like a headless chicken. It’s worth getting this all sorted the night before.

4. Protect your bike from sweat
When it comes to indoor training, sweat is the enemy. It can corrode the bolts and bearings in and around𝓰 your headset and ruin any alloy on your bike frame and handlebars. As a best practice, we suggest covering your handlebars with a towel and wiping your bike down after every indoor ride.

5. Remember to lube your chain
Like the outside world, chain lubrication reduces friction, improves performance anᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤🌄⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚd softens drivetrain noise. While there are specific chain lubes formulated for indoor use that require a new coating every 8-10 hours, a normal wax-based lube will do just fine.

For queries about network, data an✤d connection i𝐆ssues, visit . 

Back then, he was a WorldTour rider discovering gravel racing as part of the team’s Alt calendar, though that fourth-place finish was just the beginning. Now the WorldTour is a distant memory, but the calendar is fuller than ever, and the EF Education-Easypost rider is returning to the familiar territory in the Flint Hills as the 2024 Unbound 200 vꦫictor. Still, just like in 2019, this year a new adve♎nture and a new experience await as he takes on the Unbound XL.

There will, of course, be no flying under the radar for Morton as he steps into the 350-mile (563km) event. However, it's the Unbound 200 where the attention, competition and intensive m🐬edia focus are at their height, building even more every year as the discipline and its centrepiece event flourish. The Australian, who is now based in California, was up until this year right in the middle of that storm, given he was a rider with a record and winning ambitions.

“I guess, the increasing importance of this race among📖st the elite category, sort of all over the world, definitely increases the𒆙 stress around it. For a lot of the elite riders it can be a make-or-break kind of weekend,” said Morton.

“I 🐻think for everyone, it's different. A lot of people thrive in that sort of environment – for me, I find that challenging, in a wa🦹y, and it’s a tough one because the thing I do love about these events is the engagement we have with people. And then it definitely feels like, for me sometimes coming to this race I’m sort of trying to hide out, do my own thing.”

Do🐲ing his own thing thi💜s year, however, has meant eschewing the opportunity to step up as defending champion in the closely-watched 200, which this year will also have a livestream, and instead set off on Friday at 3pm and spend around 20 hours riding the XL.

“Approaching it this time around with a fresh challenge, something that you know, I don't have the experience in, it's nice. I do like that feeling of the unknown … it's exciting,” Morton told Cyclingnews via a call, stopping roadside to fiℱt in an interview. 

“Just being out on the bik🍎e today all day, riding here, and sort of simplifying it all back to what it is – just a pretty cool off-road race around Flint Hills on a beauti🦄ful course. For me, once you are here and you remember what it is that's special about the race – drown out the hype and get off the social media and all the hoopla around it – it is still just a beautiful very special event, which is what made it so popular to begin with.”

Morton, who has seen so many gravel events around the world, has come from 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:The Traka in Spain, which didn’t run to plan thanks to a busted wheel, and also a speedy dash along the 300-kilometre Bergslagsleden mount♔ai🐓n bike route in Sw🦄eden. That means✨ there wasn’t a lot of time for Unbound preparation.

“There was definitely a shorter runway, more or less 10 days at home to prepare, and there was a lot going into it – a new bike, a different setup and also with the longer distance, the preparation is a little different along with the equipment. There was lots to cram into a short period of time … and I also had two acres of whipper snipping to do,” laughed Morton as he 🅘recounted his efforts to𒐪 tackle the long grass when he finally managed to get back to his Californian base.

“It made for a big week, but in the end the nice thing about the long distances is that the way in which you prepare is the sort of riding I really like to do. It’s not a chore. I’m happy if I can just switch off and ride my bike for eight hours.”

Particularly, at a stage when there isn’t much time for switching off, as while 2024 may have delivered an endurance effort that would seemingly make all that followed a piece of cake – a 14,200km, 30 day, 9 hours and 59 minute dash around Australia – Morton has found the packed calendar which is seeing him leaping from continent to continent is another kind of endurance e𝔍ffort, one that takes a mental toll given the constant shifts in focus.

Never say never

In this year of trying plenty of🧜 new things, it is also perhaps fitting that Morton is adding a different twist to his Unbound experience, although it may have been a different scenario if he hadn’t already tamed the 200 in 2024.

“If I’m in the right mi𒁏ndset, I definitely still thrive in that,” said Morton of the pressure cooker of the main event. “It ꦐwas just knowing that I’ve had that experience I’d chased here last year and to come back here, replicating that was the maximum I could do.”

The opportunity to com🍌e and still enjoy the event but do something differentಞ had far more appeal.

“But I wouldn’t say I would never do the 200 again but its just wh🔯ere I’m at now,” said Morton. “Physically I feel like I’m in basically the same spot I was in last year but just the motivation wasn’t right to chase it.”

Given his record, even though it is a debut at the event for Morton, he will still be entering the🅺 XL with a favourite tag. However when asked what he w𓂃anted to walk away from Kansas with this year, it wasn’t the end of the race he was focused on, but the journey along the way.

“I want to come out of the race with a new exper﷽ience and one where I'm just enjoying what🌠 it is to be here," said Morton. "You know, not looking at what the finish line can bring me and really try and just soak it all in and not be caught up in this hype bubble, but just appreciate the reality of it

“It's very cool when💃 you zoom out and you realise, 'wow', this is, I guess the biggest gravel race in the world taking place in Emporia, people coming all over the world to be here. It's special.”

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But with Unbound Gravel set to light up our social media feeds over the coming week, we also wanted to run some tests on carrying a hydration pack to see whether there were a🐟ny gains to be found. 

In last year's race, as Lachlan Morton stormed to Unbound 🐓200 Men's victory, he was wearing an adapted Rapha skinsuit that housed the hydration bladder on the inside. British aero clothing brand Rule 28 has also produced a similar product - its Gravel Suit - which has a sleeve across the back to house a bladder. Castelli's Unlimited jersey offers a similar solution in jersey form too. 

Interestingly, USWE, the Swedish brand that m♐akes a host of race-focussed hydration packs, claꦐims that its Race 2.0 pack actually makes you more aerodynamic than not wearing one at all. 

All that sounded like some tes🐬ting was needed, and with an hour of wind tunnel time spare during our recent testing day, we put some ideas to the test. 

Here are the questions we wanted to answer: 

• Are you more aerodynamic with a hydration pack?
• How does Rule 28's Gravel Suit compare to a normal skinsuit without a hydration pack?
• How does it compare with the hydration pack?
• My cheap version of Lachlan's trick (which I used at Gravel Nationals last year and this year's Gralloch): Does wearing a hydration pack beneath your skinsuit make you faster?
• And finally, how much can you save by stuffing a bottle down your jersey? (For this, we used Rule 28's Cargo base layer to hold it in position!)

And i🍸mportantly, by way of a prelude, none of this article is🍷 sponsored or funded by any of the brands tested. We simply asked Rule 28 and Kalas to borrow their kit, and the Camelbak hydration pack used for testing is my own.

The test protocols

To find out, we headed the wind tunnel at Silverstone Sports Engineering Hub, the facilitator of most of the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Cyclingnews Labs group tests, including our test of 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:11 WorldTour level superbikes, 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:18 high end road wheels, and 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:two-dozen aero helmets. 

For each﷽ test, the wind speed was set at 40km/h (24.85mph) and the wheels set t🍰o spin at a matching speed. The rider on the bike was me (Josh 👋), and my cadence was held at a constant 90rpm. 

We were testing to find the CdA (Coefficient of Drag x Area), and this was captured at five different yaw angles: -10, -5, 0, +5 and +10 degrees. This is the angle at which the wind hits the rider, and although we could have stopped at zero – a direct headwind – since most people are largely symmetrical, we opted to test both sides to be more c🔥onfident in the🅷 data we were seeing. 

Each capture – the period of time during which CdA readings are measured by the wind tunnel software – was held for 30 seconds, and the resulting reading is given as an average over that 30-second period. Engineers from SSEH keep an eye on the live CdA reading to spot any unexpected fluctuations (most often a result of the rider shifting 💙position suddenly) and if any were spotted, we'd repeat the test. Luckily there were none. 

Using the CdA figures, we can then🌠 calculate the power it would take to pedal at a 🎶given speed. 

When doing this, I have w🗹eighted the CdA as set out in the research by Barry, 2018. This essentially increases the importance of the lower yaw angles in line with the frequency distribution found in the real world. You spend more time at 0🍨° and 5° yaw than you do at 10° or more, so it's widely accepted as fair to weight accordingly. 

Using the weighted average, I have then calculated using the following equation, where Air Density is set at 1.2 kg/m3 an🐟d Velocity is 11.1111 m/s (40km/h).

The standardisations

For every test, we kept everything the same apart from the single item of clothing being tested. That extends to the bike; we used a Cube Nuroad C62 SLT that was already in the wind tunnel for our earlier 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:test on road tyre widths. It also extends to the testing protocols, the rider, helmet worn, shoes worn, 💦hand position on the handlebars, pedalling cadence and more. 

The wind tunnel was tared pr⭕io🔯r to each test too, which is essentially the same as zeroing your kitchen scales. 

The caveats

As ever, Cyclingnews doesn't claim that this is the final word on the aerodynamic performance of the items tested. Particularly with clothing, each item will undoubtedly perform differently depending on who is wearing it. However, as a means to share the potential available savings between two items or two setups in a controllꦯed test, we think the results are valuable, and iꦰnteresting if nothing else. 

Our stastical error margin for these tests is +/- 2.55 watts (at 40km/h), or a CdA of +/-0.0032 M2. This was calculated using the blue Kalas 'Team Tor' Sonic Suit (my old team kit) at the beginning and end of the day, as part of a wider test around how many watts you can save by investing in your clothing. That test found aꦗs many watts as a $14ꦯk superbike for 3% of the price.

The results

Are you more aerodynamic with a hydration pack? 

There's a simple𓆉 answer here, and it is… no. At least not with this one!

Without the hydra🦂tion pack, our CdA data equates to a r⭕equired power of 322.58 watts. That figure rises by almost seven watts when you add the pack. 

Inputting that same CdA and extrapolati⭕ng over a 200-mile Unbound course, the hydration pack would be setting me back 3 minutes and 43 seconds.

Even when you take into account our error margin, the difference is at the very least 1.6 watts, but potentially as many as 12.15 watts.ꦬ 

If it were me, I'd probably still be wearing one so I could carry the🐠 🐬extra fluid, but given the available savings on the table, I'd certainly be looking at how long it'd take me to fill bottles at aid stations to see if I could do that with a net time saving.

Can you offset those losses by wearing it beneath your skinsuit make you faster?

Assuming you've decided you can't do without a hydration pack, then you can mitigate your losses a little bit with my lo-fi haꦆck of simply wearing it inside your skinsuit. 

Of course, if you're actually doing Unbound and your fuelling strategy means you're going to need to swap or refill your hydration pack mid race, you'll probably spend longer freeing it from itsꦰ sweaty prison than you're likely to save on the road, but if you're planning to get round on one hydration pack, refilling bottles instead, then there are savings to be had. 

For the sheer fun of doing the maths, when extrapolating it out to the 200 mile course and assuming an average output of𝓡 250 watts, it's a potential saving of 57 seconds. Not much, I'll admit, but not bad for free. 

If you're doing a shorter race like the Traka 100 or the Gralloch, where two litres of fluid will see you throu🧸gh the entire race, this is a no brainer in my opinion. The differences here are smaller than above, to the point that they're within our error margin, but with as many as four watts on the table at 40km/h, it's enough to consider. 

My extra tip for anyone wearing a hydration pack on a warm daꦉy is to underfill it with water (ensuring you don't reduce you🍨r carbohydrate mix), refrigerate it overnight, then dump a load of ice into the pack before the race. This will help to keep your core temperate down during the first part of the race, potentially giving you a few extra free watts. 

How does Rule 28's Gravel Suit fare in comparison?

British brand Rule 28 makes a gravel-specific skinsuit with a slee♍ve across the back for a hydration pack bladder. This reduces the bulk of carrying the pack itself, and since there aren't any straps across your shoulders, 🌳looks like it'll help smoothe airflow across your leading edge more effectively. 

For this part of the test, we tested it first without the hydration bladder fitted, then again with it in place. This allowed us to compare how the skinsuit itself compar🎀es to our baseline Kalas suit, how they both compare with the respecti꧅ve hydration solutions fitted, and how aerodynamics are affected with the bladder in the rear sleeve. 

Again, the differences are w♏ithin o🦩ur error margin, but the baseline skinsuit without a hydration pack came out fastest of the lot, with a power requirement of 322.58 watts. 

The Rule 28 suit 🍸without a hydration pack is the next fastest at 325.53 watts. That&apoಞs;s a 2.95-watt penalty, although with our error margin accounted for, that could flip the other way. 

The slowest solution of all was the hydration pack worn over the Kalas skinsuit. This is quite understandable, given it leaves the shoulder straps on show to catch the win🍃d. 

Most interestingly, while adding a hydration pack costs in the region of 7 watts with the Sonic suit, or 5 watts if you follow my lo-fi hack, adding the bladder to the Rule 28 suit comes at a penalty of ౠjust 2.03 watts. This presumably is a result of the hose being draped over the rider's shoulder and into tꦚhe wind. 

Finally: Free watts simply by stuffing a bottle down the front of your jersey?

For this, as mentioned⭕ above, we used Rule 28's Cargo base layer to hold the bottle securely, but the saꦫme can be achieved without. For clarity, to help readers understand the size of the bottle, I used an Elite Fly lightweight bottle, the 550ml one rather than the larger 750ml option.

Again, the savings are small enough to be within our error margin, but simply stuffing a bottle down the front of my jersey resulted in a saving of 2.73 watts at 40km/h. Account♎ing our error margin that saving could grow to as much as 7.99 watts, but it's important to consider it could also flip the other way to become a net loss of 2.54 watts. 

That wattage saving reduces to a more modest 1.15 watts at more gravel appropriate s🐼peeds of 30km/h, but over a long course like Unbound 200, those small savings add up. 

Extrapolating that out to the Unbound course and assuming an av♌erage power of 250 watts, that's a saving of 1 minute 29 seconds, and perhaps even higher. 

However, a very big caveat to say it's important to consider real world application of doing this. Firstly, it's ridiculously uncomfortable. After this test showed a potential saving, I tried it on a long training ride𝓰 and quickly wrote it off as a raceday option due to the plastic di🀅gging into my chest. 

Secondly, if you can get over the discomfort, I wouldn't recommend using anything as solid as the bottle I used, and it's especially important not to put anything sharp inside. 🍬I wouldn't want to crash with that hard plastic cap pressing against my ⭕sternum, nor with a multitool stored inside. 

Instead, I'd choose to stuff something like a rain jacket or gloves in the same position for a softer, more comfortable 𝓀aero hack.  

Conclusions

If we add together the two 'free' tricks that don't directly affect your raceday nutrition strategy; wearingꦇ your hydration pack inside your skinsuit and stuffing something down the front of your jersey, there's just shy of two and a half minutes on the table here – 2:26 – for absolutely no cost. 

Admittedly, the differences are small, but the available time savings shown here are evidence of the importance of aerodymamics at all speeds, n💧ot only at WorldTour level, especially in an event as long as Unbound. 

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Would Olympic road race champion 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Kristen Faulkner (EF Education-Oatly) 𒁏be able to defend her elite women's road race title or even take t🅰he gold in the individual time trial? Who would be the new elite men's road race winner, with Sean Quinn (EF Education-EasyPost) not able to compete due to knee surgery? And who would be the rising stars in the junior 17-18 and U23 divisions?

From the opening individual time trials, the six-corner evenin♕g criteriums and then the hilly road courses, riders displayed bold moves and relentless teamwork to grab medals and the 18 stars and stripes jerseys on offer.

The under-23 women put on some serious shows last week as they had dedicated contests for the first time in the criterium and road races events. Cassidy Hickey (CCB p/b Levine Law Group) won her first U23 titl🔥e in the criteriuﷺm Thursday night, using an attack just 10 minutes into the 50-minute c🌺ontest and her team controlling the field to hold the gap. 

Two days later on Saturday Ella S☂abo held off Hickey to win the U23 road race title, this time Virginia's Blue Ridge TWENT🧸Y28 🎃doing the work to hold off challengers.

"Crossing that line fi𓆉rst—it was surreal. My first national title. My first win in almost two years. I almost couldn’t believe it. The win 🔥was anything but solo," Sabo said about her victory in the women's first dedicated U23 road race.

It was an opportunity for riders from smaller teams to match up against riders on WorldTour squads, too. In the elite women's time trial, for instance, Emily Ehrlich of Virginia's Blue Ridge TWENTY28 won the gold going 27 seconds faster than Women's WorldTour rider Faulkner. And while F🔥aulkner struck back to retain the road race title ahead of Lauren Stephensꦿ (Aegis Cycling Foundation), it was 21-year-old Katherine Sark♛isov (CCB p/b Levine Law Group) who was in the thick of the action for the bronze.

And on the men's side, 22-year-old Gavin Hlady (EF Education-Aevolo) put on shows in the road races, winning the men's U23 crown then taking the bronze in the elite men's contest on Memorial Day behind 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:winner Quinn Simmons (Lidl-Trek).

Check out some of the highligh🌱ts of thꦬe criterium and road races from USPRO, as seen through the lens of SnowyMountain Photography.

Fast forward 24 hours, however, and Del Toro's performance on stage 17 showed that it's not quite as simple as that. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Coming back to win in Bormio certainly hasn't proven that he's going to win the race, as he do🧸es keep showing points of weaꦍkness in the longer climbs. But he's definitely shown that anyone who wrote him off after stage 16 was wrong. 

In fact, the variety of performances on show on Wednesday have demonstrated th♊at this Giro d'Italia is still extremely tight, with only two mountain stages to go. We keep thinking it's over – Del Toro is cracking and it's done, or Richard Carapaz 🉐is riding away to victory and it's done - but the race keeps ojn showing that it is very much not over.

On stage 17, we learnt a great deal about the protagonists in the GC fight, but whilst we might know more about them now, that doesn't necessarily mean we know who's going to win. Del Toro called the top four the main contenders to w𒅌in this Giro, all sitting within two minutes of the lead, and any🍬 one of them could still win, or still lose.

Let's start with Del Toro. He won his first Grand Tour stage, adding some time to his pink jersey lead, and s♔howing that mentally, he is a fighter. He wasn't going to be cowed or scared by one somewhat bad day on Tuesday. 

However, we also saw again that he really does have weaknesses in the long climbs and high mountains. UAE have the strongest mountain train in this race, by a fair margin, but when Del Toro's older, more experienced Grand Tour rivals kick aaway in the hard parts, he can't always follow.

So far, he's always been able to fight back to either 🔥get back on the group or at least save his pink jersey. But it's clear that, with three big climbs on stage 19 and the Colle delle🔯 Finestre on stage 20 still to come, the Mexican is vulnerable.

After launching what turned out to be the winning attack on stage 17, Richard Carapaz has moved up to second overall, and to many, he is now the favourite tꦜo win this Giro. It's easy to see why: the Ecuadorian rider excels in the long climbs, but also he has no hesitation to attack, with a signature stinging acceleration that no one except Del Toro has been able to follow so far.

However, Carapaz&𓆉apos;s attacking nature could also be his own vulnerability. It's not happene🧸d yet, but a big move can also be a big risk, and when he's brought back by more steady riders – as he was on the Mortirolo – he could find he's used energy too early. His aggressivity is great, but needs to be used carefully against the potentially more stifling tactics of UAE's mountain troops.

Simon Yates (Visma-Lease a Bike) lost a spot on GC on stage 17, unable to follow the move from Carapa🌜z and Del Toro in the finale, but is looking strong on the climbs. However, he is missing the punchy acceleration to follow riders like Carapaz and Del Toro, so if they can get a jump on him in the lon꧋g climbs, he could be defeated in his preferred territory.

There's also a growing sense that the p😼ressure and seriousness of his position is getting to Yates. He's never been much of a talker, but the Brit is increasingly swerving interviews and the like. This could be a good way of not letting anyone know what's going on in his head, including his rivals, or it could be a sign of some nervousness.

And finally there's Derek Gee. The Canadian dark horse has hardly put his nose 💯in the wind this whole race, but could that be his key to success? Like Yates, Gee is a steadier climber, so it's not surprising that he didn't follow the attacks in the finale on Wednesday. But it also means he's looking better than at least Del Toro for the long, high climbs to come. 

The Canadian knows full well that he doesn't have the team to support him that other favourites too. Howeve,r he's been racing with that in mind, saving energy and riding into form after a tough start to the race. He'll be hoping that he's conserved enoughꦿ to really show his strength in the tough mountains, and his 1:57 deficit could absolutely turn into a podium finish or even race win. 

What happens next?

So, what's the conclusion? Well, therein lies the problem – it's so hard to conclude anything 𝔍from these first two mountain stages of t🌸he final week. The top four riders in this race are all so different, and so well-matched in many ways. All four have great strengths, and they all have weaknesses too, and the time to either profit off your strengths, or exploit another's weaknesses, is dwindling.

Stage 19 has the potential to be decisive, but so did stage 16, and stage 1🅰7, so it's very tricky to say when this race will finally reveal its winner. It looks increasingly likely that it could come down to stage 20 and the Colle delle Finestre, where there's really nowhere to hide, and very little that a good team or a stinging punch can actually do. Saturday🐓 will be an all-out fight to see who wins and who loses. 

For some analysts, it might be frustrating to find a race so hard to predict, or to be proved wrong so quickly, but these delicate🔯 balances and fine balances are what make racing great, and why we could be in for a truly fascinating end to this 🍸Giro. No one can be written off, and no winner can be declared until Rome

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more168澳洲5最新开奖结果:.

Carapaz's Climbing Masterclass

The big mover of the day, 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost), bluffing throughout Stage 16 was perfect. His attack with 7km to go was carefully chosen. Allowing 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Simon Yates (Visma–Lease a Bike) to provoke the initial selection that pulled Isaac🤪 del Toro (UAE Team Emirates) and himself out of the favourites gro📖up was tactically brilliant.

Then, when the Visma leader finally sat down after a kilometre of sustained effort, the Ecuadorian put in an attack of such ferocity that nobody even thought of goi🐽ng with him. What followed in those next five minutes threw the overall race i♍nto disarray and has changed the GC completely.

Over roughly two kilometres, we saw a demonstration of what climbers do best: a long period of on-the-limit riding, constantly in and out of the saddle to maintain speed. This is typical of South American riders in the past. Nowadays, there's a lot of staying in a power zone, not going over a cert✤ain number, but there was no sign of that from the 2019 Giro winner.

Only when he got into the last 10 minutes of the climb did he 🌞have to drop to a more stable effort, the fatigue from that long section in his red zone finally making him pay. Crucially, the choice of pace was his and not imposed by others. Recovery ought not to be too much of a concern for the coming days. Taking nearly a minute from his direct rivals was an opportunity he seized.

Yates's Tactical Error

Simon Yates messed up when he let Derek Gee (Israel-Premier Tech) ride off while he worried about the Maglia Rosa being stuck to his wheel. Choosing not to follow the Israel Prem༒ier Tech rider meant dropping del Toro would be harder♈. He was clearly strong in the first half of San Valentino; his acceleration on one of the steepest sections showed that.

However, by accelerating so early, he had shown hi🍌s hand too so༒on. The others would then let him do most of the work if they could. His only chance of getting some help was to have a steadier rider with him.

When he let Gee ride away in an effort to force del ♉Toౠro to come past, that opportunity was gone. He slowed too much for too long, and the race went up the road without him. Once the second of his attacks saw the race leader drop, Yates was tired.

This explains why 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Michael Storer (Tudor Pro Cycling Team) was able to stay with him. The British rider doesn’t have the same ferocity of accelerations as Carapaz and is moಞre suited to a sustained effort, which usually burns off other riders. But in the last 4km, he was climbing at the same rate as his rivals ahead.

Yates was good, though he couldn’t have matched Carapaz when he went by. Concentrating on the race leader instead of realising Derek Gee would always ride a steady pace cost him a lot of energy and time. His climbing legs are there; he rode most of the last climb on the b꧃ig ring. Tactically, it wasn't his best rid🎀e.

Del Toro's Harsh Lesson

For Isaac del Toro, it was an introduction to a 200km mountain stage among some of the best GC riders. The bad weather for the opening part of the💝 day played a role in his pe൩rformance. He's 21 and doesn’t have the same resistance as Yates and Carapaz yet.

The numerous grim, unrelenting, and nasty race days give an inner strength he will eventually develop. Forღ the moment, he’s like a young racehorse: eager, ready, and not quite sure of his place in the hierarchy. On the last climb, he found out that things can go from f🔯ine to trouble quickly.

Not having 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Juan Ayuso (UAE Team Emirates) nearby put all the pressure on him, and at first, he seemed okay. He didn’t panic when Carapaz attacked and based his race on Simon Yates, who he thought would be his biggest rival🌠.

The problem with that idea is that the Visma GC man rides at a high pace for a long time. If you follow th꧟at speed and it’s just beyond your limit, eventually you have to let the wheel go. Del Toro didn’t make that decision and cracked beca🐼use of it.

With more experience, he would have known to pace himself better. But he’s young, and today's 𒊎climbing🍬 lesson was quite harsh. He ran out of energy, and it's telling that all the riders who dropped before him came back and rode past.

He ཧfinished very, very tired. We'll now see what his recovery is like after such a bi🗹g day. All the previous attacks, accelerations, and efforts came back to bite him today. It wasn’t a complete disaster like teammate and co-leader Juan Ayuso, as he’s still in Pink, but the sharks are circling, and they sense blood.

Gee and Bernal: A surprising showing

De💎rek Gee has been consistently present but not spectacular, staying out of the GC spotlight. This approach might not have been entirely a choice, but the mountains have shown he's climbing as well as ever. He's not Richard Carapaz or Simon Yates.

The Canadian sticks to his limits and doesn’t immediately react to the big attacks from the punchy climbers. On long ascents, that works very well for h🤪im. On San Valentino, he paced it perfectly, closing the gap to Carapaz to just 13 seconds at 🀅the line.

He was suffering inside the last kilometre, but he ꦡhadn’t endured the same number of accelerations as the others. For most of the climb, he got to choose when he was at his maximum, and the result was better than he pr💃obably expected.

When Yates and del Toro let him ride away, he wouldn’t have ꦬbelieved his luck. He was another rider to capitalise on the opportu♎nity. He’s got to be looking forward to the coming days and is right back in the podium places battle.

168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Egan Bernal (INEOS Grenadiers) had a slightly disappointing day. Falling off early wouldn’t have helped, but he dug deep to climb into the top six. For a moment, it looked precarious. On the penultimate mountain, he was in trouble, not as bad as fellow I⛎neos teammate Thymen Arensman (INEOS Grenadiers), but not comfortable.

The Colombian’s performance on San Valentino showed his current level: lacking a little of the top-end power he once enjoyed. However, he has to be pleased with his resistance to fatigue. Only five riders were faster than him on𝐆 the last climb🐷, so he is far from broken.

He might appear far off the podium, but st൩ranger things have happened at the Giro and probably will before the end. In Egan Bernal and Ineos’s favour, their tactics and choices have got🍷ten better and better.

Italian Hopes

We know Michael Storer can be brilliant during a Grand Tour, but he’s had a few seasons of doubts. Since hi💎s Paris-Nice and Tour of the Alps wins this year, his confidence has returned, and he’s willing to test himself.

The attack he made with Max Poole (Team DSM-Firmenich PostNL) on the penultimate climb was well-timed and might have worked ༺out better if he had been given more leeway. UAE closing them down was probably more about keeping the pace steady for del Toro and discouraging others from gaining an advantage before the big GC sort out at San Valentino.

However, Sto☂rer is now in a similar position to Egan Bernal, around three minutes off the lead. With him climbing better, he has to be looking at the podium and thinking it’s achievable. Being able to work with Simon Yates indica𝔉tes he is a genuine contender.

He has the added bonus of not being in the spotlight. His and Tudor’🎉s race is probably goꦐing to be tied to what Bernal and Ineos do. They'll likely put a few men in the break and hope they can assist later if their leader comes forward.

To wrap up, the Italians. Lorenzo Fort🎉unato (Astana Qazaqstan Team) and Astana have earned the mountains classification; Stage 16 for them couldn’t have wಞorked out better. However, as far as the overall is concerned, look past Damiano Caruso (Bahrain Victorious) and Antonio Tiberi (Bahrain Victorious).

The Bahrain duo are s💧urviving and being dictated to when 💜the pressure ramps up. I can see them racing to protect their top ten place from now on. The real interest for the tifosi is Giulio Pellizzari (VF Group–Bardiani CSF–Faizanè).

Now that Roglic is out, the Red Bull rider is freed up to see what he is capable of. His attack at the bottom of San Valentino was a strong move. Rafal Majka (UAE Team Emirates) was setting the pace after 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Wout van Aert (Visma–Lease a Bike) had hurt everyone with the aim of launching Sim🌠on Yates, but over 11km remained, and it seemed to be a💃 moment to recover.

Pellizzari decided otherwise, and only Carapaz saw him again. Pedalling smoothly and looking to be in control of his effort the whole time, even the arrival of the EF rider didn’t faze him. If he had been tired, Carapaz would have dropped him, but it🦄 was Pellizzari who was 15 seconds ahead at the finish.

The 2019 Giro winner made the most spectacular attack, but the Italian was the one who rode the last climb the fastest, which is impressive. It's a warning to the others that he wil🧜l be one to watch during the final week.

Fast forward to now, however, and the protagonists of this Giro are names that we ✱were told were outsiders or top 10 fodder when we headed to Albania – or, in Isaac del Toro's cas🌟e, not even part of the conversation.

After stage 16, 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Del Toro leads the g🐷eneral classifica⛦tion, and 💖after a week of tug-of-war with Ayuso, he's now undisputed leader at UAE Team Emirates-XRG. They're going to ride for him, and he very much could win this Giro. A rider who no one touted 🍃to even make the top 10 a few short weeks ago.

Losing a huge chunk of time, 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Ayuso is now definitively out o𒁏f the GC figh🐻t. And those names we expected to be his rivals? 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Roglič abandoned on Tuesday after already conceding that his GC fight was over, and Tiberi is now four minutes down after a difficult day. Not out necessarilyဣ, but hardly in the driving seat.

As for those riders we thought would be just fighting for the top five or top 10, well, they&apo🦹s;re the ones making this race, looking the strongest, and ultimately fighting for pink.

Behind Del Toro, Simon Yates (Visma-Lease a Bike) is in second, looking the best he has for a long time, then it's Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) ahead of Derek Gee (Israel-Pre🥀m🐭ier Tech), whilst on stage 16, Michael Storer (Tudor Pro Cycling) looks as strong as any GC contender.

For some, the loss of the likes of Roglič and Ayuso from the GC fight might be a negative – it would have been good to see two riders of their stature go head to head, and maybe no one dreams of a Derek Gee vs Michael Storer showdow🍌n, but why not? Surely the racing is more exciting than the names on the results, and really, the way this race is panning out is more exciting and less predictable than we ever could have hoped.

Think back to this stage in last year's Giro d'Italia. Tadej Pogačar had just taken his fifth stage win of the race, and he was already over seven minutes ahead of his nearest rival. The race was over, completely over. A few more shuffles around the top 10 would come, but ultimately, the final week was just an exercise in confirming what we'd already known pre-race. There were good momen🦩ts, but it was not a thriller.

This year, Del Toro has been🍷 in pink for eight stages, but it's very clear that his grip on it is very much open to attack, sitting 🍌just 26 seconds ahead of Yates in second, and 31 ahead of Carapaz in third.

On Tuesday, his rivals were strong enough and motivated enough to attack,🍰 and Del Toro was strong enough to battle to the line with enough time to just hold onto his pink jersey. This is exactly what we want racing to be – riders attacking, not waiting, and others fighting back, not just capitulating.

On paper, the GC order may not have changed too dramatically on stage 16, but the gaps have all narrowed, and ultimately, there's been a power shift. Roglič and Ayuso ar💫e gone, Gee and Storer have stepped up, and the top four are looking like the riders who are going to contest the win, though plenty of the top 10 could still be up there to🦹o.

'Best of the rest' shining on the Grand Tour stage

What's even more exciting than having several riders still in contention for the win, though, is the kind of riders they are. Yates and Carapaz are former Grand Tour winners, yes, but they didn't start this race as huge favourites, nor do they have teams who can control like UAE or Red Bull may have. Along with Gee and the ascendant S🙈torer, the protagonists in this race and riders who have been underdogs so far, and that makes for scrappier, heartier riding. Real racing.

Even Del Toro is an underdog of sorts▨. Of course, he is in pink and flanked by an extremely strong UAE team, but he's spent a week trying to fight for his place as a leader, something he didn't ever expect, and the Mexican has shown time and time again he has that attacking, exciting spirit when it comes to racing. There's no one in the top five who is just going to suffocate this race, or sit back and pace instead of chasing down attacks, and that's refreshing.

Stage 16 has shaken up the GC, but the most exciting thing is that there's still so much to come this week. There's another mountain stage on Wednesday, and then two more on Frid😼ay an☂d Saturday, concluding with a daunting Colle delle Finestre stage that is sure to decide this Giro.

Unlike the final weeꦛk of last yea🍰r's Giro, where the result was a foregone conclusion, stage 16 has shown us that even our best pre-race predictions can soon mean nothing. Moreover, it's shown that the riders are keen to attack and to race, and that if they do, they will be rewarded.

In some Grand Tours in the last few years, riders have been scared to risk what t🐷hey already have, preferring to ride to Rome or Paris conservatively instead of trying to make a move that could see them fall down the rankings instead of climb. But here, so many riders have so much more to gain than to lose, and unlike the big riders who might feel unmotivated about a podium finish, these underdogs are going to give it all they've got to gain as much as they can.

In an era that&apos𝐆;s been defined by impressive but nonetheless predictable pe🉐rformances, this Giro is giving the 'best of the rest' time to shine, and they might just provide the most exciting racing for a long time.

While it’s quite the superlative, it’s probably not far off the truth. Italy is one darn beautiful country, with its varying landscapes, and the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Giro d'Italia is one damn hard race.

The last week at the race has been an interesting one, without a ton of crazy action to write꧋ home about, but even lacking a “Queen stage,” there was no lack of intensity. I’ve heard a bit of discussion on the course design, with this Giro’s heavily weighted final week leaving all of the suspense for the last few days, it’s tough to say what design is "better."

It’s also sometimes hard to be objective when you are in the race, as I can tell you, the most exciting races to watch on TV are not always tඣhe most enjoyable to races to ride… unless you have ꧅the legs of a certain Tadej Pogacar. 

But so far, I’d say this Giro is somewhere in between - int🔯ense every day, without a deat🐼h march of a stage where the whole peloton finishes on their hands and knees. I’m sure those days are yet to come this next week. 

The age of the attack

One thing I am certain of is that the style of “modern cycling” as we like to call it, is ever-changing. Gone are the days of a slowly increasinꦇg tempo over the day, before a full gas final climb to the finish. No, now, we never know where or when we will go to our maximum. 

Where it used to rarely happen before the last 20km, now it could be 50, 80, 120km from the line. Thi🔯s week, it seems that the old adage of saving, saving, saving in a Grand Tour seemed to b🉐e thrown out the window, with GC riders attacking on all types of stages, and the classification changing the most on days we least expect it! 

One such stage was two days ago in Nova Gorica in Slovenia. We seemed set for a challenging sprint finish, with a couple ofဣ short climbs before the technical🌊 finishing circuit and then a kicker to sap the legs each lap before the line. 

We were looking fo🎉r a good result for our sprinter, Maikel Zijlaard, and we made it over the hills in good position, before entering the slippery circuit. One moment to the next, when we changed from pavement to small cobbles, the entire Lidl-Trek team went down. 

They also happened to crash on the narrowest paﷺrt of the circuit, making it very difficult to get through. I was lucky enough to be able to brake and dismount my bike, but as I passed through, I couldn’t help but get distracted by the carnage. I could see Giulio Ciccone crawling from the middle of the road to the sidewalk, grimacing in pain, trying to get out of the way of the rest of the riders. The image stayed with me, the picture of his agony burned into my brain. It’s kind of crazy when you think about it, you see some of your comrades from the peloton lying on the ground, sometimes i🎐n critical condition, and we just have to keep fighting. Imagine if you did that to your coworker?

My slight distraction meant I ended up in the group just behind 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Michael Storer (our GC rider), and seeing as I happened to be with a few riders ahead of him on the GC, I couldn’t take a pull. But what’s crazy to see is the group’s appetite for risk change from one corner to the next - after that crash, we went through each corner on the circuit as if we were riding unicycles on ice… It’s quite the sight. It’s something that always makes me laugh, as if you corner well in the dry, the technique shouldn’t change much in the wet. But I get the impression that as soon as the road glistens with raindrops, half of the peloton seems to believe that it’s their shoulders that turn the bike! It has happened to me before as well, but I’m not sure at what point we feel the need to turn into rollingꦛ Frankensteins because of wet roads. 

T𓃲o tell you the truth, I’ve even been 🥀known to do the same thing when driving my car as soon as the rain starts to fall…

The athlete's diet

Looking towards the coming stages, 𝓡we have some huge mountains on the horizon. With the changing terrain, going from flatter stages and more rolling hills to the pure climbs, another thing we change is our diet. 

At the beginning of the race, we opt for a more normal type of diet, with salad, veggies, or fruit smoothies to accompany our usual meals of pasta, rice, and oatmeal. A generally “healthy” diet, I thi꧋nk it could be considered. High in carbs, reasonably high in protein, relatively low in fat. But as we get closer to the mountains, this begins to change. 

First, we get rid of the salad, the raw veggies, or maybe the pieces of fruit you might have as a snack. Next goes the cooked vegetables, anythin𒈔g that could slow digestion or add a bit of added bulk to the gut. Then it’s the porridge, as it is also quite high in fibre. And at the end, there’s not much left to eat. Just colourless, soulless fuel. White rice. White chicken. White fish. Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes, Coco Pops. 

The only bit of colour on the menu might be the juice we drink to reach our carb quota in the morning. It c༺an be grim, but it works. 

The low fibre, or low bulk diet, is something that has become rather ubiquitous in professional cycling over the last number of years, as you can drop “unnecessary” weight before the critical mountain days. As a lover of food, of salads, of all things veggies and fruit, it’s a sad existence, but this 🦩endurance athlete’s version of a little kid’s diet works. You can lose around a kilogram in just a few days.

But for now, since I can’t enjoy my food all that much, it’s time to enjoy the other little things on the last moments of my rest day. This time, we got quite lucky to be at a spa hotel and resort. I took advantage of the thermal baths with a brief dip in the afternoon, although I was the only rider on the team to do so! I figure if this is where the geꦉneral public comes for some rest and relaxation, why not me too? It’s gotta be good for the muscles. The day was just what ꦇI needed to be ready and raring to go. 

I think it’s safe to say that the next week will be one of the biggest of most of our lives. I have a feel💃ing the race will live up to the a📖nnouncer’s phrase this week, with lots of suffering, but also lots of scenery. So then, I’m guessing, it will be great to watch.

He's joined by Turner, who's riding his fourth Grand Tour, and has been telling his younger compatriot all race to eat and to sleep. ღThe Welshman doesn't listen to everything Turner tells him, they joke -  but he's definitely been taking that particular tip on board.

As they sit down together for a chat before they head out on a rest day ride, seeing the pair siဣde-by-side is a familiar oﷺccurrence at this Giro. Whether it's been in their light-hearted, sometimes chaotic vlogs on the Ineos Grenadiers social channels – or V-Logs, as they'd say – or their tag-team efforts within the race, the two Brits have become a recognisable duo over the last few weeks.

Three years apart in age, Tarling and Turner didn't grow up racing together, as many of the current crop of British pros did, and their friendship only really started when Tarling joined Ineos in 2023. From there, their similar quﷺalities and similar programmes have seen them🅷 bond.

"We always do the same kind of races, and the last few years we've always done the grim ones together, like Paris-Nice, and last year we did a lot of the Tour build-up together," Tarling says. "And we always do a similar job in those �꧂�races, so it's kind of clicked."

Turner adds, "I guess we're just close, aren't we? And as Josh says, we spend so much t🌳ime ra🌟cing together – to be fair, this year I don't remember the last day that I didn't see you. Even at home, we were all day together. So it's super nice, it's much better like this than just being quiet or not speaking."

For cyclists who start racing abroa✤d at such a young age, it can be easy to forget how 🌌daunting it might be to join a WorldTour team as a still-teenager, and therefore how important it is to have a friendly face and some camaraderie.

"It's a lot e🍸asier, because you're not alone," Tarling says of often having Turner by his side on the road. "In the Vuelta last year, obviously I knew everybody, but it's different, you know? Especially this week, when you get tired, it's just nice to be around your friends.

"In the build up it helps too, because when you're doing it alone, you don𓆉't really have🍨 much of a reference or any back up or anything like that, so it's nice to go through it with somebody else, and then come to the race and do the same job and work off each other."

With a couple more Grand Tours under his belt, Turner does try and help Tarling out a little bit, sharing what he's learnt – don't push you▨rself where it's not useful to the team, save energy when you can, nail the basics – but they're much more like peers than a mentor and mentee.

"I tried to give 💝him tips, but I don't think he listened," Turner laughs. "You told me toꦗ sleep," Tarling chips in.

"I told him to sleep, yeah, and eat a lot, and just save as much as he can every day, and then I ꦿsee him not doing that, so he's obviously not listening. But obviously he's a much better rider than me, so I can't really teach him that much."

Friends off the bike, and key riders on it

Despite Turner's suggestion that Tarling is the better rider, which may be true just based on results, both have been really key pღarts of Ineos' Giro d'Italia so far, working hard for leaders Egan Bernal and Thymen Arensman all race.

When it's their turn to work, the pair will often hit the front at the same kind of time, and it's clear that their off-bike relationship helps them♋ to read each other in the race too.

"When you spend so much time with someo🍌ne, and you go to all these races – it's the same for everyone in the team, but especially for me and Josh – we'v🔯e done so many races together now, especially this year, you know what each other can and can't do, what they will and won't do," Turner explains.

"So you just have trust in each other and you have faith in the other person, and then you can really say 'Okay, I'm tired, can you do that, and we'll change', and we'll try and we&💜apos;ll always do the maximum that we can."

So far, that's been about using their strength in the flat and punchy moments, and really personifying the new, aggre𝓀ssive style oꦓf racing that Ineos have tried to adopt this year, which is certainly better for their abilities. 

"When we went on that descent the other day, and stuff like that, that really suits us," Tarling says. "Because you could save us for the final week, but you'd 🎃only get so much out of us, whereas on stuff like that, where we don't have to use too many guys, it works out perfectly for us. I'll go or Ben will do two minutes full, and then we get out of the way and tap in it, get a bit of rest, but knowing we've exploded the race quite quickly."

There's certainly a balance between aggression and still racing smart, which Ineos openly say they're still working out, but in this Giro, for the riders especially, the main thing is to at least do something to try and 🔴go for the win.

"That's really what it's about, just making the most of evꦅerything, trying everything, exploring every option w𒉰ithin the race, and having no regrets at the end of any race," Turner says. "Maybe sometimes you're like 'oh, we shouldn't have done that'. 

"We may try to make too much, but at a certain point, you can also look at it the other way 🧔and think when we do these things and it does work, then that's a positive."

Classics riders at heart, Tarling and Turner are cut from a𓆏 slightly different cloth from their leaders, Bernal and Arensman. But part of the success in this race has been how well their approaches have aligned.

"It's really good, because it's Egan who's pushing the race a lot, which is exciting," Tarling says. "And obviously Thymen is flying. So it's exciting, it feels like we're properly in the race, and it's always nice to feel like you ca🍌n play a role with them as well.

"I think in theꩲ race, we all have similar vibes, we wan🤡t to race, but then it's nice off the bike as well. Everyone's a similar age, it's a nice environment, on the kitchen truck, everyone's chatting, and it just works."

Even though we might think of Tarling and Turner as future Classics stars, they're definitely both warming to the ꦦpositives of Grand Tour racing.

"It's way better here," Tarling laughs. "Flanders and them lot is horrible, you've got to race all the way to the𝔉 line, whereas here, when you're dropped, you're like 'well, I've got tomorrow'. 

"It's a lot different off the bike too, because in the Classics you have so much time where you have to prep for the next race o🍨r whatever, but then here you finish the stage, eat, have a bit of a meeting, hotel, massage, food and then sleep. So t🎀here's no real time to stress about the next day."

The good and the bad

As the two Brits say, a lot of the benefit they feel from having such close relationship🐽s in the team is the sense that you're not going through anything alone at a Grand Tour. That means sharing the good and the bad. 

So far, the race has been going fairly well for Ineos, so there are mainly good things. Tarling took his first-ever Grand Tour stage win on day 🐼two, which would seem like an obvious highlight, but such is the group bond that he doesn't single out his individual success.

"Nah, that's selfish, that is,♔" he says. "I'll say Alan, our chef, he's a bit of a GOAT. He's been getting us round.

"To be honest, it's just been a really nice group and I've enjoyed all of it really," Turner say🅠s of his best moments. "Just making the most of every day on the bike, and rea🐎lly enjoying racing the bike. Then to be fair, when Josh won, I was screaming in the car in Albania, so that's quite nice, I'll go with that."

🎀What's not been so good? It's testament to the riders' strengths and racing so far that they both struggl𒆙e to answer this one. 

"I'm tired," Tarling says. "Also, Ben's crash yest﷽erday, I think that was the 🎶most scary moment."

Turner adds, "Yeah, you've just ♋reminded me, that hurt a bit actually. Yeah, we'll go ༺with that."

Finally, what are they going to do when they go home? Maybe finally spend a bit of time not in each other's company for the first time this year? Well, 🌠it sounds like perhaps not. 

"Not a lot, chill, see the dꦉog," Tarling says. "We&ap🌃os;re going to have a barbecue, aren't we?" Turner interrupts. "We've been learning. It's Alan again, he's the best thing about it."

It was a vlog around the ♓barbecue in Albania that first started Tarling and Turner's journey as the fan-favourite duo at this race, so it seems apt that they're going to put their skills to the test once they get home. But after three weeks of aggressive racing, GC tactics, and getting through their first Giro, the two are going to have learned a lot more about racin🧜g and about themselves than just how to barbecue.

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more.

For the second week of the 108th 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Giro d’Italia the game of serpenti e scale has been the perfect metaphor. There’s been the time trial during which Isaac del Toro 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:(UAE Team Emirates-XRG) lost some of his lead to rivals 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Primoz Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe) and Juan Ayuso (UAE Team Emirates-XRG). That was expected but not to the margin ceded and therefore the GC game looked to be warming up again. It was a short step up for his UAE team-mate Ayuso and a more decisive leap for the 2023 winner Roglič. With the latter’s deficit to the race leader halved, Roglič was looking forward to a few uneventful stages, ending with a weekend visit to Slovenia and then a few mountains where he could observe who was ready for the third week.

Reassured by the TT result, experience would have been saying -  stay calm, don’t squander energy and remain patient because the biggest gains lie ahead. When the UAE duo were squabbling over bonus seconds here, there and everywhere he stayed well out of the way, rarely getting involved unless he had to and there was a sense that the Red Bull leader knew each sprint or acceleration his competitors produced would come back to bite them later on. From the outside every thing seemed in order, the plan to wait for the crucial final six days of racing appeared to be a wise choice but -  and there always seems to be one with Primoz Roglič -  he ended up on his butt. Again.

The goddess of fortune

For the third time since leaving Durazzo, Albania over two weeks ago Fortuna, the goddess of luck deserted Roglič. The injury details are vague for the stage 14 pile-up. However, since he had done the left𓃲 side on the gravel roads to Siena and then his right side during the time trial recce four days earlier, the damage sustained in Slovenia has turned out to be more consequential than the 48 seconds he ultimately lost that day. 

Grand Tours are all about energy conservation and recovery, so there’s the obvious discomfort of the cuts and bruises to deal with on and off the bike. But also those physical resources used for body repairs aren’t going to be available for pushing on the pedals at some point. That moment came for Roglič on the Cat.2 cꦫlimb to Dori when Ineos Grenadiers upped the pace for another Egan Bernal acceleratioꦜn. 

Whether they had noticed previous weakness on the longer haul over Monte Grappa is unknown but as soon as R🐓ichard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost) added to the pace the cracks appeared in the maglia rosa group and Roglič was left to his thoughts and little else. Despite valiant help from Dani Martínez and Giulio Pellizzari it looks likely now that Red Bull and Roglic’s hopes of a second Giro victory are over. Almost four minutes off the lead, battered and bruised, I don’t see a Chris Froome 2018-type revival being♔ possible. Not with UAE’s collective dominance and certainly not with Carapaz and Bernal’s ruthless intentions. Roglic may have survived if the climbs had been ridden at a steady pace, even a high one but the bursts of speed from the South Americans, Del Toro included, have never really been to his liking. Will Roglic finish this Giro is a valid question now, or will he heal the wounds and come back for the Tour de France, perhaps ?

Lidl-Trek forge on

In the meantime, Lidl-Trek los💮t Giulio Ciccone but gained another stage win. Six from fifteen is remarkable and they might no longer be in the GC battle but they are everywhere else. It’s progressed from the Mads show to a Lidl three-week Italian celebration. Last minute bargains might be harder to come by in the big mountains but there’ll be no regrets w🎐ith what they’ve taken home so far. 

Same for EF Education, Kasper Asgreen and Richard Carapaz. Each have a win to take into the final week and in the process the Ecuadorian has reminded everyone why he won the Giro back in 2019. Punch, panache and perseverance in abundance. UAE have to be careful they don’t let him and a resurgent Egan Bernal off the leash in the high mountains. Tactically, EF are very good at putting riders up the road a🃏waiting an attack from their leader and though it wasn’t something Ineos had considered previously, now ♏that they are being more aggressive in how they operate, the possibilities of the race being turned on its head is a good one. 

The conclusion of the middle week may appear on paper to still be a UAE stranglehold on the GC. However, the internal politics between Del Toro and Juan Ayuso aren’t settled yet, the tussles over bonus seconds was a pointer to the Spaniard's ambitions and the grumpy body language sitting behind the maglia rosa is a bit suspect, too.

If Ayuso considered the Mexican as the team leader he would be in front of him, closing gaps, going with the moves but he hasn’t being doing that. He’s hoping for the moment of weakness when he’ll seize the opportunity of following someone like Simon Yates or Derek Gee who are st💃rong enough to ride with him but ♒not as explosive as Carapaz and Bernal. 

Watching Isaac del Toro has to r✅emind Simon Yates (Visma-Lease a Bike) of how he raced the 2018 Giro, over-exuberant, following when he could have let others take some of the pressure, with a certain naivety even and that experience has meant he’s been very careful up until this point. With a Vuelta a España victory already in his palmares, he’s bound to know some Spanish and with what’s coming he could well find himself in a select group where that’s the first language. 

The dice have rolled well for UAE Team Emirates so far but it’ll be a high-stakes game of chess from now on. Which move and when, who to protect and who to sacrifice. Someone or s🍌omething is going to happen.  

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more. 

Just like winning the GC or a stage is the pinnacle for climbers, taking a sprint victory in a Grand Tour is one of the biggest achievements a sprinter can score. An🥂d though the Tour de France may hold the top spot, the Giro has still att😼racted a strong crop of sprinters this year.

But, as the race heads into its final week or so, the c♑hances for sprinters become few and far between, and the possibility of leaving the race winless becomes likelier and likelier as the sprint stages dwindle.

After stage 13 to Vicenza, there are only really two sprint chances left in this Giro: 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:stage 14 to Nova Gorica, and 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:stage 21 in Rome, so crunch time is approaching for many🧸 sprinters in this race.

So far, the wins have been quite spread out. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Mads Pedersen (Lidl-Trek) has taken four, mainly on the less pure sprint finishes, but the other three sprints have been won by three different riders. Good in some ways, as it means the sprinting is quite open, but it also means that many riders will want to pick up a second win, to elevate themselves above the🍌 rest.

Will 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Olav Kooij (Visma-Lease a Bike), 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Kaden Groves (Alpecin-Deceuninck) or 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Casper van Uden (Picnic PostNL) score a deuce-breaking second win? Can a winless sprinter step up in the finꦉal chances? And what does this all mean for the maglia cicl🅘amino? Let's take a look.

The winners so far

In the first five days, Mads Pedersen scored three wins, taking advantage of the tougher finishes in Albania and Matera to sprint to victo✨ry where the purer sprinters struggled or were dropped altogether. He then took a spectacular fourth win on stage 13, conquering the Monte Berico climb to beat Wout van Aert and notch up another victory, with the other sprinters nowhere to be seen. You could say Pedersen is in a class of his own, competing for wins the other sprinters have no chance at, but the fact that he is also taking top-five♎s in the flat sprints means that the pure sprinters can and should be compared against him.

In the flat sprints, no one has been able to assert dominance in the way Pedersen has on the punchier ones. From three bunch sprints, we've seen three different winners: Casper van Uden in Lecce, Kaden Groves in Naples, and Olav Kooij in Viadana. With such an equal share of the spoils so far, there's certainly a sense that ෴one of those three will want to add a second, or third win to their tally to try to lay claim to being the best sprinter in this race.

Of these three, Olav Kooij looks like the likely contender to win again, particularly in Rome. The Dutchman has a super fast turn of speed, 🎉and has only been hampered by some mistakes in the Visma lead-out, rather than not being fast enough, but they look to have ironed those issues out.

Groves is also sprinting well, but has been dealing with a lingering injury this season, and could be more disadvantaged by the tiring final week. Van Uden, who is riding his first Grand Tour, is in a similar spot, and his lack of experience in three-week races could be his undoing. His win in Lecce was not a fluke but certainly surprising, so he's probably a bit of a daꩲrk horse to take another win, especially missing a lead-out rider in Bram Welten.

The maglia ciclamino

As well as wins💙, the subplot always surrounding Grand Tour sprinting is the points jersey. This isn't all about winning sprints, and there are points on the line on every stage, both at the finish and in intermediates, but with the bulk of points available on flat finishes, a couple of victories can rocket you into contention.

Pedersen has led the maglia ciclamino standings since day 1, but Kooij has been running close, and the Dutch rider's victory on stage 12 d💝id put him possibly threateningly close to Pedersen. However, Pedersen's win on stage 13 has bolstered his lead to 122 points, so while not mathematically secure, and of course he has to finish the race, it's looking increasingly likely that the Dane will win the classification. The other sprinters are just here for stage wins now.

The next chances

With the🌌 final week of the Giro traditionally packed with climbing stages, there are only really two or three stages left for the sprinters, but even then, history has shown us that late flat stages can sometimes see the break get the better of a tiring peloton.

The next chance comes on stage 14, but that's not an entirely straightforward sprint. The stage to Nova Gorica in Slovenia has a 3.5km climb in the final 50km, and then the finishing laps sees the peloton take on the 700m, 7.7% Saver climb twice. It's only short and sharp, but could make for a more hectic sprint, or challenge the weaker climberꦚs. From there it's a flat finish in the ꦺtown.

Stage 18 could also be a sprint, given it's flat for th♛e final 45km, but three tough climbs early on could either see the sprinters dropped or tired early, or lean in favour of the breakaway, especially with the sprint teams tired after some tough mountain days.

After that, the final chance will be in Rome, on a very flat closing stage set on laps in the capital. This is a pretty naile🅺d-on sprinting day, but the laps can always make it hectic, and means that organisation and staying composed in the stress may be more important than just pure speed. This is as much a test of the lead-out riders as the sprinters.

With just a maximum of three sprints remaining, and lots of sprinters without any kind of t🍸op result to speak of, who are the riders we're expecting to be hunting victory with increased desperation in the next nine days?

The sprinters still chasing a win

Paul Magnier (Soudal-QuickStep)

Rec💝ord so far (o🌟n pure sprint stages 4, 6 and 12): 7th, 3rd, 8th

Soudal-QuickStep's 21-year-old Frenchman had a really good start to the season, winning on his first day of racing and taking a close second in Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, but a💞s the Giro approached – his first Grand Tour – his form has waned. After a post-Classics break, his last result was 91st in Eschborn-Frankfurt, so it's not a huge surprise that he didn't hit the ground running in the Giro. However, he has been consistent in the top 10, and with the likes of Luke Lamperti and Ethan Hayter supporting him, he definitely shouldn't be written off. Rome may be too tough and hectic, but he should hope for a top result on stage 14.

Sam Bennett (Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale)

Record so far: 6th, 11th, 11th

Sam Bennett came to this race trying to brea💃k a Grand Tour stage✤ win drought that's lasted nearly three years, and so far it hasn't been great. Decathlon are here without a GC rider, so in theory, the Irishman should have some good support, but they've looked overwhelmed by the bigger lead-outs so far, with Bennett lacking the speed in the finals too. Winner on the Champs-Élysées in 2020, Bennett can navigate a crazy sprint, so Rome could be a real chance, but with his results so far, perhaps don't hold your breath.

Milan Fretin (Cofidis)

Record so far: 11th, 2nd, 6th

Every year, a sprinter emerges as the new name expected to challenge the established riders, and this year that honour has been bestowed on Cofidis' Milan Fretin. He's taken three wins so far this year, but his first Giro is so far winless. He came really close in Naples, albeit from a reduced group after the crash, and has probably the 🦂best chance of these winless sprinters to break his duck. The Belgian thrives when it's a bit harder, so Rome could be hard, but he'll have a keen eye on stage 14.

Matteo Moschetti (Q36.5 Pro Cycling)

Record so far: 9th, 176th (releꦗgated from 8th), 10th

In the absence of Jonathan Milan, there was a lot of attention on Italian Matteo Moschetti pre-race, and he's been consistently finishing in t🌠he top 10, but not much higher than that. He can win in big sprints – he won a stage of the AlUla Tour this year – but the level of fight in a Grand Tour stage might just be a little too much for him right now. He should be aiming to crack th♉e top 5 one day in this Giro, but a win seems unlikely at this point.

Max Kanter (XDS Astana)

Record so far: 103rd (relegated 🎀from 5th)൩, 4th, 7th

Barring his relegation on stage 4, Max Kanter has one of the best records of the winless sprinters in this Giro. However, the German has never won a Grand Tour sprint stage, perhaps suggesting he's just lacking the final so🍌mething to transform consistency into success. What's more, Astana's points-hunting strategy could be a p💖roblem – they'd rather have several riders in the top 30, rather than commit everything to one rider.

Corbin Strong (Israel-Premier Tech)

Record so far: 13th, 144th, 17th

Corbin Strong is a rider more in the mould of Mads Pedersen than the pure sprinters, so whilst his results above in the pure sprints don't look great, he came second behind Pedersen in Vlorë and is a really strong rider. The remaining sprints are probably a bit too easy for him to shine, but if things get a bit chaotic, he could ﷺbe an outsider, and should definitely be trying to crack the top 10 on one of these days.

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more.

Possible new sponsorship from TotalEnergies could give the team the funds needed to compete with the super teams and 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:even sign Remco Evenepoel or the next teenage Grand Tour super talent.

Ineos have abandoned other sports sponsorships in sailing, rugby and football but cycling and winning the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tour de France again seems a priority.

TotalEnergies have been reported as a possible new title sponso🅘💎r alongside Ineos, from as soon as July 1 and this year's Tour de France, while the team could switch from Pinarello bikes to Specialized for 2026 if Evenepoel joins the team, or ride Canyon bikes. A source told Cyclingnews that the German direc𒅌t-to-consumer brand made a 'massive' offer to become the team's bike sponsor.

The arrival of TotalEnergies would allow Ineos to reduce their near 50-million Euro annual sponsorship, while raising the overall budget of the team. A source told Cyclingnews that Ineos owner Jim Ratcliffe is ready to person🐈ally bankroll Evenepoel's transfer and significant salary.

Cyclingnews spoke to Ineos Performance Director Scott Drawer at the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Giro d'Italia. He talked at length about how the team is trying to get ahead of their biggest rivals and how riders' are asked t🌳o 'bu🐽y-in' to the project and share their opinions.

Cyclingnews asked Drawer about TotꦿalEnergies and Evenepoel. He refused to comment but indicated that the team has ambitious plans for the future.

"We can't speculate about any investment coming into the team and who is going to be part of our future. Our CEO John Allert has said publicly that we're looking for investment and we'll continue to do that," Drawer told Cyclingnews.

Drawer preferred not to answer ✃specific questions about Evenepoel but made it clear that Ineos are constantly studying the rider ma𝓡rket.

"We're focuse🐲d on what the team needs and what's going to help us win Grand Tours again," Drawer said.

"We would look at all the candidates. There's a number of other r🅰iders that may be available in 2026 or 2027, we keep a good eye on them and talk with the right people at the right time."

Evenepoel is a ಌlogical target f🐟or Ineos but so are younger teenage super talents.

"In our view, the probable next Grand Tour winners are going to come through at a very young age, like Tadej Pogačar did and like Isaac del Toro looks set to do,"ꩲ Drawer suggested.

"So I think our most critical focus is getting the whole pathway right, I think that's what&apꦺos;s going to set the team up for the fu🙈ture. You can look at existing talent that's out there but I definitely think emerging talent will be the future."

Believing in Bernal, Rodriguez, Arensman and other young talents

Drawer is caref💝ul not t𓆉o look beyond the current Grand Tour riders on the Ineos roster.

168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Geraint Thomas is about to retire and probably take a key management role at Ineos alongside Drawer but the team have Egan Bernal, C💎arlos Rodríguez and also believe in Thyman Arensman. Bernal and Arensman are currently ninth and 13th at the Giro d'Italia but could climb into the top five in the mountainous final week.  

"We have some exceptional GC talent in the team, as well as some younger talent that's going to come through very soon. They're only going to go in o꧃ne direction," Drawer said.

"Of course, athlete development is not quite a linear process. Riders can surprise you how quickly they're developing,🦋 look at Isaac del Toro. Sometimes you may not need to go to the market becau🃏se you have the talent already on board."

Bernal seems back t൩o his best, four years after his terrible training crash that left him with multiple fractures. His contract ends in 2026 but Drawer seems keen to exteไnd the Colombian's time at Ineos. Ultimately, that could depend on Bernal's performance at the Giro d'Italia, and if he is willing to race in support of Evenepoel at the Tour de France.

"I🅠 think people can see how well Egan's been doing in the Giro," Dra💝wer pointed out.

"There's a lot to come from him in this Grand Tour.🧸 He's a great leader, he knows he has the legs, he has the numbers, he has the capability, and he's a competitor, he wants the race, he wants to fight, he wants to compete."

Convincing the riders to 'buy-in' to Ineos plans for the future

Drawer returned to Ineos in the spring of 2024 after a spell as head of Sport at the prestigious Millfield School, which has developed many British Olympians. He has also worked for England Rugby and UK Sport and Team GB, leading research and innovation across five Olympic Ga✃mes cycles.

He spent six months reviewing the performance environment at Ineos and made some significant changes in October after a disappointing season. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tom Pidcock was released and allowed to transfer to Q36.5 Pro Cycling and there🌳 were significant changes amongst staff.

Drawer is cerebral, not authoritarian. He wants everyone to 'buy-in' to Ineos' plans for the future. That's why Thomas was nominated as the team's 'roa🌳d captain' and a rider representative group was created to improve dialogue between management, riders and the staff.

"Ultimately, we're about giving riders the opportunity to achieve their best, and if things are not quite working for them, we'll adapt accordingly. I think having that dialogue is quite an important piece of the puzzle," Drawer explained to Cyclingnews.

"That's the way🦂 you move forward as a team. I think that's the best way for modern high performan🐬ce sports to work. It can't be autocratic.

"I think the modern athlete knows that the dynamic 💫has changed. They want a lot more ownership of it, and we want to give them that. It's the fastest, fastest way you leꦆarn and improve."

Drawer hopes his approach and new sponsorship can help the team catch-up and even ღleap ahead of their rivals.  

"It's about how we're going to get ahead of the curve. There's no point in copy💝ing, because everyone will already havꦐe moved ahead," he explained.

"We spent a lot of time last year and over the winter being a lot more objective abou🅠t th🐬e change in trends and patterns in the sport. We shared that with the riders way back in early December at camp, and we got them actively involved.

"One of the emerging trends, which is not rocket science, is the increase in solo wins and long-range attacks thanks to nutrition and riders like Tadej Pogačar. So in response, you've got to have the physical pre🅰paration to be able to execute that, which changes the way you train and prepare for major ra🅺ces.

"Josh Tarling is another example. He's a world-class time trialist, who understan🃏ds every detail when he does a recon and when he performs at the highest level. Filippo Ganna is the same.

"Philosophically this is about the riders, first and foremost. Putting them in the center of the performances, so you can't exclude them from some of those decisions. ꧑We're trying to create an environment where riders feel like they can share technical and tactical information and say where we could be better," Drawer continued.

"We want to give them the keys. They've got to make the decisions out on the road, they're the ones feeling the race, they're the ones that know how they feel in the t𓄧raining environment.

"Our long-term plan𒉰 is for everyone to work collaboratively tog🎃ether so the team has the best chance to succeed."

Scratch the surface, though, and it’s clear all is not what it seems, with race cancellations affecting all levels of the sport. Not only has the Tour of Scandinavia been struck from the WorldTour for good, but a raft of losses at th༺e .2 and .1 level, the fourth and third tiers respectively, are depriving young, inexperienced riders of developmental opportunities, undermining the sport’s foundations.

Mischa Bredewold’s gripping breakthrough win at Amstel Gold added a new name💫 to the WorldTour list of winners, even if she does represent SD Worx-Protime, the world’s most dominant team. Behind her, though, others were racing for 🌊their own less lofty victories.

"I just wanted to make it to the circuit, but I exceeded my expectations by actually being able to finish the race feeliꦐng strong throughout," ♑said Scottish rider Morven Yeoman of the British Continental DAS-Hutchinson team.

Now 20 years old, Yeoman has been racing for more tha🌜n half her life, racing in Europe as a Junior, graduating directly to senior racing in 2023. Then, after a series of DNFs, she opened her account with a very respectable 66th overall at the second-tier Festival Elsy Jacobs stage race. But three weeks later, days after her 19th birthday, her WorldTour debut at the Ford Ride London Classique was a step too far.

"Physically, it was really demanding for a young person who hasn't ever raced above 100km befo🐭re," she explains. "I think the first stage of Ride London was 150km. But also real꧙ly mentally challenging, having gone from being a fairly decent junior, having decent results and always being at the pointy end of a race, to barely being able to hang on to the bunch, you really struggle to understand why.

"I think racing lower-level races, .2 and the lower end .1, you can just feel a lot more comfortable in the bunch, you can control a lot more than when you've got 10-15 WorldTour teams to compete with. It's✱ not necessarily even about the result on the day, but if you feel confident in the group, and you can use that confidence [goin♋g] into the next race, then that's where it also builds. Whereas if you're just consistently getting to 70 kilometres and then DNF, you're not actually getting that much out of it."

And therein lies the problem. If those .2 races are lost, so are development pathways 🎉for young riders like Yeoman. In 2025, only 78 days of fourth-tier racing were scheduled worldwide, down from a 2023 high of 109, and, other than the pandemic-blighted 2020 season, that’s fewer than any year since 2018. What’s more, nine of those days have subsequently been cancelled, leaving only 69 days. 

At the next level up, 95 days of .1 racing were slated, more than any season ജsince the creation of the WorldTour in 20𓂃16, but 19 have since been cancelled.

When one considers there’ll be 66 days of Women’s WorldTour racing this year, after the Tour Scandinavia’s cancellation, cycling’s hierarchy of women’s events looks more like a rectangle than a pyཧᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚramid.

The women’s sport is not as healthy as it seems

Natascha Knaven-den Ouden established NXTG Cycling in 2018, creating a positive environment for girls and young women to develop both as racing cyclists and as people. NXTG set riders like Ally Wollaston (FDJ-Suez) and Charlotte Kool (Picnic-PostNL) on their path to the top of the sport, and while part of that team has since morphed into the AG Insurance-Soudal Women’s WorldTour squad, NXTG has contꦯinued under Knaven-den Ouden’s guidance.

She believes the lack of opportunities for an increasing number of talented, but inexperienced, young female riders will soon undermine the foundations of the Women’s♈ WorldTour, threatening the top tier’s future.

"There aren’t enough riders to broaden the roof, so you have to widen your foundation to get enough top riders in 10 years' time, otherwise it will fold," the Dutchwoman tells Cyclingnews.

"Then we are back where we were 15 years ago, when ꦰyou had to r꧙ace as a junior with the elite level because there were not enough races. We are all shouting that there needs to be more teams, there needs to be more WorldTour races, but you can’t fill these races and these teams with high-quality riders. 

"When Demi Vollering q💦uits or Lotte Kopecky quits, who’s the next? Demi Vollering is a benchmark, a role model, but on the other side, she always says ‘it all starts with dreaming🅰,’ but if it goes on like this, it will stay a dream for the youngsters."

Knaven-de🅺n Ouden believes hype is driving the women’s sport too fast, and it’s too early to compare the men’🐎s and women’s sports.

"What you see is that men’s cycling in general has evolved; it is organically grown. The smaller Continental teams, which were not healthy, folded, and the healthy ones stayed. They built a Pro Continental [now ProTeam] level and then a WorldTour level, and that was org🧸anically grown in 25 years. Also, the market, the sponsor money, and the budgets have grown organically. 

"What you see in women’s c🤪ycling with all the hype on the equality side, that women have to have the same as the men, is made artificially in five years, and that’s not healthy, it’s not sustainable. And then 🐻the whole base, the foundation, is forgotten. 

"Then you see these .2 races and .1 races folding. That’s the platform for young talent to stick their nose to the window and develop, because young talent needs races to learn how to race, because cycling is one of thꦫe most complex sports in the world."

The Teams

Thanks to the success of world champion, Lotte Kopecky (SD Worx-Prot🐓ime) and sprinter Jolien D’hoore before her, Belgium has experienced a huge increase in the numbers of girls and women racing. However, even in a country many would consider as one of the sport’s international heartlands, quality racing i🦂s often hard to come by.

"There are a lot of kermesse races, national races on club level, and then we have a lot of WorldTour races, but those .1 and .2 races they're not there," explains D’hoore, now the sporting manager at AG Insurance-Soudal and their Under 23 Development team. The team’s raison d’être was to give their yo🐈ung women the chance to race 🃏those lower-level UCI races. 

"Half of their programme is just gone, which is a bit of a shame, and we have instead to give thꦿem kermesse races in Belgium. There are a lot of biꦫg races, everybody's seeing the big stars on television, but the races below, especially in Belgium, they're being cancelled."

For some, though not D’hoore’s U23 team, i🦂f lower-level races are unavailable, young, inexperienced riders are cast into the cauldron of the WorldTour. Okay, once or twice maybe, but with dire consequences if that’s the only racing they’re getting.

"You get to race against Kopecky and SD Worx and against the big names, those riders are idols for them, and it's fun. But after a while, when you only race in the beginning of the race, it gets annoying, and then you'🧸re thinking, ‘Okay, why am I doing this? Why am I training this hard?’ and they lose the joy in cycling, and they quit eventually," explains D’hoore.

The issue of cancelled races extends beyond Belgium. Canyon//SRAM zondacry🧜pto are another Women’s WorldTeam with a development offshoot, though their Generation squad operates slightly differently, developing both promising young riders and those from under-represented countries. They would normally begin the season with national level races, before progressing to the lower tiers of international competition, aiming for .2 stage races.

"By the regulations, .1 races can be up to seven WorldTour teams, this is what we want to avoid, especially if we are going there with a full squad of [the] development team," asserts team manager, Adam Szabó. "And stage races are better from a development or a learning🐈 perspective. If you make a mistake, we can talk about those mistakes s🌃traight away, and then you can apply the learnings the day after, you don't need to wait for another week."

In previous years, they raced the Vuelta Extramadura, but wi💎th that race stepping up to the third-tier .1 level, and five WorldTeams on the start list, the team decided their riders would be best served in Italy at Trofeo Ponente in Rosa. However, just five days before the start, that race was cancelled, organisers lacking funds. That meant the Generation squad’s first UCI race as a team was Festival Elsy Ja🀅cobs, on May 3rd.

Yeoman’s DAS-Hutchinson team were another team affected by the cancellation of Trofeo Ponente in Rosa, the late cancellation leaving more than a dent in the riders’ programmes, team co-principal Simon Howes told Cyclingnews.

"Cancellations are obviously really challenging, but it’s late can🎉cellations that are the most challenging. I completely understand why organisers do it, they’re hanging on to get the funding in place, but we’d paid for flights, so that’s money lost. Not only does it affect your programme, it also affects your budget because money spent on that is money you don’t have to go to a replacement [race] or another stage race."

The race organiser’s view

The cycling calendar has always been a moving feast, with new races coming and older events going for a multitude of reasons. The COVID-19 pandemic condemned 🍎some to history, while others alway൲s seemed more a flight of fancy than a serious proposition; the Tour de Femina Malaysia was scheduled every year from 2020 to 2024 but never happened. And staging the International Syrian Tour in either 2022 or 2023 would always have been impossible given the conflict ravaging the country.

Cancellations are not a new thing, but they are on the increase. In the four years between 2016 and 2019, a total of three women’s .2 and .1 race days were lost after being published o♋n the UCI’s calendar. In 2023 alone, that number was 36. So far in 2025, it’s 28, and that’s without the intervention of extreme weat♛her, which has previously accounted for some losses.

Financial problems seem to be the main culprit, even at the top of the sport. In 2023, the WorldTour-level Women’s Tour was cancelled after several years spent searching for a title sponsor alongside organisers, Sweetspot, goin🌠g out of business. Luckily, British Cycling stepped into the breach, renaming the event the Lloyds Tour of Britain. The Tour of Scandinavia was less fortunate. Beginning life in 2014 as the three-day Ladies Tour of Norway, it was cancelled in 2024, then, earlier this year, organisers pulled the plug for good, acceptinꦬg it was not financially viable.

Festival Elsy Jacobs has been on the calendar si💙nce 2008, starting life as a one dayer then moving to three days, including a prologue. It’s been at .2 level, up to ProSeries and is now two 1.1 races. Marianne Vos (Visma Lease a Bike), Anna van der Breggen (SD Worx-Protime) and Kasia Niewiadoma (Canyon//SRAM zondacrypto) are all former winners, but it's clash with the Vuelta Feminina means it can no longer attract the big names.

"We have to adapt, not to have the big names but the big names of tomorrow," says Michel Zangerlé, president of the organising club, SaF Zéisseng. "We got ProSeries [status] for 2020, but of course we had to cancel, so the first edition as ProSeries was in 2021, until that point we grew from year to year, but it was difficult to maintain because there were always more costs and more workload. Security issue🉐s are one point, but not the only one."

Like many events at this level, everyone involved is a volunt♔eer. Hiring professional help would cost more, and even in Luxembourg, per capita, the European Union’s richest country, raising the required €135,𝔍000 (£114,000/US$ 152,000) is an issue. This year, they operated a small deficit after Ceratizit, title sponsors since 2021, withdrew, leaving a hole in the budget, some of which was filled by the government.

Zangerlé is not optimistic about the future. "It will not be bright, I do not know if it will be worse than now, I don’t think so, but there will be some races🍸 that will disappear." While he acknowledges the Vuelta clash is a hindrance, he accepts the presence of big organisers is a benefit to the wo📖men’s sport, but would like the UCI to help in at least one way.

"Organising the calendar better would be a great thing, I think, if they did not put us and the Vuelta on the same day, perhaps we would even stay as Pro﷽Series, but managing the calendar as bad as they do was not good for us."

Knaven-den Ouden believes t🍃he introduction of a league where smaller Continental teams and larger club teams can earn UCI points would help breathe life into lower-level race😼s. D’hoore suggests staging more races on local circuits could cut organisers’ costs, while Szabó thinks teams can help promote races, especially on social media, where they have far larger followings. 

As for the U♉CI, they were approached for comment twice but have failed to respo🅺nd in time for publication.

What’s next?

So, ♍how long have we got before the crumbling foundations begin to show?

"When Demi [Vollering] and Lotte [Kopecky] quit cycling, what’s next?" as🀅ks Knaven-den Ouden. "Will they still be there until their 40s? Will we have 12 years of the same names? It’s always the same names. Cat Ferguson and Imogen Wolff come in; they are big talents, but where’s the rest? You have to have a big peloton, you want to have 150 riders of good quality."

Clearly, thi𓆉ngs are not as they should be, and Knaven-den Ouden’s prediction may be a wors🎐t-case scenario given there is certainly increased depth, just look at the Vuelta Feminina where a large group survived onto the last climb.

Mischa Bredewold didn’t start Amstel Gold as a favourite, indeed, her victory is🅰 an illustration of how the women’s sport has developed. Rewind 10 years to a time when a living wage was an exception, now there is a minimum wage at World and ProTeam level. In 2014, fans would scour Twitter for race updates; now we can watch the top riders race the biggest races and read a steady flow of quality interviews and analysis.

Societal change, the creation of the WorldTour series of races and the UCI’s subsequent insistence that all those ✅events be shown live have undoubtedly been key in the sport’s development. The Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift turbocharged that.

However, the sport’s base has consistently been ignored, and the sport is facing issues which must be addressed to ensure progress made is no🎉t wasted. And that girls and women can continue to dream of a secur🗹e future in a truly professional sport.

evolve® makes its debut with the CIMA, a lightweight, aerodynamic, and rigorously tested roa🥀d frameset tജhat demonstrates evolve®'s prowess in technical innovation and bold ambition.

evolve® may be a new name to many European cyclists, but its co-founders are already well-established veterans in the bike industry. Tony Tong is also the founder and product engineer of Elitewheels and Mian Chan is the founder and designer of the crank brand Cybrei, with both brands already making inroads into Europe over the last few years. evolve® is headquartered in Xiamen, China’s carbon fibre manufacturing hub, bringing in-house design and production under one 𒆙roof.

Its mission? Deliver a world-class ride experience through meticulous design, premium materials, and no-compromise testing. evolve® debuts with the CIM𒉰A, a lightweight aero frameset that boasts some impressive specs, let's dig into the details.

CIMA: Lightweight, Aerodynamic, and Ready to Race

The name CIMA, Italian for “summit”, is a nod to the legendary Cima Coppi — the title given to the highest point in the Giro d’Italia. The frameset is a lightweight aero allrounder which puts it in the 𒅌crosshairs of bikes like Specialized's Tarmac SL8.

Unsurprisingly for a bike named after a mountain classification, this frameset is engineered to be as light as possible. evolve® claims the CIMA weighs just 650g unpainted (size M), which is lighter than many flagship all-rounder frames from 🎃legacy Western brands. 

At the recent China Cycle Show 2025 in Shanghai, evolve® made headlines with a complete CIMA bui✤ld tipping the scales at just 4.95kg. Featuring a Dura-Ace groupset and carefully selected lightweight components from Elitewheels and Cybrei, it showcased what’s possible when cutting-edge materials and elite engineering meet performance obsession. Even with more conventional builds, the CIMA comfortably stays below the UCI’s 6.8kg weight limit — a strong indication of its real-world race readiness.

Despite its featherweight status, the CIMA should deliver stiffness where it counts. The frameset is constructed from a mix of TORAYCA T1100, T800 and M40 carbon fibre. evolve® has also used a special resin formula which is claimed to increase the carbon construction rigidity by 12 percent. The bottom bracket stiffness, measured at 29.4 N/mm, ensure♑s immediate power transfer and razor-sharp responsiveness.

Aerodynamics were also a key consideration when designing the frame profile. The front-facing area of the frame has been significantly reduced to just 635.35mm², making it one of the smallest in its category of road bikes. evolve® has al꧅so🌞 developed an aero-integrated handlebar to pair with the CIMA, more on that later.

evolve® hasn't forgotten about th🀅e small details either, home mechanics will be pleased to see the frame specced with a BSA threaded bottom bracket and a SRAM UDH derailleur hanger. The frameset also comes specced with CeramicSpeed SLT heads𓄧et bearings and a carbon seatpost.

And while it won't be an♓ important consideration for most of us, the frameset is UCI Approved; CE Certified should you need to race it.

Fit is paramount in performance cycling, and evolve® takes rider-centric design seriously. The CIMA comes in six frame sizes, accommodating riders from 146cm to 202cm, and offers two fork offsets and three bottom bracket drops to maintain💫 consistent handling across all sizes.

Lab proven

evolve® has been sure to back its claims with real performance data. ✱The CIMA underwent 21 in-house lab tests, exceeding ISO standards in key areas such as seatpost fatigue, where it en🔯dured 1440N loads over 120,000 cycles.

The frameset was also independently tested by Zedler Institute, in Germany, who are specialist in state-of-the-art bicycle and EPAC/e-bike testing technology and runs𓃲 its own accredited lab. The CIMA passed the institute’s Advanced standard testing, giving it elite-level validation few lightweight frames can claim.

In terms of aero gains, the evolve® team tested the CIMA at the Silverstone Sports Engineering Hub (SSEH) in the UK, a trusted site for F1 and Olympic-grade cycling R&D centre and a facility Cyclingnews has used for our own independent lab testing. 

The results? At 45km/h, the CIMA is said ꧒to save an average of 4.74 watts compared to a leading international competitor, backed by a lower CdA — a m🦩etric obsessive racers will instantly recognise.

More than a frameset, evolve® launches Kreuza

To complement the CIMA, evolve® has introduced Kreuza, a new accessory line built on the same principles of lightweight performance and ergonomic precision. The flagship Apex handlebar has a svelt NACA aerodynamic design, with a quoted weight of just 305g (painted, 380×110mm) it comes in 18 size options ranging from 360mm to 400mm wide and stem lengths between 90cm and 140cm — allowing riders to tailor their cockpit for perfect fit💫 and control.

evolve® will offer the Kreuza handlebar as an optional extra with the CIMA frame plus there's a Kreuza computer mount and bar tape to fꦕinish off your cockpit.

The CIMA is available in four subtle yet eye-catching colourways. The CIMA is available in four subtle yet eye-catching colourways. The CIMA Artist - Mist and CIMA Speed - Streams have grey and silver designs with hazy logos and flowing lines across𝕴 the frame. The CIMA Artist - Emerge is a deep green with nature-inspired detailing around the headtube and fork. Finally, there is the CIMA Speed - Nirvana which at first glance appears to be plain black but on closer inspection has some splatter designs around the lower fork and rear trianglဣe.

Graphic elements are kept to a minimum, further 𓆉enhancing the premium aes✨thetic of the framesets.

With the launch of the CIMA, evolve® has made a real statement of intent. From materials and fit to aero gꦉains and rigorous testing, evolve® seeks to deliver "performance with purpose". 

Learn more at and stay tuned via

But this year, in a 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Giro d'Italia that is already exp🐎erimenting with the form of a Grand Tour, all the time trialling kilometres are already complete after 10 stages, leaving 10 more days for the general classification to be changed and rearranged.

In many ways, the lack of any more time trialling in this race is an exciting prospect. When there's a particularly late TT – on the final or penultimate day, as has been in the Giro in recent years – it can act as a caveat, as riders, teams, anꦰd we as onlookers know ജthere are certain riders who are guaranteed to take or lose time. Riders may attack less in the mountains, knowing they will take time against the clock.

This year, there is no caveat; there is no TT for anyone to rely on. What happens in the next ten d🅰ays will decide who wins, and riders will have to go toe-to-toe in the mountains if 🀅they want to take time and move up the GC. There may be fewer summit finishes left than usual, but there's a huge amount of climbing thanks to a loaded final week. 

The rest of this race is also particularly open after Tuesday's 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:stage 10 time trial, as, perhaps also unusually,🏅 the shifts on GC were more subtle than big, race-defining changes. In truth, really, everything is still to play for.

Some of this is thanks to the positioning of the TT – legs are fresher than thꩵey will be in the final few days of the Giro, when tiredness can exacerbate weaknesses in the discipline – and also the rain that fell. The wet was, unfortunately𒀰 for some and fortunately for others, something of a leveller in Pisa. 

The riders who got to race in drier conditions, like Derek Gee (Israel-Premier Tech) and Max Poole (Picnic PostNL), were the fastest GC finishers, beating 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Primož Roglič and Juan Ayuso༒, whilst most of the other overall contenders lost time on the two pre-race favourites. 

Just one rider was slower than Roglič but faster ꦑthan Ayuso, and that was Ineos Grenadiers' Thymen Arensman, who also enjoyed some dry roads and moved three places into the top 10.

However, even those who lost time to Roglič and Ayuso lost less than you mඣay expect in a Grand Tour's final TT. Riders can capitulate big chunks of time across a 25 or 30km TT, and hopes of top 10 finishes can go down the drain, but in Pisa, across 28km, most riders managed to limit their losses. 

Richard Carapaz, Giulio Ciccone and Michael Storer were the GC riders who lost the most, probably expectedly given their lack of TT specialty, but even those losses were at most a minute and a half to Roglič, with Egan Bernal the biggest victim at 1:43 down on the Slovenian due to a crash. Rider🐼s like Simon Yates and Antonio Tiberi ran pretty close to the Red Bull rider, who is꧟ meant to be the top TT specialist among the GC riders.

The result is that, at the end of the day, only 2:27 separates leader Isaac del Toro (UAE Emirates-XRG) and 10th-placed Arensman. This is a reasonable number for st🅘age 10 of a Grand Tour, but it's small margins at a point where there's no more time trialling. Anyone in the top 10 could still feasibly win this race; anyone𒁏 in the top 15 could probably get into the top five. 

And the good news is, there are ample opportunities to make these moves. The race is climbing again as early as tomorrow, with 3,800m of elevation on th🌊e cards and a climb in the final 12km of stage 11. 

Stage 11 brings some punchy climbs in the finale and an uphill finish, stage 15 sees the return of the threatening Monte Grappa, and then next week is chock-full of climbing. Stage 16 finishes on an 18kജm climb, stage 19 features almost 5,000m of elevation, and then, of course, there's the small issue of the Colle delle Finestre on the penultimate day.

That all means that margins of less than a minute between Ayuso and Roglič, or two or three minutes between the top 15, could very soon mean absolutely nothing, and there's no TT lifeline to change your𝔍 trajectory if you're not up to it in the mountains.

The favourites are still the favourites

All that said, however, no matter how open the rest of the race can be, what Tuesday revealed to us is that the pre-race favourites Roglič and Ayuso are still very much the favourites, and the two strongest riders in the race. With more climbing approaching, they're both making gains, and they look to be 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:on a collision cour🐻se towards GC battle.

On the first summit finish of the race, Ayuso struck the first blow as Roglič was caught sleeping, but the Slovenian still looked strong on 🧸the Tagliacazzo finish. They were equally bashed up by crashes in Sunday's gravel stage, though Roglič yielded time, but then in the TT, the Slovenian went 19 seconds faster than Ayuso, closing the gap between the two on GC.

Both strong time trialists, in any other Grand Tour, the pair might be eyeing up aꦉ late TT as an opportunity to steal time on one another, but this isn't an option here. They're going to have t🧜o do it in the mountains. 

Despite some very tough cဣlimbing stages still to come, only two feature summit finishes (stages 16 and 20), with the Giro organisers✤ tending towards finishes in the valley or just over the top of climbs this year.

In theory, that could mean that team strength plays a bigger role, as it's less about just an all-out, one-on-one fight to the finish. In this respect, Ayuso looks stronger. Race leader Isaac del Toro, Adam Yates, Brandon McNulty and Jay Vine are all still up there on GC, and have looked a force to be reckoned with so far, compared to Roglič ❀who has lost Jai Hindley, isn't sure about the form of Dani Martínez, and is looking at Giulio Pellizarri as possibly his strongest mountain domestique.

However, what looks like UAE Team Emirates-XRG's strength may indeed turn out to be its weakness. Ayuso was clearly hoping to take pink on Tuesday, and Isaac del Toro's com🦋plicating time in the race lead,🦋 but the young Mexican held on to pink, and the more time he spends in that jersey, the more questions are going to be asked about whether he could actually be a GC leader. 

Ayuso and UAE really can't attack their own pink jersey, but the Spaniard faces a wait to see if and when Del Toro will crack, so he can step back into the leaders꧂hip he expected to have at this race. It could be a real limiter for the team.

Whatever is still to come, the race so far – the season so far – has told us that Roglič and Ayuso are the strongest, and their paths are only getting closer as Roglič clawed back time 🦩on Tuesday, and Ayuso looks increasingly at risk of some intra-team destabilisation. But with all of their preferred discipline in the TTs completed, the event often knoꦍwn as the race of truth, it's the rest of this race that is really going to reveal the truth. There's nowhere left to hide, and still 10 tough stages to get through, with their competition close and ready to pounce.

The time trialling may be o🍸ver, but the real battle in this Giro is only just beginning. 

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from each and every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more.

As I reached down to take♔ my bottles out of my cages at the race HQ🍷 (read: random village hall), a friend stopped me and repeated a hand-me-down axiom that claimed empty bottle cages were slower than simply carrying your bottles. 

I remember being fascinated by the ဣidea that aero trumps weight, but took his advice as gospel, ✅slid my bottles back into their cages, and set off (wearing a long-sleeve Castelli Gabba. Clearly, much was to be learned).

In 2015, the whole marginal gains philosophy had been in action for a few years at Team Sky, but it was far from gaining widespread acceptance. The decade since has seen finding those small savings become ever prevalent, and in many cases, the key to success, bꦏoth at the top level and in grassroots ꧃cycling, too. 

Here at Cyclingnews, we've spent the past year building up the 'CN Labs' content series, using wind tunnels, rolling resistꦿance rigs and more to empirically test as many cycling components as we can, to help our readers understand where to spend their money in the pursuit of going faster. 

We've found the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:fastest aero helmets, tested 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:budget vs aero cycling kit, compared 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:11 of the best superbikes on the market, put 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:18 road wheelsets head to head, and we even 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:rolling resistance tested road tyres. 

Today's test focuses on bottles, and we had plenty of questions to answer: Should you use one, two or even three? If one, where shoul꧒d you mount it? Are aero bottles all they're cracked up to be? And with all the limelight being on lowering core temperature and optimising cooling strategies, is there a penalty for running big 750ml bottles? 

And, most importantly, to take me back to 2🌠015 and complete the circle of my journey into aerodynamics, was my friend right? Are empt✃y cages slower than full ones?

Let's get stuck in and find out. 

The test

To find out, we headed to the wind tunnel at Silverstone Sports🐲 Engineering Hub. This is a cycling-specific wind tunnel, and it allows us to measure the CdA (Coefficient of Drag x Area🅺) of a given item. 

CdA is essentially a measure of how easily something moves through the air. The 'Cd' portion (Coefficient of Drag) relates to how easily air passes over an item's surface, whereas the 'A' is the item's Area. Put simply, the bigger an item is, the more air it will hit, but if you change the item's shape and surface material, you can reduce the Drag Coefficient. This is why a bullet is more aerodynamic than a c🐟oin of equal size, for example. 

We tested using a Cube NuRoad SLT gravel bike, and ensured everything apart from the test variable remained completely unchanged between tests, including the wheels, tyres, crank position and so on. This bike offered us the chance to test a third bottle on the underside of the downtube, but the main reason we used it was for its tyre clearance, because on the same day we also tested the aero performance of various road tyre widths. The results of that were pretty shocking, concluding that 40mm tyres are likely faster for most people. 

We tested the following setups: 

• No bottles
• One bottle, mounted to the down tube
• One bottle, mounted to the seat tube
• Two bottles, on the seat tube and down tube
• Two tall 750ml bottles, on the seat tube and down tube
• Two empty bottle cages, on the seat tube and down tube
• Three bottles, on the down tube, seat tube, and the underside of the down tube
• A single Elite Aero time trial bottle, mounted onto the down tube
• A single Elite Aero time trial bottle, mounted onto the seat tube
• A pair of Elite Aero time trial bottles, on the seat tube and down tube

We tested the setups without a rider. I admit it would be more realistic to test with a pedalling rider, but the accuracy of the result would have been lost given the small🎃 differences we were trying to measure. We opted for clean data with confident conclusions. 

We tested each setup at 40km/h - my thinking here was that anyone questioning how many bottles to use and their ideal position is probably racing, and likely doing shorter, harder races.൩ Amateur riders doing longer races🅺 or sportives, where the speeds are more likely slower, would prioritise carrying the extra fuel, and if you're riding over 40km/h, you're probably sitting in a bunch where aerodynamic impact is reduced. 

We tested at five yaw angles, in five-degree i⛎ncrements from -10° to +10°, to simulate the wind hitting the bike at various angleꦗs. 

Each capture - essentially the period during which the CdA measurement is taken - was held for 15 seconds, and if any unexpected turbulence was found in the CdA readings (ie, if it randomly jumped up or down mid capture) we'd repeat th൩e test. Luckily, each test recording was stable. 

Confidence margin

We performed𓆉 a repeat of the first configuration (no bottles or cages) at the end of the day to understand what sort of variance we coul🦹d see in our results, even before we changed anything. 

We calculated the margin as 0.0385 watts or a CdA differen💙ce of 0.00004 m². This is a very small margin, even for a test without a rider, but one that's reflective of the minimal interference we were having. We didn't need to remove the bike from the stanch💧ions, turn the cranks, or change wheels. Aside from the addition and removal of bottle cages, everything else remained untouched. We also managed to test everything within about an hour, so there was minimal temperature swing throughout the test, and the machines had been given plenty of time to warm up beforehand. 

The caveats

As with any of our CN Labs projects, Cyclingnews does not claim that this data is the final word on the aerodynamic ꦰperformance of the items included, but rather an additional stream of independent, unbiased testing and ๊information for our members. 

The results are simply repre💧sentative of our day of testing. We hope that🍌 being clear about our method and our protocol allows readers to appreciate the data while also understanding the bigger picture.

We also understand that a rider's pedalling legs may a🐷ffect the airflow around the bottles and affect any of the savings found. Still, we think the bike-only data is valuable and worthy of shari🍃ng. 

The results

When showing the results, I will start by showing the CdA o👍f each configuration. I will then use those figures to quantify the power required to pedal aඣt a given speed. 

Typically, we would use this formula💯, which assumes everything else (weight, drivetrain friction ♔and rolling resistance) remains constant: 

However, given there is quite a siz♔eable weight difference in adding (full) water bottles to a bike, I will also factor in 🍸the additional power required as a result of this weight. 

For that, I will use this equation, which is a simplified version of the full equation but one that is generally accepted as being accurate at lower ဣgradients. 

Added together, this will give us the power required to overcome air r🐬esistance and gravity. In a real-world scenario, you would also factor in rolling resistance and drivetrain friction, but since we're only interested in the differences between each bottle setup here, we'll assume those factors remain constant and set them at zero. 

Since we're working with a bike only, the CdA and weight are both small, and therefore the power required will be s𝔍mall. This is for comparative purposes only, we know bikes can't pedal themselve✨s. 

However, for the sake of showing the effect on a full riderꦫ, I will also apply the differences to a baseline rider with an arbitrary CꦓdA of 0.3 and weight of 83kg. For this, I will set the no-bottle-cages setup as the 'zero', and adjust the CdA and weight from there.

In the graph above, I've ordered by CdA from lowest to highest, and added an approximate weight figure🎃 for each configuration (bottle, cage and liquid) to the side. 

From a purely 🙈aerodynamic perspect✤ive, there are a few interesting points we can infer from the data. 

As we expected, the aero time 𝄹trial bottles from Elite are more aerodynamic than standard round bottles. 

Running a bottle on the seat tube came out at the same CdA as running one on the more conventionally used do🗹wn tube, so whenev🏅er you want to run a single bottle, there is no right place to put it. Use whichever feels more comfortable for you. 

If all-out speed is what you're after, running the Elite bottles is the solution, but if you don't have a s🧸et, then ♊you're better off running nothing at all. Of course, that only applies if you can make it through your chosen event without water. 

Perhaps most interesting is that running three bottles, with the third on the underside of the down tube, was faster than running two, and even faster than running two 750ml ꦚbottles. 

To help you quantify the differences, here's a graph 🐬that shows how these CdA figures translate into watts required at 40km/h. 

This shows tha𝔍t from the 🅘fastest option, the Elite Chrono aero bottles require two fewer watts than the worst option, the two empty bottle cages. 

However, 🅠all of the above is useful when riding on the flat, but they ignore the impact of weight when riding on hills. Of course, most courses include a mix of uphill and downhill, but to keep thiಞs from becoming a 10000-word essay, I'll focus on riding uphill. 

Using the approximate wei💟ghts for each configuration, I have calculated the power required at 0%, 2.5%, 5%, 7.5% 🀅and 10% gradients. 

The reason I've done it at five different gradients is that I wanted to show how much the importance of weight grows as hills get steeper. In the above graph, I've shown the lightest and heaviest options in our test, no bottles vs three bottles; a swing of 1.8kg. At a gradient of 0%, the power required to overcome gravity is♚ zero for both options. 

At 2.5% the baseline takes an additional 21.8 watts, growing to 26.7 watts when you add the three bottles, a difference of 4.9 watts. At 1ও0%, that same 1.8kg weight gain will cost you 19.6 watts.

Here you can see that on flat terrain, the Elite cages save 0.9 watts compared to the no-bottles-no-cages baseline configuration. That saving shrinks to 0.4 watts when you start climbing, and when you hit gradients of 5%, the add▨itional weight begins to make itsel🍒f known, making you 0.2 watts worse off. 

For the heavier options, such as two or three bottles, the number of watts required grows significantly at higher gradients, with the heaviest op🍌tion costing you a chunky 20.4 watts compare🗹d to the baseline. Remember this is for the bike without the rider though, so this figure is somewhat exaggerated. 

Here, with♔ our figures adjusted to mimic a real rider, I have calculated at a slightly more attainable speed of 30km/h. The whole reason for adding a rider into the equation is to make it more real-world applicable, but nobody can ride uphill at 40km/h, so it made sense to adjust. 

Here, at the slower speed, the available savings are more modest. There's just 0.4 watts on the table between the baseline and theꩵ fastest option on flat terrain. In fact, all setups are within just half a watt. As soon as you introduce any gradient, the available aero savings are offset b💝y increased weight, even when the bottles are empty. 

At 10% gradients, there's a 15-watt difference between best and wors♔t.

The takeaways

On flat roads, when it comes to carrying water bottles on your bike, your fastest option is to use time trial bottles. In fact, even if you don't need water, the bottles act as fairings that make you faster. That could be the Elite Chrono bott💯les as we've used here, but there are plenty of alternatives, including the Tacx TT or the aero bottles that came on the Trek Madone. 

The savings are small, but not insignificant; in the regi🃏on of half a watt at 30km/h, around one watt at 40km/h, or more as speed increases. With regards carrying one bottle vs two or three bottles, and their optimal position, the differences are even smaller, albeit still significant if 𒉰you're looking to eke out every last second from your performance. 

However, as soon as you start riding uphill, those small savings are quickly offset by the increase in weight, meaning if you're riding primarily uphill, your fast🅺est approach is to not carry any bottles or cages at all. However, this is only applicable if you can finish your ride safely, without dehydration or overheating. You'll lose a lot more than the 15-watt deficit we saw here if you fail to hydrate properly or you overheat. 

Assuming you've wor💜ked out how much fluid you want to carry, the above data should hopefully be a useful guide on the best way to do so. 

Conversely, it should also serve as a reminder of how marginal these gains are. Having done all the maths here, I recently chose to run two round 750ml bottles in a gravel race. I knew I'd be racing for around 4 hours, in temperatures ꧒around 25C/75F, and my average speed would be in the region of𝔉 30km/h. With all that in mind, the aero penalty would cost me 0.9 watts, but since I had plans to shelter in groups, that would be reduced further. The weight penalty would cost no more than 4 watts on the steepest kicks, but less on average. The benefits, however, would be an extra 500ml of water that I could use to hydrate and cool myself (on top of the energy drink I had in a hydration pack), avoiding the need to stop at feed stops, and saving me a lot more time in the end. 

Importantly, we also did some testing on hydration packs on the same day, including a test wearing the hydration pack inside a skinsuit vs on top as normal, as well as tests with the Rule 28 Gravel Suit, which holds the hydration bladder in a sleeve at the rear. We'l൲l share the data for that soon. 

But to go back to the very beginning, my friend was right. Empty bottle cages are indeed slower. On flat terrain, they're halfꦯ a watt slower than no bottle cages at all, although that saving shrinks to just a tenth of a watt when compared to leaving your bot🐲tles in place.

The positives were that Roglič had already been race leader for two of those days. The negatives were that he had fallen, 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:they had lost Jai Hindley and – the biggest worry of all – the 2023 Giro champion had been outflanked by UAE Team Emirates-XRG, sitting 2 minutes 25 seconds behind 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Isaac del Toro and half that to 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Juan Ayuso.

It was always going to be a possibility that UAE would play the numbers gam🐻e when the opportunity presented itself and the gravel sectors on the way to Sienna seemed the mostly likely terrain for that to happen, so it’s not a gr🍌eat surprise. The concern is that now the options to recover the minutes lost to Del Toro and Ayuso on the crucial mountain stages are more limited, with Hindley’s retirement and Dani Martínez’s iffy form. 

Compared to the UAE Team Emirates resources available, namely 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Adam Yates and Brandon McNulty, the critical role of climbing domestique is likely going to fall on the shoulders of Giulio Pellizzari who was the only teammate that Roglič had left in the final part of the fateful ninth stage. The interesting part of this situation is it was Pellizzari who was runner up to Del Toro when the latter won the Tour de l’Avenir twoꩵ years ago, the Italian taking the stag𝔍e win and the Mexican the overall victory on the last mountain top finish. 

Now at this Giro they find themselves rivals again, one protected in the maglia rosa and the other in service of his team leader. Born only six days apart it's not yet approaching the Wout van Aert vs Mathieu dan der Poel saga but the possibility is there given time, which of course they have plenty of at the age of 21. Van Aert and Van der Poel have 126 days of separation, a chasm by comparison with the youngst🦩ers.

Searching for clues

The first opportunity for Roglič to regain some seconds is 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tuesday's time trial where theor༺etically he ought to be 30 seconds faster than the pink jersey wearer but, between calculating seconds per km of previous TTs and the reality of what damage has been done in his crash, it could go either way. 

Same for Ayuso, normally he would lose 15-20 seconds to Roglič however stitches in the leg are going to make the day more uncomfortable. Even so, if the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe leader races to the form book he’ll still be roughly two minutes behind on GC. Not insurmountable but not ideal and with Ayuso mugging him on the uphill sprint🥃s that are his trademark, there are no margins left for the lapses of concentration that we saw in the last few metres of stages 7 and 8. 

The Spaniard remains the biggest threat to Roglič but overcoming Del Toro won’t be simple and the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:second week ou꧒ght to give a few clues to how the GC tactics play out.

UAE have the upper hand but can’t lie back and rꦉisk Roglič wearing them down in the last week, they can’t let him take bonus seconds either. There are three days coming where the breakaway has the chance to survive so they can let Lidl-Trek's Mads Pedersen and co. try to control things and that leaves the two mountain stages to cover if Roglič goes on the attack.

He has to do tꦰhat, but there's the risk of being countered by not only the UAE duo but Simon Yates (Visma-Lease a Bike) and Richard Carapaz (EF Education-EasyPost), who are looking spritely and each have a Grand Tour on their palmarès as a warning of how strong they can be. Then there’s Egan Bernal (Ineos Grenadiers), who is no stranger to racing aggressively, and all this means the Giro’s middle part will be complicated as each contender tries to figure out when, or if, to make a move.

Commit or play poker?

For the fast men it’s been a fruitful race so far, nine days and five sprint finishes of one sort or another. Kaden Groves (Alpecin-Deceuninck) blasted the other hopefuls on the rain soaked trek to Naples only two days after Casper van Uden (Picnic-PostNL) surprised everyone in Lecce. In between it was the Pedersen show again. The former world champion has remained the reference in terms of sprinting but now that Wout van Aert has a confidence boostᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚing win under his b🅷elt I wonder if Visma-Lease a bike will rethink their strategy of all in for🐻 Olav Kooij on the flatter stages. 

With Lidl-Trek having Giulio Ciccone involved in the GC they can't afford to control the race every time it's meant to be a sprint and therefore at some point Visma-Lease a Bike, Picnic PostNL,ཧ Jayco-AlUla and Alpecin-Deceuninck are going to have to decide amongst themselves if, ho🌊w and when they commit to policing the guys in the early break.

If the team directors in the cars play poker then we might see another Diego Ulissi type surprise. Though, given XDS Astana's points tally for this year, that they were rewarded with a day in pink at the Giro wasn’t the biggest 'what j𝓰ust happened?' moment. They have had KOM blue jersey wearer Lorenzo Fortunato consistently in the attacks too and, though Luke Plapp (Jayco-AlUla) out-muscled them for a rather impressive win, you get the feeling that the team will continue to be a feature. 

What I don’t expect is for an intra-team conflict at UAE to emerge straight away, it might later on, but given the pasting that Del Toro gave to Van Aert on the climbs heading t🌟o Sienna there’s no valid reason to question the strength of the current maglia rosa. 

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more. 

So, I finꩲally gꦗot my gelato. A small “tre gusti” (which was nice as they don’t always let you have three flavors in a normal-sized cup in this country) at an artisanal spot, along with a walk and a few photos holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa, was just what I needed to recharge my batteries today. 

Exactly how to handle the rest day in a three-week race like the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Giro d'Italia is quite the topic of discussion 💝amongst teams and riders, and seems to require some combination of voodoo and black magic to get just right.

Let’s just say it’s more of an art than a science. Some guys have been known to ride up to four hours on the rest day, while others don’t ride at all. I’ve had teammates do full gas efforts up mountains, yet others w🦂ho barely put one foot in front of the other. And strangely, I have not seen one method which really seemed to wo🌱rk better than any other. 

Many riders and friends are convinced that a rest day “blocks” them - whatever that means - while others feel rejuvenated and ready for battle. I think I lie somewhere in the middle of this spectrum - I like to ride a little, but not too much, and an OK pace, but notꦦ too hard. 

What I am 100% sure of, though, is that you need to do what you think is right. Because if you think you’re going to be “blocked” or tired, or whatever,🐽 from either doing too much or too little, you will without a doubt feel that wa🌠y the next day when you mount your bicycle to start the stage!

First week in Italy

The last six stages have been quite the whirlwind since we arrived in Italy, and for me 🦹personally, they seem to have flown by. We started in a beautiful town in Puglia called Alberobello, a city with very cool historic domed architecture, which we almost semi got to appreciate as we rolled through the town at about two kilometres per hour during the neutral. 

It’s not always something we getဣ to see as we are rolling along through cities or the countryside or up and down mountains, as being in a peloton catapulting along the roads at speeds too fast to appreciate requires quite a bit of focus. It’s only after the fact sometimes when you seꦐe a photo and wonder, 'When the heck did we pass that?!'

While some stages were harder than ꦚothers, there were a few moments of note - the one with the most press coverage probably being the crash on the stage to Napoli. Personally, I⛦ was extremely fortunate to escape unscathed, but I can confirm, the roads were like ice. 

We had noticed the lack of grip a bit on one of the earlier descents, as once or twice we could feel our tires slide a little bit out from under us. Th♑en, in a town just before, we went over some wet cobbles, and a rider in front of me lost his rear wheel as it slid from the right to🌺 the left before being bucked off the saddle, and somehow landing back down on it safely. From there, I knew the conditions weren’t great. 

So I cannot say it came as all that much of a surprise 💧that when we were rolling down the false-flat descent into the outskirts of Napoli at 60 kph on a road that glistened with a mix of motor oil and grit, guys just started to fall like dominoes. I was quite well placed in the bunch, but the entire row of riders in front of me went down. 

Luckily, I had left a tiny bit of distance between m🌌yself and the guys just in front, so I tried to brake as hard as I could safely while trying to move slightly to the left to go through the only gap in the line I saw… my rear wheel slid once, then twice, and somehow I managed to slow down enough to sneak through the only gap I saw and got to the other side upright. I thanked my lucky starsꦍ. 

Half of my team went down, though luckily no one was too badly hurt, but one of my teammates said it wa꧂s so slippery that he nearly fell over again because he slipped as he was standing up from the road!

Stage 8 was another crazy day as everyone was sure it would be the first day for a potential breakaway victory. Unlike stage 4, where only one poor soul decided to take his chances off the front, it seemed that on the day to Castelraimondo, there was maybe only one guy who wanted to stay in the bunch! 

But it was the first time in this Giro I really felt like we had a real Giro stage, one with a fight that seemed to last an eternity. There were 🅘attacks and attacks, and just when we reached the point you really didn’t think it was possible to attack anymore, there were even more attacks. And then from that point on,🐬 the battle continued for nearly another hour. 

So it’s safe to say that half the guys in the break were dead upon arrival in the front. It’s not easy timing it right on a day like that, as you never know when the right move will go – it could take two minutes, or two hours, like w🦋e saw on that day. But one thing is for sure – when it goes like that, the winner is a damn strong bike rider. 

Our main goal for most of the stages has been to keep Michael Storer, our GC leader, out of trouble. So on a day like that, we could be spectators to the madness, but you can’t help but feel for the guys who try a hundred attacks and then miss th🐬e hundred-and-first, which happens to go. It’s not easy!

And then we had the Strade Blanche. I always enjoy racing on the gravel road,s even though they can be rather savage. There is often debate on whether or not they belong in Grand Tours, as they surely add an el🐓ement of danger, but I can say that while personally I like them, they do add a lot of stress for the team.

I do believe the winner of a Grand Tour should be a well-rounded bike rider – one who can climb, descend, TT, and race on all different terrains. But 🗹as a teammate supporting someone attacking the GC, even we support riders feel the stress.

The teams invest a ton in getting ready for a Grand Tour, sending us to altitude, giving us the best race programs to be ready, nutrition plans, refining equipment and the like. And that can all be lost in the drop of a hat if a guy crashes or punctures at🅠 the wrong moment, both of which we saw many of on yesterday’s stage to Siena. 

So, from the standpoint of a bike racer, I love those roads and I love the ambiance around them. I love to finish in the Piazza del Campo, to suffer up and down the steep roads, to pass through the incredible vineyards, to ride past the ancient and historic castelli, to feel the life an🍸d the energy of the tifosi screaming for every one🍌 of us as we roll by, no matter how fast or how slow, I love it. 

But even considering all that, I still totally understand the other side. There are always risks involved. From our side, unfortunately, we did not survive unscathed. Michael went down in🐻 a corner, entering one of the sectors while being in the front group, then 🐈later needed to change his bike due to a resulting mechanical. 

I unfortunately made an error and was toꦆo far back entering the first sector, never to see the front of the race again, also unable to provide crucial support in a critical moment. So, as with everything Strade Bianche, it’s a love-hate relationship.

And that’s the thing about Grand Tours. You can get down on yourself when you have a bad 🍌day. It’s frustrating when things don’t go as planned. But they are not one-day races. They las🌃t for three whole weeks. 

There are plenty of ups, and there are an unfortunate number of downs. One day you can be on top of the world feeling li🧔ke a king, the next you can be off the back fighting just to survive and 💃finish in the time limit. And both sides can happen to anybody on any given day. Peak form. Sickness. Unbelievable fatigue. I’ve felt all sides. 

It’s also what I think makes ✤these races some of the most beautiful sporting events in the world. It’s what makes them the most brutal, too. They and we are human.

For this week, though, I’m hoping for beauty. Only two more♑ weeks ‘til Rome. 

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from each and every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more.

We will see if 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Juan Ayuso can reclaim team leadership at UAE Team Emirates-XRG from his friendly upstart Isaac del Toro, if 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Primož Roglič can pull back the minute he lost on the Strade Bianche gravel roads and if Mads Pedersen and Lidl-Trek can ✅continue to dominate the sprint stages.

The racing resumes on Tuesday with the 28.6km stage 10 time trial from Lucca to Pisa, where every second will count in the GC battle. That is followed by an unheralded but brutal mountain stage through Garfagnana, across 3,800 metres of climbing, towards Modena, where the GC riders will have to perfo💖rm again on very different and demand♍ing terrain.

Stage 13 from Modena to Viadana is largely flat🐻, while🍌 Friday's stage to Vicenza ends with the 1km ramp up to the Santuario di Monte Berico that overlooks the city. 

ಞStage 14 is another sprint day to the Slovenian border and the cross-border city of Gorizia-Nova Gorica, the 2025 European city of culture. The stage seems a snoozer, but the 26.4km city-centre finishing circuit will be a test of nerves and bike skills for everyone in the peloton.

Sunday's 15th stage is another cruel switch to th🙈e mountains, with a 214km ride over the Monte Grappa mid-stage and then a later 16.4km ramp to Dori and t🃏he Assiago high plain.

The rain will be an extra factor and an extra challenge in week t𝔍wo of the Giro. It's still spring-like in central Italy, rather than the warm and sunny early-sꦡummer weather the Giro often enjoys.

Rain is forec🍬ast for some time on Tuesday afternoon, when the GC🌼 riders are due to clash between four and five in the afternoon, with sudden strong winds from the south also blowing against the riders. 

There is also a risk of rain for the stage that clim🧜bs into the Apennines on Wednes🧸day, with up to 20mm of rain likely on the ride to Vicenza. The sun will only emerge with force at the weekend.

Back in action for the Lucca-Pisa time trial

The riders enjoyed a quiet, relaxed re𝄹st d♏ay, spread between the Tuscan coast near Viareggio and Pisa.

Taco van der Hoorn went looking for the leaning tower of Pisa and enjoyed Italian gelato, whilℱe others were careful to make zone three efforts to keep their engines revving. Some checked out the time trial course, but the official reconnaissance ride comes on closed r♍oads on Tuesday morning. 

The 28.6km individual time trial from Lucca to Pisa will be nail-biting to watch but tough to ride. It seems to suit the specialist like stage 2 winner 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Josh Tarling (Ineos Grenadiers) and E🐎uropean c𝓡hampion Eduardo Affini (Visma-Lease A Bike), who knows how to push a big gear while staying aero.

Th𒐪e course is largely flat and fast, but starts with a loop𓂃 of Lucca on a path along the city walls.

The main road cuts through the hills south via the 950-metre Monti Pisani tunnel to San Giuliano Terme before entering Pisa from the east for a section along the Arno river and cutting into the historic city centre for the finish alongside the spectacular Leaning🍃 Tower of Pisa and the white marble Duomo.

Roglič and Ayuso will be hoping to straighten their overall ambition, while the 28.6km course will test Del Toro's GC ambitions and his ability to handle the pressur🎀e and race in the magl🃏ia rosa.

A warm southerly wind will blow in the afternoon, holding off the rain unt🤪il the clouds burst, sometime in the afternoon. Those who lost time on Sunday, slipped down the GC, and so will start the time trial 30 minutes or so earlier, could avoid the worst of the rain in a reversal ꦅof fortunes.

High into the Apennines

The Giro d'Italia always includes a less-famed mountain stage, and this year's climbs high into the Garfagnana valley and the Tosco🍨-Emilia Apennines between Viareggio and Castelnuovo ne' Monti.  

The 185km stage has been rated just three stars by many experts, but it will be a real test for the GC riders, given the terrible San Pellegriဣno in Alpe climb mid-stage as well as the constant rolliꦫng and twisting roads that lead to the finish.

The Giro last climbed San Pellegrino in Alpe 25 years ago when Franceso Casagrande won the stage to Abetone. He cracked 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Marco Pantani and gained 1:39 on Stefano Garzelli on the steep slopes of the climb. Garzelli and Pantani later combined to defeat Casagrande, but the💝 stage showed the dangers of the Tuscan climb.

It is 13.7km long, with an a🌄verage gradient of 8.8%. It sta🃏rts with 4km at 9.4%, eases in the middle, and then steepens to 12.1% for the final 2.5km.

The 1,623-metre high summit is followed by a 40km d🌳escent on country roads to the foot of the gradual 11.1km Toano climb. More twisting descents lead to the final Pietra di Bismantova climb, which leads close to the finish.

If anyone is dropped early on the San Pellegrino in Alpe, there will be no way back to the front of the race, with huge time losses inevitable. Someone will surely b♔e caught out this year.

A break is likely to go clear, but whoever goes on the attack will have to be sure of their climbing ability if ꦫthey🍃 want to hold off the GC riders, who will also be fighting for the Red Bull Kilometre, placed just 23km from the finish. 

To the River Po, Vicenza and the northeast

Thursday's stage 12 is geographically completely different to stage 11, with the 172km ride from Modena ๊to the banks of the River Po on valley or flat roads.

The sprinters' team will surely not let their chance of success go after suffering in ꩵthe recent mountains, the Strade Bianche gravel and the Lucca-Pisa time trial.

The s🌠tage includes a 26.6km circuit and a sharp turn left into the 450m long finishing straight. A leadout needs to go beyond the corner and then accelerate towards the line. It seems perfect for another Mathias Vacek-Mass Pedersen combo, u🧔nless Wout Van Aert and Olav Kooij can work well together.

Week 2 of the Giro includes several transfer stages that take the race north from Tuscany in🏅to the Veneto and then east to Friuli-Venezia Giulia, on a cultural and geogra✅phical journey of discovery. 

Stage 13 from Rovigo to Vicenza starts on the flat roads of the Po delta, heads towards Verona to remember 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Davide Rebellin and then t🔯o the Vicenza hills 𒈔for a 20.3km circuit he would have loved to race on.

There are three steep 'muro' Monte Berico climbs in the final 20km, each less than a kilometre long but at 9%. The🀅 Red Bull Kilometre is again late, 10km from the finish, with the finish line atop the last climb overlooking Vicenza. 

It will be a stage for a finesseur like Corbin Strong (Israel-Premier-Tech) or even Tom Pidcock (Q36.5), or perhaps even 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Mads Pedersen again. The GC riders will also ha𝕴ve to be ꦚvigilant and protected to avoid any crashes and slits in the peloton.

Stage 14 is from Treviso, the home of Pinarello, Benetton and many other industrial groups, to Gorizia-Nova Gorica on the Slovenian border. The 195km stage heads northeast on flaꦗt roads north of Venice and Portoguaro, with only a short hill after 157km in Goniace.

The 26.4km Gorizia-Nova Gorica finishing circuit crosses between Italy and Slovenia and unites the town, their now combined cultures and their love of cycling. The circuit climbs the Saver hill twice but will have little impact on🌸 the sprint showdown, with the ꦗfinish on a flat road near the station.

Week two ends with a day in the mountains, heading east from Fiume Vento to Asiago, which overlooks the Vento plains. The 219km stage is a day of two halves, with a flat 103km only disturbed by a visit to the Ca' del Poggio climb, which celebrates the region's Prosecco🔯 wine.

The climb of Monte Grappa marks the start of the second half of the stage. The constant 7.5% Strada Cadorna road is climbed from the south. Monte Grappa is 25💎km long, but comes with 90km still to race.

It is another day for a brave breakaway. If there is any GC aဣction, it will be on the later climb to Enego (16.4km at 5.4%) and on the rolling high plain road afterwards.

The high mountains, tᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚhe most decisive moments of the race, come in the third week of the Giro, which begins on Tuesday, 𒁃May 27, with the stage to San Valentino near Trento and then on to Bormio over the Mortirolo.

Week two is an intermezzo of ever-changing, ever-d♚ifferent racing, as the Giro d'Italia has been so far this year and should always be.

Giro d'Italia week 2 stage profiles

With five sectors and 29.5km of u🌸npaved, beautiful white gravel roads to battle with, Giro organisers RCS and race director Mauro Vegni got exactly what they would have wanted when they designed the routeꦰ from Gubbio to the Piazza del Campo.

The Strade Bianche one-day race in March is one of the most idyllic viewing experiences on the cycling calendar, and by bringing it to the Giro, it witnessed an enthralling fight for victory between Van Aert and Isaac del Toro (UAE Team Emirates-XRG), who became the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:first ever Mexican to lead the Giro.

168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Van Aert completed his comeback from illness and injury with a first wiไn of the season, a 50th victory as a pro and a completion of the Grand Tour trilogy of stage wins, adding a Giro triumph to his nine from the Tour de France and three from the Vuelta a España.

He described it as perhaps "the most beautiful place to finish a bike race", with the incredible vistas throughout Tuscany and the ever-obsessed tifosi coming out in the same numbers t🀅hey do every March to offer support that ꦕfew other races can replicate. 

It more than delivered with drama on a GC front too, with Del Toro claiming the race lead, and his teammate Juan Ayuso also gaining time on main rival Primož Roglič (Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe), as the Slovenian, like several others on Sundaღy, fell victim to the gravel roads with a crash and punctu🌱re. 

Siena provi꧟ded the perfect closure to the first week proper of this year's Giro, setting things up for a tricky second week and brutally tough third week, where the fight for the maglia rosa will enter its final phase. 

We've compiled some of the best pictures from the day's action, where the final 70km saw carnage unfold and Van Aert's incredible silencing of doubters finished off. From the Via Santa Caterina to Colle Pinzuto, relive a Grand Tour stage for the ages on some of Italy's mos💎t beautiful terrain. 

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more.

The situation in the UK has made the headlines because this summer’s 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tour de France will be the final edition to be free to air on ITV4, and after that fans will need a £31-a-month TNT Sports subscription to watch most events, with the currently-running 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Giro d'Italia already behind that paywall – but it's not unique to Great Britain. Whether it's Eurosport, Max or FloBikes, 🍷cycling is increasingly going t𝓡o subscription-only services, which are getting more expensive.

For ardent fans, it's a cost that many have little choice but to absorb, save for missing ou𒊎t on watching the key events of the calendar. But what is behind the chang🍒es, and where does TV subscription money go? 

Though TNT Sports owners Warner Bros. Discovery are now the sole owners of Tour de France rights in the UK, ITV's decision not to renew their contract with the Tour was not directly related to that, and the loss of free-ꦆto-air coverage was a long time coming.

Ned Boulting, who has been part of ITV’s coverage of the Tour de France since 2003 and will commentate alongside David Millar in July for the last time on the channel, says the🐠 more cౠasual audience has been ebbing away for many years.  

"For 99% of the British public, the Tour de France is the only cycling race that exists, and even that is of secondary importance compared to the Olympics. The audience peaked with the Grand Départ in 2014 [when the race b🧔egan in Yorkshire] and ever since then it’s been in slow decline, while the cos♊t of re-signing the rights has grown much faster," said Boulting.

As a result, ITV failed to make a bid for the new contract, and neither the BBC nor Channel 4, which initially ꩲbrought highlights of the Tour to the UK in 1986, were interested, as the audience 🦩is provably small.

“I know that the BBC have from time to time quite coveted the idea of showing the Tour, but they simply don’t have the bandwidth or the channels to stick up an event that haꦛppens every day for three weeks," Boulting added.

Although the rights holder, the European Broadcasting Union, is a club for public service broadcasters, it opted to sell the rights to TNT Sports, a pay channel created by a merger of BT Sport and Eurosport.  It made a loss of £34m in the year to July 2023,ꦬ according to Companies House filings. The actuꦯal race footage will be provided by France Television, as before.

Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent company of TNT Sports have been working on streamlining their offering in recent years, 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:shutting down GCN+ and Eurosport in the UK, and this consolidation is part of the reason why cycling is now in the main TNT subscription, rather than a cheaper Eไurosport package. 

Of course, in other sports, subscription fees of £20-40 a month are not rare. When the Premier L💜eague took the plunge into pay television at its birth in 1992, the £304m paid by BSkyB was the first step in its march to worldwide popularity, but fo🦋r cycling broadcasters, the imposition of an expensive paywall is a sign of weakness, not of strength. 

Rupert Murdoch, who had satellite dishes to sell, bet correctly that football fans were prepared to pay way more as subscribers than the rate bid by the incumbent broadcaster, ITV. The number of mat💛ches on air soared, and the quality of the coverage was transformed. There is, unfortunately, no such buzz around cycling. 

Darach McQuaid, chief executive of Oakbrew Swiss, who brought the start of the Giro d’Italia to Ireland in 2014, knows a thing or two about the delicate art of creating and funding cycling events. He has also brought Saudi Arabian funding into a WorldTour team - with 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Team Jacyo AlUla sponsored by the Royal Commission for AlUla🍨, an arm of the Saudi Arabian government.

McQuaid entered the business during the lean times of the 1980s, when cycling was largely dismissed as an activity for people who could not afford to drive. He says: “Now cy🀅cling fans are famous for paying £10,000 on a new bike, but when they go into a bike store after that, they are sometimes very measly.” Is it possible that cycling fans are in denial about the realities of following a minor🌳ity interest sport?

A tough sport to monetise

Around 12 million fans line the route of the Tour de France, one of the biggest sporting events of the year, watching it for absolutely nothing. That's magical in its own way, but a free day out for road race spectators is of little help to promoters of lesser events, struggling to make the numbers add up. Industry sources say that only a handful of other races, including the Giro d’Italia and 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Paris-Roubaix, run at a profit, thanks to things like lucrative sponsorship deals and spওortive entry fees.

For comparison, the average price of a Premier League season ticket varies between £345 at West Ham and £1,073 at Arsenal and matchday receipts account for around a quarter𓆉 of revenue.

With no income from ticket sales, race organisers need to make money somewher💃e, and this is where host cities (which we'll come to later) and selling television rights come into play.

It should be ꦿnoted that the teams who take part in the Grand Tours do not receive a slice of the television rights, but must fund themselves through sponsorship or rich benefactors. The increased subscription costs to watch cycling funnel first to the service provider, then the production team creating the coverage, then the race organiser – none of the extra money a fan will pay will end up in the pockets of a team.🍷 Conversely, lower viewing numbers may even impact the appeal of major team sponsorship.

The organiser of the Tour, ASO, does not declare its television revenue, which makes up the largest share of the revenue, but the published figures for cycle racing are modest compared to other sports. A single game in the Premier League generates more in broadcast revenue than the annual media rights earned by the UCI, which administers the UCI World Championships, with 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tadej Pogačar the reigniꦫng elite men’s world champion and Lotte Kopecky the elite women’s title holder. The UCI declared that it generated £5.1m in income from media rights and distribution before costs in 2023, a sum dwarfed by the £167m received by Manchester City for Premier League ri🎃ghts alone.

 ASO will make a lot more money than the UCI from selling the rights to the Tour, which is shown in hundreds of countries worldwide and e💟ven just in racing volume, eclipses what the UCI owns. But that is still🌼 just one income stream, and not enough to cover the cost of running the event. This is where sponsorship and hosting fees come in.

The Tour was born in 1903 of unabashed commercialism - to boost the flagging sales of the sports newspaper, L’Auto, the predecessor of L’Equipe- and, to put it politely, ASO, in charge since 1965, extract what it can along every twist of the 3,320km course. At its most boisterous, thisꦓ means the cavalcade of publicity vehicles, which precedes the riders, bearing models of galloping horses and giant plastic smurfs. Showers of free trinkets and samples are hurled into the roadside crowds.

The Amaury family, who own ASO, shares little financial information, but in 2023 it disc✃losed that it typically received payments of €90,000 from towns hosting the start of a stage, and €130,000 for those hosting a finish. Itไ declines to discuss this further, but the commercial benefits are significant when the travelling circus that accompanies the Tour comes to town. That means the race's route depends on what towns are willing to pay a fee, but in general, there's high demand from local authorities to bring the Tour to town. There are further negotiations on the precise location of the finish line, where there may be tensions between telegenic shots and the safety of the riders.

Some stages are so integral to the appeal of the Tour that negotiations are more complex. Take the ski resort of Alpཧe d’Huez, which has hosted a stage on 32 occasions and can expect up to one million spectators on its notorious 21 hairpin bends. The finale on the Champs-Élysées has also been woven into the fabric of the nation over the course of half a century: it is understood that ASO has to pay for the hefty costs of policing the event.

The big money for ASO comes from countries prepared to host the Grand Départ, at the start of each Tour, because the hotel and restaurant trade can count on up to a week of bookings. Since 2007, ꧂when it departed from London, the race has started more frequently abroad than within France. It launched from Yorkshire in 2014 and will return again to the UK in 2027, with stages in Scotland, 🍷England and Wales.

The impact of losing free-to-air cycling

The timing of the announcement that the Tour would return to the UK, just months after learning that free-to-air Tour coverage would end in the country, draws attention to a big question: what is t🧸he impact of losing free, accessible cജoverage of events like the Tour?

It remains to be seen, but there are certainly concerns that higher barriꦿers to viewership might result in smaller audiences for the already fairly niche sport, and less𒊎 eyeballs could mean less return on investment for sponsors, and eventually less sponsor interest. The next few years in the post-paywall era will show if this has an impact. 

What🐻's more, putting a barrier in front ജof the sport can limit the wider social impact of events like the Tour.

When the Tꦬour visited Yorkshire in 2014, UK Sport contributed £10m towards the event, and the official impact assessment claimed that it attracted 2.3m “unique” spectators along two stages in Yorkshire, apart from the third stage between Cambridge and London. It said the economic impact on the host regions was £128m, with a further £33m for the UK as a whole. [Three years later, in 2017, Boris Johnson, then serving as mayor of London, refused to pay ASO £4.7m to host another Grand Départ because the full organisational cost worked out at £40m].

Though those numbers are about who turned out on the road and in the host towns, the 🌳large interest was undoubtedly mainly there because people in the UK could watch the Tour for free in previous years. It was not a niche, paywalled event, and it was something many people have tuned into on a July afternoon over the years. They may not all be hardcore fans, but there's an awareness of the event. 

It was therefore awkward that in the midst of ASO's negotiations with the UK government to commi🎶t millions of pounds to the 2027 Grand Départ, it emerged that the television rights were being sold to a pay TV channel, very likely putting a huge dent in the public interest in the event.

Christian Prudhomme, director of ASO, made emollient sounds in March about the prospect of an ad hoc agreement for TNT to air the first three stages, starting in Edinburgh and then travelling through England and Wales, to a broader audience. That could involve placing it on WBD's free-to-air channel, Quest – which is showing free highlights of the Giro – or more helpfully, sharing it via one of the three main terrestrial networks, BBC, ITV or Channel 4.

 There are precedents for this: for example, Sky Sports shared its coverage of Emma Raducanu’s triumph in the 2021 US Open with Channel 4, and other major sporting finals have been given to free channels in recent years𒅌 when the national interest and importance are high enough. 

The EBU said in a statement to Cyclingnews that ASO had “guaranteed” free-to-air coverage for all three UK-based stages of thཧe men's and women's Tours in 2027.

Moreover, the British authorities have cheerfully promised a similar legacy to that of 2014, “tackling inactivity𝄹, improving mental wellbeing, boosting economic growth and supporting communities”- oh and also “to inspire a new generation of cycling fans and riders while boosting cycle tourism right across the country”. But can this be achieved if✨ much of the public won't get to watch the race?

TNT, the EBU and ASO all declined to talk on the record on how they intend to deliver this legacy and cement the impact of the race's visit, but McQuaid points out that everyone involved with cycling in the UK will need to be much more ambitious ifꦬ the Grand Départ is to enthuse a new generation.

Might new markets in the Middle East and South East Asia come to the rescue, as they have for other sports, including golf, football, and Formula 1, which has added circuits in Qatar and Saudi Arabia? Cycling as a sport has retreated in the USA, but is growing in parts of the Middle East and in Singapore. The Giro d’Italia started in Jerusalem in 2018, but Summer temperatures make it highly unlikely that the Tour could hold a Grand Départ in the Gulf. The emergence of One Cycling - a project backed by the Saudi Arabian SURJ Sports Investment fund - could bring cycling more prominently to the Middle East. With broadcast proposals still unclea🃏r, perhaps it could even make it more accessible. However, the future of t💞his project is far from certain despite the enormous capital investment being discussed.

For now, it seems that there is no opti🌟on but for cycling fans to put their hands in their pockets, which may well mean fewer people watching the sport as many simply can't 🐻or won't pay the inflated costs.

As McQuaid puts it: “Cycling sport has a 𒀰terrible business model unless you own the Tour de France. The sport is luckily populated by people who are so passionate about the sport that it somehow works.”

The second day in Albania showed us the c✱ontext of Roglič, a five-time Grand Tour winner looking to triumph at a second Giro, showing all his experience and missing that TT victory by less than a second. It also set the scene of the challenge ahead for the much younger Ayuso, who at 22 is a rising star, but failed to perform as he would have liked in the race of𒊎 truth, and has a long way to go until he can match the palmarès of the Slovenian and actually beat him across th🌟ree weeks.

Today's stage finally gave Ayuso the chance to fight back and set the story up fully, as he delivered with interest, catching Roglič out in a poor𓄧 position during the final 1.5 kilometres in Tagliacozzo and charging to the line for his first Grand Tour stage victory.

ꦉIt's his fourth time racing one of cycling's prestigious three-week races, and finally, Ayuso put it all together to net that maiden win. It wasn't just a big step up for him, but also marked an important sign for this Giro, with the stage the Spaniard won being very much a 'Roglič day' on paper.

A long, shallow climb with a steep final few kilometres that will likely come down to a sprint of the GC men –that scrꦫeams Roglič, but on this ꦯoccasion it was Ayuso who never looked out of control, scanning as he followed moves, before launching away when he realised his rival was well behind in the wheels. 

Perhaps it could mean a changing of the guard and ta😼keover of the young man from the ol♕d, but Roglič did remind everyone post-stage 7 that he's "not so young, these guys go immediately. We [older riders] need a bit of time to maybe, hopefully start working".

There is, of coꦉurse, little to panic about yet for the Slovenian, with the second and third week still to come, where all of the hardest climbing stages will com꧟e, not forgetting, of course, that he also went back into the maglia rosa on Friday.

But the psychological blow could be one that proves more important, not in the sense that Roglič begins to doubt himself – he's fought back to win Grand Tours from many times in the past, and Ayuso hasn't proved yet to be a winner over three weeks – but it could be huge for Ayuso's confidence. Though again, the last time this happened, when Ayuso outsprinted Roglič up La Molina in the Volta Catalunya, the Sl༒ovenian still came good and delivered a killer blow on the final Barcelona day to wrest back the overall lead and win.

UAEꦿ Team Emirates-XRG move well ahead of Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe

There's anoth🎐er big factor in how the team situation has played, with drastic changes unfolding in the past twཧo days, after swinging well in Roglič and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe's favour in Albania.

While key UAE Team Emirates helper 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Jay Vine crashed and lost lots of time on the opening day, removing him as a GC card to play, Red Bull lost their main climbing domestique and well-positioned overall Jai Hindl🐲ey on stage 6, with the Australian abandoning with a concussion and fractured vertebra.

With Dani Martínez also nowhere near his best, that carried him to second at last year's Giro behind only Pogačar, Roglič's loss today was compounded by the top 15 on GC now𒁏 being filled with UAE riders as they impressed on the climb.

Another potential superstar Isaac del Toro finisꦍhed second on the day and alꦐso moved closer to Roglič's overall lead, now sat just nine seconds behind him, with Brandon McNulty and Adam Yates also not far behind in seventh and 15th.

As the men in white and black grow stronger and Roglič'🍨s support squad gets weaker, the 2025 Giro d'Italia is swinging more and more in favour of Ayuso's chances. The Emirati team will have several cards to play for when they want to put the pressure on.

Roglič was, and by virtue of reclaiming pink, still is the man to beat at the 108th Giro d'Italia, with histor༒y suggesting that he will only get better as the fight for pink rages on towards Rome, bu🍨t Ayuso appears to be at levels unseen before. 

Ayuso winning a Grand Tour would also mean completing something a Spanish rider hasn't for 10 years, since Alberto Contador at this very race in 2015, so recent history is not on his side. He was after all, one of the youngest GT pod𓄧ium finishers ever at his debut Vuelta, so a win seemed very much possible for his future, even this soon into it.

With a potentially very risky gra𒉰vel stage 9 to c♎ome before the second rest day on Monday, and the important second time trial from Lucca to Pisa not long after that, it's not long until we'll have a greater picture of where things stand ahead of the proper mountain tests in week two and three of the Giro. 

But the open race th꧟at was promised is beginning to materialise, and it is Roglič and Ayuso who are forming the rivalry that we were expecting – the game is now well and truly on for the maglia rosa.

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from each and every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more.

From strength training and nutrition to mental tips and prioritising recovery, various factꦯors and lifestyle elements play a key role in improving a rider’s performance – it's not just pedallin𝄹g.

To find out how the top riders utilise non-riding strategies to get better and faster, we spoke to two coaches to fin♍d out how th𓆉e pros do it, and what tips you can take on board to improve your own performance. 

After our latest fitness guide showed you 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:how to train to become a bette📖r climber, here are all the off-the-b🅘ike wa🙈ys you can become a better rider.

1. Strength training

As we've already explored in more depth, pro riders ar🀅e hitting the gym more than ever these days, and strength training is pr⛦oving to be a key element to cycling success.

UAE Team ADQ's 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Silvia Persico credited her gym routine when celebrating victory on stage 3 at the UAE Tour earlier this year, while 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tadej Pogačar’sꦿ has reportedly ramped up his strength train൲ing for this year as he targeted both the Spring Classics and Tour de France. 

"This has increased in prominence in the last decade and now you find most cyclists are doing some form of strength and conditioning work," Dani Rowe, coach at Rowe and King and former British track and road cyclist, told Cyclingnews. 

"The only caveat is you [need to] really define and invest fully. Dipping in and out of strength and conditioning 👍in 𝕴the gym doesn't really work, you need to buy into it. 

"Overload in the off-season and then maintain through the season. It's not something you can do for a couple of months in the winter and then neglect through the seaꦅson."

2. Stretch properly

Linked to strength training, incorporating a🌞 stretching routi𝐆ne can improve a rider’s performance and also prevent injury. 

"Stretching is important for pre🥂venting sore knees and back issues," said Row💮e. 

"A lot of riders struggle with sore backs and tight IT bands as well, and eಌspecially for those who are spending hours and hours on the bike, maybe four or five hours back-to-back, stretching can really help. It’s a simple one but can be hugely 🍬effective."

3. Prioritise high-quality rest

Nowadays, with all the external stimuli like social media, countless apps on phones, and family commitments, properly relaxing can ဣbe tricky, but prioritising high-quality rest helps pro riders boost recovery.  

"A rest day isn't necessarily a high-qu💧ality rest," said Rowe. "A rest day might be no bike but high-quality rest might be no bike with a nap, some time on ▨the sofa, and putting your legs up."

"It&ap💫os;s tricky to get that high quality rest frequently because we’ve all got busy lives, family commitments and ultimately cycling is a hob༒by but for professionals, your job is kind of seven days a week so on a rest day, your job is to rest."

Rowe s🔜uggests that getting a massage can help force this 🐬high-quality rest.

"It’s quite personal as to whether you buy into the benefits of m🌊assage but one thing it does is give ꧃you that forced chill out time," said Rowe. 

"You&a𒐪pos;re lying down for half an hour which gives yo🐠u some good switch off time and mindfulness."

4. Prepare kit, bike and route

While pro riders are away at training camp or at a race, they are largely under the wi⛄ng of a team who prepare everything for them, but when they are at home, it’s all on them. Being prepared can help take some of the effort out of training, allowing you to focus on your performance.

"Preparation is really important, and this means ꦐmaking sure your kit is all organised so when you come to ride, your kit&apo🅷s;s clean, your bottles are where they should be, nutrition's prepped, and your bike's in good working order," said Rowe.

"Maintaining your bike is part of this. I've known multiple pros who haven’t maintained their bike, the chain snaps when they’re two hours from home and they are sitting on the side of the road waiting for a family member to▨ come pick them up or tryin𝓡g to find a lift to the local bike shop.

"It's not conducive to being a professional stꦿanding on the side of the road in the UK in the middle of winter when it's coming down with rain."

It’s not just about your bike and your kit ei൲ther. 

"Be prepared with your routes and to try and get the best out of yo☂urself during your efforts,"🍬 said Rowe. 

"When you have a training plan you know what type of efforts you need to be completing, so if you've got a 20-minute threshold effort, then find a road that's going to enable you to ride for 20 minutes uninterrupted as opposed to trying to tie your effort to a city or to 💟a town or some roundabouts where you're going to get disrupted."

5. Have life admin in check

As with the rest of us, pros also have the stresses of paperwork and life admin and having this all in order helps decrease stress and clear the mind s🍨o riders can focus on the job instead. 

"Having an orderly house which is neat and tidy, sorting out paperwork and ti𒀰cking off life admin can help reduce stress," said Rowe. 

"This gives riders a clear mind to focus on the job at hand. The less you've got on your mind, the less you've got hanging over you by way of chores and other obligations, then the freer your mind will be ꦉto focus on and commit to your bike riding🐲."

6. Nail nutrition

We all know that eating a good diet can reap dividends on and off the bike, and to make this easier, pros will often plan and prep meals ꦦahead of time.

"Prepping your nutrition before you head out so ꦰyou have p𒅌re-ride, post-ride, and evening meals can really help," said Rowe. 

"When you come back from a training ride, you're tired and there is a tendency to be a bit lazy🌊 and ultimately your nutrition might be sacrificed." 

7. Get enough sleep

Sl༒eep is also a crucial element and can exponentially help performanc♏e as sleep impacts everything from muscle repair, glycogen storage, and hormonal balance to immune function, mood, and motivation. 

Poor sleep means slower recovery, reduced power out⛦put, lower endurance capacity, impaired 𒁃reaction times, and can even weaken the immune system.

ꦫLidl-Tre♎k coach Aritz Arberas Pampin advises between seven and eight hours a night. 

"When I s🌜ee a rider is sle𓄧eping less, I always ask 'do you think it's enough?' Some riders are fine with six hours and for me this is incredible because I love sleeping," said Aritz.

8. Mental strength

There is now a greater awareness of the mental wellbeing of riders, and Elisabetta Borgia was the first sports psychologist on a WorldTour team when she joined L🧸idl-Trek in 2022. 

"It's coming int🎉o training more and more but gener꧃ally it's something that the riders do privately," said Aritz.

"You have riders that don't need any kind of mental coaching, while ot✤hers might speak to their coach about it. There's another level of riders where they use a mentꩵal coach to help organise their mind or learn strategies to manage the different needs they have."

If you've got your on-tꩲhe-bike training down, but still want to make some improvements, try working on a few of the suggestions here, and🀅 you'll soon be feeling fitter and faster. 

A decade ago, all-star casts of international riders clashed on the big climbs of California, Colorado, Utah and the Ozarks of Arkansas, bringing WorldTour winners like 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Sepp Kuss (Visma-Lease a Bike), 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Matteo Jorgenson (Visma-Lease a Bike), 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Neilson Powless (EF Education-EasyPost), 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Chloé Dygert (Canyon-SRAM zondacrypto) and 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Ruth Edwards (Human Powered Health).

Since the last major race, the Tour of Utah, went away in 2019, the road calendar has shrunk to just two UCI stage r🙈aces (only one for men) and a pair of one-day races (Graꦉn Premio NYC for men only).

However, road racing in the US is not ready for an epitaph yet. There may be fewer UCI-level races and smaller teams, but there is no shortage of racing opportunities. The path to a WorldTour career may not be as straightforward either, but talented riders are there, says 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Gavin Mannion, a former UnitedHealthcare p🍰r𒉰o turned national team coach for USA Cycling.

"I think it's definitely an interesting place that US cycling is in. But yeah, I mean, just look at the results at the highest level, something's working," he told Cyclingnews.

"It seems like we have the most high-per𝐆forming athletes at the highest level of the sport than we ever had, on the men's and women's side on road, mountain🌺 bike, track, including the Olympic level. It seems like we're killing it."

Magnus Sheffield (Ineos Grenadiers) made his mark as a 17-year-old at the Valley of the Sun Stage Race; his teammate AJ August ꦑmixed cyclocross prowess with road skills, grabbing wins at the Green Mountain Stage Race and the Redlands Bicycle Classic before signing with Ineos, too. Lily Williams (Human Powered Health) and Skylar Schneider (SD Worx-Protime) earned their stripes at criteriums like Sunny King Criterium, Armed Forces Cycling Classic and Intelligentisia Cup series, now Chicago Grit, before ascending to the sport's top levelꦏ.

The longevity re🐭mains with many races, but rarely are organisers looking to get a UCI license. This year, the women's peloton gained a spark with the Tour de Bloom in the Pacific Northwest, upgrading to UCI 2.2 level to join the Tour of the Gila on the international calendar. There will als✃o be a UCI 1.1-ranked women's one-day race in Baltimore on September 6 held jointly with the men's 1.Pro Maryland Cycling Classic.

"It's exciting to see we have UCI races coming back to America. We had quite a few back in the past, and they'll slowly build again," said US all-rounder Lauren Stephens, who swept the GC titles at the two US UCI stage races this spring w🍌ith the Aegis Cycling Mixed Team. "We had a little lull with COVID, but I think that we see that it is coming back."

However, Stephens used a non-traditional path to continue racing for her 12th pro season, switching to a self-supported off-road campaign for the first time in her career, then joining a new startup Aegis Cycling Foundation club team😼 for the UCI-sanctioned stage races. The flexibility offered as a privateer allowed her to compete at non-UCI events like Valley of Tears Gravel, where she was third this year, and The Growler, which she won.

Gravel's rise in popularity is💝n't the main culprit for a decline in large road events, but Mannion said it is a part of the equation with limited sponsorship dollars across the cycling industry, which are the low-hanging fruit🦹 for events and teams. There is a big bang for the buck for a company sponsoring a couple of gravel riders rather than a full Continental team.

"The domestic racing scene that I was🌟 a part of for a long time is almost non-existent at this point. Redlands is still hanging on, and Gila, sort of the only two races that were part of the old NRC or PRT. It's definitely interesting. Things were sort of declining before the pandemic, and then🌺 the pandemic was sort of the final nail in the coffin for a lot of races and a lot of teams," Mannion said. 

"I don't know wha🐟t the path back looks like, or if there is one. I think it's just different now, with all the different disciplines, like graꦿvel. I don't know that it's ever going to look the same."

'Brutal' path on road for juniors

So, how does young talent get discovered these days and find a career in road ra🧸cing? According to Mannion, "we have tons of talent and tons of international success," but motivated riders may not have as many domestic races to showcase their talents. He said that making the jump from the junior ranks to pro ranks now doesn&apos🐓;t have a true under-23 transition like in his days. 

"I think before you sort of had to know someone, it was just a lot more convoluted of a process, and you had until the end of your under-23 career to sort of make plans," said Mannion, who reti🗹red from racing𒁏 in 2023.

"I think we're probably just lagging behind the times, because every other sport is looking at 14, 1♕5, 16 year olds and tracking them for years and years, and by the time they're 18 or 19, they're in the pipeliꦚne to be a professional."

Rachel Heddermann, who used to manage UnitedHealthcare and now coaches junior women for USA Cycling, saw both the number of t꧅eams and stage races decline after the coronavirus pandemic, but athletes kept riding bikes.

"There aren't as many races as there were 15 years ago, but the riders are still finding 🌊different ways to come into i🐻t. So I think, in terms of looking at the next generation, they are coming in through gravel," Heddermann said.

"Things ebb and flow. And I think there are different races coming through, like the Tour de Bloom. And races like Valley of the Sun and Tucson Bicycle Classic have been around for a while, but maybe ꦛthey're becoming a litt♉le bit bigger."

Juniors between the ages of 15-18 can get experience, and get noticed, in a USA Cycling Junior Gravel National Series, which is almost as robust as the Junior Road National Series. Racing a🐷t USA Cycling Pro Road Championships for juniors 17-18 is the highlight of the early summer. High school cycling leagues like National Interscholastic Cycling Association (NICA), collegiate teams, and development teams like DC Devo and El Grupo Youth Cycling have spots for women, but the more robust development teams like Hot Tubes and EF Education-ONTO focus on the men. 

"Brutal and almost non-existent" is how Ignacio Rivera de Rosales, co-founder and head coach of long-standing El Grupo development out of Arizona, described the l🐠andscape for yo🅘ung women these days. "College is the best path forward to get to race and pursue a career."

Nicola Cranmer, who has shepherded many young female riders to professional and Olympic Games success with the Virginia's Blue Ridge TWENTY28 squad, aꦜgreed there was not a clear path, but she was more optimistic.

"A young female who wants to be a professional cyclist will find a way. There's never been an exact pathway. Whether it's through getting noticed with criterium racing teams or getting to the road from NICA or collegiate sports as well. There's no [one] way to do it. They just start racing," Cranmer told Cyclingnews.

"There's plenty of racing. I mean, we're having to pick 🍸and choose. We can't do all of it. Our athletes race with national teams as well. So we didn't do Redlands, we chose a Virginia race to try and because it's in our home state, and we wanted to support the Tour of Newport News, which is fantastic. We're not doing Gila because it's the week be💦fore collegiate nationals, and coaches didn't want them to do it.

"We ended up sort of pivoted and focused on Tour de Bloom. So I think doing Redlands, Gila and Bloom ꦯall stacked up is a lot. There are tons of criteriums, too. I mean, there's nothing more valuable than going to Tour of America's Dairyland and racing 11 straight races to bring a team together and build skills. It's not big endurance, but ♋there's a lot that can be accomplished during those races."

When it comes to gravel riding, the market has come a long way in the last few years. As with road bik🅠es, there is not really a one-size-fits-all solution, so it’s important to consider what you want to use your gravel bike for when looking to invest in one. Fortunately, Niner Bikes offer🍎s two specific performance models to match your gravel riding needs. 

Be they epic adventures on arduous terrain, or flat-out racing where speed is of the esse🐭nce, Niner has the models to cover you.

The RLT 9 RDO

Rꦐoad Less Travelled, and Race Day ꦅOptimised. That summarises what the RLT 9 RDO is all about.  

"The RLT is the weapon of choice for gravel racing and high-performance gravel riding," expla🌊ined Niner Regional Sales Manager, Mondo Aguilera.

It has been built for speed and efficiency;🌊 a lightweight missile, and many riders’ choice for gravel races when speed is the priority. A special ‘Fireroad geometry’ uses a longer chain⭕stay, dropped bottom bracket, and a slacker headtube to keep things comfortable and stable, yet still agile enough for racing. 

The RDO carbon is a special construction designed specifically for the demands of gravel riding. Yes, it’s the usual combination of “light, fast, strong, and stiff,” but it’s the addition of specific bump-absorbing compliance that makes the biggest diffe🥃rence༒ to a gravel riding and racing machine. 

RDO carbon fibre is built w♐ith a unique process that optimises complete compaction of the carbon layers under heat and pressure. By maximising the carbon-to-resin ratio in the finished product, Niner is able to keep the frame and fork light and stiff while improving compliance over rough surfaces.

But it’s not just speed and racing where the RLT excels. There are 26 integrated, fixed mounting points on the frame for bottles, bags, lights, fenders, racks, and even internal hub dynamo light routing in the fork. Add to that tyre clearances for 700x50c tyres, and the RLT can be used as a capable adventure bike. This is further aided by a geometry that has been refined to provide both a💧 stable and agile ride. It has also gone through ISO mountain bike testing to certify its strength.

A PF30 bottom bracket shell provides a stiff platform for laying down the watts, while al𒁃so accommodating both geared and single-speed options. Being compatible with wired or wireless, geared or single speed, 1x and 2x 💎drivetrains. This is the perfect bike to tackle fast-paced gravel races one day, then long off-road multi-day adventures the next. 

The RLT 9 RDO coꩵmes in sizes of 47cm, 50cm, 53cm, 56cmﷺ, 59cm and 62cm. A frame-only price is €2,699 (£2,500 / $1,999), with full bikes available from €3,999 (£3,899 / $3,529).

The ORE 9 RDO

Meaning Off Road ಌExplorer, Niner’s ORE 9 RDO has been designed to be the adventure bike to beat all adventure bikes. 

“The more♔ we tested this bike, the more it became apparent it was different from the RLT," says Niner Gravel Category Manager, Linda Travis. "From the varying terrain in Colorado to the mining roads across the ﷽US, we decided to call it the Off Road Explorer.”

A slacker geometry for a more reliable and consistent handling ride is paired with an innovative suspension-corrected fork, allowiไng the switch to a suspension fork setup with up to 40mm of travel. 

Internal dropper cable routing and a huge two-inch tyre cle🧜arance enhances the ORE’s off-road capabilities. It is also tested to the MTB ISO standard to gi🦩ve you confidence on those rowdy off-road rides.

“RLT is designed for smoother gravel riding, whereas the ORE evolved into something much more adverse," begins Niner Design Engineer, Patrick Bonifas. "A slacker h🗹eadtube angle with a longer front-centre has optimised weight distribution to make sure off-road riding over technical terrain is much easier for the rider. That allows for a performance that is tailored to a different style of gravel riding, one that is much more progressive in nature. ”

This bike is built for go-anywhere adventures, testing the limits of gravel terrain and pushing the rider to their limit. A 69-degree headtube angle, 50mm fork rake, and 435mm chainstay length gi🦩ve a sꦡlack and stable singletrack-friendly geometry. 

The RDO refers to the carbon layup, which has been carefully la🌸yered and optimised for both stiffness 🐼and compliance exactly where each is most needed.

Moving to a T47 ཧthreaded bottom bracket also opens up serviceability while allowing for a wider bottom bracket she♛ll and greater drivetrain compatibility and clearances. Universal Derailleur Hanger (UDH) compatibility enhances this even further. 

Full sleev꧟e internal routing also ensures crisp and clean shifting even after long periods of use on dusty a🌠nd muddy trails. 

To ensure that the bike can keep hold of all the essentials needed for epic singletrack explorations into the unknown, the frame features an array of fitment points. There are bolt mounting points for the top-tube, ✃frame bags, and three water bottles on the main triangle of the frame.

The ORE 9 RDO comes in sizes of 47cm, 50cm, 53cm, 56cm, 59cm and 62cm. A frame only pric🥀e is €2,500 (£2,500 / $2,499), and full bikes are available between €3,999-€4,499 (£3,199-£3,499 / $3,799-$4,499)

To add to this, all of Niner’s bikes come with a life꧋time warranty and crash replacement services so that whatever may happen in the future, the brand will help get you back on the bike as soon as possible and back exploring.

To tell the truth, though, I never was keen on getting into breaks in the first week of a Grand Tour. I only did if I was going for something like the mountains classification or if there was a really, really good ch🦩ance of success. Which, normally, there wasn't.

There are several reasons why it's not such a good idea. Firstly, everybody is really fresh, so th🐠e first hour is carnage as everybody tries to get in the moves, only to find that afterwards the teams♈ are still on full strength so can chase the breaks down more easily. Secondly, the overall classification tends to be fairly close, so a lot of riders are still hoping to make it into the pink jersey, so it's harder to form a break, anyway. 

It might be a bit easier on some of the technical Italian roads to get in a break at the start, particularly if there's a bit of a𝔍n uphill or it's narrow and twisty and if it's really big, straight 🅺roads in the first 40 kilometres, there is always somebody who gets past the [sprinters teams'] blockade early on. But then the bunch gains speed again and it closes down those kind of dangerous-looking breaks quickly and easily.

When it comes to a break's chances, there's also the question of what k🍷ind of leader's team is running the GC. I remember in one Giro, 2021, there were 11 or maybe 12 breaks that made it to the finale. But if it's a leader's team that likes to chase down breakaways, then they will do exactly that, just for that extra stage win.

If it's a more open GC battle, that also has an effect, because then most of the leaders' teams will prefer to have a fresh team in the finale. So unless it's a ve𒆙ry easy break to pull back, they won't do that and a bigger group with a lot of good riders in it has a much better chance of getting seven or eight minutes, say, and staying away.

Yet another factor is your team duties. If you have a sprinter in the team, like I would have in the Giro with 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Caleb Ewan sometimes, mostly likely you'll find yourself wor🍷king for them. One thing that was good in Lotto was that there w𝓀ere always a very clear understanding of what my role was, long before we even got to the race. 

For example, they'd say 'On stages 3, 4 and 6 we need you to help co🅠ntrol 𝐆the breakaways', but on other days, even if it was a mountain stage, I'd have a free role. Which was logical, because if you have a sprinter, then there's a much better chance of him winning on a flat day than my small chance of winning in a break, particularly in the first week.

My last breakaway win

There are exceptions, like that day when I won in Naples in 2022, which was stage 8, a day when everybody expected that it&♕ap🤡os;d come down to a bunch sprint – much like today's stage to Naples. 

But in fact what made the difference was that so many guys got away early on the hillier part – 21 in total, including 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Mathieu van der Poel and Biniam Girmay – that there was always a better chance of it staying away. This year for example, with a much flatter finale into 🔥Naples, I don't think there's so many options of a break making it to the finish.

Three years ago, it was also quite a different kind of break for me, too, because I had a teammate with me, Harm Vanhoucke. Initially I wasn't really working for him but then when the leading move shrank to just four riders, I did do a lot more so he could save some energy and hopefully attack on the little, late climbs climbs. But then when the mℱoment arrived for him to do that, he said he did not have the legs anymore.

I explained to him that he should try at least, because maybe it was his one chance of💞 a big victory, while I could chase down the🎉 two other guys in the break, because they knew I was the fastest, so they would not bring me back. But he just didn't have the strength, so I said to Harm now it was up to him to work for me, because I was the fastest, and I had to make sure Van der Poel and Girmay didn't get back on. So he emptied his tank for me, and I won.

I didn't talk for quite a while after I'd won, because it had been incredibly stressful, partly because it was such a hard stage, and partly because there had been such a very narrow gap back to the🌼 other riders. Normally that would be ok, but knowing I had Van der Poel there on my trail, there was always the possibility he could have made it back, and then if he had, he would have won. 

On top of that, the last 40 kilometers were just very hard. We were always on the limit. We were pushing mostly about 400 watts෴ for the last hour. In my mind I was already racing for a fourth place, until we had to change strategy when Harm couldn't attack, and I had a chance for myself. So it was a big surprise that I could go for myself, but I knew, if I could just find the strength to do a good 15 second sprint, I could beat the other two guys [Jorge Arcas and Davide Gabburo]. They are not bad riders, but I could see from their legs that they were more climbers than sprinters.

I didn't really think it was going to work out with a break, let alone a win. Before the stage, mentally I had been in a diff🎶icult plac♛e, because I'd already had to do a lot of work for Caleb and yet the team still had the hope that I'd at least get in a breakaway, and perhaps win, on other stages. 

Personally, I had the thꦇe feeling that it wasn't possible to combine the two things. But in the end it worked out, and that turned out to be my final victory as a road pro. So it was a very sꦓpecial one.

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more.

Vacek, still just 22, leads the best young rider classification four days into the action, with top-tier positioning and lead-outs for Pedersen, alongside a strong 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:stage 2 time trial, leaving h💧im third overall. He shouldn't be too unknown, given his exploits at last year's Vuelta a España – where he finished second twice on stages 1 and 7 on Grand Tour debut – but his versatility has put him well into the focus of the cycling wo🎀rld.

He's a calm and quiet individual in conversation, completely contrasting with his power and intensity on the bike, a power that his teammates say he doesn't even know the limit of, with the Czech having more than found his place as a jack-of-all-trades domestique with 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Lidl-Trek for the moment.

"He's a super good rider. I don't think he realises how hard he can ride a bike, it amazes me every day," said Thibau Nys to Cyclingnews when asked ab꧙out his Czech team﷽mate back in January. 

"I always have the feeling that he can just get out of bed and push 500 watts for ages♊, this is the type of rider he is. H🐈e is also always there to help the team, and you can trust him."

The char🥃acteristics Nys spoke of have been on show throughout the 2025 Giro, with huge 1200-watt power being recorded in his lead-outs, and a selfless role being played out so perfectly by Vacek, that Pedersen vowed after his second stage win to help pay him back with a maiden GT stag🙈e win.

"Vacek is absolutely amazing. This kid here has such a big future ahead of him, and he's shown again and again what he is able to do," said Pedersen after 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:winning stage 3. 

"But we also have to watch out that we&𝐆apos;re not putting too much on this guy, because he can win a lot of bike races too.

"I tell you guys I will do absolutely everything possib𝕴le to make him have a stage win in this race, because he deserves it as well. He's a machine, and I'm so proud of being able to have this type of guy riding with me because he makes a big difference."

A shock WorldTour win, cross-country skiing and finding his feet at Lidl-Trek

The Czech rider had his WorldTour breakthrough three years ago at the UAE Tour, where he won a sprint stage from the break while racing for the former 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Gazprom-RusVelo team, who were formally suspended fo🦋llowing Russia’✱s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. 

Following this, he found his w♕ay into cycling's top division in August of the same year and has only gone on to refine his skills, learning from the likes of Pedersen, a former world champion and one of the peloton's top riders, along the way.

"I'm really learning from him now, so the plan is to be as good as him in the Classics and still come to the Grand Tours and win stages like him," Vacek told Cyclingnews and Daniel Benson's Substa﷽ck before stage 4 in Alberobello.

"I would see myself a little bit like him, but there's still a long way to go. For now, everything is on the right track, and I'm⛄ happy with how it is.

"[Pedersen is] a real leader, and the biggest things I've learned f🐬rom him are how to handle situations, how to handle a team, how to be as calm as possible, and foc𝔍us full gas on the performance and races."

Vacek i🦄s a remarkably d💫ifferent rider from who he was when he won that UAE stage in 2022, with Lidl-Trek aiding his development from a former dual-sport talent in cross-country skiing and cycling to one of the hottest prospects in the latter.

"I was doing both when I was younger but in the end, if you want to be the best in sports, then you have to focus on one thing, and cycling was the way to go," 💟said Vacek of his former high-level racing days on the snow, making the full switch to cycling in 2020 after becoming the junior European time trial champion.

"After the UAE win, it was quite a big development for me, because when I entered the pro peloton, the WorldTour, it was a big change for me, and♎ I was struggling with how to get into it and manage myself or prepare for races.

"But now with Lidl-Trek I'm really supported a🌞nd have what I want. I think we're really on the right track for the future, which is something I'm looking forward to."

That immediate future will take the form of trying to win a first Grand Tour stage at the Giro, with the loyal help of Pedersen and others, and could come on the punchy final in Matera on stage 5, or the gravel day into Siena on stage 9.

"I'm really happy with the performance I have now,♐ and everything is going really, really well so far. I'm feeling good, so probably I will also have a chance in the next few days to go for a stage," said the Czech rider on Tuesday.

"We will see how it goes, what the plan will be, but for sure, also with this team, we cไan go with a reduced bunch, put guys under🌠 pressure and win from a small group."

Having haꦆd what was meant to be a great Classics season derailed by sickness, Vacek was well away from the potential he showed at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad as he tried to help Pedersen in the cobbled campaign, however,🌄 he was fully refreshed ahead of the Giro and looking for that maiden success in a three-weeker.

"I recovered at home from the Classics, and I feel quite ready. Of course, the Classics season was a bit unlucky with the sickness and crashes I had, but this belongs to cycling," Vacek told Cyclingnews on the eve of the race in Tirana. 

"Now I'ꦉm here, standing again in really good shape. We'll see what the Giro will bring, but it should be a good Giro for me.

"I will give it all in the TTs, which I'm aiming for, so that's where I want to take at least a second place like in the Vuelta last year," he laughed. "It will be hard to win, but ♉I will try. A stage win, of course, would be phenomenal."

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more.

For the last few years, XDS Astana have been one of the teams at risk of relegation from the WorldTour, but they have followed the top teams in incorporating data science into their programmes, hiring data s🐷cientist Morgan Saussine to help turn the team's fortunes around.

It's not a new concept – 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:UAE Team Emirates-XRG teamed up with the big data analytics company Presight and now have a bot called 'Ana' to help answer questions on how to get the best out of their riders꧑. Visma-Lease a Bike use AI to help with nutrition and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe are talking🌠 about incorporating all manner of data into one unified system, according to a recent report in . 

Even the lower-ranked teams ܫare getting on board – Tudor Pro Cycling have – so incorporating data into pro cycling is clearly important, and that's because it works. Case in po🦩int, XDS Astana.

Astana had been on the decline ever since 2021, when they 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:lost Premier Tech as a sponsor. They finished last among the WorldTour teams in 2022, 2023 and 2024 and are behind ProTeams Israel-Premier Tech and Lotto, meaning they have to beat two WorldTour teams to make the top 18 in the✅ three-year UCI Team Rankings – a requirement to remain in the🎃 sport's top tier

At the start of the 2025 season, the team needed to score about 5,000 points more than teams like Cofidis and Arkéa-B&B Hotels ov💟er the season to make the top 18. So Saussine used the available data and helped advised the team on selecting races where their riders have the best chance at scoring points.

Now, just 18 weeks into the season, XDS Astana are third behind UAE Team Emirates XRG and Lidl-Trek for 2025 so far, and have 🎃168澳洲5最新开奖结果:succeeded in surpassing Arkéa-B&B Hotels 🍷and Picnic-PostNL and are closing 🅘in on Cofidis in the three-year rankings. 

The riders, coaches, sport directors, mechanics and management all contributed to XDS Astana's success, but Saussine helped them not just with their calendar and rosters, also with൲ training and nutrition by creating tools that can help the team make informed decisions.

Saussine emp🍬hasises that his approach is just helping human beings to make the best decisions, and is not turning the team iꦛnto robots.

"The day when you will have an automatic AI voice that's gonna speak in your team car – I don't want to see it either. I like the hybrid way of having someone to work with, because we are talking about people who have years of experience in cycling, so I learned a lot from them," Saussine told Cyclingnews.

"In a WorldTour team at the highest level, when you need to perform, you have different use cases on a weekly or sometimes daily basis. So then you need really someone to focus on the data. It's quite new in cycling that you need to do data engineering – gathering the data, do the extraction, transforming, loading and then cleaning the data. Then you have the data analysis part, where you can build some dashboard charts to make the data more readable for the end user. Then you have also the data science part,ဣ where you create models to make predictions.

"But it's not PlayStation ... [you have to make] it readable for the guys who have the real expertise – you can be the best coder on Earth, but if you don't understand cycling, it is more difficult. I'm a recreational cyclist – 💎not at a high level – but I was building to꧙ols for myself, having a coach, doing testing... So I can speak to a nutritionist, I can speak to a coach, I can speak to a DS – I have less expertise than them, but I can speak their language."

The variables you can control

The upward trajectory for XDS Astana also came thanks to a✃n infusion of cash from the Chinese bike maker XDS. The team was able to hire a slew of new riders like Wout Poels, Sergio Higuita, and Diego Ulissi but the team still lack a major star like Pogačar, wh♍o has scored a third of UAE Team Emirates' points this year, or Alpecin-Deceuninck with Van der Poel earning nearly half of the team's total. 

XDS Astana have instead relied on their depth and data-informed decisions. Their top rider in th🧔e team rankings, Simone Velasco, has earned just over 10% of their points. They've also balanced their targets almost evenly between WorldTour races where scoring points is more difficult but more lucrative, Pro Series and .1-ranked races where there are fewer points but lighter fields.

Sports director Dario Cataldo saw the results of their work first-hand at the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Presidential Tour of Turkey. The team won the overall with Wout Poels, who took three stages, and had Harold López 🥀finish second overall.

"[Saussine] analyses the cycling calendar [and predicts] where we have the highest probability to score points with the riders we have, taking into consideration their characteristics. In a certain period of the year, he studies which race we should take part in and with which type of rider. It's bringing excellent results," Cataldo recently told Cyclingnews correspondent Jean-François Quénet.

"It's a team effort. It's not the data scientist who decides and the sport directors who follow. 🐼When there's a doubt, we provide him with information, we ask him to analyse the situation, and he comes back with numbers that tell us what suits us. It's very useful. In relation to his feedback, 🦩we decide which riders we send to which race according to the probability of scoring points."

Since the start of the 2025 season, XDS Astana has not only wiped out their deficit to 18th place in the three-year team rankings, they're on a path to climb even higher up the rankings if they continue🙈 on as they have in the spring. Could data analytics be the next 'margin🌊al gain' for cycling?

Vasilis Anastopoulos, Astana's Head of Performance, thinks so. "Morgan played and still plays a significant role in our decision making, about the roster of the team, the selection of the races. He defines the strengths and limiters of our guys," he told Cyclingnews.

"He's helping us by choosing the best roster for each race, and also he's helping us analyse the data after the races and indicate if a rider needs a rest, if he's in an overload si🍌tuation, if the training we have applied to him is effective or not, and that was a big, big help for us – a huge asset to the team over last year."

Of course, data analysis can't solve everything. Christian Scaroni was the team's top scorer until 1ꦬ68澳洲5最新开奖结果:Strade Bianche, when he crashed hea♛vily, showing that bad luck ca🐻n be around any corner. 

"Even though you could select th🍌e riders that have the most chance to score with ... if you don't have the legs on the day, if you crash on the wet road, on the downhill 🦩– there are so many variables that you do not control. But that's what we love about cycling too. We're trying to decrease the amount of unknown variables, but at the end, you still have a lot," Anastopoulos said.

According to Anastopoulos, the next step for using data is "to create some models predicting more accurately things like athletic performance and optimising the training program that we apply to the riders with the goal of the riders reaching their top shape at the moments thaꦫt we want. 

"There is still some work in progress, but the work that Morgan is doing and all the data that he's analysing is rea🏅lly, really useful for decision making."

Bardet has won four stages of his home Grand Tour, the polka dot king of the mountains jersey, as well as 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:wearing the yellow jersey last year after he and teammate Frank van den Broek kept the✨ charging peloton at bay on Stage 1 after a thrilling breakaway effort. 

Bardet turned pro in 2012 and, aside from his neo-pro season, has ridden a Grand Tour every year since then. He’s ridden 11 Tours, three editions of La Vuelta a España, and threeܫ editions of the Giro d’Italia. 

This year's 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Giro d’Italia, which kicked off in Albania, will be 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Bardet’s final Grand Tour. He's fought for stage wins and the general classification in previous Grand Tours but admits the modern-day peloton's racing style perhaps lacks the romance of decades gone by. The Frenchman explained in a recent interview with Cyclingnews what makes the sport beautiful for him

"My biggest achievements came when we improvised during racing. We carefully planned and executed my stage victory at last year's Tour, but it was "pure cycling" as I said at the time. That way it's more satisfying. I♌t's what makes our sport so beautiful, no?"

Here, we will take a look back at Bardet’s grand tour race bikes from various points i♏n his career.

Bardet began racing in 2013, which means he has ridden through some sizeable changes in race bike tech. The Frenchman began on rim brakes, mechanical groupsets, and tubular tyres and finishes with aero optimised frames, tubeless wheels and the latest semi wireless Shimano Dura-Ace equipm💎ent. That's to say nothing of the changes in race kit and aero equipment that dominate the sport now. 

The Frenchman started the race aboard his Team Picnic Post NL Lapierre Xelius DRS road bike. After the freshly rebranded team 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:switched from Scott bikes at the start of this𒆙 year, and announced a four-year deal with the brand. 

During his professional career, Bardet has raced on Lapierre, Scott, Eddy Merckx, Factor, Focus and Kuota bikes. He raced his first Tour on a Focus Izalco MAX back in 2013, and will retire in 2025 on a Lapierre. We will start withꩵ his current 2025 race bike and move back through the years, arriving at his first-ever Tour de France in 2013. 

2025

Bardet's race bike this year will be the Lapierre Xelius DRS modelꦺ. A fairly standard-looking design as modern road bikes go, until you arrive at the dramatic chainstay design. This model received an update for 2025 and has clearance for up to 32mm tyres. 

Build-wise, the bike is♛ fitted with a Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 electronic groupset, Lapierre proprietary seatpost and stem/handlebar, Prologo saddle and handleb🤪ar tape, Ursus wheels and Vittoria Corsa Pro tyres. 

Some pro riders seem to have a deep connection with their machines, while others just see them as tools. We don't know Bardet's view, 🧸but hopefully, man and machine can come togethe♊r on the road to Rome to produce some final Grand Tour magic. 

2020

Next, we jump back half a decade to 2020, Bardet was in his final year racing for
AG2R La Mondiale. He spent nine years on the team in total, and it's fair to say♈ the bulk of his career. 

Bardet used an Eddy Merckx Stockeu69 model in 2020, not the ꧙greatest model name, but it's a good-looking bike nonetheless and marks the end of the rim brakeꦓ era in the pro peloton. 

Bardet was still on electronic Dura-Ace, but a rim brake ver🅰sion, plus a Rotor chainset and gold KMC chain for a bit of a component mix. Mavic Cosmic carbon tubular wheels complete the build. Interesting to see now is the integrated carbon handlebar and stem, but with some cabling still visible, marking the transition to fully internal front ends, which have been made possible by disc brakes. 

2018

Bardet was racing at  in 2018, but the team was riding on Factor bikes during this period. Here we have Bardet's 2018 Factor One Tour de France bike. A model that looks more aero-influeꦫnced than the 2020 Merckx he used. 

The Factor One caught the eye at the time for its distinctive external steerer tube design, which can be seen in the photo below. Factor at the time claimed it was the world's most aerodynamic bike, it was actually available as a disc brake bike, but the pro peloton hadn't quit✃e made the jump to discs at this point. 

2016 

2016 was Bardet's fifth year with AG2R, and we turn our attention to the Focus Izalco Max, a bike that the Frenchman would surely have become very familiar with durin👍g his five years or so riding one. 

The Izalco Max, in its lightest form, was one of the world's lightest production frames. Frames like the Izalco Max and Cannondale Supersix Evo Hi Mod could result in very lightweight overall builds during this period, with their rim brakes and sl❀ender tubes. 

2016 was an interesting year for tech because Bardet was riding with SRAM Red 22 mech🌳anical and eTap electronic wireless groupsets. Representing a transitional year. 

From these pictures, it seems Bardet was experimenting with two different bike builds to try out the systems. Builds were finished with Zipp tubular wheels, Con✨tinental tyres (who else loved the old Zipp logos?) Zipp stems, handlebars and seatposts and Look pedals.

Bardet finished second in the Tour de France this y🧸ear and won stage𓆏 19. 

2015

Bardet's bike didn't change♓ too much between 2015 and 16, the standout difference was the introduction of Red eTap in 2016. 

In 2015, Bardet ran SRAM Red 22 mechanical groupset, Fizik seatpost, stem and handlebar and the bike here is pictured with Zipp 202 wheels, the lightest wheelset the American brand produc🧜ed at the time. 

Bardet often appeared to h💯ave a healthy amount of forward handlebar roll with a fairly hig🐬h shifter position – the first shot below is a good example of this.  

2013 

Finally, 🧜we arrive at 2013, Bardet's first 🥂Tour de France. Bardet finished 15th in the general classification and 4th in the best young riders competition for under-25s in 2013. 

We only have one 🤪picture from 2013, AG2R were still using Focus bikes, the Izalco Team SL model,ꩵ but the equipment package was a little different. 

AG2R used Campagnolo Super Record in 2013, EPS – the brand's electronic groupset was actually on the market at this time, launching in 2011, but in the below shot Bardet is using a mechanical version, evidenced by the gear outers at the front of the bike, m🍷echanical was still probably a little lighter and weight may have influenced the decision. 

Wheels for the Stage 17 time trial were the shallow, carbon fibre Fulcrum Racing Light XLR m༒odels fitted with Schwalbe tyres. In 2013, the team used Fizik seatposts, bars and stems.  

Wood has been a double national champion, represented England and Great Britain at Commonwealth Games and World Championships, and took multiple wins in the UK and Europe as a professional. She retired at the end of 2024, and now works as a coach for SYNRGY and a commentator for Warner Brothers Discovery.

Retiring at 2🃏9 might sound absurd to most people, but not in professional cycling. When your career starts in your teens, and every decision revolves around racing, training, and recovery, 29 can feel like the end of a very long road. 🔯The question I kept circling back to wasn’t whether I could keep going, but whether I should.

Deciding when to retire from the sport you’ve given everything to is one of the hardest decisions a rider will ever make. Sometimes, the choi🦋ce is made for you when a contract doesn’t materialise, or an injury takes you out. But I didn’t want that to be my story. I wanted to leave on my own terms, n🐷ot because I had to, but because I chose to.

My sister Hannah stepped away from racing a year before I did, and watching her transition out of the sport shaped how I approached my own decision. Her back and hip issues didn’t outright prevent her from riding, but the pain stole the joy. Racing became a burden, and when her contract ended, so did her career. She didn’t ride again for over a year. It hit me, if this sport that had defined us for so long could lose i🎶ts spark like that, I wanted to make sure I bowed out before that happened to me.

In February, I made the call that 2024 would be my final season. And once I said it out loud, something shifted. It felt like a weigh𝐆t had lifted. I was heading into a season without chasing a contract for the following year, which relieved me of so much stress. There was no pressure to impress, no scramble to earn a renewal. Every race was mine to enjoy, savour, and give everything to without a hidden agenda.

That mindset didn’t change how I trained or raced. I still showed up prepared, committed, and focused. But the motivation had shifted. I wasn’t trying to catch anyone’s attention or prove I deserved a spot. I just wanted to finish on a high, kn🍃owing I gave the sport everything I had. Performing my role as best as possible in that specific race, whether that was helping my team or racing for a result myself.

Throughout the season, I❀ still had some strong results, mainly in the .1 and .2 races I’ve come to really enjoy in recent years. And with those results came the inevitable questions: "Are you really retiring?" "Don’t you want to keep going?"

But those performances did🔯n’t make me doubt my choice; in fact, they confirmed it. I wasn’t crawling to the finish line. I was still contributing, still comp🦹etitive. Although WorldTour races were a different story for me. Women’s cycling is changing so much, and to keep pace with the evolving level of the women’s peloton, I knew it would require even more: deeper sacrifices, bigger investments, more time, more energy. And mentally, I was already starting to step away.

Because being a professional cyclist isn’t just a job, it’s a lifesty♛le. It consumes everything. Your days, your diet, your travel, your holidays. Everything revolves ar𝔉ound performance. You miss weddings, birthdays, and family moments. You become used to it, but it never gets easier. 

Especially now, in this stage of life, things like becoming an aunt and watching friends get married have started to matter more. I⛦ didn’t want to keep missing the moments that make life outside of cycling so precious.

That doesn’t mean I’m leaving the sport behind completely. Cycling has given me everything: my husband, discipline, f🃏riendships, incredible memories, and I’ll always be part of it in some way.𝄹 

But I’m also excited to rediscover the sport from a different perspective. I want to ride when I feel like i💞t, not because it’s on the schedule. To go to events without a race number on my back. To find new challenge🐻s, new rhythms, and maybe even a new passion.

For any rider reading this who’s wrestling with the same thoughts: know that there’s no perfect moment to retire. There’s only the right one for you. Mine came quietly, not with a crash or a missed contract, but with a quiet conviction that it was time. And that, I think, is the best way it could have happe💃ned.

From VC Venta in Winchester, to cutting his teeth in Italian under-23♔ racing, and finally making it to the WorldTour in 2025 with Jayco AlUla, Double has a♒rrived somewhere he at times didn't think would be reachable – La Corsa Rosa.

It came after years of resilience and a "seeing how far you can get" attitude from the 28-year-old. Was he nervous ahead of the start? Of course, "but at the end of the day, it's just bike racing", and he&apo๊s;s getting stꦿuck in.

He was 13t𓆉h on the opening day, with friends and fa🍨mily making the trip to Albania, and after the Grande Partenza, is Jayco's second-highest ranked rider on GC, 1:13 down on the maglia rosa.

"The older guys say Grand Tours are a journey for all and that everyone's got their own story," Double told Cyclingnews on the eve o♍f the race. "I🐻'm looking forward to what comes in the next three weeks; I'll just try to enjoy it and hopefully get something out of it.

"I definitely didn't always think a Grand Tour d🍬ebut was going to happen. I took it step by step, and it has seemed the logical move to make it in the last year – I didn't end up coming in 2024, but I&aposꦇ;m here now and I'm just excited."

An Italian journey from past to present

Double gave some insight into what it's taken to get to this point, after not rising through as a superstar junior like many of the riders who dominate today's peloton, coming to cycling late, and making the most of various opportuni✃ties in Italy.

That first opportunity with a link to the Giro's home came after impressing at an amateur race in Wales n💯ine years ago, where former Italian pro Flavi🤪o Zappi saw his potential. 

Zappi wanted Double on his British junior team, which also played a role in the start of fellow Giro debutants Tom Pidcock and Mark D💃onovan's car𒈔eers. However, it took a year for Double and Zappi to finally link up in 2017, when cycling started to become more of a career than a hobby for the Brit.

"I do always🔴 e♕nd up speaking about him [Zappi], but I guess that shows how big a part of the path he's been for me," said Double. 

"I guess I started taking cycling more seriously when I moved to Italy, to be honest. In🍃 the UK, I wasn't a complete bum, but I didn't really know what to do and didn&ap💛os;t have any direction."

Making it in cycling was gradual, in theory, but it wasn't linear at all for Double, whose perseverance carried him through the tough times and three years of bouncing 🌼from teams like Colpack, where UAE have long scouted talent, before finally landing at ProTeam Human Powered Health in 2022. 

At 25, the Briﷺt had endured a fair share of financial and career struggles that woul💦d have seen most others give up the ghost. 

"I guess it has been sacrifices, lonely times, and I've spoken about my resi🤡lience," admitted Double modestly. 

"Maybe some people, definitely others along the way, who I've been on teams with, they'vꦍe called it quits, and I carried on. So I'm proud of myself in that sense. I guess I'm an okay bike rider, and I've managed to make it here.

"Racing in the UK was in lots of small pelotons, proper amateur racing. Then you go to the under-23s in Italy, and it's still amateur, but it seems very professional, and you've got 150 🐻to 200 guys racing. 

"I was getting my head kicked in, but I think the key was to just keep battling on🎉, and you should learn fast. Maybe I learned a bit slower, and my progression was a bit slow, but I was always improving. If you had your head kicked in at some stage, it's easier to keep going on, I guess."

Grand Tour debutant or barista?

If he hadn't endured all those races "getting his head kicked i🐭n", Double wasn't overly sure what path he might have taken; however, coffee would have certainly been involved.

"I was just doing odd jobs and helping my dad out with his business. I say helping out, he'd probably say I was just being a pain. I didn't have any direction," said Double to Cyclingnews.

"Maybe I'd have continued working in cafes and found a pไath in coffee. I enjoyed the barista side, and I still now think about maybe setting up a small cafe sometime, that would be quite fun."

For Double, it was never abou♎t the money, too, or fame, but that pursuit of self-imꦏprovement that impacted his drive to keep going, with the move to Jayco not being the destination but merely part of the journey. 

"I only did cycling as long as it was financially viable, so that's why I would continue when it was hard and I wasn't making much money, because it was pos🔴sible🥃," said Double. 

"Now I guess there's a bit more secur🙈ity, and I suppose you don't do it just for a living. It's a chal🌳lenge to keep on progressing and seeing how far you can get – that's why I do it."

I always thought I could win, but it just never clicked… Then it did

The Giro, too, was just the next logical step in becoming a🥀 better bike racer. He didn't just take the start in Albania and celebrate being there; he's at the Giro to compete. With the race reaching Italy on stage 4, he'll be looking to repeat what he did at this year's Coppi e Bartali, where he took a first pro victory on adopted home Emilia-Romagna roads.

"To win on those roads where I used to train, that was pretty special. It went in a nice, full circle, you know, came back to where it was s🦄🐟tarted in Italy," said Double. 

"It was a big milestone, and good for the c🌃onfidence because I always thought I could win, but it just never quite clicked… Then it did. It was perfect timing, too, with this race coming up."

Double's Giro debut almost came a year earlier, when his natural affinity to Italy con🔯tinued as he joined Polti-Kometa, the Italian ProTeam run by Alberto and Fran Contador and Ivan Basso, when he was in the right shape, but missed out due to scheduling issues. But now that it's here, he isn't merely aiming to be a debutant, but a winner.

"It had been the plan, aiming for the Giro, but obviously nothing is guaranteed. We were happy with my form in Coppi e Bartali, but m🎃aybe the consistency wasn't quite there, so I don't know if behind the scenes, maybe there were some question marks," admitted Double. 

"[At] Tour of the Alps I didn't get the top result, but I was quite consistent, and then we did a nice ride as a team in Frankfurt. So I thought tha🌞t I was going, but when I got the confirmation, that was really, really nice. 

"We're all going to dream of a stage win. I'm going to race and hopefully take opportunities to get thꦫe best results possible. But at the same time, there's going to be a lot of unknowns for me personally." 

Unknowns or not, Paul Double making his Giro d'Italia debut at 28 seems like one of those things that is just right. He's more than paid off those "sacrifices" and "lonely times" by m🎀aking it to the WorldTour alone, but a win at the Giro would be the u💃ltimate confirmation of what Zappi saw in the Brit that day nine years ago in Wales.

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more.

But despite its name, the race has yet to step foot in Italy. The race began across t🔜he Adriatic Sea in Albania, before an early rest day after just three days of racing. 

That rest day is today - at the ti🔯me of writing - and over the first three stages, the incredible race photographer Chris Auld has been pointing his camera at anything new and shiny, and has done an excellent job of unearthing some neat tech hacks from within the peloton. 

Alongside the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:brand new Campagnolo Super Record groups🍒et breaking cover, we've unearthed new helmets at both the XDS Astana and Q36.5 Pro Cycling camps. We've spotted a host of time trial tech, including s▨ome ridiculously big 68-tooth chainrings. 

There's also been a horde of great-looking bikes, an interesting volcano-inspired paint job, and🐷 an impressive level of attention to detail across the entire paddock. 

There are closಌe to 60 images here, so I won't waste your time any longer. Let's get stuck in. 

That's all for today, folks. Around 60 photos of new and interesting tech from the Albanian Grande Partenza of the Giro d'Italia, which heads back to the mainland on Monday's rest day ahead of stage 4. As ever, we'll be sure to keep our eagle eyes on the race to see if anything else crops up that we've not 𝔉seen before. Keep an eye on Cyclingnews to ensure you don't miss a beat. 

We'🃏ll also be heading💯 to the Critérium du Dauphiné soon, and of course, the Tour de France. Both of those are great places to find new tech, so we'll have galleries from both. 

Gravel fans, we recently covered the best from an enormous collection of bling tech at the Traka, so check that out if you haven't already. We'll also be heading to Unbound for a gallery there too, so once again, keep CN in your bookmarks to make sure you don't miss out. Alternatively, sign up for our new subscriber-only newsletter. From exclusive interviews and tech galleries to race analysis and in-depth features, the Musette means you'll never miss out on member-exclusive content. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Sign up now.

If you subscribe to Cyclingnews, you should sign up for our new subscriber-only newsletter. From exclusive interviews and tech galleries to race analysis and in-depth features, the Musette means you'll never miss out on member-exclusive content. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Sign up now

From Durres in Albania to Ro✨me the final day, hopefully I can provide you all with some interesting insights into daily life as a bike racer in a Grand Tour with some funny anecdotes along the way꧃. I hope you enjoy.

The Grande Partenza

"Watch out!" I yelled, as I too frequently do, trying to signal a massive crater i🧸n the road to my teammates behind. As I swerved to avoid it on my BMC TimeMachine TT bike, I hit a different bump just next to it, and my sunscreen-coated gloveless hand slipped from the bar, and I stumbled, only to somehow catch myself with my wrist and keep my bike upright. It was a close call. 

My Giro nearly ended before 𝕴it started here in Albania, but luckily, my teammates and I all made it to the start line in Durres in one piece. And out of the first three stages for that matter, which, seeing how it started on our first ride here, seems like a big win.

Foreign starts in Grand T🥂ours like this one in Albania for the 2025 Giro are always special. They bring a different ambience and flavour to the race, often with huge crowdꦦs and a fair share of stress, but it always seems like the number one objective is to get out of the first few stages safe and make it to the home country of the race. 

And while I have to say we were somewhat worried about the state of the roads after our two pre-Giro training rides, the ones we raced on were in quite goo💝d condition. I also find that when everyone is on high alert in the bunch - for example, on rainy days or with terrible roads - it seems like there are even fewer crashes than normal, I think because of💝 the increased focus with the greater perceived danger. 

So, on the whole, I think there seemed to be a fair number fewer crashes in the r🍷ace than normal for the first few days of🌄 a Grand Tour, which is a very good thing.

My team is here with a mixed group of riders, a few guys for the sprints, and a few climbers for the mountains and GC. Our hopes are mainly pinned on Michael Storer, our Aussie GC rider/climber ex🙈traordinaire and recent winner of the Tour of the Alps. The dude has an engine. 

He also happens to have the pleasure of ro൩oming with yours truly for the next three weeks. So obviously, perfectly set up to have a great race. We have two Dutchies, three Germans, and a Swiss rider to complete the international group. As it's my 13th season as a professional, I am the "veteran" of the team here, ready to guide the young guys through the ups and downs of the race.

But even after so many seasons as a🎀 pro, it's still hard to get the lead in to a Grand Tour right. It's a fine line between resting and recovering enough to be fresh for three weeks of racing, yet primed enough to go from Stage 1. And as you can see from the first few days, even some of ༒the leaders don't always get it right. 

We are so used to training and racing under so much fatigue that if you take too much rest before, you actually perform worse! And while it sounds counterintuitive, it is something 🦋important and difficult to judge. One guy who clearly did not get it wrong was Mads Pedersen, off to a flying start. 

As for us, Michael did an excellent 🦩TT on the second stage to head out of the first block of racing, already in the top 10 of the GC, which is exactly where we'd like to be. After a few sprint stages, we'll head into the mountains, where his talents🍸 really lie.

I'll try to enjoy our rest/travel day as much as possible, heading out for an easy spin, but probably skip my usual rest day gelato, considering we have only done three days of racing s💙o far… I think I'll have to wait 'til after stage 9 for my sweet treat. Bef♔ore then, though, I need to make sure my bed is free and clear of the ants, which somehow seemed to invade it while I was out during today's stage, so I can get a good night's rest before our bus/plane/bus journey back to Italy tomorrow. Pro cycling - it's not all fun and games. Wish me luck!

The 11th edition of 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:La Vuelta Femenina toꦏok in seven days of racing across Spain, bringing the riders from Barcelona to the summit of the Alto de Cotobello via hills, sprints, a team time trial, and two major summit finishes.

It was a week of Dutch domination as four women💎 – Demi Vollering, Marianne Vos, Anna van der Breggen, and Femke Gerritse – shared the individual stage wins between them followi꧙ng Lidl-Trek's TTT triumph.

The conclusion of the race saw 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Demi Vollering crowneﷺd as the queen of the V♒uelta, continuing her flying start to life at FDJ-Suez. However, there was much more to the race than Vollering and her compatriots scooping up the glory.

With the year's opening Grand Tour in the rear-view mirror, we offer our five conclusions to La Vuel🐭ta Femenina 2025.

Demi Vollering is the strongest GC rider on the strongest stage racing team

Demi Vollering moved to FDJ-Suez ahead of the 2025 season, and the team signed strong support for their new star with 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Juliette Labous joining Evita Muzic on their climbing squad. Vollering, Labous, and Muzic formed an unbeatable combination on theไ mountain stages, something that isn't a given when putting together a new team.

Labous and Muzic would be leaders in their own right at most other teams, but they happily scaled back their own ambitions to ride in sꦆervice of Vollering.

On both stage 5 an🌳d stage 7, Muzic and Labous worked hard on the penultimate climbs to reduce the size of the group of favourites. On the finishing climb of the former, to Lagunas de Neila, they kept pushing to set up Vollering's stage-winning attack on the last 3km

On the latter, it was Anna van der Breggen (SD Worx-Protime) who took the lead, preventing any attacks before the final kilometre, but this couldn't stop Vollering from digging deep toward൩s the end of the climb and distancing her former coach by 25 seconds for another solo victory that confirmed her as the Vuelta overall winner.

After she missed the 2024 Tour de France Femmes victory due to losing time after a crash, Vollering an✨d her new team look more than ready for the stage races to come this summer.

Anna van der Breggen back at her best

In 2021, the Ceratizit Challenge by La Vuelta was the final stage race before 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Anna van der Breggen retired from cycling, moving into a sport director role with SD Worx-Protime instead. Her retirement was a surprise to many at the time as she was still very competitive, having won, among other races, the Giro d'I💫talia, Vuelta a Burgos, and La Flèche Wallonne that year.

Eventually, Van der Breggen was second-guessing her decision, too, and after three years behind the wheels of team cars, she returned to racing for 2025. The Vuelta Femenina was her🌟 first Women's WorldTour stage race (afterꦑ the ProSeries-ranked Setmana Valenciana in February).

With her experience and tactical nous, the 35-year-old grabbed the opportunity to descend away from a reduced group to a solo victory on stage 4. She finished ﷺthird on stage 5, but it was the final stage in Asturias that saw Van der Breggen's greatest performance.

On the 10.3km Alto de Cotobello, she set the pace for almost 8km, reducing the group of favourites to only the top four GC riders. She could not keep up with Vollering and 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Marlen Reusser (Movistar) at the end, dropping to third overall, but the GC podium finish shows that Van der Breggen is ba𓂃ck.

Vos is boss in the Vuelta sprints

For the third year in a row, 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Marianne Vos (Visma-Le♋ase A Bike) has won the green points jersey at La Vuelta Femenina. And for the third year in a row, she won two stages while doing it. Add two second places to that, and the points classification wasn't even close, with Vos' 245 points dwarfing the 149 points of Demi Vollering.

Ever since the Ceratizit Challenge by La Vuelta was renamed to La Vuelta Femenina, moved to early May, and extended to a full week for the 2023 🍰season, Vos has made the Spanish stage race a c🧔ornerstone of her racing calendar.

For various reasons, top sprinters 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Lorena Wiebes and Elisa Balsamo have been taking ꧒breaks from road racing in early May for several years in a row, and Vos has carved a niche for herself where she can be the undisputed favourite in sprint 🅰finishes.

But being labelled the favourite is one thing – confirming that status by winning two of the three sprint stages and finishing runner-up on the third one as well as on the hilly stage 4𝐆 is quite another, and a testament to the strength of Vos even in her 20th pro season and the support of her team.

Opportunities for lesser-known riders

The calendar s♐pot and somewhat less lofty status of La Vuelta Femenina compared to the Giro Women or Tour de France Femmes has been a benefit not just to Vos, though, as the race offers opportunities for talents who aren't yet considered as being at the very🌄 top of the sport.

168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Femke Gerritse (SD Worx-Protime) took her first Women's WorldTour victory when she outsprinted Vos to win stage 3, taking the overall lead and wearing the red jersey for two days. 20-year-old 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Marion Bunel ♑(Visma-Lease A Bike) proved her climbing prowess by placing seventh and ninth on the two mountain stages, though time lost on the first road st✨ages meant that a top GC result was out of reach.

168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Usoa Ostolaza (Laboral Kutxa-Fundación Euskadi) impressed with a very ꧙well-paced climb to the Lagunas de Neila, coming from behind to pass Bunel and Cédrine Kerbaol on her way to a fifth place on the stage, but the Spanish champion cou🎶ld not repeat her feat on the final stage and dropped out of the GC top 10.

168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Monica Trinca Colonel (Liv-AlUla-Jayco), on theꦑ other hand, finished in the top-20 on every stage, shꦅowing that she is not only a climbing talent but also adept at staying well-positioned in the peloton on hectic stages with echelon action and in sprint finishes, something that other climbers sometimes lack. Only in her second pro season after switching over from Gran Fondo racing, Trinca Colonel will be a GC contender to watch.

More multi-mountain stages, please!

Stages 5 and 7, with their summit finishes, were the days that decided the general classification, and they would have been so even if they had only include🍬d those finishing climbs. But both stages were not just flattish stages with a hard finishing climb, as is so often th😼e case on the women's calendar.

Instead, stage 5 comprised two ascents of the Lagunas de Neila climb, turning left 2.5km from the finish line at the Alto de Roཧza🐽vientos to descend and tackle the whole climb once more. Stage 7 was even more challenging with the uncategorised Puerto de Pajares, followed by the Alto de la Colladona, Alto de la Colladiella, and the Alto de Cotobello.

The presence of multiple climbs on the stages significantly altered the way the races developed. In the end, both stages were won by Demi Vollering, but the attacks from Mareille Meijering (Movistar) on stage 5 or Femke de Vries on stage 7, as well as the move by Evita Muzic and Mavi García (Liv-AlUla-Jayco) ahead of the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Alto de Cotobello climb would likely not hav🌟e taken place⛄ without the earlier climbs.

Last but not least, multi-mountain stages are considered a completely normal, indeed necessary, part of Grand Tours or week-long stage races in men's road cycling. They should get the same status in women&apos✱;s racing.

That he had the measure of young rival 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Juan Ayuso, who was himself fresh from winning the arguably tougher Tirreno-Adriatico, was an indication that any concerns over age or pressure were perhaps a touch hasty. However, not racing through the whole month of April did seem risky given that the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Giro d'Italia's opening stages in Albania w🍸ere goi🉐ng to be frantic.

They contained no high mountains, certainly, but were stages hard enough t❀o expose any deficiencies that might arise following a period a🥂way from top-level competition. Mathieu van der Poel may have perfected the art of taking three or four weeks without racing before returning and winning straight away with seeming ease, but as athletes get older, it usually takes a few outings to get used to the demands of the pro peloton.

It wasn’t as🌃 if Roglič was sharing the position of top favourite with a rival either, so expectations were high, with all eyes set to be ๊on him.

Arguably, he was going to get through the opening day on ex🌠perience and freshness, but the individual time trial on day two was the first proper test. Maybe not decisive in GC terms ♐at such an early stage, but a test nonetheless of where he was compared to the other GC hopefuls – and a confidence boost if he came out of it in a strong position. 

That he aced this first reference point and took the race lead as a result was both a warning to the other riders that he had rediscovered his time trial abilities he's used so often in the past to make a difference, and more importantly signalled to his team mates at 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe that he was ready for the task ahead.

They've shown♉ they are willing to take responsibility to control the race whenever the tactics dictate that someone was going to have to chase or control, but with Roglič already ahead of some of his poten🍃tial rivals, this first weekend has calmed any doubts that might have lingered. 

Pedersen's perfect start

For Lidl-Trek and 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Mads Pedersen, the visit to Albania has been a mission accomplished. Following a strong start to the season and a Classics campaign that saw him involved in all the major action, he came to the Giro intent on winning the openin🏅g stage and taking the first maglia rosa.

As a project, it was ambitious, but it’s been one that the whole team has embraced and executed perfectly. Save for Roglič’s time trial performance getting in the way, they would have held the race lead for the eﷺntire Grande Partenza.

Pedersen’s two stage wins we🐼re impressive enough on their own, while the real depth of the commitment to make them possible and the manner in which they burned off the specialist sprinters was pretty daunting.

E🐻ach time they did so, the climbs were ones that some of the fast men would have expected to hang on a lot longer and then come back on th😼e descent, but the Lidl-Trek boys set that hard a pace that there were fifty riders left in the peloton by the top. It was a climbing speed that I would speculate saw no one in the bunch talking, and once a rider was dropped, he was condemned to his fate.

The first stage set the scene, with the team paying attention all day, riding the break down, and then dispatching the climb on th♍e finishing circuit at warp speed, with Mathias Vacek leading out in the last kilometre.

However, 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Pedersen’s second win was probably even more impressive. The decisive climb wasn’t in any way a small hill. 10km at 7% is serious꧒, and for the Dane to survive that was quite special.

He launched a super powerful closing sprint from the front and was pushed all the way by Corbin Strong. That just confirmed that Pedersen will lik🅘ely be the guy to beat for the points jersey by the time the race gets to Rome. In the meantime, the coming stages in pink will be the extra icing on the team’s cake-eating start.

Talented Tarling and no more 'Free Landa'

Usually at this point in any Grand Tour, we would be commenting on how many minutes 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Mikel Landa had lost, either needlessly or due to his rather average time trialling, but not this time. There are certain riders who seem to be involved in any and every crash. Geraint T🍰homas, Tao Geoghan-Hart or even Roglič himself spring to mind.

Unfortunately, Mikel Landa is part of that infamous club, and he didn&💃apos;t make it out of the first stage. There'll be no 'Free Landa' at the 2025 Giro, which is a shame for the race and for Soudal-QuickStep, who can now refocus to support Paul Magnier on the sprint days. The mountains of the final week won't be the same without the Basque rider to shake things up. 

On a completely different note – 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Josh Tarling, what a talent! He won the stage 2 time trial and was in the escape of t🐭he day with five others the next day. With Caleb Ewan now retired, he's the Ineos rider with the most victories this year, and the team are going to have to be careful in developing him because, as is the way nowadays, the last week is properly hard with long, steep climbs and not always great weather.

They would have noticed, too, that 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Egan Bernal was the only Ineos representative in the forty-odd group that came to the finish on the opening day. That would have been an interesting deb🌞rief in the bus afterwards for sure, and not just because Thymen Arensman got dropped on the final climb. 

The basics are that at least o🤪ne teammate has to be with the GC rider, so although the team is saved by Tarling’s performances, others are flying under the spotlight. 

Outside of Mads Pedersen and Lidl-Trek, it hasn’t been an overly spectacular visit to Albania. UAE Team Emirates-XRG are lurking in the background, the Yates twins are separated by three seconds, and Tom Pidcock has been floating around near the front looking for an opportunity to mak🌼e something happen.

The coming sprint days ought to see Kooij, Bennett and co locking swords in the usual frenetic Giro flat finishes. Maybe there'll be a Wout Van Aert moment, too, but I get the feeling that the current maglia rosa Pedersen will be involved in any and all action for as long as he𒐪 can be.

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more. 

Having secured the time trial title at the Australian Championships for a third time and also instrumental in p🌟ropelling his Jayco-AIUIa teammate Luke Durbridge to the road title just a few days later, the 24-year-old continued with a solid performance in the Tour Down Under, taking sixth overall. 

But then some much-needed surgery on a lingering hand injury forced the Jayco-AlUla rider to rethink his goals radically for much of the first half of the season. His spring program was drastically reduced, and although there was a morale-boos🌄ting stage win in the🥀 low-profile Tour of Hellas mid-April, a return to WorldTour racing only took place in the Tour de꧂ Romandie a couple👍 of weeks back.

As a result, Plapp told Cyclingnews pre-Giro d'Italia, that while the third Grand Tour participation of his career - and his second Giro  - waඣs never in question, he no longer had the option of having a crack at the Giro overall and seeing where it got him. 

Instead, as he said, he's coming into the Giro🌠 d'Italia with the idea of riding hi🎃mself into top shape for the second half of the race, and going for stage wins instead.

"The year started awesome, but then I had a lot of days off after surgery, I mi🔯ssed a lot of race days in Europe, and a lot of days that were planned to happe🍸n like UAE, Paris-Nice and the likes of that," he said.

"So I'm quite fresh coming into the Giro in terms of race days, but training's been going well up to now, a𒆙nd I've been bꩵuilding every single day.

"I'm interested to see how the first week goes and how I feel on th🍒e bike, and hopefully I'll be able to do well in the second half of the Giro and in the second TT."

Sure enough, as the Giro tackled the Cat.3 Surrel climb late on for a first time on Friday, Plapp could be seen hovering at the rear of the pack, still holding on but not forcing the pace. Then the second time round, as Lidl-Trek uꦡpped the pace to increasingly fraugh༒t levels, Plapp dr♏opped back, 𒐪finally losing 5:35 by the line

Team officials were untroubled by his time loss at the finish, saying that he would be focused on the days and weeks to come. Although the first 13.7 kilometre time trial in Tirana could feel like a natural objective, Plapp told Cyclingnews pre-Giro he's got more interest in how he'll perform in Tuscany on the much longer TT challenge ꦗof stage 10.

"Saturday's TT is not one that suits me massively, or a distance I love," hꦰe said. 

"I'm definitely focusing more on the second one, I've been✨ training towards it a bit, knowing how Romandie went, and how my training's been. So I'll build into the race and get better rather th🌠an try and be red hot in the first week."

While the dust has yet to settle in Jayco-AIUIa on general manager 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Matt White's shock exit ♚fro🌸m the team on Wednesday afternoon pre-Giro, Plapp politely but firmly decline꧋d to comment on the news. 

However, he is clearly focused on his upcomin🦩g Giro d'Italia goals, a race where he held the Best Young Rider's jersey in the 2024 edition, and which he says is more an inspiration than a realistic repeat goal for 2025.

"With [Juan] Ayuso (UAE Team Emirat🅘es) here, it m🐎akes it a lot more challenging," Plapp said.

"It's not something I have earmarked as a big task, but I did leave last year's Giro with three top fivꦿes and a seventh on 𒐪stages in there." 

"If I can be ♐around that mark and fighting for some stages this year, that's what I want to be doing, and if I can capitalise on one of those days and turn it into a stage win, that'd be 🉐awesome."

Never one to beat around the bush, Plapp described his return to Worl🐼dTour racing at R♊omandie, where he finished 72nd, as "a massive shock to the system."

"It's May now, and I hadn't done a WorldTou💞r race since Down Under, which was obviously a very different WT race in itself.

"But it was something I think I really needed, and I'm really grateful I did it going into the Giro because I think if🐷 I hadn't don💦e it, the first few days would have been quite tough."

The question of skipping the Giro altogether was never on the cards, though, he says, even if he had to change his goals so considerably. As he puts it, quite apart from what he can do in the race itself, last year completing the Giro pushed his overall level up ꧟consider🅰ably, and this year he could perhaps reap the benefits from May in longer-term goals like the Worlds TT.

First,ꦑ though, comes the Giro d'Italia, where Plapp says that the very different scenario on offer in 2025, compared to Tadej Pogačar's domination of 2024, will likely help him in his goals of a stage win.

"I thinkཧ the GC battle is going to be very tight this year. [Juan] Ayuso has shown some red-hot dominant form this year, but I think thღe way [Primož] Roglič and the [Adam and Simon] Yates brothers ride, too, they're not going to try and win six stages and the GC [like Pogačar] anyway."

"So rather than Pog's saying I want to win this, this and this stage, in terms of breakaways it will be a lot more open and hopefully this time they can stay away." And in the proc👍ess, hopefully, Plapp can reap some major benefits, too.

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more. 

In fact, becoming a better climber doesn’t mean riding up a hill day after day. From pacingꦆ, to gear ratio choice and cadence, to leaving your ego behind, there is so much more to it.

Want to climb better on your bike? Here are some key tips 𒐪and ওtricks, including advice and a training plan from a WorldTour coach.

Establish a starting point

If you want to get better in the hills, the first place to start is by benchmarking your current climbing level. A common way of doing this is through an FTP test or on your local clim☂b.

"If you have a climb near your home which you can do week in, week out, use this as the best marker," said Peter Leo, coach at 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Jayco Alula and sports scientist for the Australia Cycling💖 team.

"Do this in early the season and then in the mid-season and then late season, and you can see your progression. You don't necessarily need a power mete𝔉r because you can use data 👍to benchmark your uphill performance by using the segments and the time."

Be consistent and get comfortable

Once you've set your benchmark, you canꦓ start to think about making improvements. As with any performance area you are looking to improve, consistency is key ﷽without overdoing it. 

"Look for a sustained climb at your home location that ta💛kes 20 to 40 minutes as that's the sweet spot where you can really work on your climbing ability," said 🌄Leo.

"Do this no more than tw𓆉o to three times a week and make sure you separate those🌃 days with easy rides in between.

"F♔or example, for an ambitious rider you could do a short climb on Tuesday of 500 to 1,000 metres, a medium climb on Thursday of 1,000 to 1,500 metres☂, and a long-sustained climb of 2,000 to 2,500 metres on the weekend. That has a nice distribution of elevation, and the rest of the days can be filled up with flat hilly rides without crazy elevation gain."

If this doesn’t sound appealing, then Leo says tone it down and simply get comfortable with cycling uphillꦅ.

"People who struggle with climbing in general need to start more progressively and maybe before going for an hour cli🅺mb, go for a 10 to 15 minute climb or even a five minute climb, and st🦂art to feel more comfortable," he said.

"Then gradually climb for longer, 20 minutes, then 30 minutes and then you will feel that kind of shift of feeling comfortable because at the end of the day, you don't🌳 like climbing because you don't do it often enough. It’s a matter of getting used to it." 

Keep cadence high with good gear choice

Another crucial aspect to improving your climbing performance isᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ finding the sweet spot of opt💞imum cadence rhythm with power delivery.

"I re❀cently did some research and we found the biggest trigger for sustained climbing performance is keeping your cadence ওup," said Leo. 

"When you fatigue, the big problem is that you drop your cadence because the body cannot keep up with the high pedalling rate which results in a drop in power. If you keep good cadence control throughout your sustained effort, you're delivering power consistently.♉"

Keeping your cadence up is acutely linked to selecting the right gear which can mean putt🍸ing your ego aside.

"Often people are not happy with the climbing because they used the wrong gear rღatio," said Leo.

"♌Often you see climbeꦡrs riding at quite low RPMs, and if you don't have the power capacity to increase your cadence with your selected gears, then you might think about improving your gear selection by adjusting your crank set.

"Maybe try compact and don’t let your ego get in the way. Having more variation in your gear selection helps you to work moꦐre on your cadence com💦pared to using a pro gear ratio set-up."

Can you go too low? 

"I don't think so because even with a compact groupset you will hardlyꦑ exceed 90 RPM uphill. For a pro rider, yes, because you want to be in that sweet spot of optimum cadence to power production. If you overdo the cadence, that's not ideal because your pedal efficiency drops." 

Stick to your rhythm

Once you’ve established your pacing from benchmarking and worked out how to keep a steady cadence thankꦉs to excellent gear choice, your climbing rhythm should follow.

"Finding your pace and finding your rhythm is the most important factor in order to෴ improve uphill performance," said Leo. 

As part of this rhythm, the question of whether to stay ♚seated or stand up on a climb comes into play. 

"If you are on a four to five per cent gradient and you're still going at 20 kilometres p♚er hour, and you're always out of the seat, this has an aerodynamic disadvantage," said Leo.

"But sometimes when you're ๊going slow or it’s really steep, being out of the saddle helps to apply force better to the pedal and having a ♋rhythm of going in and out of the saddle can also help. 

When preparing for a gran 🍌fondo or similar, it’s all about personal pace and rhythm, but in a race, it’s a slightly different strategy.

"You've got 𝐆to be very adaptive in terms of rhythm changes and that's a completely different beast," Leo said of racingꦺ in a bunch.

"You cannot find your rhythm beꦗcause the race dictates the rhythm and because you've got to follow your teammates, or you follow your opponent. There are attacks and you need to recover from the attacks and then you need to go back into your rhythm. In training we include lots of variability to allow 👍riders to better absorb those undulations during racing."

Luckily, for most amateur riders, you won't have to worry about all of that, and you can just focus on yourse𒀰lf.

Look at your physique rather than your bike

If climbing doesn’t come naturally to you, the reason could be that you simply are not built for it. It’s an unsympathetic reality that smaller body types ma🎃ke for better climbers.

"Body type is a very determining factor for someone to be a good climber, es🐠peciall𝓰y for multi-stage racing," said Leo.

"When you look at your body type or just your anthropometr𒉰ic profile in terms of your body mass, 🌄very often climbers in the subtype are quite small. You need to have a certain physique to become a good climber."

Expensive equipment, like havin🌜g the lightest and most aero bike, also won’t make the ꧂biggest difference if you're carrying significant extra weight or have a naturally bigger build.

"The easy wins are in body composition," said Leo. "Rather than buying a group𝕴set which is 500 grams lighter than your current one, if you have the capacity to lose five kilos that’s a much better option."

That said, weight loss should always be done in a safe and sustainable way, and only if it's actually appropriate for your current body type – losing excessive weight or underfueling won't help y🌱ou in the long run, and it's not worth damaging your heal♋th to shave a few seconds off a climbing time.

Weekly climber training program outline

Designed by WorldTour coach Peter Leo, this climbing training programme is aimed at cyclists with a high level of fitness training for a Gran♍ Fondo.

Incorpꦫorate these three sessions into your weekly training to start improving your climbing. Reduce the efforts as needed to make it work for your current level.

Session 1: Short Hill Blowouts

Workout: 5 x 1 km hill climb or 5 x 3-minute hig💝h-intﷺensity efforts

Intensity targets:

• RPE (rate of perceived exertion): 8-9/10
• HR: >90% HRmax
• Power: 90-95% of best 5-minute power

Objectives: 

• Develop anaerobic capacity and explosive climbing power
• Improve VO2 max and lactate 

Session 2: Sustained Tempo/Threshold Efforts Uphill

Workout:

• Rep 1: 15 min, progressively building intensity
• Rep 2: alternate between cycling 1 min standing + 2 min sitting
• Rep 3: 5 min hard + 5 min hold + 5 min hard

Intensity targets:

• RPE: 7-8/10
• HR: 85-90% HRmax
• Power: 90-95% of best 20-minute power

Objectives: 

• Enhance climbing endurance and sustained power output
• Improve lactate threshold and aerobic efficiency

Session 3: Long Sustained Tempo Climbs

Workout: 3 x 30-minute sustained climbs

Intensity targets:

• RPE: 6-7/10
• Power: 80-85% of best 20-minute power

Objectives: 

• Build muscular endurance for long climbs
• Increase aerobic efficiency and fatigue resistance

Yet, with his 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Giro d'Italia debut now just around the corner, Pidcock's chance at a second taste of that Grand Tour stage success resumes, and looks more likely than ever with a reignited hunger and a newfound consistency at the second division Swiss🀅 squad. 

The Brit spoke in November about how he'd lo꧟st the enjoyment of racing at the Tour de France, with the prestige and pressure of cycling's biggest race only seeing him struggle, not thrive꧃ as he did in 2022. He'd twice been shoehorned into riding for GC, not as the main Ineos leader, but as a second, or even third option behind the likes of Geraint Thomas or Carlos Rod﷽ríguez, and failed to live up to the potential he knew was in him.

However, five months after his 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:drawn-out divorce from Ineos and with Q36.5 presenting him an opportunity to ride the Giro, not th🍰e Tour, the enjoyment seems to be back, and the question of whether Pidcock will be operating as a stage hunter or chasing a career-best Grand Tour GC fini💝sh remains unanswered. 

According to Pidcock's long-term coach and the team's Head of Technical Performance, Kurt Bogaerts, a maiden Giro stage win for Q36.5 will be priority number one, especially on the team's Grand Tour debut, b🔯ut the Belgian didn't deny they were hoping for a solid overall placing.

"It's the first time we're riding the Giro, so that's already exciting. We have high ambitions. We'll try to win a stage with Tom," Bogaerts told Cyclingnews, one week before the Giro's start. 

"It would definitely be a milestone for him and for the team to win in the Giro, after our first invi൲te, which was already a𝐆 milestone. If we can win a stage now, that would make it complete and then all the rest is an extra.

"But 💃we have not done a specific altitude camp in function of the GC at the Giro; however, at the same time, we want to develop [Pidcock] and try 𓆏to be competitive for 21 days, so we will see what it leads to. 

"So it'💎s not been the ultimate preparation for a Grand Tour, but his condi🌠tion is good, he's not tired after Liège, and definitely in the first part of the Giro, he can do nice things. Maybe on the first mountain stages, he will suffer a bit, but if we can battle through, then I think he can step up."

Thirteenth and 16th at the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tour de France are no𓆏t overall results to be sniffed at, but they are well away from the hig✃hly ambitious goals an Olympic champion and Alpe d'Huez winner would have. But Bogaerts, of course, isn't expecting to change that into a top five or podium overnight – a solid GC run starts with consistency.

"We also just need to be competitive every day. It's a signal that we want to send to his mind and his body, tꦗo see what we need to work on if we really target a Grand Tour in the future," continued the Belgian, who's worked with Pidcock since 2018.

"I think this is the most consistent year I'🔴ve seen from him until Liège, and I see hunger. A lot of hunger in the first part of the season, and he's definitely also finished the Classics st💜ill with that hunger, speaking about the Giro immediately after Liège. 

"That's the Tom that I saw in the youth, when he did a similar thing after winning World Cha🌸mpionships, already talking about his future goals around the podium. He just really wants to compete, basically."

'Leadership suits Tom, he wants to be responsible for results'

It's a confidence from Bogaerts that had its foundations built in the early season stage races on Q36.5, with Pidcock netting victory overall at the AlUla Tour – his first professional GC win – but also scoring a top three in Valenciana and coming sixth at Tirreno-Adriatico, where Giro d'Italia co-favourite 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Juan Ayuso won overall.

Bogaerts believes one of the biggest changes for Pidcock has been a mental🍎 one, with the clarity of leadership allowing him to focus and place the majority of responsibility on himself to score results, the type of pressure he has used to thrive throughout his off-road successes. 

"Leadership suits Tom. He wants to be responsible for results. He wants to be responsible for his teammates. He wants to be responsible for his team. He wants to be accountable," said Bog🎐aerts, who arrived in Albania for the Giro's start on Tuesday. 

"It's also the clear tactics, and not too complicated strategies, that have made it easier for Tom. He's in a good place and he feels really at home in the team, while also r𒆙eceiving their maximum support.

"That's really encouraging for the future, what we did this year already. Tom is getting more mature🍒, and he's definitely more consistent t♕han in the other years. If you can do the block he did to start the season, then you can definitely be in a good place to make a transition to Giro."

Bogaerts also admitted that he didn't expect to be in quite such a solid position only five months into Pidcock's change of team, with the new consistency he's unlocked in 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Q36.5's "positive environment" only suꦬggesting that a future as a great GC rider is still possible for the Brit.

"I always try to calculate my decisions, so I was hoping to be in the game in the Classics, but I think we're a little bit ahead of what I was hoping to be," said Bogaerts to Cyclingnews. 

"The team also adapted to us and r💮eally shared our vision of hard work and commitment – the two pillars, which w🌜ork well in combination with a positive environment. It's a challenging environment, and we're trying to make each other better, and I think up to today, we've definitely done that.

"It's also a mental thing for Tom. He's 25, going on 26, and you need to have the mental capacity to be competitive 🤪every day. That's definitely something that's so important for Tom, and he needs to be ready and mature for that. 

"Then you can see where the gaps are, and we can try to close them. ⛄On paper, I don't see anything in the future that suggests Tom cou🅺ld not be a good Grand Tour GC rider. He has a lot of the physical capabilities, and he should be able to do well if his mind and hunger are in the game."

But what would make a successful Giro d'Italia debut for Pidcock? When asked, Bogaerts reiterated how that first Grand Tour stage win in three years would be the most important thing to achieve, before admitting a 🐠personal hope as his coach that the Brit can better his previous top Grand Tour result by eight positions.

"Again, a stage win, I mean, that would be a successful Gir♋o," said the Belgian coach. "Then, yeah, if I really dream, I hope for a top five in GC."

When Pidcock spoke before the team presentaꩲtion in Tirana on Wednesday, he was less ambitious when it came to the overall ambitiไons, instead focusing fully on the hunt for a stage win.

"My goal is to win and to just race every day hard, and be there at the front enjoying it," Pidcock told CyclingProNet. "I'm not really interested in the GC, no."

His and his coach's ambitions may not seem aligned, but it💝 should become evident after the stage 2 time trial in Albania's capital and the stage 7 mountain test to Taglicozzo whether Pidcock is hiding his true ambitions and that the GC is still something 🌃he's aiming for.

Knowing 'the legs will be there' in Italy

Pidcock, after all, has raced very well in Italy throughout his career, having won the under-23 Giro d'Italia in 2020, racing for Trinity, and been one of the a🐽bsolute best Strade Bianche performers, as a former winner and top-five f🙈inisher in each of his appearances on the Tuscan sterrati. 

"In general, Tom always l🃏ikes to race in Italy, at Strade and Milan-San Remo. We actually thought the Giro would be his first💦 Grand Tour, before the Tour even," said Bogaerts. 

"We just wanted to make sure we had one Grand Tour this year, in the end, we got two. I think he's at a good age to do two GTs, try to recover well after the Giro and then build good towar🦄ds the Vuelta and the end-of-season races. 

"Everything is falling into place now, and we⛄'ll see how long the condition can last, because I think he's in a growing phase. If I see every race in the Ardennes and we make the transition well now between Liège and the Giro, then it's a good time to do this."

"This is my first Giro d’Italia and I am excited. Racing in Italy is always special, and I’ve got a lot of great memories♒ from racing there," said Pidcock in Q36.5's team announcement. 

"We have a responsibility to show we are worthy of the opportunity. For me personally, I come with high ambitions ওand with the form I’ve ෴carried from the Ardennes, I know the legs will be there."

He also stressed how the team hadn't been reco🅘ning specific stages that Pidcock will target in the months prior. But Bogaerts is confident that his versatility should allow him to compete on punchy, descent or mountaintop finishes, alongside, of course, the ninth stage to Siena, which features five gravel sectors.

"He's very versatile, so there are a lot of stages that suitও 𓂃him. It will come down to the legs; if he has them, he will be in the game a lot," said the Brit's coach. 

ꦍ"If you can win on Alpe d'Huez, he can definitely do something also in the last week. But that's the nice thing – I think Tom doesn't need to make a balance after the first week, he can make the balance after three weeks, because there are a lot of ꧒opportunities."

Entering 'a new chapter' on the road

Pidcock's road season so far in 2025 has seen him take four pro victories, almost doubling his total from four seasons at Ineos🌞, albeit in smaller races, but Bogaerts does believe he's only just coming into his very best in the discipline.

With mountain bike goals achieved until the next Olympic cycle for LA 2028, and cyclocross becoming less of a main focus, the 25-year-old has managed to show his most consistent set of results from February to May yet. Alongside his stage racing form, he was 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:se𓃲cond only to Tadej Pogačar at Strade Bianche, before again matching well against hi♎m and the likes of Remco Evenepoel at the Ardennes, finishing ninth at Amstel and Liège, and third 🍸at La Flèche Wallonne.

"I think if you see in Liège, he was able on La Redoute to follow the best in the game. Of coursꦡe, there is one thꦇat is outstanding at the moment, and that is what it is," said Bogaerts. 

"But in Strade he also stayed really long with Tadej, and I think it was🐻 a good experience where we can buil🔯d on and where we know consistently try to improve our team, improve the details, and try to try to strive for excellence – that's the goal."

The Slovenian is the benchmark in today's peloton, as t🎶he undisputed best rider in the world and the only man to💧 be comparable with the great Eddy Merckx. That's what Pidcock is aiming for: to be able to beat the world champion. Even without him on the start line of the Giro, Bogaerts made sure to emphasise that point, with a consistent 21-day performance the starting point of that.

When asked if we had seen Pidcock's🎃 top potential on the r𒀰oad and when that will arrive, Bogarts said: "I think it's already starting, you know, this is a new chapter. 

"There's definitely more emphasis on the road. Now we will see more of Tom on the road, and the big goal is to beat like a guy like Pogačar one day – because at the moment, that's the highest level in the 🌠sport. 

"If you can do that, that's definitely really important. Of course, he's not at the start line in the Giro, but🎐 there are other good guys who are at a really high level. So number one, it's about, day in, day out, performing on the road and trying to win races, that's the big goal. We did this during the beginning of the season,♛ it's time to pick that up again."

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more.

One of those storylines, which is perhaps going under the radar, is this: what will the team do with 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Brandon McNulty? 

The American will be starting his third Giro and heads into the race as a winner of stages in the Giro and 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Vuelta a España, mult𒆙iple stage race GC titles, and a junior time trial world champio🌟nship. 

Of the three US riders starting the Giro – the other two being 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Larry Warbasse (Tudor Pro Cycling) and 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Luke Lamperti (Soudal-QuickStep) – McNulty is by far the most successful🐼 💯at the highest level, but will likely fit into a support role in Italy.

From his days as a prolific winner in the junior ranks, to consisten♏t progress as a professional, McNulty has the profile of someone who should be discussed more, and perhaps even lead a team, but in💫stead he'll start this Giro with a lowkey presence.

♏Part of this is almost by design. A bi💖g success on the bike, McNulty is a hard man to pin down off it and outside of racing. Often, it is because he is literally an ocean away from the journalists who would be hoping to speak to him. 

This was the case this winter when Cyclingnews caught up with the American near his home on the outskirts of Phoenix, Arizona. In Europe at that time, his UAE Team Emirates-XRG teammates were at team camp, facing various questions from journalists around the world. McNulty was, however, on the other side of the Atlantic, sitting with juꦓst one journalist in the shadow of a shopping mall. 

What was clear as soon as McNulty sat down was th🐈at the American was infinitely more comfortable with the latter when it comes to interacting with the media.

"When it's only about cycling, training and everything – I don’t know," McNulty told Cyclingnews about his tendency to shy away from frequent interviews. "We're all real people as well. My wife and 🍰I are somewhat private, but we also l🔯ike to put things out there that are human, like the funny things that we do."

In the context of the moment, the real life of McNulty and his wife was a pressing concern for the pair. They had just bought a new house up the hill fro🐠m the shopping mall in Cave Creek. A house move was looming. And McNulty was balancing all of it with the 30-hour training workload that is unavoidable in December and January. 

Moving and homemaking aside, the story of McNulty is far f🐼rom the norm of those Americans sitting around him. McNulty has slowly, methodic🍸ally become one of the best cyclists in the world. Come Friday, when McNulty lines up for the Giro d’Italia’s Grande Partenza in Albania, he will once again be part of one of the top teams on paper. 

💟Yet for fans in the US and around the world, so much seems unknown about McNulty beyond his exploits you see on TV, even though he is a leꦑading light of the best crop of American riders since Lance Armstrong.

"It's kind of weird to think that because I don't know. I feel like I'm still young, but I guess I am one of the oldest now," he said. "I guess 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Sepp [Kuss] is our true leader, and then I'm there, but I still feel like I'm just a young kid, kind ofဣ."

While McNulty might feel like a kid, the Giro this year shows just how quickly those tables are turning on the American who turned 27 in April. Instead of being a part of the 💙endless cavalcade of youth recruits, McNulty is now a fixture of the old guard. 

Of the eight riders starting the Giro for UAE Team Emirates-XRG, McNulty is in the older cohort along with Jay Vine, 29, Adam Yates, 𓃲32, and Rafal Majka, 35. They are opposite the likes of Isaac Del Toro, 21, Igor Arrieta, 22, Juan Ayuso, 22, and Filippo Baroncini, 24. 

Even as♐ he matures, there is still a sense of the unknown around McNulty's potential – how far he can go, what kind of wins he can achieve. 

"Brandon is an amazing rider," Joxean Fernández Matxin, sport manager at UAE, told Cyclingnews in the lead up to the Gꦆiro. "He has the capacity to win and the capacity to be one of the best teammates."

But despite his clear successes and strengths – WorldTour time trial wins, a Giro stage, and a centre stage performance at the 2022 Tour that had him as the last teammate climbing with 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tadej Pogačar and 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Jonas Vingegaard – McNulty w🍌on't have pressure on his shoulders at the Giro. Instead, his versatility will be put to use, with plenty of chances across the medium mountain stages and two time trials on the route. 

"He can be great 365 days a year across the sprints, mountains, and time trials," Matxin said. "In years past, he has gone to the Giro for the general classification, and he hit his capacity. This year is about enjoying cyc൩ling and having less pressure."

Calm and consistency the key to growth for McNulty

This push and pull between the undeniable talent of McNulty and his lowkey character has made him something of an enigma. But, in a roundabout way, it also has become his superpower. In the face of it all, McNulty has increasingly stuck to what he knows, and it has, in turn, sharpened his skills every year, both phys▨ically and mentally. 

"When I was a younger rider, I went to some camps, and when you don't know better, you compare yourself," McNulty said. "I’ve learned, especially recently, that consistency is something I need – it's just the way I operat🐬e. 

"Being comfortable kind of leads to where I perform the best. When I find something that works and it's comfortable, it's easy for me to continue growing, versus h🙈ow some people like new things and discomfort. I like to feel at home, within that comfortable🐲 environment, where you can do the things you need to create change"

After the end of McNulty’s Arizona winter, the only real consistency around his season has been racing – and even that has been scattered across different countries, race types,꧂ and objectives. All of this, however, was a part of hiꦍs plan to keep stretching his capacity. 

"Last year was the best year I've ever had," McNulty said. "But I think it was almost going from a breakout result of the Giro kind of th🌳ing, to cementing that I can be consistent over the whole year, even if it's not a win or podium or whatnot, but just at least showiܫng myself I can be at a good level from January to October."

On paper, 2025 has started as a bit of a step back from his 2024 season, with no wins on the scoresheet just yet. However, read between the lines and his performance trajectory, and the arrow is pointing firmly towards a big showing🌠 at the Giro. 

A strong start to the season was derailed by an illness that took him out of the back half of Paris-Nice and scratched him from Milan-San Remo. That trend was bucked in the Ardennes, where he was Pogačar’s key domestique in Amstel Gold R🌠ace and Flèche Wallone, and his good form looks to continue into May ♏with the Giro. 

Ultimately, the biggest deciding factor in McNulty’s success at the Giro might be from wiღthin his own team. With both Juan Ayuso and Adam Yates heading into the r🌃ace as bona fide general classification contenders, McNulty could be used as a domestique de luxe to lock the race down as he did in the Ardennes, rather than going for his own results. 

Or, if everything goes to plan, UAE might be able to have its cake and eat it too. In that scenario, McNulty꧒ might have another chance to demonstrate just how unreal of a rider he can be. 

Subscribe to Cyclingnews for unlimited access to our 2025 Giro d'Italia coverage. Our team on the ground will bring you all the breaking news, reports, analysis and more from every stage of the Italian Grand Tour. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Find out more. 

The 2025 Giro is only racing in Albania for three days, but in equivalent leisurely discussions during the countdown to Friday's opening stage, the hot topic – the 'xhiro about the Giro', you might say – is simple: What will this year's edition be like without the presence of 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tadej Pogačar?

The short answer has to be: very different, given last year from beginning to end, Poga🦹čar had a complete stranglehold on the Giro d'Italia, claiming six stage wins en route to th༺e biggest winning GC margin – 9:56 – since 1965.

But having blazed such a devastating trail in his Giro debut, then opting not to go for a repeat participation in 2025, the 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:UAE Team Emirates-XRG leader leaves a correspondingly large vacuum of power in his wake. Had the brief Giro d'Italia participation rumours about Jonas Vingegaard (Visma-Lease A Bike) proved more than winter speculation, the double 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tour de France winner would have been the obvious candidate to fill the gap l꧟eft in Italy by Pogačar.

But the rumours proved unfounded, and to say the absen⛦ce of the two most successful stage racers of their generation leaveꦅs the 2025 Giro d'Italia much more wide open would be a massive understatement.  

The number of potential candidates for victory isn't endless, but it's certainly much higher than 2024, even when you exclude Pogačar. For one thing, there are up-and-coming challengers of the calibre of the Slovenian's teammates, 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Juan Ayuso and Isaac del Toro or Michael Storer (Tudor) and – per♐haps, given his GC ambitions are as yet unclear – Tom Pidcock (Q36.5).

But amongst the established heavyweights, quite apart from riders with tried and tested GC potential like 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Mikel Landa and the Yates brothers – Adam and Si🥀mon – no less than five former Giro d'Italia winners are set to clamber down their team bus stairs and head down the Giro's first startline i﷽n Vlore on Friday.

These range from Nairo Quintana (2014), Richard Carapaz (2019) to Egan Bernal (2021), Jai Hindley (2022) and the biggest favourite – but by no means the overwhelming one like Pogačar – of all: 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Primož Roglič (2023). 

'No Pogačar or Vingegaard – that shifts the responsibility for the race'

When it comes to such a long contenders list, you could draw parallels with the 2024 Vuelta a España, which was the only Grand Tour that season in which Pogačar did not start, either ⛦– and neither did Vingegaard.

However, as Roglič's team manager at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, Rolf Aldag, points out, the fact that the Giro always comes first♏ in the Grand Tour calendar means more riders are racing in Italy (and Albania) at their maximum potential. On paper, at least, that should make the battle much fiercer and unpredictable than even the Vuelta a España.

"The Giro being in May makes it easier to plan, normally you've been working straight up to one event since November," Aldag told Cyclingnews. "What happens at the Vuelta is normally the consequence of something else: either it&🌟apos;s the second Grand Tour of the year or something went wrong beforehand" – like Roglič crashing out of the 2024 Tour, say – "and you're trying to fix it.

"Then the fact tᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚhere is no Pogačar or Vingegaard – that shifts the responsibility for the race, that's clear. Because it feels like whenever UAE go anywhere with Pogačar, they take responsibility because he's the number one in the world.

"So it's going to﷽ be interesting to see who's committing to what, who looks at each other and says –  it's up to you to race, or to chase down a group. That helps mak🍌e it all a bit more unpredictable."

Red Bull know only too well from recent experience what a topsy-turvy Grand Tour leader's battle that can emerge from a lack of clear domination by a top squa♊d or individual can look like.

In the first week of the Vuelta last year, by getting in a surprise breakaway and then Red Bull failing (with the other GC contenders&💫apos; teams) to chase it down in time, AG2R's contender Ben O'Connor was able to carve out a massive 6:30 advantage over previous race leader Roglič. The Australian then held onto Vuelta's top spot on GC that lasted nearly a fortnight and left Roglič playing a drawn-out (and entertaining for the fans, if not the team)  game of catch-up. 

That kind of early ambush on GC, causing major trouble for other pre-race overall candidates, is only one of several potential multiple scenarios in this year's Giro. But as Aldag says, the very fact that it could happen makes for a very different situation🌄 from last year's Giro, where Pogačar&🌞apos;s domination more or less killed off any suspense whatsoever from the first summit finish on stage 2 at Oropa.

"It makes a little bit more uncertainty, a little bit moཧre gambling. And a little bit less clearness who the stand-alone favourite is," Aldag says.

It's all 🎉a far cry from the upcoming Tour de France, say, where anything but a Pogacar or a Vingegaard win currently seems wildly improbable, and also - assuming at least one of the two rides - the 2025 Vuelta.

There's not just the Giro's long history of unexpected GC plotlines to bolster that argument that pretty much anything could happen, too. The 2025 Giro d'Italia route also lends itself to a rise in speculation as to who could really come to the fore and how quickly. There are plenty of opportunities for ambushes in the fiไrst two weeks, and the Giro is far more fraught with far more potential danger spots than, say, the Tour's usual opening ten days.

As Remco Evไenepoel found to his cost in the 2021 Giro, stage 9's ride through the Strade Bianche of Siena, say, or the complicated, technical finales to both stage 1 to Tirana and stage 5 to Matera all have the potential to catch out the unwary anﷺd/or under-prepared. 

Yet even if there is a first-category finish a🐎t stage 7 at Tagliacozzo, it's also true that in the first half of the 2025 Giro, there is no major set-piece mountain battle we've seen in other editions: there's no Etna in the south or the Gran Sasso or  Blockhaus in the Apennines.

Rather, barring the stage 10 time trial, if it's easy to see where a GC contender or two could drop off the radar, for the majority there's likely a temptation to play a waiting game until the third week, which in terms of vertical climbing at least, has four of the fi꧂ve hardest mountain stages. But as Aldag says, that strategy carries its own risks, too.

"I wouldn't underestimate the Albania stages, from what we know so far, they're far from easy," Aldag warns. "But yes, we're back to that old phrase about the usual first week 🃏scenario of – you can't win the Giro, but you can lose it.

"Certainly you can't take the traditional approach of, say, the Tour de France, where it's ok for a GC rider to have 95% of their top shape in the first week because it's only  Normandy or Brittany and it's all flat. If you tried that in the Giro, you might have a ꦆprett𒈔y bad wake-up call.

"You're not going to win the Giro in this first week. But it can be very interesting to see who is really sharp at the start and who needs more work to✱ get the ball r👍olling."

From Albania to Finestre

While there's no knowing whether Albania's opening hilly stages will actually see GC action – there's a case for saying both could end up being large bunch sprints – the question of GC 'readiness' will definitely be important on stage 2's 13.7km time trial. ('Everyone will have their own time, so it's a GC day, ' as Roglič told Cyclingnews.)

That kind of distance ꦬis not long enough to create any kind of major differences, and there's no Remco Evenepoel present, either, to open up a gap of 20 seconds on all his rivals as he did on a similar distance on the stage 1 time trial in Ortona back in 2023.

However, as we saw in the early Giro time trial in 2022, as well, in Hungary, the stage could yet see some interesting time gaps emerge, and ღRoglič, who's only ridden one time trial this year back in the Volta ao Aꦐlgarve, will come in for special attention.

As Roglič told Cyclingnews when asked about it last week, he has not dedicated special attention to his time trialling training, and in fact, his last victory of a total of 19 time trials to date – three i🦂n the Giro d'Italia, including the crucial final race against the clock in 2023 on the slopes of Monte Lussari – was in the 20♑24 Itzulia Basque Country, over a year ago.

"Every TT needs full focus and everybody's kind of happy that this early TT isn't one where it's decided tha𒁏t they'll make it 65km long and then they [the organisation] are surpriseಌd that a lot of the GC interest is gone," Aldag says when asked about Roglič's options and possible vulnerability – given the lack of 'live TT work this spring – this weekend in Tirana.

"Engineering the course is always a big challenge for the organisers, to try and create a clear hierarchy but not pre-decide the race, and I think t🔜hey've done a good job this time rou﷽nd. We'll get time gaps on Saturday, for sure. But not massive ones."

At the opposite end of the 2025 Giro's challenges comes the Colle delle Finestre, the toughest climb in what is by far the hardest stage of the entire race, and the last major challenge, too, prior to the largely ceremonial final run through Rome on June 1. However, Aldag does not agree that – as has happened in Giros like in 2022 and in 2023 – that, as a result of such a daunting test at the finale, the GC riders 🍬may play it overly conservative in theꦡ long build-up beforehand.

"I think there are enough really interesting stages before, and there's always a risk if you do wait, because that way there's only going to be one winner," Aldag said. "I think favourites will test each other sooner, and you have to be flexible enough to say that if you see a certain weakness in a com🅺petitor, or if they have a problem with the weather, say, then you have to make use of it. 

"Every Grand Tour, in any case, has its own special scenario, and you have to be flexible, n🅘ot just stick with particular predictions. Waiting for the end, though, will only work out for one rider, so I think it's unlikely."

Aldag returns briefly to the subject of the 2024 Vuelta again, and O'Connor's devastating breakaway and the need to keep the other GC contenders under ♋control.

"You don&a𓆉pos;t want t𒈔o end up with a gap of nine minutes on somebody who could end up in the top five in a Grand Tour," he warns.

But rather than be reactive, as Bora were effectively forced to be in the Vuelta last year, another strategy in an unpredictable race with so many potential candidates like the 2025 Giro couᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ⁤⁤⁤⁤ᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚld be to try to dominate the overall from early on, come what may.

Of all the squads with GC option♒s in the 2025 race, arguably Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe have the most – and how they use them could well be very decisive in the race's overall outcome. 

'Primož has it in his legs to win it'

Quite apart from fielding the top favourite like Roglič, the German team also have other potential major players like 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Jai Hindley, the 2022 Giro d'Italia winner and 2021 podium finisher, as well as last year'ꦓs runner-up Dani Martínez.

Put them all together, along with Roglič's thir🎐d place back in 2019, and Red Bull have no less than five top-three results from three different riders to keep their motivation high and keep them in contention in multiple scenarios. It's not hard, say, to imagine Hindley orꦺ Martínez going up the road while Roglič controls their rivals behind – or vice versa.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe want to keep their opponents guessing about their strategy and Aldag bristles slightly when Cyclingnews asks him about which of his top riders apart from Roglič will have protected status, pointing out that the answer to that question is something that 🌳at least one top rival squad would very much like to know, too.

But he does, also, recognise that keeping their GC options open in such an unpredictable event as the 2025 Giro d'Italia would be n👍o bad thing at all.

"You have to think about how the race would unfold, but we have the guy who finished secoꦉnd from last year's Giro and the winner's not here, so there's a lot of 'what ifs?' about that," Aldag says. 

"Of course, we do believe that Primož has it in his le﷽gs to win it, but we would be crazy not to consider bad luck and other situations that can always happen.

"So I do think it's smart to bring a lot of firepower, especially if you have one of the three big favourites that we see thereജ, and then maybe you have a 🦹different answer that people did not expect."

Aldag points out, in any case, that he has no intention of giving away any game plan before the race reveals it anyway. "But I would be crazy to tell you, 'Oh w💜e're going full on with Dani Martínez' or 'Jai won it in 2022, so he'll have the upper hand'. All I'll say is – we're in a pretty comfortable situation," he says.

The fact that Red Bull are investing so heavily in the Giro d'Italia – and they are far from being the only team to do so – also brings us bacꦏk to the absence of Vingegaard and Pogačar from the Giro start line.

In his pre-Giro interview, Roglič told Cyclingnews that he was glad to have won the Volta a Catalunya because "whatever happens in May, the Volt🌱a is already in the pocket', and it's not hard to imagine that, given the superiority Pogačar and Vingegaard have sho💝wn in the last four Tours, winning a Giro is an increasingly coveted option for the rival squads.  For one thing, teams could then go to the Tour knowing that they have the Italian Grand Tour 'in the pocket', whatever happened in July.

"That's the dream scenario, of course," Aldag concludes. "But first it's the Giro and then it's the Tour, 🔥and it'd be interesting too, to know what other people's race calendars are, of course. 

"Certainly, whoever wins the Giro༒ is one step ahead. Because there are just three Grand Tours, that's it, and it seems like Tadej Pogačar is planning to start the other two.ღ Whenever he starts a race, it is pretty much out of other people's hands.

"Now the Tour is the Tour, and it might be different, but it definitely puts you in a better𒊎 spot when you already have ♎something on your account, and the Giro is a big thing to have on your account. 

"So for anybody who wins the Giro, that will changꩵe theiꦿr approach to the Tour de France, too."