Hour “record”, marketing, vandalism, weather, crashing, Britain, weird stuff, https://neon-velo.com/, Gerrans-ing, Lotto Belisol Belgium Tour, Vos, van Dijk, “naked” kits, Buzzfeed, pumpkin spice condoms, free publicity, decency.
the How The Race Was Won® cycling blog
Hour “record”, marketing, vandalism, weather, crashing, Britain, weird stuff, https://neon-velo.com/, Gerrans-ing, Lotto Belisol Belgium Tour, Vos, van Dijk, “naked” kits, Buzzfeed, pumpkin spice condoms, free publicity, decency.
Cosmo, keep it up. Best commentary on cycling anywhere.
What happened to your elbow?
Crashed at Valmont in a cross race last weekend. A lot of abrasive hard pack out here means it’s actually pretty easy to lose skin in cross.
It’s nice to hear that someone else finds this new record and the terms under which it was set a bit weird. I figured that when they scrapped the Merckx-bike stipulation they would simply scrap the records set under those conditions and thus revert to Boardman’s old “superman” mark. My own vague sense here is that this was all the UCI’s backdoor way of nixing twenty years of EPO-scented hour records and giving the whole thing a clean reboot. And it seems to be working: a popular underdog gets to draw attention back to the record, hopefully inspiring the real TT specialists to come and show us what the world’s best riders are actually capable of these days.
Sad to see you leave out the results of the challenge sprint in Quebec last weekend after drumming up interest in last week’s coverage. Would have been interesting to hear what you had to say about a regional third-tier pro-during-the-summer-back-to-work-the-rest-of-the-year rider taking on all the WorldTour guys and dealing them a smashing.
I actually tried to fit in a longer section on this—about specialization, about whether the pros compete whole-heartedly in such a different type of racing, and whether the WorldTour guys might have been the underdog against Canning, who’s done a lot of this type of racing before. But it would have run about 90 seconds and didn’t really fit in with the rest of the show.
The results should have been in last week’s show—the event was over before I started filming, and I just absent-mindedly left them out. That was definitely an oversight on my part, and I’m bummed about it.
Interesting take on the Columbian team kit in this thread
https://velorooms.com/index.php?topic=6603.0