The Podcast Postbag

That’s a wrap for the 2026 Giro d’Italia, completing a decade of daily coverage of Italy’s Grand Tour by The Cycling Podcast. Thank you for all your comments over the past three weeks. Here’s a recent selection from our postbag. If you have a question or comment email us at contact@thecyclingpodcast.com

Ciclismo! (What great Giro coverage!)

Well, I hope you’ve received many emails with this as the subject! Congrats to everyone at the Pod on a brilliant Giro. Had I just listened rather than watched when I could, I think I would have given it 4.5 wine glasses. (I think Daniel is right that it was a three-glass Giro).

The ‘Pelacci/Friebe in Italy’ combo is fantastic, and I loved the Baron’s stint too. Would have loved a bit of guest Lionel content on key stages to take me to five glasses, but we can’t have it all.

This Giro really felt like what The Cycling Podcast does at its best – expansive, erudite, and sometimes a little sideways, proper journalism – Adam

Loved the podcast. It was the best ever, thank you! – Tracy

I just wanted to get in touch to say a massive thank you for the Giro coverage. I’ve been a listener since the start of the Grand Tour coverage (and before) but this year’s pods hit differently for me. I spent almost all of the duration of the race in Italy, exploring places and eating things that I’ve picked up from your episodes and the TV coverage over the years.

Perversely I saw almost none of the actual race this year as we travelled round the country as a family (apart from the odd day when we had access to RAI), relying on procyclingstats for race results and the podcast for context. It was a unique way to follow the race but I loved it. The whole trip was inspired by pointers about areas, traditions, food that I’ve picked up from the podcast over the years. Your Grand Tour coverage is so much more than reporting on a race – it’s an introduction to a whole country and culture – and this year’s trip only started to scratch the itch. Thanks to Daniel and Pelacci for a fantastic three weeks’ work and the whole team for the body of work over a decade – Paul

Just a quick message to say a massive thank you to Daniel, Michele and Brian. You have really brought the race alive in a way you just can’t get from watching the TV coverage. Great to have Lizzy on the Giro Women episodes too. Looking forward to the Tour coverage – Andrew

Brilliant Giro podcasts. The on-the ground journalism is valuable, the travelogue enchanting. It multiplies my enjoyment of the Giro. Thanks to Daniel, Brian and Michele – Christophe

Grazie mille

To add to – or amplify – Daniel’s list of thanks at the end of the final episode from Not Rome… we’d like to say a huge thank you to all our listeners for tuning in, and especially to our Friends of the Podcast and those subscribers to The 11.01 Cappuccino who choose to support us financially. As an independent media company, the support of people who enjoy our work is not only vital, but hugely appreciated because it’s the ultimate vote of confidence in what we are doing. Whether you’ve been listening since day one in 2013, or have discovered The Cycling Podcast more recently, we’re delighted to have you with us.

A big thank you to Brian Nygaard and Michele Pelacci for adding so much depth, colour, fun and enthusiasm to our coverage over the past three weeks.

Our production team of Jon Moonie, Tom Whalley, Adam Bowie, Huw Owen and Elinor Terry perform heroics night after night, editing our episodes and getting them online so quickly after the stages. Without them we’d be talking to ourselves!

The support of Mike Newman and the team at Audioboom, as well as all our advertisers, is hugely appreciated for the part they play in keeping the show on the road.

And of course, I’m sure all our listeners will join in sending thanks to Daniel for once again being the ultimate tour guide to Italy, its culture, cuisine and customs as well as for the commentary on the race. And he didn’t have to put up with me ordering a cappuccino in the afternoon or pointing at a random hillside and asking whether it was the Dolomites!

LB

The Giro d’Italia Women is well underway

Of course, that is not the end of the elite racing in Italy. The Giro d’Italia Women started on Saturday – and what a wild start it was. Rose, Rebecca, Denny and Lizzy are taking turns at the mic, Madison hand-slinging one another into the action as the race evolves. The GC is set for a shake-up with the individual time trial today (Tuesday) building up to the big mountain stage to Sestriere on Saturday. No spoilers here in case you’re catching up with the episodes so far, but follow The Cycling Podcast in your preferred podcast app to ensure you get the episodes as soon as they go live.

Stage One of the Giro d'Italia Women

Was it a vintage Giro d’Italia? Probably not. I think our listener Adam was about right when he said that the podcast’s coverage was worth at least another wine glass on top of Daniel’s rating. Being there, following the race in real time, always gives a very different impression to the one gained watching on television so I can understand Daniel’s judgement but, having watched every stage from the comfort of the sofa, evaluating the race in terms of televisual excitement, racing dynamics, rivalries and simmering storylines it was lacking much drama. The race for the pink jersey was a formality. The battle for the ciclamino jersey and king of the mountains jersey bubbled for a few days. The highlight in the overall race was the dogged – albeit obviously doomed – way Afonso Eulálio defended his race lead, scrapped to cling on to a high overall position and the white jersey. The stages were spread between fewer than half of the teams. Jonas Vingegaard, Jhonatan Narváez and Paul Magnier won 11 of the 21 stages between them. The breakaways featured the same faces time and again.

Having said that, it’s impossible to take anything away from the precision with which Visma-Lease a Bike and Vingegaard set about their task. They were clinical, ruthless at the right moments, and utterly unflustered. As they say in football, you can only beat what’s in front of you, but it’s also fair to say that Vingegaard was almost unopposed so it is tricky to evaluate how his performance stacks up against that of Tadej Pogačar two years ago or whether it increases his chances at the Tour de France in July.

There was still plenty to enjoy, though. The stage wins for Alberto Bettiol and Michael Valgren were gripping. The break staying clear in Milan, where Fredrik Dversnes won, was one of the best moments of the season so far at the end of a stage that promised next to nothing on paper. Paul Magnier’s sprinting gives France a potential green jersey winner in the not-too-distant future. Felix Gall’s steady Eddie approach and sheer consistency in the mountains were strangely appealing (even if the angle of his knees drove me to distraction) but Vingegaard’s superiority did mean that once the GC hierarchy was set at Blockhaus the overall contenders settled into a formation.

Stage 19

• A short but very hard Queen Stage featured the Passo Duran and Passo Giau along with four second-category climbs, meaning a huge haul of points was on offer in the king of the mountains competition. Giulio Ciccone, who looked to have given up the fight for the blue jersey in frustration the previous day, went out on the offensive from the start, getting into the 24-man break and taking maximum points from the first four climbs to overtake Jonas Vingegaard’s total.

• The beef started at the Red Bull KM, where Ciccone’s Lidl-Trek teammate Derek Gee-West pipped Movistar’s Einer Rubio to maximum points. Had Rubio won that sprint he’d have wrapped up the Red Bull KM classification with two stages to go. Revenge was served cold, because later, on the penultimate climb, the Passo Falzarego, Rubio sprinted past Ciccone to take the points, which led to head-shaking and arm-waving from the Italian, who then took off solo on the descent, fired by his irritation.

• On the final climb Visma-Lease a Bike’s Sepp Kuss, who had been lurking quietly in the break all day, broke clear, passed Ciccone and completed the set of Giro, Tour and Vuelta stage wins. The consolation for Ciccone was third place on the stage and the king of the mountains jersey, which he had been keeping warm for Vingegaard, was now his.

• Jai Hindley of Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe climbed above Thymen Arensman and onto the third step of the podium, while Derek Gee-West rose to fifth place as the top ten was shuffled a little, with Afonso Eulálio slipping to sixth.

• EF’s Michael Valgren, who won the 17th stage to Andalo, and his teammate James Shaw, pulled out of the Giro ahead of the final two mountain stages. Hit by injuries and with two more Grand Tours to come, EF decided to prioritise rest and recovery, which strongly hints that Valgren will be selected for the Tour de France in July.

• Jhonatan Narváez, whose chase for the ciclamino jersey appeared to be ended by Paul Magnier’s stage win in Pieve di Soligo, withdrew from the race with a nosebleed and dizziness. It later emerged that the Ecuadorian had ridden into a team bus that braked unexpectedly while he was looking at his bike computer on his way back to his own team bus after stage 18. It remains to be seen whether the crash will jeopardise his place in the UAE Team Emirates line-up to support Tadej Pogačar at the Tour.

Stage 20

• An early break of five went clear and Manuele Tarozzi and Larry Warbasse then had a long, hard chase to bridge across to join Jack Haig, Guillermo Thomas Silva, Jonas Geens, Axel Huens and Andreas Leknessund.

• Later, Igor Arrieta and Ludovico Crescioli got across to the break and the Spaniard won the Red Bull KM to give himself a shot of overtaking Einer Rubio in the overall classification.

• The second ascent of Piancavallo saw the break reeled in so that when Jonas Vingegaard accelerated at the front of the GC group it wasn’t long before he was at the front of the race. As we’d seen several times, Felix Gall stayed on Vingegaard’s wheel briefly before settling into his own rhythm.

• Meanwhile, Vingegaard’s teammate Davide Piganzoli’s hopes of taking the white jersey from Afonso Eulálio evaporated when he was among the first of the GC riders to slip backwards. Arensman was also struggling and was grateful for the steady pacing from his Netcompany-Ineos teammate Egan Bernal to limit the damage to just a few seconds and keep hold of fourth place overall.

• Vingegaard’s fifth stage win, and Visma-Lease a Bike’s sixth, was a formality with around 10km to go, and the race behind him played out as expected too, with the riders reaching the top in form and (almost) general classification order.

Stage 21

• Jonathan Milan’s seemingly eternal wait for a stage win in this Giro finally ended in the Eternal City. While there was no win for Milan in Milan, he finally bounded across the line in first place in Rome to complete a very solid Giro for the Lidl-Trek team. They scored the second highest tally of UCI points (2,287 pts after Visma-Lease a Bike’s 3,287), with a stage win for Milan, a day in pink for Ciccone plus the king of the mountains jersey and fifth place overall for Derek Gee-West.

• The run-in to the line was intriguing because both Milan and Paul Magnier had teammates in the leading trio, which was being driven by Filippo Ganna. Matteo Sobrero and Jasper Stuyven were enjoying a free ride and barely gave Ganna a turn as they policed the move for their sprinters.

• Visma-Lease a Bike won their second Giro in a row, after Simon Yates’s win last year. Jonas Vingegaard clinched the Grand Tour grand slam – beating Tadej Pogačar to that particular milestone – and becoming the first rider since Chris Froome to complete the set. Two years ago, Pogačar did the Giro-Tour double, which many felt was an achievement that had been consigned to history by the intensity of modern racing. Vingegaard’s victory was not quite as crushing – five stage wins to the Slovenian’s six; a five-minute winning margin compared to Pog’s ten-minute victory – but he was never in difficulty. The question now is whether the Giro victory will help or hinder Vingegaard’s bid to unseat Pogačar in July.

• Igor Arrieta won the Red Bull KM to pip Einer Rubio to the overall title. Rubio must’ve been cursing Gee-West.

• Nelson Oliveira of Movistar completed his 23rd Grand Tour, keeping up a 100% record since his debut at the 2011 Vuelta a España. The veteran Portuguese rider has one stage win to his name – at the 2015 Vuelta – and a best finish of 21st in that same race. While it’s not a record for Grand Tour starts (that’s Matteo Tosatto’s 34), or even finishes, it is the joint longest 100% record without a single abandon.

• In terms of stage wins, 14 of the 23 teams ended up empty-handed, continuing a trend we’ve seen at a few Grand Tours in recent times. Of the teams that didn’t win a stage, Decathlon and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe will be happy to have made the final podium with Gall (who also finished second in five stages) and Jai Hindley. Tudor’s Michael Storer and Matthys Rondel were seventh and 11th, the latter riding his first Grand Tour. Polti-Visit Malta and Bardiani fulfilled the role of wild-card teams by getting in lots of breaks, with Polti’s Diego Sevilla enjoying the best part of a week in the mountains jersey. But looking at the haul of UCI points for each team, there were some worrying performances. Jayco-Alula (335 pts), Lotto-Intermarché (332) and Alpecin-Premier Tech (295 pts) all had mitigating factors. But Picnic-PostNL’s 67 points, with Warren Barguil’s ninth place at Chiavari their best result of the race, adds pressure ahead of the Tour de France.

The Cycling Podcast returns to regular weekly episodes as Lionel Birnie and Graham Willgoss build up to the Tour de France. Later this week they’ll preview the Critérium du Dauphiné, sorry, Tour Auvergne Rhône-Alpes.

by Lionel Birnie

Listening to Daniel’s latest KM0 One-Hit Wonder, which features Alexander Foliforov talking about his unlikely victory in the mountain time trial on the Alpe di Siusi a decade ago brought back a host of buried memories.

The 2016 race was the first Giro d’Italia The Cycling Podcast covered with daily episodes recorded on the road and I’d been at the race since the grande partenza in the Netherlands. The mountain time trial was my final day before heading home and perhaps I was guilty of mentally checking out and assuming that the short stage would be a logistical piece of cake, especially as we were staying in a little guesthouse just a few kilometres from the start.

One of my main memories of the day is driving our gleaming Maserati up and down the same stretch of motorway, through multiple tunnels cutting through the mountain side searching for an exit that didn’t seem to exist. It seemed that the road was too new for our GPS and after three or four pointless laps, Daniel called a colleague who explained there was a hidden back road that led us where we needed to go.

Later on, now running a little behind schedule, we took the cable car up into the Dolomites and were treated to an awesome birdseye view of the riders as the road switched back and forth beneath us.

My memory is that by the time we got to the top, Foliforov was one of two Gazprom riders occupying the top two places on the stage. Sergey Firsanov was the other, although he would later be pushed down to fourth place.

Foliforov’s time stood for the rest of the afternoon, although the maglia rosa Steven Kruijswijk pushed him very close, finishing in a time less than a second slower. It was a stunning upset by the 24-year-old Russian rider and, as the podcast’s resident sceptic, I have to admit my eyebrows were raised pretty high when we recorded our episode. The Gazprom team were a surprise wild card selection in the first place, picked at the expense of Gianni Savio’s squad. There were accusations that the selection was due to the fact that the man behind the team, the billionaire Igor Makarov, also held an influential position at the UCI. Anyway, Gazprom had barely made an impression in the race for two weeks and then Foliforov caused an almighty upset.

Was my scepticism well placed? Well, I won’t spoil the episode, you’ll have to listen to One-Hit Wonder for the accusation levelled at Foliforov and his account of the day. But what is equally remarkable is that two years later, aged 26, his professional career was at an end. His Giro stage win – referred to on social media, especially by the Dutch, as Foliforov Day – was by a huge margin the biggest win of his career, although he did win the king of the mountains at the Tour of the Alps in 2017.

As the Giro reaches the Dolomites today (pretty sure that’s right…) it’s well worth listening to one of the most remarkable stories of the 2016 race – the ultimate race of truth – and make up your own mind what happened.

One-Hit Wonder is on our regular feed for everyone to listen to now.

Listen to One-Hit Wonder

Giro d’Italia Women: Daily episodes start tomorrow

Join Rose Manley and Rebecca Charlton tomorrow (Saturday) as the Giro d’Italia Women gets underway with a stage from Marco Pantani’s home town, Cesenatico, to Ravenna. As the week unfolds, The Cycling Podcast Féminin’s team will rotate with Denny Gray and Lizzy Banks joining the coverage to analyse the race as it heads to Saluzzo via Sestriere.

Tune in to see if Elisa Longo Borghini can become the first rider since Fabiana Luperini in the 1990s to win three editions of the Giro in a row. Or can Anna van der Breggen equal Luperini’s record of five overall victories? Or perhaps Demi Vollering will add the Giro to her Tour and Vuelta titles after dominating the spring Classics.

Follow The Cycling Podcast

The first Giro

This episode of KM0 revisits the very first edition of the women’s Giro, which was held in 1988, when Italy’s Maria Canins was one of the top riders in the world. Tom Whalley spoke to Lisa Brambani, a member of the Great Britain team with an Italian name, who finished in the top ten of that first race. It’s a fantastic, colourful and upbeat listen about a race which broke new ground and veered from the dramatic to the chaotic, told in brilliant style by Lisa. The episode is available for Friends of the Podcast subscribers to listen to now and I’ve bumped it back to the top of our playlist so it’s easy to find. It’s the ideal way to warm up for the 2026 edition.

Sign up as a Friend of the Podcast

With three stages remaining, there are still 15 teams without a stage win. Between them, Jonas Vingegaard, Paul Magnier and Jhonatan Narváez have won ten of the 18 stages so far meaning the rest of the peloton will be scrambling to salvage something over the final three stages – two of which are savage mountain days, and the final one in Rome should go to a sprinter. Here’s my armchair summary of the past few days from Pod HQ.

Stage 16

• A short, sharp day trip to Switzerland for the Giro saw a familiar cast of riders get into the breakaway. Giulio Ciccone and Jardi Christiaan van der Lee were hunting king of the mountains points in an increasingly futile chase for the blue jersey. Jhonatan Narváez was seeking to unsettle Paul Magnier in the battle for the ciclamino jersey and he was joined by his UAE teammate Jan Christen. Diego Ulissi and Einer Rubio were hunting for a stage win, and Chris Harper was looking to climb back into the top 10 overall.

• However, Visma-Lease a Bike once again maintained their iron-like grip, holding the break within a safe distance and then reeling them in at the bottom of the final climb. Ciccone, looking frustrated, more or less conceded defeat in his bid for a second Giro mountains title, but Narváez did narrow the gap in the points competition to just two points at the intermediate sprint. Harper was the last man to be caught and passed by the yellow train at the front of the peloton.

• Giulio Pellizzari, still suffering the effects of illness, was first of the GC contenders to be dropped, with 10.6km to go, and he finished 18 minutes down to tumble out of the top ten. Next to be distanced was Afonso Eulálio, whose place on the podium was in peril. He dug in but still lost three minutes and slipped from second to fifth overall. Ben O’Connor was another highly-placed rider in trouble while Visma’s Victor Campenaerts was still doing his mountain time trial effort on the front.

• After a short stint from Sepp Kuss, Davide Piganzoli – one of the stars of this Giro – took over to set Jonas Vingegaard up for the inevitable decisive blow 6.8km from the line. Felix Gall tried to react but, as has become customary, the Austrian rode a sensible race and settled into his own rhythm. Vingegaard pushed on to the line with the rest of the Giro sorting out the battle for the podium places behind him. It was the Dane’s fourth stage win of the race, and his first in the pink jersey.

• Felix Gall staked the strongest claim to second place, although his lead over Thymen Arensman is only 24 seconds. Jai Hindley also jumped above Eulálio into fourth and Derek Gee-West was the other big riser – climbing three places to sixth. Piganzoli looks on course for the top ten and, with Vingegaard more or less assured of overall victory, he may get the freedom to attempt to gain another couple of places over the final mountain stages.

Listen to our Stage 16 episode

Stage 17

• The 202-kilometre stage to Andalo was uphill from the start and, with chances running out for the numerous teams still searching for a stage win, there was an aggressive, restless start to the stage with 13 riders eventually getting away in two groups. However, it was one of those days when nothing seemed to settle. Even watching from the sofa was an exhausting experience and, with the UK basking in a heatwave, it’s possible my eyelids may have obscured some of the action in the middle of the day.

• Remi Cavagna of Groupama-FDJ carved out a good lead with 100km to go but with so many climbs ahead, it was a near impossible task to stay away without help. During the final phase of the race, it was no surprise that Igor Arrieta, Einer Rubio and Michael Valgren worked their way to the front. Rubio was especially aggressive, as Movistar have been throughout the race, and at times Valgren seemed to be hanging on for dear life, unable to go through and do a turn on the front. In the final couple of kilometres, Arrieta – who had been dropped – got back up to them, then Aleksandr Vlasov, Damiano Caruso and Andreas Leknessund caught them too. Caruso was the first to try something but everyone reacted smartly, only for Valgren to attack just inside a kilometre to go and there was a crucial few seconds of hesitation that allowed the Dane to get a good gap.

• Valgren, a winner of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Amstel Gold Race in the past, had endured a long road to recovery after a horrendous crash at La Route d’Occitanie in 2022 which almost ended his career. A stage win at Tirreno-Adriatico in March was his first victory in almost five years, and this Giro victory was his first at a Grand Tour, which seemed improbable given his quality. As he approached the line, victory safely in the bag, he reached into his back pocket for a green Pokémon disc made for him by his son. Valgren only carries the disc during Grand Tour stages when he feels he has a chance of winning and today was one of those days. Seeing Valgren acknowledge his son, and Vingegaard’s ritual of kissing the photo of his family on his handlebars, was a reminder of the sacrifice the riders make at the Grand Tours. They all spend weeks and weeks on the road. Bulgaria must feel a long while ago now for some of the teams, especially with the spoils being spread so incredibly thinly.

• Narváez took the ciclamino jersey but perhaps will have hoped to finish better than ninth to apply more pressure to Paul Magnier.

Listen to our Stage 17 episode

Stage 18

• The Prosecco Stage should have been perfect for the breakaway, especially with the steep Muro di Ca’ Del Poggio coming so close to the finish, but with Jonathan Milan still waiting for his first stage win of the race, Lidl-Trek were among the teams wanting to keep things together in the closing stages. As a result, the breakaway consisting of two Polti-Visit Malta riders Mattia Bais and Andrea Mifsud, who were later joined by James Shaw of EF Education-EasyPost and Jonas Geens of Alpecin-Premier Tech, had a fairly hopeless outlook. Mifsud, who was celebrating his 27th birthday, was perhaps trying to earn a glass of bubbles. Geens was the last man standing but the peloton was in no mood to let the stage slip away.

• The ‘wall’ was spectacular. Very steep and every bit as dramatic as its namesake in Liguria. And credit to Jonathan Milan, who rode front and centre among Vingegaard and the other GC leaders until the very top of the climb to stay in contact and give himself a chance of an unlikely sprint win.

• Eulálio had an incredible afternoon. He crashed with around 50 kilometres to go and faced a mammoth chase to get back to the peloton. Then, on the Poggio, he attacked near the top and forced a split in the bunch. When it all came back together again, Eulálio was the only rider to react when Johannes Kulset of Uno-X broke clear. They were caught with just over a kilometre to go as the peloton raced to beat the rain into Pieve di Soligo.

• Earlier in the day, there’d been a shot of two horse riders in a field alongside the peloton. One of the horses was reminiscent of Milan’s sprinting style. At the finish, he was unmissable sprinting through the middle but he didn’t quite have the pace to hold off Paul Magnier, who clinched his third stage win of the race and 50 points which – barring a disaster – should wrap up the ciclamino jersey for the Frenchman. Milan will now have to hope he can win in Roma on Sunday.

Listen to our Stage 18 episode

• Follow The Cycling Podcast in your preferred podcast player to ensure you get notification as soon as a new episode drops. Join Daniel and Michele as the Giro d’Italia comes to its conclusion and then tune in as The Cycling Podcast Féminin picks up the Giro d’Italia Women. There’ll be a regular episode next week looking ahead to the Critérium du Dauphiné Tour Auverge-Rhône-Alpes.

by Lionel Birnie

The penultimate weekend of the Giro d’Italia delivered everything we expected, and a stage in Milan that demonstrated cycling’s capacity to serve up a surprise even when the raw ingredients look anything but exciting.

Jonas Vingegaard finally moved into the maglia rosa and with his teammates having everyone suffering like a Piganzoli it is his race to lose now. The race for the podium remains alive, as does the contest for the ciclamino jersey.

And, with 16 of the 23 teams yet to win a stage, the battle to get into the breaks in the final week will be intense because so many teams are on course to leave Rome on Sunday empty-handed.

As the men’s Giro reaches its conclusion, the Giro d’Italia Women will roll out of Cesenatico. Don’t forget we have daily episodes covering the race starting at the weekend. In the meantime, here are our observations following the middle week of the Giro…

Stage 13

• XDS-Astana have got their mojo back since being involved in last season’s relegation battle to avoid demotion from the WorldTour. The way they reshaped their tactical approach to racing has rolled over into this season and they’ve raced with far greater belief and confidence.

• It was a classic end of the second week, eve of a big mountain day, transitional stage. An early break of 15 riders got clear and led by more than 10 minutes approaching the final climb, which is where Andreas Leknessund of Uno-X went clear on his own. Alberto Bettiol was clearly biding his time and waited until the final few hundred metres before launching an intense acceleration to blitz past the Norwegian.

• It was XDS-Astana’s third stage win of this Giro – following Guillermo Thomas Silva and Davide Ballerini. It’s been a fairly barren few years for the Kazakh squad at the Grand Tours. Their previous three stage wins span the 2023 Giro d’Italia (where Mark Cavendish won) to last year’s Vuelta a España – that’s three wins in nine Grand Tours. Now they’ve collected three in a fortnight. The last time Astana won three times in the same Grand Tour was the 2019 Giro.

• Bettiol has a lot of quality but a relatively slim list of race wins. His first victory as a professional was the 2019 Tour of Flanders, which perhaps set expectations too high. This victory was only the ninth of his career, and his first in XDS-Astana colours since a mid-season transfer from EF Education-Easy Post shortly after winning the Italian national title two seasons ago.

Listen to our Stage 13 episode

Stage 14

• Visma-Lease A Bike dominated the stage to Pila, taking control of the peloton more or less from start to finish and starting the final climb with intimidating numbers in front of Jonas Vingegaard. It was a show of strength that enabled the Dane to make the maximum gain for the minimum amount of time spent in the red. He went clear with 4.7 kilometres of the final climb remaining. Felix Gall was the only rider to stay close to him, demonstrating again his cool-headed style under pressure to limit his losses and then try to recover time rather than match the accelerations and blow up. Vingegaard soloed away to win his third stage by 49 seconds. Could he have gained more time? Perhaps, but it’s clear that he is racing with one eye on July and doesn’t want to go too deep here. Is it a swashbuckling, breath-taking display in the style of Pog in his pomp? No, but it doesn’t need to be. As golfers say – there’s no room for pretty pictures on the scorecard.

• Tim Rex – now nicknamed T-Rex by everyone – put in a ferocious, if slightly theatrical, turn on the climb before a turn of speed by Sepp Kuss spelled defeat for the break. Davide Piganzoli was the last man for Vingegaard and he was strong enough to mark Gall and finish fourth on the stage. Afterwards he said he’d been ‘suffering like a pig’. A new description is born – suffering like a Piganzoli.

• Afonso Eulálio put up a spirited defence of the pink jersey and managed to retain second place overall. While he will be vulnerable in the face of Gall’s consistency in the mountains, a top five place must be his target now.

• Decathlon’s steady evolution into a stage racing powerhouse is slowly bearing fruit. They were supporting Gall with good numbers until quite late on the climb, suggesting they will be able to provide Paul Seixas with some meaningful back-up at the Tour de France.

• Thymen Arensman faltered slightly in the heat but he dug very deep to limit his losses and kept his podium chances alive. The battle between Gall, Arensman, Jai Hindley and perhaps one or two others for the right to stand alongside Vingegaard in Rome looks to one remaining intriguing battle of the final week.

• The other battle is between Jhonatan Narváez and Paul Magnier for the ciclamino jersey. The Ecuadorian got in the break and took the jersey by winning intermediate sprint points – something he will presumably seek to do knowing Magnier is unlikely to be able to do the same when there are big hills in the way.

Listen to our Stage 14 episode

Stage 15

• On paper, Sunday’s 15th stage looked like a snooze. A flat stage and certain sprint finish in Milan was hardly likely to make appointment viewing for millions of armchair spectators. Of course, taking the Giro into the centre of one of Italy’s biggest cities is less disruptive at the weekend but if professional cycling is to exploit the rich seam of untapped TV viewers surely the organisers need to schedule the best stages on Saturdays and Sundays. The only thing worse would have been another time trial. But what a stage it turned out to be – in front of a big crowd too.

• When it became apparent that the GC riders, led by Jonas Vingegaard, were calling for the race organisers to take the times for the overall classification with one lap – 16 kilometres – remaining, it was tempting to wonder whether the point of a stage race is becoming lost. The Milan streets on a warm, sunny day were not as dangerous as some of the roads in Bulgaria or Napoli, so there seemed to be no compelling reason to give the GC riders any added breathing space. Back in 2009, the Giro peloton – led by Lance Armstrong and Danilo Di Luca – successfully argued for a neutralisation in Milan before Mark Cavendish won the stage, so it wasn’t without precedent. On that occasion, the riders were protesting about inadequate course safety following a terrible career-ending crash for Pedro Horrillo the previous day. The Milan stage, held on the same course as the one that started the very first Giro 100 years earlier, was disrupted by a rider protest at the end of the fourth lap and the organisers agreed to cancel the GC times.

• On Sunday, it was probably the right decision too – and it made me think that perhaps the UCI needs to reconsider the rules for all the flat stages because it wasn’t the decision itself that made the sport look shambolic it was that the rules of engagement were once again being negotiated while the race was playing out. The riders acknowledge that the presence of the GC contenders and their teammates is one of the aggravating factors during sprint finishes, increasing the risks for everyone. But the sprinters will also highlight the fact that they have to survive the mountain stages inside the time limit. So perhaps the answer is to have an equivalent time limit on the sprint stages. Take the GC times at 10 (or in this case 16) kilometres to go but anyone sitting up to stay out of trouble must finish within a certain time of the winner, meaning they can’t just coast to the line but have to carry on riding at a similar intensity to the front group, just without the jostling for position and danger. If they miss the time cut they get their actual elapsed time. This introduces a sporting element of risk and reward for the GC riders to consider and the best option would probably suit everyone – the GC riders sit at the back of the peloton without losing contact safe in the knowledge that if gaps open up they won’t lose unnecessary time. Perhaps this sounds too complicated to administer but continuing the way the sport is going, with discussions during the stage and the viewing public coming to the conclusion that the riders don’t want to race, is farcical. The Grand Tours are either a test to see who can complete a mammoth 3,500-kilometre course in the lowest aggregate time or they’re not.

• While all that was going on, the peloton seemed to forget that the breakaway quartet was out in front. They had ridden brilliantly all day to maintain a gap that was still a very healthy 1-30 with 25 kilometres to go. The break was packed with riders who between them had spent more than 1,400 off the front of the peloton before Sunday’s stage rolled out of Voghera. Mattia Bais of Team Polti-Visit Malti had been in six breaks, his teammate Mirco Maestri in two and Martin Marcellusi of Bardiani CSF had been in four. Frederik Dvernes of Uno-X, who kicked off the move in the opening kilometres, was in his first major escape in this, his first Giro d’Italia.

• The quartet rode incredibly well and co-operated brilliantly to give themselves the best chance. Although the gap was melting away in the closing 25 kilometres, the peloton did not get its act together sufficiently. With 20 kilometres to go, the gap was still 1-06. Ten kilometres later it was 45 seconds, and with five to go it was still 27 seconds and. Behind them, the sprinters’ teams realised too late the opportunity was slipping away. Lidl-Trek’s Derek Gee-West did a big turn for his sprinter Jonathan Milan. Unibet Rose Rockets were also working well for Dylan Groenewegen. But Decathlon (for Tobias Lund Andresen) and Picnic Post NL (for Casper van Uden) were reluctant to assist.

• A couple of the teams took the old adage that you have to be prepared to lose in order to win a little too literally. The panic was full on when Milan’s leadout man Simone Consonni was on the front with 2.6 kilometres to go but by that stage Lidl-Trek, at least, had realised the gap was not closing quickly enough.

• The sentimental among us must have been hoping for either a Maestri or Bais win. Maestri, riding his ninth Giro with a best stage result of second last year, has done his time in the breaks over almost a decade. Bais too is one of the first riders to jump out of the bunch on days like this. But in the end, Italy was to be disappointed when the only foreign rider, and the only one from a WorldTour team, proved strongest in the sprint. There’s often no room for sentiment in cycling.

• We were denied the sight of a Milan win in Milan. And Jonathan Milan’s wait for a stage win this year might now go all the way to Rome. It was a bad day for more than half of Milan too because a few kilometres away, later in the evening, the rossoneri lost their final Serie A match of the season to Cagliari to miss out on a place in the Champions League – very much the football equivalent of failing to catch the break in the final kilometre.

• The race for the ciclamino jersey came alive with Jhonatan Narváez showing his hand and making it clear he wants to win the points competition in Rome by going for the final point at the intermediate sprint in Pavia. Paul Magnier came past him quite easily to draw level overall, and then the Frenchman stretched his lead by winning the bunch sprint for fifth place behind the break. It’s a complicated final week for Magnier, who may have to watch helplessly while Narváez chips away at his lead but, if he can go into the final stage within 30 or 40 points of the Ecuadorian he will feel the jersey is his to take.

• Enrico Zanoncello of Bardiani CSF was rightly disqualified for aiming a headbutt at Jayco-Alula’s Robert Donaldson in the final sprint, which caused the British rider to crash. It was a moment of madness that doesn’t do the peloton any favours when they are arguing for safer racing conditions.

• Who would have thought there’d be so many talking points from such an uninspiring-looking stage? It just goes to show that the riders are the ones who make the race. Their decisions, their risks and their hesitation can deliver the drama in the most surprising ways sometimes.

Listen to our Stage 15 episode

Rest day listening: Viva Somarriba!

May’s episode of The Cycling Podcast Féminin is online now

Grab a round of agua con gas and listen in as Rose Manley, Denny Gray and Rebecca Charlton review the Spanish stage racing block.

With many of the big hitters away making preparations for the forthcoming Giro d’Italia, the short stage races of Itzulia and Vuelta a Burgos provided plenty of surprises and breakthroughs. On a rare opportunity from domestique duties, Mischa Bredewold led the charge for SD Worx who looked back to their old imperious best. But what does the win mean for a team that already have so many champions in their roster? Yara Kastellijn’s huge victory on the final day of Burgos cemented a phenomenal few weeks for the rider who has been without a win since her breakthrough at the Tour de France Femmes in 2023. Plus, did FDJ United Suez make the wrong call in Itzulia by not backing young British star Lauren Dickson?

In our mini feature we speak to the last Spanish rider (before Paula Blasi this year) to win a women’s Grand Tour. That champion is Joane Somarriba, a rider who twice won the Giro Feminile and three times won the precursor to the Tour de France Femmes, the Grand Boucle. She talks about her journey to the top, overcoming hospitalisation and prejudice to become one of the best riders of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

We also look ahead to this year’s Giro d’Italia Women which begins at the end of the month. The Cycling Podcast Féminin will bring listeners daily coverage of the race for the first time, starting on Saturday (May 30).

Also on the agenda: the ambience of shopping malls, virtual sangrias and Denny’s dream of being paid in cheese.

Listen to The Cycling Podcast Féminin

by Lionel Birnie

Every year during the Giro, we are asked about our theme and incidental music. It’s by a brilliant London-based pizzica band called Amaraterra. The theme song is called Cozze and so for Jordan, Alice, Neil, Richard and everyone else who has asked during the first couple of weeks of the Giro, here it is. I’m sure you agree that there’s something about it that combines so gloriously with the scenery and the weather to transport us all to Italy to join Daniel – and Michele and Brian – as they follow the race.

As the race heads towards the end of its second week, with a big mountain stage to Pila tomorrow (Saturday), the storylines appear to be written, the conclusion to the race known in advance. And yet it feels like a Giro of known unknowns. We know Jonas Vingegaard is the best climber in the race, but is overall victory going to come easily? Certainly at the moment he’s riding very conservatively, doing just enough but no more, and gives off an air of confidence that once he inherits the pink jersey the defence will be straightforward.

We knew Filippo Ganna was the best time trialist in the race, but can he or his Netcompany-Ineos team add another stage win or two, and support Thymen Arensman’s bid for the final podium?

We know Jonathan Milan is the fastest sprinter in the field but he’s not proved it yet. Will his time come in the city that shares his name on Sunday?

And Jhonatan Narváez is clearly the punchiest and most dynamic all-rounder. He must look at every stage profile and think he has a 7/10 chance in most of them. Can he add to his hat-trick of wins?

Stage 10

• No one was surprised that Filippo Ganna won the individual time trial in Tuscany. He was the hot favourite and a thrashing was on the cards right from the start when he caught and passed his minute man, Cyril Barthe of Groupama, after less than eight minutes of racing. Soon after that, he scorched by Paul Magnier in his ciclamino skinsuit and then carried on picking off riders until he got to the finish in Massa. As Ganna approached the line he almost caught Bardiani’s Filippo Magni, who had set off eight minutes earlier. Ganna’s average speed of 54.921kph was a Grand Tour record for any time trial over 40 kilometres in length.

• Ganna’s dominance meant the stage was largely stripped of drama until the GC riders set off. The Italian time trial champion was one of only three riders to get comfortable in the hot seat. Max Walscheid of Lidl-Trek set the early time to beat and then Sjoerd Bax of Pinarello-Q36.5 produced a brilliant ride to take a surprise lead. He kept it warm until Ganna finished.

• Sometimes, cycling history can be perplexing. The Giro organisers stated that Ganna’s seventh Giro individual time trial stage win meant he drew level with Eddy Merckx in the all-time list, though still some way off Francesco Moser’s record of 12. I’ve scoured the record books and can only find six individual time trial wins for Merckx at the Giro. Perhaps they’re counting the 1973 prologue in Verviers, which was actually a two-man time trial in which Merckx partnered his Molteni teammate Roger Swerts and crossed the line first to take the pink jersey.

• The course from Viareggio to Massa showed the Tuscan coastline in a far better light than the Tirreno-Adriatico stage a couple of months ago when the weather was grey and the towns were sleepy. While it’s still early and the summer season has not kicked off yet, there were more people around and the sea looked brighter and bluer. Forte dei Marmi’s designer boutiques had at least raised their shutters. One of the great joys of watching the Giro is vicariously soaking up the sunshine and holiday vibes knowing summer is not far away.

• Anyone who watched that Tirreno-Adriatico time trial in March would not have been surprised by Thymen Arensman’s ride. Ganna and Arensman finished first and second then too and although the Dutchman was a distant 1-53 behind his Netcompany-Ineos teammate on Tuesday, he is much better suited to a flat time trial course than most of the other GC contenders. Second place on the stage propelled Arensman up to third overall, still some way behind Vingegaard, but suddenly the final podium in Rome looks a realistic target for him.

• I expected Jonas Vingegaard to take the pink jersey in the time trial, not because the course suited him – it didn’t – but because it suited Afonso Eulálio so much less. While the Dane will have been relatively unconcerned about not assuming the race lead this early, the fact Arensman, and to a lesser extent Ben O’Connor and Derek Gee-West, had moved into his orbit will have given Visma-Lease A Bike pause for thought.

• Eulálio produced the time trial performance of his life. There’s not a huge bank of evidence to go on but he is not noted for his strength against the clock. Two years ago he was 67th in a time trial at the Volta a Portugal. In last year’s Giro time trial from Lucca to Pisa, he finished 150th out of 171. While 41st place, almost five minutes slower than Ganna and 1-57 slower than Vingegaard, was unremarkable it was far better than many expected and it meant the Portuguese rider kept the pink jersey by 27 seconds.

• With illness in the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe camp, both Giulio Pellizzari and Jai Hindley conceded time. Felix Gall slipped one place overall but the time loss to Vingegaard – 1-22 – dashes any slim hopes the Austrian might have had that he could somehow overhaul the Dane in the mountains.

Listen to our Stage 10 episode

Stage 11

• It was another day when everyone knew what was going to happen but no one could do anything about it. The peloton must be suffering a collective Narváez breakdown at this point (that play on words is courtesy of Friend of the Podcast Edward Pickering). Since being reduced to just five riders after three stages, UAE Team Emirates have raced aggressively whenever there’s been the opportunity. And while everyone must let out a sigh of resignation when they look around to find they’ve been joined in the break by Jhonatan Narváez the roads of Italy favour so many of his strengths it’s hard to know how to beat him on days like this.

• Not that he needed any further help but a crash on the final big descent of the stage tilted the odds even further in Narváez’s favour. Christian Scaroni, Lennert Van Eetvelt and Filippo Zana fell on the descent with the Belgian coming off worst. Although he finished the stage he was unable to start the following day, reducing his Lotto-Intermarché team to just four riders with half of the race still to go.

• Of the riders in the break, Scaroni was probably the biggest threat to Narváez, so as the Italian chased to get back up to the front the UAE Team Emirates rider made his move with Enric Mas of Movistar. It’s hard to picture a more mismatched head-to-head sprint than that. Mas, not noted for his turn of speed on the flat, put up a spirited fight but he was no match for Narváez, who clinched his hat-trick of stage wins.

• By getting in the break, Chris Harper of Pinarello-Q36.5 made big gains overall, climbing seven places to tenth. You could start calling it the Giro Down Under because that meant there were four Aussies in the top ten – Ben O’Connor (fifth), Jai Hindley (sixth), Michael Storer (seventh) and Harper. There have never been so many Australians to finish in the top ten of the same Grand Tour so they could be on for a record. At the Giro Cadel Evans and Richie Porte were fifth and seventh in 2010, and Ben O’Connor and Michael Storer were fourth and tenth in 2024.

• Erland Blikra of Uno-X finished about a minute and a half outside the time limit. He was suffering from the same illness that forced his teammate Martin Tjøtta to abandon. The Giro lost one of its stage winners – Italy’s Davide Ballerini, who triumphed in Napoli – crashed out, suffering a fractured finger.

Listen to our Stage 11 episode

Stage 12

• The Milano-Sanremo in reverse stage treated us to the same glorious coastline but bathed in the glow of warmer sunshine than earlier in the spring.

• The pace on the Bric Berton climb was fast enough to shed the big sprinters – notably Jonathan Milan, who is presumably waiting until Milan on Sunday to open his account at this Giro, Paul Magnier and Casper Van Uden.

• Ben Turner of Netcompany-Ineos suffered the misfortune of a puncture 23 kilometres from the end and had a lung-busting chase with teammate Jack Haig to get back up to the front group with 10.5 kilometres remaining. Unfortunately for the British rider the effort took its toll over the final small climbs and he was dropped with 4.5 kilometres to go.

• Eulálio is refusing to accept his spell in the maglia rosa is finite. He sprinted to take the time bonus in the Red Bull KM to extend his lead over Vingegaard to 33 seconds. While it’s likely that won’t be enough to keep the pink jersey past Pila on Saturday Eulálio is relishing playing the Juan Pedro Lopez role and looks set to complete 10 days in the race lead before passing it over. Mind you, I thought he’d relinquish the jersey in the time trial so perhaps the Portuguese rider has one more surprise in him?

• Alec Segaert did an ‘Alec Segaert’, flying out of the speeding peloton with 3.3 kilometres to go and holding off the field to take a brilliant win. In the spring, he did something similar – though not from as far out – to win the Grand Prix Denain. At Gent-Wevelgem he almost caused an upset when he flew across to Mathieu van der Poel and Wout van Aert late on. The late break is becoming his signature move. I remember in the late 1980s a Dutchman called Jelle Nijdam pulled off a similar late attack to win a Tour de France stage. My memory is no doubt playing tricks on me here but after that it felt like Nijdam tried to pull the same trick every other day. Movistar tried to drag him back, then Uno-X took up the chase but left it too late to close the gap and the Belgian held on relatively comfortably. It completed a perfect day for Bahrain Victorious – their first Grand Tour stage win since 2023, and another day in pink.

Listen to our Stage 12 episode

Out next week: The Cycling Podcast Féminin

Tune in to the May episode of The Cycling Podcast Féminin when Rose Manley, Denny Gray and Rebecca Charlton recap the Spanish swing of the stage racing season. Itzulia Women and the Vuelta a Burgos Feminas followed the recent Vuelta España Femenina as the peloton prepares for the Giro d’Italia Women, which starts next Saturday (May 30).

The episode also focuses on Joane Somarriba, the last Spanish woman to win a Grand Tour before Paula Blasi took the Vuelta Femenina.

For the first time, The Cycling Podcast Féminin will have daily episodes covering the Giro d’Italia Women. Rose, Denny, Rebecca and Lizzy Banks will be your hosts on a rolling through-and-off basis as the race makes its way from Cesenatico to Saluzzo.

Follow The Cycling Podcast in your favourite podcast app to make sure you never miss an episode. If you follow us, you’ll receive a notification from your app as soon as a new episode goes live.

Follow The Cycling Podcast

The Dukes of Hazard

Rest day listening: Long-time regulars on The Cycling Podcast’s Giro d’Italia coverage, in this year’s edition Matt White and Max Sciandri are directing operations, together, from the front seat of the Movistar team car.

Australia and Italy, fire and ice, they make an intriguing duo, but can it be a successful one at this year’s Giro? We went behind the scenes on the day of their boldest tactical plan yet, on stage four of the Giro to Cosenza, to get a sense of how their partnership is galvanising the Spanish team at this year’s Giro. Daniel Friebe then summoned Matt and Max the following morning for a debrief and typically mirthful discussion of what they each bring to their roles.

Listen to The Dukes of Hazard

Have you had technical issues lately?

We’ve had a few messages from listeners who have been experiencing technical issues playing or downloading the podcast. We’ve checked this out with our audio hosts and there haven’t been any interruptions lately – our RSS feed is working correctly – so it’s likely that in most cases a simple fix will sort the problem.

If an episode of The Cycling Podcast doesn’t play, try these three fixes first:

1. Turn your device on and off again

2. Quit your podcast app and restart it (and check whether the app needs an update)

3. Unfollow The Cycling Podcast and re-follow the feed

If your episodes still won’t play, and you’re not running a VPN or ad blocker, email us at contact@thecyclingpodcast.com and we’ll get further tech support from Audioboom.

If your usual podcast player isn’t working, you can listen to our episodes at thecyclingpodcast.com or on our Audioboom home page.

Stage 7

• What did we learn after six hours of racing that we didn’t know already? That Jonas Vingegaard is the best climber in the race and the Giro champion-elect? Did we need six hours of racing to come to that conclusion? The stage to Blockhaus raised the question of whether there is really any need for a 244-kilometre stage in the modern era? It was the longest Giro stage since a 264km slog to Fiuggi won by Diego Ulissi in 2015 (although there were stages to Pinerolo in 2016 and Gualdo Tadino in 2018 that were also 244 kilometres long). Okay, so the route depends on a wide range of factors and any distance not covered on the bike usually means longer transfers by bus, but there was an old school pace to Friday’s stage. A few weeks ago on the podcast, Larry Warbasse and I were discussing whether Decathlon should select 19-year-old Paul Seixas for the Tour de France. A couple of decades ago the wisdom was that riders needed to mature and build up the required levels of endurance to cope with the workload of a three-week race. The Grand Tours are still an endurance test, of course, but they are far more intense these days and less attritional. The result is that cycling is becoming a younger person’s sport. But the stage to Blockhaus bucked that trend and the outcome surprised no one.

• Blockhaus is where Eddy Merckx won the first Grand Tour stage of his career in 1967 but Vingegaard’s approach to this Giro is not Cannibal-esque. Instead, he’s deploying salami tactics, putting together an ultra-efficient GC campaign slice by slice. By attacking with just over five kilometres to go, Vingegaard did more than enough to assert his supremacy but without going too deep. The strength of his teammates Davide Piganzoli and Sepp Kuss will have bolstered his confidence too.

• Afonso Eulálio saw almost half of his lead over the Dane evaporate but he remained in pink with a nice advantage of 3:17, although it is surely only a matter of time before he passes the jersey over. It was notable that Vingegaard made his move just as Eulálio was losing contact with the lead group.

• Felix Gall was the other big winner, plotting a sensible course to the top of Blockhaus without panicking when he couldn’t follow Vingegaard and Giulio Pellizzari. His deficit at the line was just 13 seconds and he has emerged as a strong candidate for the podium and has given himself a chance to improve on his best Grand Tour result, which was fifth in last year’s Tour de France. The time trial is likely to be his Achilles heel. He lost more than a minute and a half to Vingegaard over 33 kilometres in Caen at last year’s Tour. A similar loss over 42 kilometres in Tuscany on Tuesday would be a good result.

• Italy’s great young hope Pellizzari was quick out of the blocks to react to Vingegaard’s move but he stayed on the Dane’s wheel for a matter of minutes before he slipped back and was passed by Gall. Later he was joined by his teammate Jai Hindley and another Aussie Ben O’Connor, who may well find themselves locked in a battle for the podium with Gall.

• Hindley – who laid the foundations for his 2022 Giro win by taking the stage the last time the race went to Blockhaus – subtly re-asserted himself as the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe leader, crossing the line three seconds ahead of Pellizzari and moving ahead of him overall. Pellizzari deserves credit for reacting so promptly to Vingegaard’s move, and for trying to stay with him. If he’d been able to hang in there we’d be talking about him as a serious threat, but the way he faltered so soon reinforced the fact that the biggest mountain stages often reward caution over risk. Gall resisted the temptation to jump and worked his way back and was cutting his deficit the closer they got to the line.

• There are three other teams with a pair of overall contenders and these mini races within the race developed in intriguing ways. Matthys Rondel – who collided with the rear window of a UAE Team Emirates team car last week – showed no ill effects, finishing sixth on the stage, a little ahead of his Tudor Pro Cycling teammate Michael Storer. Giulio Ciccone remained ahead of Derek Gee-West in Lidl-Trek’s pecking order. And although Thymen Arensman’s performance for Netcompany-Ineos was a little disappointing, he was well clear of Egan Bernal, who later revealed that his ride on Blockhaus was his best ever 40-minute effort, and yet it was not enough to keep up with Wout Poels, let alone Vingegaard.

  Listen to Stage 7

Stage 8

• After the grind to Blockhaus, a short, frenetic stage shook up the rhythm of this Giro and exploited a few weaknesses. Early on, there looked to be a prestigious two-up all-Italian break on as Filippo Ganna and Alberto Bettiol got clear. They probably needed the company of another couple of riders of similar stature to make it stick.

• The eventual race-winning move came on the first of a number of small but tricky climbs in the jagged final third of a stage. UAE Team Emirates may be down to five riders but they are racing with the strength of eight men. Mikkel Bjerg was joined by teammate Jhonatan Narváez and then Andreas Leknessund of Uno-X. Bjerg did most of the work leaving Narváez to drop Leknessund and ride solo to his second, and UAE’s third, stage win of the Giro.

• Christian Scaroni of XDS-Astana gained more than a minute by joining the secondary escape that got clear over the closing climbs. That lifted him to fourth overall, the best placed Italian, although he’s not likely to remain that high through the big mountains.

• Vingegaard’s economical approach yielded another couple of seconds as he and Hindley opened a small gap over the rest on the way to the line.

• Giulio Ciccone deliberately lost almost five minutes, sacrificing his GC position in the hope he might be allowed more leeway in the hunt for stages.

• Jan Christen is the default winner of the Battle of the Brothers, as Fabio pulled out suffering from the injuries sustained in a crash earlier in the race.

Listen to Stage 8

Stage 9

• For a while, Giulio Ciccone’s strategy looked to be paying off. Having slipped out of the GC picture on Saturday, he waited until the road started to rise in the second half of the stage to go across to the break, then he formed a useful-looking partnership with Einer Rubio at the head of the race before going clear on his own with about 7.5 kilometres of the final climb remaining.

• Unfortunately for Ciccone, his gap was never big enough to hold off the chasers, especially once Felix Gall opened up hostilities and Vingegaard reacted. They reeled in the Italian and Vingegaard went clear of Gall just inside the final kilometre to eke out another few seconds. Eulálio lost another 41 seconds on the road, plus Vingegaard’s time bonus for winning the stage, means the Portuguese rider will be defending a lead of 2:24 when the race resumes with a time trial tomorrow (Tuesday). Eulálio is not noted for his strength against the clock – he finished 150th in the 28-kilometre time trial to Pisa last year. The Tuscan stage is 50 per cent longer, so unless the maglia rosa gives him super-human strength his spell in the lead could be coming to an end.

• Vingegaard’s efficiency and consistency are impressive, if not exactly thrilling. Gall aside, he gained significant time over everyone else in the space of three stages. Pellizzari lost 1-28 on Sunday, while not a final blow to his podium aspirations, it was enough to make Hindley Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s best bet from now on.

Listen to Stage 9

The Podcast Postbag

Drop us a line at contact@thecyclingpodcast.com

‘Jonas is not a great champion. Honestly, the man is a wheel sucker who seemingly never wants to share the work. He is the guy in your group ride who sits in the wheels until the very end of the climb and sprints to win.

He did this to Gall today, and he did it to Remco earlier in the spring. The man then kisses his handlebars and his ring and can barely do a proper champion’s salute showing off his sponsors’ jersey. I can think of no cycling champion with less panache than Jonas Vingegaard.

No wonder the Italian press and fans are disappointed. He doesn’t respect them enough. That said, the Cycling Podcast is doing a fabulous job bringing the race to life. I truly appreciate listening to all of you. Audrey’

LB: Tell us what you really think, Audrey! It’s a fair point but seemingly a deliberate strategy to ensure Vingegaard doesn’t stretch himself so far that he’s unable to mount a challenge at the Tour de France later this summer.

‘Every team talks about the importance of getting a ‘podium’ in Grand Tour stages, but is this even a thing? I’ve never seen the first three stage finishers on the podium, only at the final GC podium after three weeks, or in the Classics and other one-day races. Am I right? And, if so, should teams really be banging on about it, because in the eyes of the public, the third-place finisher is kind of no better than the fifth-place finisher, surely? Jonathan’

LB: I couldn’t agree with you more, Jonathan. Until race organisers start inviting the top three to the podium, finishing second or third on a stage does not count as ‘a podium’.

by Lionel Birnie

Sometimes the Giro d’Italia has to be seen to be believed. Ever since the race resumed in southern Italy after its Bulgarian grande partenza there have been moments where we’ve collectively gasped and wondered ‘did that really just happen?’

UAE Team Emirates – reduced to just five riders by crashes in Bulgaria – won back-to-back stages, the second in the most extraordinary fashion as two breakaway riders took it in turns to pick themselves up off the canvas.

And then came the cobbles at the finish in Napoli where it was hard not to ponder just what the race organisers were thinking.

Daniel, Brian and Michele are well underway and the nightly episodes will take you right to the heart of the Giro d’Italia over the next two and a half weeks. The 11.01 Cappuccino this year is a random assortment of observations from Pod HQ released after every third stage.

Stage 4

• The course profile didn’t suggest we’d see such an exciting stage but the aggression and commitment of the Movistar team and the fact several riders seemed to have ‘post-rest day’ legs – especially after three relatively undemanding stages in Bulgaria – made for a thriller. The Giro didn’t so much as wake up, it sat bolt upright in bed.

• Race favourite Jonas Vingegaard lost an important teammate for the mountain stages when Wilco Kelderman was a non-starter as the race resumed in southern Italy following the transfer from Bulgaria. The veteran Dutchman was really bashed up after a crash during the opening weekend.

• Two more sprinters dropped out on the road. Alpecin-Premier Tech lost their versatile Aussie Kaden Groves, stage winner on the skid pan stage into Napoli last year, with injuries sustained in a crash in Bulgaria. And Arnaud De Lie, dropped early on the big climb of the Cozzo Tunno, finally succumbed to the stomach upset he’d been struggling with after ingesting cow manure during a race in Belgium, which he won, shortly before the Giro.

• The six-man break, featuring the mandatory riders from Bardiani CSF (Marcellusi this time) and Team Polti-Visit Malta (Bais), was caught on the climb by a flying peloton led by five of the Movistar team. Their objective was to drop the sprinters, which they did one by one until their man Orluis Aular was one of the only fastmen standing.

• The maglia rosa, Guillermo Thomas Silva, was perhaps surprisingly dropped with 9.6 kilometres to go to the top, meaning the Uruguayan’s spell in the race lead was over and the jersey was up for grabs. Florian Stork (Tudor) must’ve been pinching himself as he was the best-placed rider in the lead group at that point.

• Sensationally, Egan Bernal was dropped 2.2 kilometres from the top – before his Netcompany-Ineos teammate Ben Turner, one of the best bets to win the uphill sprint among the riders left in the lead group. Turner sacrificed his own chances of winning the stage, dropping back to help pace Bernal up to the leaders. They regained contact with 16 kilometres to go. Derek Gee-West also found himself in that group when he had a mechanical issue and was grateful for Turner’s presence.

• Victor Campenaerts led out Vingegaard for the Red Bull KM but Jan Christen of UAE Team Emirates took the sprint, ahead of Giulio Pellizzari and Giulio Ciccone. That left the virtual GC position beautifully poised with four riders – Stork, Ciccone, Christen and Bernal – all tied on overall time as they headed to the finish.

• With 1.7 kilometres remaining, Jan Christen took a flyer from deep in the group and – despite looking over his shoulder multiple times – stayed clear until the final few hundred metres as the road rose to the line. Movistar’s Aular opened up his sprint a long way out – perhaps too far out – and was looking good until Christen’s UAE teammate Jhonatan Narváez came gliding past to win the third Giro stage of his career and give his depleted, injury-hit team a boost. Aular was second – perhaps a disappointing result considering the full commitment of his Movistar team. Ciccone was third and Turner was fourth, clearly experiencing fabulous climbing legs and left wondering what might have been had he not had to chase so long to bring Bernal back up. The question is, where were the other Netcompany-Ineos riders who might have been able to do that work and allow Turner to concentrate on the stage win?

• Ten years after his Giro d’Italia debut – when he won a stage at Sestola – Giulio Ciccone pulled on the maglia rosa for the first time thanks to the time bonuses won in the Red Bull KM and on the finish line. This time last year, I was touting Ciccone as an outsider for the final podium, to much derision, partly because his best Grand Tour result had been 11th in the Tour de France. He eventually crashed out while still just about in contention. The closest he’d ever got to the pink jersey at the Giro was in 2021, when he climbed up to fourth place, 36 seconds off the lead. Finally, at the end of this, the 150th Giro stage of his career, he took the coveted jersey. Could he become the first Italian since Alessandro De Marchi in 2021 to hold it for more than one day?

Listen to our Stage 4 episode

Stage 5

• The rain fell on and off all day, occasionally very heavily. Twelve riders made the break, including the previous day’s winner Narváez and his UAE Team Emirates colleague Igor Arrieta. Ben Turner was hoping to make up for his near-miss. Former pink jersey wearer Guillermo Thomas Silva and his teammate Christian Scaroni meant XDS-Astana were hunting in pairs again. Movistar had Lorenzo Milesi and Einer Rubio in there. Rubio was just 10 seconds off the race lead, which meant the bunch was never going to allow the gap to get out of hand.

• Having missed the break, EF Education-EasyPost’s Darren Rafferty braved the elements to power across the gap.

• On the big climb, the Montagna Grande di Viggiano, Arrieta broke away and was joined by Afonso Eulálio of Bahrain Victorious. That’s when the drama, and an episode of Wacky Races, began. With 13 kilometres to go Arrieta’s bike slipped from under him as he took a corner on a descent. Eulálio didn’t capitalise but he didn’t wait either, which was fair enough.

• With 6.5 kilometres left, Eulálio went down too, skidding into the kerb. He quickly got on his spare bike but his advantage had melted away and as soon as they reached the next steep climb, Arrieta was back on his wheel.

• The pair rode together, slightly cautiously, on the wet, slippery roads until, close to the finish, Arrieta misunderstood a marshal’s directions – the flag was pointing to the left, but the course went to the right – and the Spaniard took the wrong side, bursting through the red and white tape that was the race organiser’s attempt to close off the road. Adrenaline no doubt surging through his veins, Arrieta’s bike almost slid from under him again as he sprinted to catch up again.

• Astonishingly, Arrieta closed the gap to Eulálio and jumped past him to win UAE Team Emirates’ second consecutive stage. It came 20 years after his dad, José Luis, won a stage of the Vuelta a España for AG2R.

• Eulálio had a pretty decent consolation prize – becoming the third rider from Portugal to wear the pink jersey after Acácio da Silva in 1989 and João Almeida in 2020. The former mountain biker boosted the Bahrain Victorious team, who lost Santiago Buitrago to a crash in Bulgaria, and he knew his lead of almost three minutes would stand at least until Blockhaus, with all the GC favourites slipping more than six minutes back.

• Ciccone’s spell in pink was brief – and he spent most of the day with a dark rain jacket covering up the jersey. Oh well, he’ll have a pink jersey to frame and put on his wall.

Listen to our Stage 5 episode

Stage 6

• Another stage finish in Napoli – which brought back memories of my disastrous final day on last year’s Giro, when I persuaded Daniel it would save us time if I dropped my suitcase at my hotel on the way into the city. Unfortunately, we got stuck in a three-hour traffic jam – caused by the race – and missed the stage. The rain had made conditions treacherous and the stage was neutralised and chaotic.

• After last year’s farce it was bold of the Giro organisers to plan a finish on cobbles, with a U-bend around 400 metres from the line, gambling on the weather remaining dry.

• There were familiar faces in the break, which was kept on a tight leash. Tarozzi and Bais were in there, of course, joined by Marcellusi and Vergallito.

• In reality, the race was between the Giro peloton and the moody-looking dark clouds overhead. In the end, the rain won because it only took a sprinkling to make the cobbles slick. A crash seemed inevitable.

• Unibet Rose Rockets took the race by the scruff of the neck, looking to set up Dylan Groenewegen, but they went down on a right-hand corner, with Jonathan Milan and Tobias Lund Andresen also losing their chances in the crash. Paul Magnier was held up, got going again quickly, and managed to finish an incredible third.

• But it was Davide Ballerini who gave XDS-Astana their second stage win of the race, holding it all together and keeping Jasper Stuyven at bay on the short, cobbled rise to the line.

• The other notable incident was two idiots watching the race on a roundabout who seemed intent on causing a crash by stepping into the road and laying their hands on a rider as they sped past.

• So, after six days of racing, Soudal-Quick Step, XDS-Astana and UAE Team Emirates are all square with two stage wins apiece. Next up is today’s (Friday) mammoth 244-kilometre slog concluding with the first big mountain of the race, Blockhaus, where Jai Hindley won in 2022 and Nairo Quintana took the stage in 2017. Strap in, kids, it promises to be well over six hours in the saddle, with the stage getting progressively harder from the halfway mark onwards. It may turn out to be too long and too arduous, meaning the GC riders may exercise some restraint. Or it could be ridden aggressively before the stage blows to pieces on Blockhaus. Tune in tonight to find out which.

Listen to our Stage 6 episode

• Join The Cycling Podcast over the weekend as the real climbing starts and the Giro heads towards its second rest day. How many hams will be handed out of the coming days? Follow The Cycling Podcast on your favourite podcast app to make sure you never miss an episode. You’ll be notified as soon as a new show is live.

Online now for Friends of the Podcast subscribers

It’s ten years since Vincenzo Nibali delivered the host nation’s last Giro d’Italia victory. The decline of Italian cycling has been a recurring theme of The Cycling Podcast’s Giro coverage ever since, although the emergence of Giulio Pellizzari offers some hope of a reversal in fortunes beginning this year.

Depending on your point of view, last year’s Italian national championship road race represented either a new nadir or a fairytale pointing towards a better future built on new foundations. The winner was Filippo Conca, and his team, the Swatt Club, the dominant force throughout, despite their modest status and beginnings i.e. a semi-pro or ‘club’ team born out of… a blog on alpine skiing.

Conca’s national title earned him a place in the WorldTour with Jayco-Alula last summer but he was not selected for the Giro this month, meaning the red, white and green Italian champion’s jersey is absent from the race.

In this special episode for Friends of the Podcast, Michele Pelacci speaks to the architects and protagonists of a remarkable story. The day when a more or less unknown rider from a tiny team caused an upset by beating the best WorldTour riders Italy has to offer in Gorizia last June.

Subscribe as a Friend of the Podcast

by Lionel Birnie

The Cycling Podcast’s three-week, immersive adventure at the Giro d’Italia got underway on Friday. Following Hungary and Albania, it was Bulgaria’s turn to host the grande partenza. Our surround sound race coverage paused today as the Giro’s peloton, entourage – as well as our intrepid podcasters Daniel and Michele – made the relatively short hop across the Adriatic to Calabria, where things will resume on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, at Podcast HQ in Not Watford, I’ve barely moved from the sofa all weekend. I’ve been watching and listening as the race made a slightly unsteady start in unfamiliar territory and here are my thoughts on the opening few days of racing.

Stage one
• As expected, the first significant break of the Giro featured a rider from Bardiani-CSF (Manuele Tarozzi) and one from Team Polti-Visit Malta (Diego Sevilla). It has to be said, much of the course was far from inspiring – they seemed to spend three-quarters of the day on the same dual carriageway. It was like watching one of those old Road Runner cartoons where the same scenery repeats over and over in the background.

• It made me think that perhaps the Grand Tours need to be bolder, reinventing the format of these opening weekends on foreign soil. Bear with me – this is another suggestion from my collection of Wacky Race ideas. They could have made stage one a points race, with multiple sprints at suitable intervals on the dual carriageway – perhaps one every 20 kilometres – with double points at the finish, all adding up to crown the first maglia rosa of the Giro.

• I enjoyed the aerial shots of the Upside-Down House in Chernomorets, near the Black Sea. The roof is at the bottom, the car is parked (upside-down, of course) at the top, and everything inside is upside-down and it offers visitors the chance to take photos of themselves that make them look like they are standing on the ceiling.

• The finish was marred by a huge crash with about 600 metres to go. Only ten riders got through unscathed and Paul Magnier, the Texas-born Frenchman, burst through to win his first Grand Tour stage and take the pink jersey in the process ahead of Tobias Lund Andresen, Ethan Vernon and Jonathan Milan. A lot has been expected of Magnier since he burst onto the scene a couple of years ago. He won a handful of stages at the Tour of Guangxi last autumn but the Giro is another level. It also meant his team could breathe a sigh of relief. This is – by some distance – the longest they’ve had to wait in the season for a WorldTour win since the competition was created in 2009. It leaves just Groupama, Movistar, Jayco-Alula and Picnic Post NL as the four elite level teams still waiting for a WorldTour win this season.

• I was surprised to hear Michele award three prosciuttos for the opening stage given the trundling break, dual carriageway and crash in the finishing straight. Such optimism and an infectious sunny disposition from the young man. The Not Watford jury gave the stage a solitary Scotch Egg…

Stage two
• Several riders were nursing bumps and bruises after the opening day crash but the only non-starter was Matteo Moschetti of Pinarello Q36.5, who was suffering from concussion.

• Another day, another two-man break – this time a Team Polti-Visit Malta duo of Sevilla (again) and Mirco Maestri. The route was much more varied and interesting than the previous day, but the persistent rain made the roads slippery. Shortly after the Polti pair were caught, there was a hard crash involving around 30 riders on a wet descent. Shortly afterwards, the action was neutralised by the commissaires to let the fallen riders – or most of them, at least – catch up, but the race was back-on perhaps a little too soon because the Red Bull KM sprint was looming.

• UAE Team Emirates were worst affected by the crash. Jay Vine (fractured elbow and concussion) and Marc Soler (fractured pelvis) both pulled out of the race with their injuries. Adam Yates was given the all-clear as far as concussion was concerned but had bad abrasions across his shoulders. He was one of the riders who didn’t manage to rejoin the peloton before the neutralisation was ended and he was quickly more than nine minutes down, eventually coming in almost 14 minutes after the winner. He did not start stage three, meaning UAE Team Emirates were down to five riders inside 48 hours. Santiago Buitrago of Bahrain Victorious and Ådne Holter of Uno-X were the other riders to abandon. Derek Gee-West (Lidl-Trek), who was fourth last year, was the most notable GC contender to lose time, finishing in a group just over a minute back.

• Netcompany Ineos took control for the Red Bull KM and Egan Bernal won the sprint ahead of his teammate Thymen Arensman to take some very valuable seconds.

• Jonas Vingegaard – the Giro winner-elect, we all expect, although it may not be a cakewalk – made his first move of the race, attacking on the Lyaskovets Monastery pass and dragging Giulio Pellizzari and Lennert Van Eetvelt away with him. The trio were still away going into the final kilometre, when they were joined by Jan Christen – one of UAE Team Emirates’ five survivors. They were caught close to the line by a pair of XDS-Astana riders sprinting in tandem, as they did to great effect last year. It was a surprise win for Guillermo Thomas Silva, ahead of Florian Stork (Tudor), 2025 podium outsider Giulio Ciccone (Lidl-Trek) and the back-end of the XDS-Astana pantomime horse Christian Scaroni. Silva became the first Uruguayan to win a Giro stage and take the pink jersey.

Stage three
• Diego Sevilla (Team Polti-Visit Malta) was in the break for the third successive day, again joined by a teammate, this time it was Alessandro Tonelli, and Tarozzi again. This was the best stage of the three, with beautiful scenery, attractive Balkan towns, mountains and rivers and then huge crowds in Sofia.

• Arnaud De Lie of Lotto-Intermarché has had a torrid weekend and was dropped on the climbs, suffering from some sort of stomach upset thought to be the result of riding through something unpleasant – cow manure – washed onto the roads in the process of winning the Lotto Famenne Ardenne Classic in Belgium a few days before travelling to the Giro. His teammate Liam Slock was also affected and was too sick to ride so – as we heard in the opening night’s podcast – Josh Giddings was called up as a replacement. Then Milan Menten fell ill and delayed his departure for the Giro. De Lie began to feel ill on the flight and had been barely able to eat. On the big climb, Victor Campanaerts offered to take De Lie’s bottle to save him a few hundred grams. When I first saw this on the TV I couldn’t work out what Campanaerts was doing and for an awful moment thought he was going to take a swig from the bottle. De Lie has survived Bulgaria and must hope a rest day helps him to recover his strength before the next major opportunity for the sprinters in Napoli on Thursday.

• The three breakaway riders put up a tremendous fight on the wide roads approaching Sofia. The peloton had them in their sights for ages, so the suspense was heightened because they could keep them where they wanted them and complete the catch relatively late to deter any counter-attacks. They were finally swamped in the final kilometre. Jonathan Milan opened up his sprint so early he looked vulnerable to being overtaken and so it proved as Magnier, in the ciclamino jersey, came cruising past on the paving stones to win his second stage in three days. ‘Who was second?’ my daughter asked. ‘Was it bobby head guy?’ It was indeed… Milan may have to wait until Napoli – or perhaps Milan – for his first stage win of this Giro.

• After a fairly unpromising opening day, Bulgaria looked – and sounded – great, certainly better than Albania last year, but perhaps that’s not a surprise. There’s a real cycling culture in Bulgaria, for a start, which could not really be said for Albania. As an aside, the 2024 Tour of Bulgaria winner, Italy’s Matteo Malucelli, is riding this Giro for XDS-Astana. However, the crashes took the shine off to some degree. Yes, they are part and parcel of any Grand Tour, but, as ever, they heightened the familiar sense of relief that the race is returning to Italian soil.

Follow The Cycling Podcast in your favourite podcast app to ensure you get our nightly post-stage episodes as soon as they are released. Your app will notify you as soon as the new show drops.

The Giro d’Italia wine collection from DVine Cellars

Toast the Giro as it makes it way to Rome with a collection of six wines celebrating the route of the 2026 race. UK-based listeners can buy the case, curated by Greg Andrews and the team at DVine Cellars, here.

Online now: Arrivée and the Angliru

There’s plenty of racing and plenty of Spanish omelettes for Rose Manley and Rebecca Charlton to get their teeth stuck into in this special Arrivée episode on the Vuelta Femenina, which was released today.

With seven days of racing ranging from the pretty bumpy to the vertiginously mountainous, including a historic first summit finish on the Angliru, expect no shortage of drama from this first ‘Grand Tour’ of the year. With back-to-back champion Demi Vollering choosing not to compete this year, a brand new champion was set to be crowned, but who could it be? Would Tour de France Femmes champion Pauline Ferrand-Prévot back up her Grand Tour credentials in Spain? Could Anna van der Breggen show that she’s back to her stage racing best? Or might this be the crowning moment for a surprising young star?

Also on the agenda: free jazz race reportage, unwanted gifts and Denny Gray’s 4am McDonald’s order.

Listen to Arrivée

The Cycling Podcast’s Giro d’Italia is already well underway ahead of three weeks of coverage, which will mark a decade spent following the Italian Grand Tour from start to (almost) finish each year. (We’ve occasionally skipped Rome for logistical reasons). Get ready for the 2026 grande partenza in Bulgaria with our series of episodes designed to get everyone in the Giro mood.

Out now: The Preview
Daniel is joined by his Giro d’Italia teammates Brian Nygaard and Michele Pelacci to look ahead to what the 2026 edition has in store. Can anyone stop Jonas Vingegaard? That’s the big pre-race question but, as ever, there’s so much more to this Giro.

Out now: Girovino!! The Wines of the 2026 Giro
Discussing the collection of six wines celebrating the Giro route, curated by Greg Andrews of DVine Cellars. Cases are available for UK-based listeners to order now.

Out now: Meltdown: The Race to Escape Nuclear Disaster
A two-part KM0 telling the story of the 1986 Peace Race, which started in Kyiv just ten days after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Available for a limited time on the regular free-to-air feed, or ad-free and permanently for Friends of the Podcast.

Out now for Friends of the Podcast subscribers: The Foot Notes
Daniel’s annual conversation with Professor of Modern Italian History, John Foot, has become one of our pre-Giro d’Italia traditions. We usually say No Ciro, No Giro, but an edition of the Italian Grand Tour could not get underway without analysing the race and route through a cultural and historical lens.

The Foot Notes is available for Friends of the Podcast to listen to now. John’s book Pedalare! Pedalare! A History of Italian Cycling is highly recommended reading too.

Subscribe as a Friend of the Podcast

Starts tomorrow (Friday): Stage one, recorded in Bulgaria recapping the opening day’s action, kicks off three weeks of daily coverage. Who will pull on the first maglia rosa of the 2026 race?

Monday: Arrivée returns with Rose Manley and Rebecca Charlton covering all the big talking points from a week of racing at the Vuelta España Femenina.

Girovagando: the ultimate cycling journey

by Lionel Birnie

In an age of supposedly shortening attention spans, the Grand Tours prove that the greatest sporting adventures still prioritise engagement over impressions. The richness and variety of the storylines offered by cycling’s greatest stage races continue to amaze us. Interwoven with the unfolding landscapes and touching upon the history and culture of the country, the racing provides us with a prism through which to observe Italy and Italian life as spring gives way to the first intense rays of summer.

The Giro d’Italia, perhaps more than any other race, still captures the spirit of the sport’s early days, when people would devour the daily stage reports in the newspaper over their morning coffee, or tune their ears to frenetic radio commentary while enjoying an afternoon cappuccino. Okay, let’s not push it.

In a country somewhat starved of sporting success lately, it’s sometimes hard to marry our old impressions of the Giro as a race so intense it had the power to unite and divide a nation with its current incarnation. The Giro has such a distinct identity – pink everywhere you look, the deep blue of the sea, the white of the ice walls yet to melt in the mountain sun, smooth grey ribbons of road laced across vivid green fields and threaded through towns and villages so beautiful they take your breath away. And yet the Giro still seems to lack a certain confidence – desperate to embrace modernity and appeal to a global audience, yet often painfully conservative and reluctant to proudly embrace its Italian character and heritage and show them off to the world.

In a way, the Giro is like Italian food, always at its best when served simply, imitated, not always terribly well, elsewhere. A pizza cannot be beaten if the tomato sauce and mozzarella are the best. A drizzle of good olive oil makes it pure perfection. And yet, the modern Giro sometimes seems to be nervously wondering whether to add pineapple or sausage to attract someone new.

Unlike the Tour de France, which is a global phenomenon, the Giro remains just parochial enough to keep all of us outsiders feeling as though we are stumbling across something new every May. Some of the stories that unfold over the next three weeks will perhaps be more surprising than those we’ll witness later this summer, although the stunning drama of last year’s race may not be matched.

The Giro conveys better than any race the episodic, soap opera quality of the sport that captured people’s imaginations over a century ago. It retains a sense of mystique the Tour de France has perhaps lost to some degree. Today there’s a sense that we are about to set off on an adventure, a three-week holiday from ourselves, vicariously enjoying the country and racing in the company of friends. From the opening bars of Cozze, our Giro theme song by the brilliant Amaraterra, I feel transported to another world – one that is somehow brighter, noisier, more chaotic, bursting with flavour, and certainly more elegant.

I will no doubt experience a wave of FOMO when the race gets underway in Bulgaria tomorrow but I know we are in very safe hands and I’ll be watching, listening and providing another perspective on the race over an infuriatingly-timed cappuccino.

Before our first episode tomorrow, here is a selection of the things I am looking forward to seeing unfold…

Will it be a formality for Vingegaard?

Jonas Vingegaard is starting the Giro d’Italia for the first time in his career but he could complete the Grand Tour Grand Slam of Giro, Tour and Vuelta titles before Tadej Pogačar has the opportunity to do so. The Visma-Lease A Bike leader is the outstanding favourite, especially with one of his biggest potential rivals, Joāo Almeida, withdrawing after a spring disrupted by illness. Vingegaard is not the only former Grand Tour winner in the field – Egan Bernal, who won the Tour in 2019 and the Giro in 2021, the 2022 Giro champion Jai Hindley, both know what it takes to come out on top at the end of three weeks of racing. There’s Sepp Kuss – the winner of the 2023 Vuelta – too, but he will be riding in support of Vingegaard. Therefore, barring disaster, I expect the Dane to join Jacques Anquetil, Felice Gimondi, Eddy Merckx, Bernard Hinault, Alberto Contador, Chris Froome and Vincenzo Nibali in the Triple Crown winners’ club at the end of May.

Pellizzari: the great home hope

It is ten years since an Italian last won the Giro d’Italia. That was Vincenzo Nibali, who went on to finish third in 2017 and second in 2019. The only other Italian to stand on the final podium in the past decade is Damiano Caruso, who was 33 when he finished runner-up to Bernal in 2021 and is 38, lining up for his final Giro before retirement, today. It is, by some distance, the leanest era in Italian cycling history, compounding the football team’s failure to qualify for the World Cup yet again. So, it is likely that the nation will get completely carried away by the possibility of Giulio Pellizzari challenging for Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe. And why not? He was sixth in both the Giro and Vuelta last year, and he recently dominated the Tour of the Alps. In our recent episode Larry Warbasse sounded a note of caution, wondering whether Pellizzari might have been a bit too good too soon. Last year Michael Storer was in rampaging form at the Tour of the Alps but fell a bit short of expectations at the Giro, finishing tenth. The tifosi will be desperate for the 22-year-old Pellizzari to stay in the hunt for the pink jersey deep into the third week and may not be patient enough to appreciate Rome wasn’t built in a day, but a place on the podium would be a huge step forward. He has former Giro champion Jai Hindley as a teammate to share the pressure to some degree.

The Italian Job

Jonathan Milan represents the closest thing to certain success for the host nation. The Lidl-Trek sprinter is aiming for his third points competition victory and will surely win at least one stage. He should be the favourite to win the first pink jersey of the race tomorrow too. Put your house on Milan winning in Milan at the end of stage 15. The stage 10 time trial in Tuscany has Filippo Ganna’s name all over it. Giuilio Ciccone looks more of an outside bet for the podium this year than he did last (but let’s not start all that again). Cristian Scaroni leads a handy-looking Italian contingent at XDS-Astana; Bardiani-CSF and Team Polti-Visit Malta riders will pack out the breaks. Look out, too, for Pinarello – Alessandro, the rider with NSN Cycling Team, rather than the Pinarello Q36.5 team – who won a stage and finished third overall at O Gran Camiño last month. The other talented Italian youngster, Davide Piganzoli, will be working for his teammate Vingegaard.

Unibet’s Rockets set for lift-off?

Unibet Rose Rockets have made the transition from YouTube curio to Grand Tour contenders. In Dylan Groenewegen they have a potential stage winner, even though the straightforward opportunities for the sprinters are relatively few. The Dutchman had a purple patch of form at the end of March, winning three one-day races in Belgium in the space of a week, culminating with the team’s first WorldTour success at the Ronde Van Brugge. It’s a couple of years since Groenewegen last won a Grand Tour stage – at Dijon in the Tour de France – but he is the best bet to help the Rockets achieve lift-off. Milan, Arnaud De Lie, Tobias Lund Andresen and Paul Magnier are the most obvious obstacles in his way. Maybe Groenewegen can win the opening stage, take the pink jersey and make them the Unibet Rosa Rockets for one day, at least.

Netcompany’s ‘first’ Grand Tour

We’ll see the new grey-green, or is it blue-grey, Netcompany-Ineos jersey in the peloton when the riders roll out from Nessebar in Bulgaria tomorrow. Egan Bernal was second at the Tour of the Alps and fifth at Liège-Bastogne-Liège so he’s clearly in good form and has the durability to improve on his seventh place in last year’s Giro. Whether he can worry Vingegaard and win another Grand Tour remains to be seen but he could form a very useful double-act with teammate Thymen Arensman.

Beam Me Up, Beloki

Talking of new jerseys, EF Education-Easy Post have to replace their vibrant pink because it clashes with the maglia rosa. They have opted for a design even the SlovAlien™ would approve. It’s a lime green extra-terrestrial face that takes centre stage. It’s a bold design, not least because of cycling’s history of ‘extra-terrestrial’ performances over the years. According to the PR blurb, the Assos and EF Global Creative Studio collaboration ‘hovers somewhere between space, time, and the Italian roads’. It goes on: ‘We made contact. A signal. A message: We ride in peace. Do you? Join us.’ Beam me up, (Markel) Beloki! It will take quite a rip in the space-time continuum to imagine EF Education-Easy Post making an impact on general classification, although they have a few handy stage-hunters, notably Michael Valgren. Their overall ambitions took a dent when Richard Carapaz, who was third last year and won the Giro in 2019, was forced to withdraw because he’s still recovering from surgery to remove a perineal cyst. Ouch.

Who’ll be best of the rest?

It’s not the deepest list of GC contenders we’ve ever seen. Assuming Vingegaard gets the job done, there could be quite a race for the podium, and the top ten because there’s a host of riders who will be looking to post a solid GC performance, either to make a step forward, or to confirm a previous result. Chief among them is Derek Gee-West, fourth overall last year, and among the stand-out names in a congested Lidl-Trek line-up, alongside Ciccone and Milan. Felix Gall of Decathlon-CMA CGM is starting his second Giro but has been fifth in the Tour and eighth in the Vuelta before. The Austrian is a very good bet for a high overall finish, a stage win and potentially the king of the mountains jersey. Ben O’Connor of Jayco-Alula will be aiming for another Grand Tour top five result. Enric Mas has been around a lot longer than his 29 years suggest but he’s been on a downward trajectory for a while so goes into his debut Giro d’Italia with relatively low expectations. Tudor’s Michael Storer should improve on his tenth place finishes in 2024 and 2025 because Santiago Buitrago has tenth place nailed on for Bahrain-Victorious.

Another Yates shock?

What about UAE-Team Emirates. No Pogačar, or last year’s sensation Isaac del Toro. Joāo Almeida was supposed to be the leader but he’s been ill on and off all spring and is not fit enough in time. So Adam Yates steps in. Could he ‘do a Simon?’ and win the race as his brother did last year with that audacious now-you-see-me, now-you-don’t move? Probably not but when he’s on form he’s very consistent and difficult to shake off. It’ll also be interesting to see how the talented and versatile Antonio Morgado does in his debut Grand Tour, although he does not have the profile of a GC rider, and we’ll be keeping an eye on the battle of the brothers between UAE’s Jan and Pinarello Q36.5’s Fabio Christen.

The Giro is no Picnic…

Team Picnic PostNL were the last WorldTour team still waiting for a victory this season until Casper Van Uden came to the rescue when he took a stage of the Tour of Turkiye last week. It has been a torrid opening phase of the season for the Dutch team, but they were in a similar position last year, with only two wins to their name, when Van Uden took a surprise Giro sprint win in Lecce. Can Casper do it again? Picnic will hope so, because otherwise they may be scrabbling for crumbs. Warren Barguil is their veteran who will be a danger in the breakaways, but the roster looks a bit thin otherwise. Picnic are one of five WorldTour teams still without a WorldTour level victory this season. The others are Groupama, Movistar, Soudal-Quck Step and Jayco-Alula.

Follow The Cycling Podcast in your preferred podcast app to ensure you receive notification of new episodes as soon as they are released.

Daily episodes recorded in Bulgaria and Italy start tomorrow, Friday, May 8.

A note from Lionel: Eagle-eyed readers will have noticed the original version of this email went out with a major typo in the subject header. Mistakes do happen – as we used to joke, we aim for 60 per cent accuracy here at The Cycling Podcast. Usually we can live with them but spelling the name of the hottest Giro d’Italia favourite this century incorrectly is not something I can let go. I apologise for clogging up your inbox with two versions of the same email but it would ruin my weekend knowing the error was still out there, uncorrected!

In The 11.01 Cappuccino today:

• Ineos unveil €100m AI sponsorship with Netcompany

• Hugo Coorevits’ five conclusions from the spring Classics

• Our Giro d’Italia coverage kicks off on Monday

• Ten years on from our first Giro d’Italia covered daily on the ground

• The Podcast Postbag – some of our listeners’ recent emails

by Lionel Birnie

On Tuesday morning, I headed to Via Atelier in London’s Coal Drops Yard for the corporate unveiling of the Ineos team’s new title sponsor. As had been rumoured for a few weeks, the Danish IT firm Netcompany was confirmed as a significant new investor in the team, although Jim Ratcliffe’s Ineos will remain its owner.

Although the scale of the sponsorship was not confirmed, it’s believed the reported figure of €100m over five years is not too far off the mark. The big question is to what extent that has allowed Ratcliffe to scale back his spending on the cycling team but it seems likely that not all of Netcompany’s €100m will represent additional funds.

Nevertheless, it’s a significant boost for a team that has been overtaken and left behind since 2019 when Egan Bernal won their seventh Tour de France in eight years. Dave Brailsford talked about delivering an eighth Tour title within the five years of the Netcompany partnership – a target that doesn’t appear outlandishly ambitious until you consider that Tadej Pogačar and Paul Seixas may well have the next few editions sewn up between them.

Before the presentation was over, there were already rumours in the room that Netcompany-Ineos would be rivalling UAE Team Emirates in the pursuit of Seixas when his contract with Decathlon ends, if not before.

When the Giro d’Italia starts next Friday, we’ll have to get used to calling them Netcompany-Ineos, and recognising the team’s grey-green (or is it blue-grey) jerseys. It’s a curious choice – rather dowdy and downbeat – but Netcompany’s corporate colour is dark green, which would clash with the points competition jersey at the Tour de France.

Of course, the thing about the partnership that will spark the most interest – and perhaps the most scepticism – is that Netcompany is at the forefront of AI technology. It has huge contracts to run logistics at Heathrow, Copenhagen and Munich airports as well as for HMRC, the UK’s revenue and customs. Netcompany’s Pulse system will be adapted to run the cycling team’s logistics in the short term and the aim is to revolutionise every aspect of the operation with predictive AI in the longer term.

The influence of AI on professional sport is one of the great unknowns. It’s a subject I explored in an episode of KM0 for Friends of the Podcast early last year, but I must confess, it all felt very hypothetical then, as it still does now, even though we are seeing the influence of AI and machine learning in so many areas of our lives.

André Rogaczewski, the co-founder and CEO of Netcompany, talked about the blizzard of data in professional cycling, and how there are performance gains to be found if that data can be harnessed, analysed and understood in the right ways. Brailsford was in his element. The opportunities presented by AI must seem like the top one percent of marginal gains.

Rogaczewski said that in the short term, the Pulse AI system would help to streamline the team’s logistics. He was excited to get started gathering, analysing and streamlining the vast amount of data the team’s activities generate on and off the bike. Brailsford talked about the power of being able to make more correct decisions more of the time. Geraint Thomas, who joked that he’d only recently got a laptop and wasn’t the most techy guy, reminded everyone that cycling will always remain a human endeavour. After all, if they’d gone purely by the numbers Mark Cavendish would never have been offered a pro contract.

Where I remain sceptical is that AI can significantly influence the races in real time. I have no doubt AI could devise a tactic to defeat Peak Pogačar, but will there be an athlete capable of carrying it out? There is also a world of difference between the predictive AI models that sort through probabilities and scenarios in seconds and come to a best-case solution much faster than the human mind, and the sort of garbage-in, garbage-out regurgitation of existing information that we may associate with the browser-based AI engines. Predictive modelling and historical data can tell us a lot about likely outcomes but it will still come down to the old French directeur sportif mantra that the races are won by the head and the legs.

Tudor Pro Cycling’s Larry Warbasse joined me on this week’s episode and his insights from the point of view of a current professional rider were interesting. There’s so much data being recorded and not all of it is being used and some of it is not all that useful.

We haven’t yet delved into the ethical concerns about AI. The environmental impact, the cost, the ownership of the data or whether it will eliminate or reduce jobs. That will perhaps come as more people grasp the implications of the next phase of development.

In the meantime, Rogaczewski praised the Ineos team for its professionalism and focus, sidestepping questions about the presumably ongoing independent investigation into the allegations surrounding the team’s head carer David Rozman, who was linked to the convicted doping doctor Mark Schmidt. The team said last July that they had commissioned an external investigation in spring 2025. So far there’s been no update. Failing to grasp the importance of this issue is one of the team’s blind spots. Likewise, the lack of a women’s WorldTour team. For all the fanfare about aiming for an eighth Tour de France win, the team could have used the occasion to confirm plans for a women’s team targeting a first Tour de France Femmes victory.

After all, don’t women generate data too?

Listen to Ineos Turn to AI

Coorevits Corner: Hugo’s five conclusions from the spring

It was a sombre edition of Coorevits Corner in this week’s episode as Hugo paid tribute to 21-year-old Belgian rider Milan Bral, who was killed by a car while training last week. Bral, the nephew of former EF Education First rider Sep Vanmarcke, was a near-neighbour of Hugo’s and the incident shocked everyone who knew him and cast a shadow over the final Belgian Classic of the spring.

We decided to save Hugo’s five conclusions from the spring Classics for this edition of The 11.01 Cappuccino, and you can listen to that above.

It’s interesting to hear Hugo describe the Classics as predictable – which to some degree they were. Five big riders dominated the storylines and Pogačar almost completed a clean sweep of the Monuments. And yet, while the outcomes were not entirely unexpected – even Paul Seixas’ victory at Flèche Wallonne had been heavily anticipated – the racing was mostly excellent entertainment.

Having complained about Pogačar’s victory at Strade Bianche lacking drama, because it was almost indistinguishable from his other wins on the Tuscan gravel roads, I was heartened by the dynamic racing and edge-of-the-seat excitement of most of the other Classics. Perhaps it’s a fact that domination by a handful of superstars ignites interest in the sport? The audience for our Arrivée series of episodes covering the men’s races was significantly up year-on-year. Do we put that down to the calibre of racing or the calibre of the podcasting? Either way, thanks for listening.

Countdown to Bulgaria… a week of podcasts to come

The 2026 Giro d’Italia starts a week today with the first of three stages in Bulgaria before the transfer across to Calabria. Daniel Friebe will be there from start to finish and he’ll be joined by Brian Nygaard and Michele Pelacci for daily episodes released after each stage from Friday, May 8.

Before that, we have a week of episodes building up to the Corsa Rosa.

Monday: Girovino – the wines of the 2026 Giro, curated by Greg Andrews of D Vine Cellars. The collection of six wines – three reds and three whites, including a red from Bulgaria – is already on sale for UK-based listeners here.

Tuesday: The Girovagando Preview. Everything you need to know about the 109th edition of the Giro d’Italia. Can anyone stop Jonas Vingegaard from completing the Grand Tour set?

Wednesday: Meltdown: Part two. The story of the 1986 Peace Race, which started in Kyiv just days after the Chernobyl disaster, the worst nuclear accident in history. This episode of KM0 will be released for a limited time on our regular feed, and ad-free on our Friends of the Podcast feed. (More on that below).

Thursday: The Foot Notes. Daniel and John Foot, professor of modern Italian history, discuss the cultural and historical significance of the 2026 Giro route.

Friday: Stage one of the 2026 Giro d’Italia. Who will pull on the first maglia rosa of the race in Burgas, Bulgaria?

• Make sure you never miss an episode of The Cycling Podcast by following us in your favourite podcast app. You’ll be notified as soon as a new episode is live.

Follow The Cycling Podcast

Daily Giro d’Italia Women coverage also coming soon

For the first time in three decades, the Giro d’Italia Women does not clash with the men’s Tour de France, moving to a late May-early June slot on the calendar. We will have daily Arrivée-style episodes covering all the action, hosted by a rotating cast of The Cycling Podcast Féminin’s hosts: Rose Manley, Denny Gray, Rebecca Charlton and former double Giro stage winner Lizzy Banks.

The Giro d’Italia Women starts in Cesenatico on Saturday, May 30 and concludes in Saluzzo on Sunday, June 7. Will Elisa Longo Borghini win the race for a third consecutive year, or can Demi Vollering add a Giro title to her glittering palmarès after dominating the spring Classics?

Before that, there’ll be an episode of Arrivée covering the Vuelta España Femenina.

Our first Giro, ten years on

Ten years ago, Richard, Daniel and I got into Simon Gill’s Broomwagon and headed to the Netherlands for the start of the 2016 Giro d’Italia. We’d started The Cycling Podcast three years earlier with daily coverage of the Tour de France. At some point over the winter, Stephen Moon, a keen listener and CEO of Science in Sport, offered to sponsor the podcast on the condition that we delivered daily episodes from the Italian Grand Tour. It was an offer we couldn’t refuse.

We had covered Giro stages before – we all travelled to Belfast and Dublin for the opening weekend of the 2014 race – but 2016 was the first time we had the funds to commit to the whole race.

The opening weekend in the Netherlands was bathed in glorious sunshine, the crowds were enormous and Tom Dumoulin and Marcel Kittel delivered the stardust by winning the stages.

At the end of the weekend, Daniel headed home because he had a book deadline to meet, leaving Richard and I to head to Italy without his expert guidance.

We flew from Amsterdam to Lamezia Terme in southern Italy, landing well out of our depth. We were united with our luxury wheels for the Italian leg of our journey, a gleaming white Maserati Quattroporte. (How times have changed! I am still not quite sure how that sponsorship deal came about.)

No sooner had we been left to our own devices than Richard backed the Maserati into a large ornamental flowerpot on a narrow Catanzaro street. He did the same again when we arrived at our hotel in Praia a Mare the following evening. ‘Why does this keep happening to me?’ he said. A trilogy of mishaps was completed the following morning when we took a wrong turn on the way to the start and Richard had to execute a 15-point turn as a large crowd of middle-aged Italian men gestured, offered advice, pointed and laughed at us.

In Catanzaro, we found a little pizzeria where the beer of choice was cans of Tennent’s, the strong Scottish lager. ‘They must’ve known you were coming, Rich,’ I said.

In Benevento, we returned to the car park after the stage to find a group of youths surrounding the car. Some were sitting on the bonnet. Richard squeezed the remote key, the car beeped and the lights flashed. The youths leapt off the bonnet out of respect for the Italian icon, and the others parted to allow the car safe passage. Richard revved the engine – a deep, satisfying throaty roar – and the youths applauded as we pulled away. ‘Don’t stall it now,’ I said.

In Foligno, we ended up in a trattoria with a tasting menu of six or eight dishes, all bar one of them absolutely delicious. The one Richard and I spent most of the meal pushing back and forth towards each other was the tripe – slices of cows stomach in a pungent gravy. We demolished everything else and when signore came to collect the dishes he looked slightly disappointed that there were leftovers.

‘Did you not finish your tripe, Lionel?’ said Richard.

In Chianti, we saw Primož Roglič win his first WorldTour race and then were invited to a dinner hosted by the local winemakers.

‘I believe it’s your turn to drive,’ said Richard, as he poured himself a lovely glass of Chianti. What happened late that evening, as I drove us back to our hotel via a very twisty medium-mountain pass, is one of my funniest and fondest memories from all our years of podcasting but it’s one I’ll save for a future episode…

When Daniel arrived to join me during the second week, it became apparent just how much of a Giro novice I had been during the first week. Yes, it’s a bike race like any other, and the similarities to the Tour de France are obvious, but I didn’t really get Italy until Daniel arrived. The Giro has a rhythm and way of life all of its own. Learning those subtle differences over the next few years was one of the great joys of that phase of The Cycling Podcast’s evolution for me.

It’s hard to believe now it’s a decade since I first heard Cozze by Amaraterra, the music Daniel selected for our Giro theme. You can listen to that first episode of the 2016 Giro above.

The Podcast Postbag

Since Daniel and I made the slightly tongue-in-cheek comment about being uncomfortable receiving praise we’ve had a flood of very nice emails. I’m not sure how to take that – perhaps the senders are revelling in our discomfort!

Here are a few edited highlights from our recent postbag:

A short note from a long-time Friend of the Podcast (paid up member from the start) and a listener right from the very beginning... The Peace Race episode is brilliant. A reminder to not take what you produce for granted. The episodes keep coming. We keep listening. They’re all great. And then an episode such as the Peace Race drops and it stops me in my tracks, to just sit and listen. There’s very little that has me doing that these days. Magical stuff. Matt

I enjoyed the latest Arrivée Femmes. Great recap although sad to hear that Rose and Lizzy had the same problem we in the States had – limited coverage. Hope this changes soon. Bit hungry after listening to this episode. Looking for Victoria Sponge in the next startlist. Thank you for the coverage. JT, Chicago

Dear Lionel, You can choose whether to tell Daniel or not, but I just listened to the first part of his Peace Race special. Amazing. I don’t think anyone does it as well as you and he do – but this in particular was really great. Thanks as always for the work you do. Lachlan

LB: Obviously I won’t be passing that on to Daniel!

Just wanted to say I thought the Seixy Basque episode was really good – great story telling and although it was obviously great about Paul Seixas, it was also a nice insight into the Basque region. Also nice to have as a feature episode alongside the news analysis and intelligent debate of regular episodes, which also have been consistently great this year. I’ll also add I enjoyed the Roadbook specials – I’ve got no plans yet to visit the classics but a good listen anyway to better understand the cycling and race culture in those places. Regards, Dan, very happy long term subscriber!

Just sending a brief, squirm-inducing missive to say many thanks for creating something that keeps me entertained and up-to-date in the glorious Grand Tour season – I’m a painter and decorator so invariably miss all the daily action, but I genuinely look forward every morning at work to putting your podcast on first to get a breakdown of the action and minutiae from the previous day’s stage, and obviously most pressingly, the details of the evening’s repast. I’ve just signed up for the annual friend’s subscription, and frankly it’s long overdue, I get paid for my work and so should you. Already excited in anticipation of the Giro. May your travels be safe and your stomachs be full. Kindest regards, Kirsty

I have deep respect for you, firstly Lionel and Daniel, but no less for all the others you have recruited into the crew. I love your podcast, especially during the Grand Tours, not just because you’re there on the ground, but because the podcasts are so much wider, so meandering, sometimes on the fringe of cycling, but always worth a listen. You don’t just repeat what I saw on the TV coverage, you find so many other interesting themes and I often learn something new. Filip

Finally, Jannik got in touch to express frustration that the Seixy Basque and Meltdown episodes released on the free, regular feed contained adverts. As I explained in the recent episodes, we are experimenting with making some KM0 episodes available to all prior to moving them across to the Friends of the Podcast feed. Our subscriber episodes are always ad-free but when we put them on the regular feed they need to contain ad breaks. Jannik made the valid point that, as a Friend of the Podcast subscriber, he’d prefer to listen to the specials ad-free. So, we’ve already added part one of Meltdown to the Friends feed ad-free and part two will be added to the Friends feed without ads at the same time it goes live on the free feed with ads, giving subscribers the chance to listen ad free without having to wait.

A big thank you to Matt, JT, Lachlan, Dan, Kirsty, Filip (whose email was much longer than we could reproduce here), Jannik and everyone else who has taken the time to drop us a line. Feel free to get in touch – whether good or bad, as long as it’s respectful and constructive, contact@thecyclingpodcast.com

Seixy Basque – new episode of KM0 online now

Daniel Friebe was in the Basque Country to witness the week that changed pro cycling – the confirmation that 19-year-old Frenchman Paul Seixas is the real deal. Seixy Basque is an unmissable listen if you want to find out more about the latest sensation to arrive on the scene. This episode of KM0 is available on our free feed for a limited time, before it moves across to our Friends of the Podcast feed shortly. More on that decision below…

Listen to Seixy Basque

by Lionel Birnie

We saw the future on the Mur de Huy on Wednesday afternoon as Paul Seixas won Flèche Wallonne at the first attempt, something not even Tadej Pogačar was able to do. Pogačar had three unsuccessful tries before he finally conquered one of the toughest climbs in cycling and secured victory in the first of the Ardennes Classics.

Seixas is still only 19, making him the youngest ever winner of Flèche Wallonne – the previous youngest was Philémon De Meersman, who was 21 when he won the first ever edition of the race 90 years ago.

Of course, the Seixas Hype Train published its timetable a long while ago. There’s been a rumble on the tracks for the past couple of seasons and that rumble told us that a phenomenon was approaching sooner rather than later. So far, his arrival at every major station on the route to greatness has been bang on schedule. He impressed on the world stage at the Tour of the Alps this time last year, ‘gifting’ victory to his more senior Decathlon teammate Nicolas Prodhomme after an 85-kilometre two-up break on the final day. Then he looked more than comfortable at the Critérium du Dauphiné in June, and was expected to win the Tour de l’Avenir later in the summer, which he did with a flourish after a tricky week of racing against his peers.

He ended the season with a very fine 13th place in a tough World Championship road race in Rwanda, third behind Pogačar and Remco Evenepoel in the European Championships on another hilly course, and seventh at Il Lombardia.

So far this season, his development has continued apace, demonstrating Pog-esque consistency, durability, resilience and no shortage of panache. Victory at Itzulia was the first WorldTour level stage win by a Frenchman since Christophe Moreau at the Dauphiné in 2007 – almost a lifetime ago for Seixas.

We’ve been speculating since he took second place behind Pogačar at Strade Bianche whether Decathlon-CMA CGM will select him for the Tour de France and the team has said it will make a decision after Sunday’s Liège-Bastogne-Liège.

With the rumour mill already suggesting a move away from Decathlon may be on the cards when his contract expires at the end of next season – with UAE Team Emirates among the keenest suitors – it seems unlikely the French team will turn down what may be one of only two opportunities to go into the Tour de France with Seixas in their line-up.

The pressure will be immense, but when will that not be the case? France has been waiting for a winner of the men’s Tour de France since Bernard Hinault’s fifth and final title in 1985. Pauline Ferrand-Prévot’s victory in the Tour de France Femmes last summer captured the imagination and proved that, despite all those years of hurt, the country remains the spiritual and emotional heartbeat of the sport.

First, though, is La Doyenne – arguably the toughest one-day race on the calendar, the equivalent of a mountain stage with the all-or-nothing edge of a Classic. After his performance on the Mur de Huy on Wednesday, there are no doubts about Seixas’ ability to ride fast on steep climbs. There may still be a question mark or two over whether he can stay the distance right to the very end of a 268-kilometre race, but he showed at the Worlds and Il Lombardia that he was almost there and he’s developed further since then.

So, we can anticipate a barnstorming battle between Pogačar, Evenepoel and Seixas, even if there are question marks over Tom Pidcock’s readiness, despite a strong week in the Alps, and Mathias Skjelmose’s top-end.

Arrivée returns on Sunday after Liège-Bastogne-Liège

Tune in on Sunday as we recap the men’s and women’s editions of La Doyenne while the sweat is still drying on the brows of the winners. To make sure you see the episodes as soon as they drop, follow The Cycling Podcast in your preferred podcast player.

Follow The Cycling Podcast

Tolstoy for the TikTok generation

One of the recurring themes of our coverage lately has been professional cycling’s identity crisis and its seemingly perpetual search for a wider audience to help it unlock a rich seam of untapped revenue. For as long as I’ve been covering the sport, there’s been a sense that the stakeholders have been looking over the shoulders of hardcore fans hoping to attract the attention of other sports fans who might not have recognised the beauty and brilliance of cycling.

A couple of weeks ago, in Sweet Little Lies, as we discussed Remco Evenepoel’s April Fool’s Day announcement that he would be riding the Tour of Flanders after all – having told the media repeatedly that he wouldn’t be – we deviated into a discussion about what will, and what won’t, attract a new generation of fans.

The great Remco reveal was hailed by some as a triumph for a dynamic social media strategy, setting the agenda and owning the narrative without having to involve the fusty old mainstream media. Who reads newspapers, or websites, these days, grandad? (Setting aside cycling’s uncomfortable relationship with the truth in the past, it struck me that if lying – even if just by omission – is the best way to grab attention perhaps we all ought to re-evaluate what it is we’re doing.)

Anyway, it has been stated as a matter of fact for at least a decade that attention spans are shortening. Young people are not watching sport. TV audiences for live sport are getting older and many sports have been embracing ways to make their events shorter, snappier and more exciting.

A long-form sport in an era of shortening attention spans?

Road racing is the ultimate long-form sport. By the time Liège-Bastogne-Liège reaches its conclusion I’ll have spent 24 hours watching the men’s Monuments this spring, plus countless hours in the armchair watching all the other races, double-screening during ‘Paris-Adriatico’ week and watching the women’s races on catch-up because of the scheduling clashes. I am fortunate – I can stick the television on and watch all the cycling all the time and get to call it ‘work’.

No one needs to watch all six hours of Milan-Sanremo but the crucial and most entertaining parts of the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix were in the middle. The Hell of the North, especially, rewarded those of us who sat down to watch it from start to finish because the drama and tension heightened as the afternoon wore on. It was a truly fabulous race but, if you’d just switched on for the last hour or 90 minutes you might have wondered what all the fuss was about.

If attention spans are shortening and people won’t watch two or three hours of live sport in big enough numbers, the problem isn’t the promotion or the storytelling, it’s the format of the sport itself and if the product doesn’t match the adverts an awful lot of energy is going to be wasted trying to appeal to people who aren’t going to be won over.

Drawing people in via an Instagram Reel or a YouTube Short is only ever going to have limited success in converting interest into engagement. It’s like persuading someone to read War and Peace by showing them a 30-second video. In that sense, modern cycling is Tolstoy for the TikTok generation. Once you’ve grabbed the attention, what next? ‘Settle in, kids, there’s just four-and-three-quarter hours to go!’

This is the question at the heart of the sport’s marketing conundrum. Does professional cycling want exposure or engagement? Does it want ten million fleeting views, or two million committed followers? It can have a bit of both, of course, but it doesn’t necessarily follow that interest converts into a year-round commitment. The media landscape is already teaching us that views earn pennies and engagement earns the bucks, so shouldn’t the sport be seeking to deepen its connection with the fans it already has? After all, more people follow Lidl the supermarket on Twitter and Instagram than they do Lidl-Trek the cycling team.

The Tour de France is one of the most watched sporting events in the world. Millions of people tune in every July to watch the Tour. The race reaches the Champs-Élysées and there’s a sense of loss – like our best ever summer holiday has come to an end. People want the party to go on just that little bit longer. So, given all that, why don’t the same millions tune in to watch the Clásica San Sebastián a week later? Could it be that – like the Masters golf, the Super Bowl, the curling at the Winter Olympics, or the Ashes cricket – the biggest and best events will always attract a huge audience but for a large percentage of that audience, that’s enough?

The Paris-Roubaix paradox

This conflict between interest and engagement was highlighted starkly by Paris-Roubaix recently. From my point of view, moving the women’s race from Saturday to Sunday was a huge backward step. Roubaix ‘weekend’ had established itself in a very short space of time as a brilliant couple of days of racing. It offered spectators more opportunity to see the races up close from the roadside. It put the women’s race in the spotlight on the Saturday and meant we could watch both of them live, (more or less) in full. There are commercial pressures and costs of closing the roads two days running plus the benefits of being able to run the sportive on the Saturday (which doesn’t need the full road closures a pro race requires) but undoubtedly for the hardcore fans the Roubaix weekend has been diminished.

This year, the women’s race was shown live for around 90 minutes – deeply disappointing for engaged fans who wanted to see more of how things were set up and unfolded. Rose, Lizzy and Denny discussed this in depth in the latest episode of The Cycling Podcast Féminin, and it is well worth a listen.

The day after they’d recorded the episode, a French media website PureMédias reported that the French TV audience for the women’s race was up 70 per cent on 2025 when the two races were held on a separate days. In 2025, around one million people watched the women’s race. This year, 2.2 million watched the men’s race and 1.7m watched the women’s race which followed. So, does the sport want exposure or engagement? The fans want to see more of the action; the sport wants more eyeballs to see anything. Is it possible to deliver both?

Paywalls and participation

One question that rarely gets addressed in this debate about how to attract new viewers is that the best way to draw people in is to make the sport more easily available to watch. Paywalls are the ultimate barrier to engagement and so it seems contradictory that so much effort goes into creating free content for social media when the product itself is so difficult, and expensive, to for so many to watch. The sport needs money because races are expensive to host and broadcast. The sponsors want exposure and so there’s a tricky ecosystem of competing objectives and interests to balance. And perhaps this exposes the conceit behind the desire to ‘grow’ the sport. What the stakeholders really want is more money and they think the way to get that is to attract a large audience of people for free and then convert them into paying customers.

I was speaking to our producer Tom Whalley earlier this week and he made the point that participation is the key to all of this. The more people who ride bikes, the greater chance they will become curious about the sport. If the WorldTour teams united to campaign for safer roads, better infrastructure and greater respect for cyclists from other road users it would probably have a far greater and deeper impact than banding together to shuffle the race calendar around a bit or create some events in ‘new markets’. If the professional sport could help to make everyone a cyclist, they would create populations of people who might fall in love with the televised, competitive sport.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to see Paris Saint Germain play football and, thanks to the wonders of algorithmic social media engineering, on my way home I was served some adverts for the clothing chain, Zara. One of the ranges of T-shirts for children was a collaboration with PSG, designed to get kids wearing the club’s badge and brand before they’re even aware of who Ousmane Dembélé is – and certainly before they can spell Kvicha Kvaratskhelia.

It made me think that the WorldTour teams and their bike and clothing manufacturers should be investing in attracting the kids with things that will appeal to them as kids. Children’s bikes and leisure clothing. Imagine kids riding their Colnago-branded PogBike or the Specialized Remco. Make children’s cycling helmets featuring images of the star riders – turning them into cycling’s Messi and Ronaldo the same way football did. Create a range of children’s T-shirts similar to the PSG x Zara range and create fans of the brands years before they are ready to sit down to watch six hours of racing. There has to be some creative thinking because, let’s be brutally frank here, most of the brands associated with pro cycling are pretty uncool. How many kids have a favourite petrochemical company, supermarket or Middle Eastern state?

When all is said and done, cycling appeals to a type of person, not to a broad, lazily-defined age group. As I said in the podcast last week, when I was 12 I couldn’t stand the taste of coriander (cilantro for our US readers) but as I got older and my tastes evolved I grew to love it. Cycling is the coriander of sports. It’s there for people who like long-form entertainment, history, cultural context and nice scenery. Perhaps cycling isn’t even the most effective gateway to becoming a cycling fan. Perhaps Larry Warbasse was onto something when he mentioned LeBron James’s social media video in which he talked (rather haltingly, it has to be said) about Paris-Roubaix. Perhaps cycling’s most effective partnerships would be collaborations with the LA Lakers, Paris Saint Germain or WWE?

Flèche Wallonne: A teenage winner, and three minutes of action

I’m preaching to the converted here because if you listen to The Cycling Podcast, subscribe to The 11.01 Cappuccino, have opened this email and – astonishingly – read this far, you are already deeply invested in the sport but watching Flèche Wallonne did make me think that sometimes it’s clear the sport doesn’t know the power of what it’s got to offer.

Here we were, watching a teenager take everyone else to the cleaners. Seixas is 19, smack, bang in the middle of the coveted age demographic; the type of person we all have to appeal to, apparently, if the sport is to survive and thrive in this whizz-bang future that’s been imminent for a couple of decades.

The Mur de Huy is the ideal content for TikTok or Instagram Reels. It is three minutes of racing – the first rider to the top wins. Sport doesn’t get simpler or more easy to explain than that. Perhaps the broadcasters and stakeholders should work out ways to capitalise on the excitement of that. Otherwise, if the sport wants to reach different people it has to offer something fundamentally different, moving away from six-hour races and three-week epics because, in its current form, professional cycling will appeal to the next generation of the likes of me and you.

Personally speaking, I think that’s not a problem but, unfortunately, we’re trapped in a hellscape where team owners and marketing people have become convinced that there’s untold riches around the corner if cycling could just reach out and grab them.

Meltdown: Coming soon

Daniel has been busy making a two-part series called Meltdown telling the story of the 1986 Peace Race, which started in Kyiv a couple of weeks after the worst nuclear accident in history happened at the Chernobyl power plant. The fallout from the explosion blew all across Europe and Kyiv was particularly affected. They were washing down the streets to try to mitigate the nuclear material in the days before the race. The question of whether it was right to start the Peace Race, which was the biggest amateur stage race and hugely prestigious for riders from behind the Iron Curtain who were not allowed to race in the West. The first of two KM0 episodes will be released for all next week before it moves behind our own ‘iron curtain’ and onto the Friends of the Podcast feed.

A thank you to our Friends of the Podcast

The media landscape continues to shift and change and if anyone could tell me what the future looks like beyond a handful of Paul Seixas Tour de France victories I’d be very grateful.

For the past ten years, a significant chunk of the revenue we need to run The Cycling Podcast has come from you, our listeners, who have subscribed as a Friend of the Podcast. We have always made a programme of additional ‘special’ episodes in exchange for this support and we are very grateful to everyone who has supported us whether continuously since the early days or on a year-to-year or even month-to-month basis.

As journalists, it is somewhat frustrating at times to put so much time and energy into making a special episode knowing that only around 10 per cent of our regular audience will hear it because it’s behind a paywall. We also accept that for many people, the free shows are enough. For others it’s the round-table discussions that interest them rather than the documentary-style storytelling.

So, we’ve decided that some of our KM0 episodes will be made available on our regular, free-to-air feed for a limited time before moving across to live on our Friends of the Podcast feed. This will give everyone a chance to hear some of the episodes we’re most proud of making and our hope is that existing Friends of the Podcast know that it’s only possible to do this because of their continued support. I hope everyone who enjoys Seixy Basque and Meltdown joins us in thanking our Friends.

Sign up as a Friend of the Podcast

It’s been a busy couple of weeks as the spring Classics hit top gear. This week’s edition of The 11.01 Cappuccino brings you up to date on what we’ve been up to. Here’s what’s online now – and what’s coming up soon – on The Cycling Podcast. To make sure you never miss an episode, follow The Cycling Podcast in your favoured podcast app.

Subscribe as a Friend of the Podcast to listen to our additional shows here.

It’s Coming Home…

This week’s regular episode features Daniel, Lionel and Tudor Pro Cycling rider Larry Warbasse. After a puncture-hit Paris-Roubaix, Larry explains why the riders are prepared to risk flat tyres in favour of using the fastest equipment. Daniel has been in the Basque Country watching Paul Seixas become the first Frenchman to win a WorldTour stage race since Christophe Moreau took the Critérium du Dauphiné in 2007. Seixas was a nine-month-old at the time and despite the emergence of a talented generation in the meantime, including Romain Bardet, Thibaut Pinot and Julian Alaphilippe, France’s long wait for someone to succeed Bernard Hinault has never looked closer to ending. There’s also a visit to Coorevits Corner, and Daniel’s singing… but perhaps the less said about that the better!

Paris-Roubaix

If you want post-race analysis from the Queen of the Classics, Arrivée, is the place to find it. Daniel and Lionel reviewed the men’s race, while Rose and Denny took care of the women’s edition.

Hell of a Debut

The Cycling Podcast Féminin returns with Rose Manley, Denny Gray and Lizzy Banks telling the story of the Classics so far, while looking ahead to the Ardennes races.

Three very different Paris-Roubaix debutants share their stories in this month’s mini feature. We hear from long-time Classics stalwart Shirin van Anrooij, youngest finisher Jente Koops, and Alexis Magner, who comes to the race after recovering from a life-threatening crash last season.

They also delve into the decision by race organisers, ASO, to move the women’s Paris-Roubaix from Saturday to a shared slot with the men on Sunday. And explore in what ways the race’s limited TV coverage could have wider ramifications for the sport.

Also on the agenda: Lizzy’s many goats, cyclist ribs on the barbecue and, hold on, did Denny just quit?

The Unexpected World Champion

New for Friends of the Podcast subscribers, is Rose Manley’s conversation with reigning world champion Magdeleine Vallieres. The Canadian’s win was one of the stories of the championships in Kigali last year and in this episode, she talks about how a 1,000 kilometre bikepacking trip with her dad ignited her love for the sport, about a difficult time at the World Cycling Centre and a world title win that surprised many but not those who’ve watched her development.

Coming up on The Cycling Podcast

Next week
Daniel and Lionel will be back to discuss the Amstel Gold Race, Brabantse Pijl and all the latest news and racing as the spring Classics enter their final phase.

A Spectator’s Guide to… the Ardennes Classics
What’s it like to take a trip to the Ardennes to watch Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège. We reveal all – perhaps too much – in the final part of our mini-series for Friends of the Podcast.

From the archive: Lionel of the Ardennes
Check out the two-part Lionel of the Ardennes mini-series, recorded in 2019 when Lionel and Simon spent a few days in the eastern half of Belgium, riding the Mur de Huy and the Liège-Bastogne-Liège sportive. It’ll be bumped to the top of the Friends of the Podcast feed for subscribers on Monday.

Wednesday
Arrivée returns with episodes covering the men’s and women’s Flèche Wallonne. Who will win the Uphill Cheese Roll this year?

Sunday
Arrivée covers Liège-Bastogne-Liège. Will Tadej Pogačar win the oldest of the men’s Monuments for a fourth time or can Evenepoel, Seixas, or someone else stop him?

Sexy Basque
The working title for a forthcoming episode revealing more about the latest sensation in men’s road cycling, Paul Seixas, recorded by Daniel at Itzulia in the Basque Country.

May
Girovagando. It’s ten years since The Cycling Podcast began daily coverage of the Giro d’Italia. It won’t be long before the 2026 edition of the Corsa Rosa kicks off. Join Daniel, Michele and Brian on the road in Bulgaria and Italy from May 8.

by Lionel Birnie

Paris-Roubaix is the ultimate one-day race – the only day of the year when riders will press on to the finish even if they know they are well outside the time limit. Just reaching the André-Pétrieux velodrome is an achievement in itself.

For cycling fans, the Queen of the Classics is an unforgettable spectacle. A day spent in the fields of northern France is dramatic and exhilarating. The things we’ve seen. Riders jolting awkwardly over the hellish cobblestones of Arenberg with two flat tyres, just hoping to make it to the end of the section so they can get a replacement bike. Riders with their faces caked in mud, two pinkish eye holes and vacant stares their sunglasses once obscured. Knees and elbows bloodied and muddied, skinsuits ripped exposing skin the colour of rare steak. The Hell of the North takes riders to their limits and beyond.

Of all the races, Paris-Roubaix is the one that demands a six-hour window in your Sunday. To watch from start to finish is to emerge from the couch late on Sunday afternoon emotionally spent. The tension increases as they ride the supposedly flat roads that lead towards the first sector of pavé and only when it’s over do you realise you’ve been clenching your jaw for hours.

The latest edition of Roadbook is a spectator’s guide, of sorts, for those who want to see the race up close one day. In truth, the rescheduling this year has messed with my ability to offer many practical tips. When the women’s and men’s races were on consecutive days, Paris-Roubaix represented arguably the best weekend of the cycling year. A chance to see different cobblestone sectors, and sample the atmosphere in the velodrome on back-to-back days.

With the women’s race now following the men’s, I am not certain how it will impact the ability to move around from sector to sector. There may be tighter restrictions on traffic.

So, my advice to anyone who is in northern France now is simple: it’s far better to see the races once or twice rather than attempt an overly-ambitious schedule and end up missing it. If you’ve set your heart on making it to Arenberg, Orchies, Pont-Gibus or Carrefour de l’Arbre, make a decisive plan and decide on a fallback if something goes wrong. Seeing the race once or twice on the cobbles and then heading to the velodrome to enjoy the atmosphere as the anticipation and excitement builds makes for an unforgettable experience.

Roadbook, a collection of memories from travelling over to watch Paris-Roubaix over the past 26 years, is available to Friends of the Podcast now.

Subscribe as a Friend of the Podcast

Arrivée returns this Sunday

As the dust settles, we will bring you the stories from Hell. Our post-race reaction show Arrivée is back on Sunday, bringing you full analysis of both the men’s and women’s editions of Paris-Roubaix.

Daniel and Lionel break down the chaos and drama of the men’s race as Mathieu van der Poel seeks a record fourth consecutive edition of Paris-Roubaix and Tadej Pogačar aims to become the first man to win all five Monuments in a row.

Then Rose and Denny will take you through every decisive moment in the women’s race.

Follow The Cycling Podcast in your preferred podcast app to receive notifications as soon as the latest episodes drop.

Follow The Cycling Podcast

From the archive: Mat Hayman’s modern day miracle

Ten years ago, Mat Hayman was 37, a veteran of 14 editions of Paris-Roubaix, entering the twilight of his career but still dreaming of lifting the famous cobblestone trophy above his head in the velodrome.

The Australian had finished each of those 14 editions, albeit outside the time limit once, and the closest he’d come to winning was eighth in 2012, when Tom Boonen destroyed everyone.

Hayman thought he might have one or two last shots at glory and then, at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad in late February 2016, disaster struck. He crashed and fractured his collarbone. With just six weeks to Roubaix, his Classics campaign was in tatters.

But if you never stop believing, perhaps miracles can happen. Hayman was relatively lucky. He was able to train on the indoor bike and put together a programme to give himself a shot at taking part in the Hell of the North. After finishing a couple of races in Spain the week before, he lined up in Compiègne feeling he had nothing to lose. What unfolded that afternoon, when he outsprinted Boonen, Ian Stannard and Sep Vanmarcke on the track, was a sporting fairytale.

That winter, Hayman sat down with Richard Moore to talk through the whole story of how he clutched triumph from the jaws of disaster. We don’t hear Richard’s voice in this episode, just Hayman’s account of the race, but the way he tells the story is a testimony to Richard’s skill as an interviewer.

Ahead of Paris-Roubaix on Sunday, Hayman’s story is a reminder that the race has the capacity to surprise perhaps more than any other.

Subscribe as a Friend of the Podcast

Where are we, Lionel?

Paris-Roubaix is a poignant race for me. The 2021 edition, held in the autumn, was the last race I covered with Richard Moore. The 2022 edition, six months later, was the first race I covered since his sudden passing.

Paris-Roubaix had been postponed in April 2021 because of another wave of coronavirus cases and a short circuit-breaker lockdown in north-eastern France. When the re-arranged date was announced, Richard – who had moved to northern France during the pandemic – suggested we make a weekend of it, not least to witness the inaugural edition of Paris-Roubaix Femmes.

Simon Gill, Friend of the Podcast David Luxton, and I loaded our bikes into Simon’s Broomwagon, careful not to squash the collection of items Richard had asked us to bring over for him. I remember there was a haggis or two for him and a large box of Innocent smoothies for his young son among the comforts from home.

We stayed in Valenciennes, in a charming guesthouse called Le Grand Duc, which I’ve visited several times since, including last summer when the Tour de France started in Lille.

The day before the race we rode our bikes down to the Arenberg Forest, clattered across the cobbles there and then went in search of another couple of sectors, where Simon sent his drone up to film Richard and I in action. We had a pleasant lunch in a little cafe and then rode back to Valenciennes on a stretch of cycle path. Once we were half a dozen kilometres or so from home we started attacking each other, sprinting to close the gaps, generally messing about like kids without a care in the world. I launched an attack and as Richard countered, I immediately sat up and let him get on with it. Simon and I chuckled as we watched him power away from us, head down, thinking we were fighting to stay on his wheel. When we got to the next junction he’d stopped to wait for us and to catch his breath. ‘Where were you?’ he said. ‘Oh we couldn’t live with the pace, Rich.’

Back at Le Grand Duc over a beer, Simon showed the footage of Richard and I on the cobbles. At the time it had felt like we’d hit them hard, smashing our way across the stones like the pros. The video evidence was somewhat different.

‘Have you slowed this footage down?’ asked Richard.

‘I’m afraid not,’ laughed Simon.

We covered the historic women’s race, recording throughout the day, capturing the excitement and chaos as the riders hit the cobblestones. On Sunday we were up early to get to Compiègne and to the mixed zone where we wished Mitch Docker luck ahead of the final race of his career.

I decided to accompany Simon in his Broomwagon on a magical mystery tour across the countryside in search of the riders. Richard and David headed off in Richard’s car, their plans for the car suspiciously vague.

As Simon drove, I got the race up on my phone and we watched them leave the neutralised zone. Within a kilometre or so there was a crash. One rider down on the ground. An EF Education jersey.

‘It’s Mitch!’ I said.

Simon and I made it to Arenberg, and somewhere else, and eventually the velodrome in Roubaix, tired from a day of map-reading and schedule-checking and thinking three steps ahead. When we arrived at the velodrome, just in time to go into the track centre to see the riders hit the Carrefour de l’Arbre, I saw Richard and David.

‘What did you guys get up to?’ I asked.

Richard’s face broke into that mischievous grin of his. The one that says he knows he’s about to be rumbled but he couldn’t care less.

‘David?’

Richard started laughing.

‘Come on, what have you been doing?’

‘I’ve been working hard, watching the race, keeping on top of things while you’ve been gallivanting across the fields. It just so happens that we also stopped for a very nice lunch.’

After a pause, he said: ‘What did you have for lunch?’

‘Some crisps,’ I said.

‘Oh dear…’ he said, chuckling away as we walked into the track centre.

After the race had finished and people had started to stream away from the track, Richard and I stood on the pavement outside the Jean Stablinski velodrome, the modern indoor track just over the road from its more famous, outdoor cousin. We were recording some final links for our episode and as we did we both became aware, then self-conscious, of two middle-aged men staring at us as they moved ever closer. When they were invading our space uncomfortably, Richard cracked. ‘Excuse me? Do you mind, we’re working here?’

Richard very rarely cracked like this, but these two guys were drunk, lolling about unsteadily, and pretty irritating. They shuffled off, and Richard said: ‘I’ve completely lost my train of thought. We’d better do all that again.’

‘Really? Can we not just pick it up from where we got interrupted?’

‘No, it’s totally put me off my stride.’

In our unused take, we’d been talking about Florian Vermeersch, the young Belgian who’d sprung a surprise by finishing second to Sonny Colbrelli. We’d learned that Vermeersch was still studying history at the University of Gent and had been elected a town councillor in his home town of Lochristi. I had joked that he ought to have a nickname, The Mayor, or something. I was determined my joke would not end up on the cutting room floor and I was ready to deliver it again in our second take when Richard jumped in before me and stole my thunder.

‘What are we going to call him?’ he said, that same mischievous grin breaking out again. ‘The Mayor, perhaps? Is that going to be his nickname?’

‘That could be, Richard. I wonder where you got that idea? Sometimes the perils of having to do a second take means that my jokes get stolen!’

Later on, it was time to go our separate ways. We got into the Broomwagon, Richard got into his car and we were just about to get on the motorway when Richard called us. He’d forgotten to collect his haggis and smoothies, so we pulled over to the side of the road and he collected his goodies.

I did see Richard once more face-to-face, by a strange quirk of fate it was in Watford, my not-quite-home town the following February, when Richard was over in London but travel disruption and childcare arrangements meant he had to travel out to meet me because I couldn’t get into London. We recorded the podcast, with Daniel joining us remotely, and then Richard and I shook hands and said we’d see each other again at Paris-Roubaix in a few weeks.

Of course, tragically, that was not to be the case. Richard died the morning after Gent-Wevelgem, a race that has come to symbolise in the minds of many of our listeners his contribution to the podcast, the cycling media and even to the sport itself.

For me, though, it is Paris-Roubaix that most strongly resonates and reminds me of our friendship and working relationship. In those awful, uncertain weeks that followed the news we weren’t sure what the future would hold, although we were determined to return when it felt right. Having ridden round parts of Scotland with Simon – which was therapeutic in itself and helped to process the grief when it was at its rawest – I felt ready to go to Paris-Roubaix and see how it went. I’d already booked my travel, but I couldn’t face returning to Le Grand Duc – not just yet – so I booked an alternative place in Lille.

All weekend I was struck by the kindness of colleagues and strangers. The first person I saw when I arrived at the velodrome on the Sunday afternoon was Hugo, who gave me a big hug. Caley and others insisted I join them for dinner and, although I deeply appreciated the offer, I preferred to do my own thing. I lost count of the number of podcast listeners who approached me, all of them sensitively and almost tentatively, as if hyper-aware they would be encroaching on my grief, to offer a few words of condolences to everyone associated with the podcast and Richard’s family and friends. It was both touching and quite overwhelming, especially when I was in the media scrum, automatically scanning the crowd of journalists for the familiar figure that stood taller than almost everyone else even though I knew I wouldn’t find him.

If sport is about people and places, then the Roubaix velodrome will always remind me of Richard. We recorded there many times – including during the 2018 Tour de France, on World Cup final day, when Richard could barely contain his delight that England had been knocked out at the semi-final stage.

The episode we recorded that October day, which you can listen to below, was the final one Richard started with the words: ‘Where are we, Lionel?’ Those words, and Richard’s mischievous grin and hearty laugh, will come readily to mind on Sunday.

The 2021 Paris-Roubaix weekend

FAQ

If you want to listen to our archive of more than 300 Friends of the Podcast episodes plus new shows as they are released, sign up as a Friend of the Podcast here. An annual subscription gives immediate access to the full back catalogue.

Don’t sign up to The 11.01 Cappuccino on Substack if you want to listen to those episodes. The 11.01 Cappuccino is a free, regular email bulletin. Signing up as a subscriber on Substack does support The Cycling Podcast and is much appreciated but does not give access to the Friends of the Podcast episodes.

Listen to our latest episode

by Lionel Birnie

Remco is no April Fool. And yet…

I can’t have been the only person who checked the date yesterday when news broke on social media that Remco Evenepoel planned to be on the start line in Antwerp for Sunday’s Tour of Flanders.

Only in cycling could one of the sport’s biggest stars make such an improbable announcement on April Fool’s Day.

Part of me still refuses to believe the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe rider is taking part until I see him in the peloton on Sunday but he’s there, on the provisional start list, number 111.

But why is it improbable when Evenepoel is undoubtedly a generational talent who increasingly seems better suited to one-day racing than Grand Tours? Well, because he is relatively inexperienced in the cobbled Classics.

He’s raced the cobbles since he turned to cycling, of course. You can’t race in Belgium without encountering them. He won the junior Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne and rode junior Paris-Roubaix, although he finished outside the time limit there.

As a professional, there were plenty of cobbles in the two editions of the Baloise Belgium Tour he won – including Haaghoek, Lippenhovestraat, Paddestraat and the Muur. The Brussels Classic he won in 2021 featured the Muur and Bosberg twice each, and Brabantse Pijl has a few cobbles too.

But he is yet to line up for the Ronde van Vlaanderen. In fact, he is the only Belgian man to have won the rainbow jersey in the World Championship road race who has not taken part in the Tour of Flanders. That will change on Sunday (unless we’re all victims of an elaborate hoax).

In this week’s episode – Double Whammy – Daniel made the point that although Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe have been aggressive and mob-handed in many of the Classics so far, they are lacking a finisher. Whether Evenepoel is that man remains to be seen, and I have my doubts, although it feels almost preposterous to say that a rider capable of winning the world title, the Olympic Games road race and Liège-Bastogne-Liège can’t be a factor in the Tour of Flanders.

However, his experience of the intricacies of elite level Flemish Classics is almost non-existent. As a neo-pro in 2019 he rode Nokere Koerse and Bredene Koksijde Classic but that, and the few races listed above, is more or less the extent of it. He’s never ridden Omloop Nieuwsblad, Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne, E3 Saxo Classic, Gent-Wevelgem (sorry, another euro in the jar, In Flanders Fields), or Dwars door Vlaanderen. And it’s a big step up from Nokere Koerse to De Ronde.

Can he match Tadej Pogačar or Mathieu van der Poel, or even Wout van Aert or Mads Pedersen, when it comes to the dizzying left-right-left-again of the Tour of Flanders? Evenepoel’s bike-handling and descending skills are often ludicrously under-rated – the way some people talk about him you’d think he’d won Liège-Bastogne-Liège on a bike equipped with stabilisers. And yet it does feel like the Tour of Flanders on Sunday might be a case of jumping in at the deep end and getting a noseful of water…

The Belgian drought

We’re so used to focusing on the 40-year wait for a Frenchman to win the Tour de France that it has perhaps slipped under the radar that Belgium is currently enduring its longest drought in the men’s Tour of Flanders. Lotte Kopecky has won three of the past four editions of the women’s race but you have to go back to 2017 for the last Belgian man to win. That was Philippe Gilbert and, although the Flandrians took him to their hearts, he’s a Walloon. The last Flandrian winner was Tom Boonen way back in 2012.

With Mathieu van der Poel seemingly cursed by the fact that he has already won Omloop Nieuwsblad – and no one has ever done the Omloop-Ronde double in the same season – it looks like Tadej Pogačar will be the man to beat on Sunday, although Wout van Aert’s return to something approaching his peak form in the past week will ensure the fanatical Flandrians have someone to cheer even if Evenepoel falls short.

What about Ganna?

We’ve been treated to three successive nail-biters over the past few days. Van der Poel’s bluff and double-bluff, combined with the hesitation among the chase group, saw the Dutchman win the E3 Saxo Classic for the third year in a row. Two days later, Van der Poel was away with Van Aert again – the George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley of professional cycling, as Daniel described them – until almost the last moment at In Flanders Fields, only to be caught as they went under the flamme rouge. And Van Aert was pipped on the line by Filippo Ganna in Waregem on Wednesday as the Italian clinched Dwars door Vlaanderen.

In this week’s episode we credited Ganna with putting in a mammoth turn on the front of what remained of the peloton to finally catch Van der Poel and Van Aert (and Alec Segaert) at the end of In Flanders Fields. Italian observers were aghast that Ganna would sacrifice himself for his Ineos Grenadiers teammate Sam Watson, who finished 17th, well adrift of winner Jasper Philipsen. We were somewhat puzzled too, given Ganna’s ability to catapult himself out of an already fast-moving group, as he did on Wednesday. It was an even more impressive win as he had to swap bikes when his handlebars snapped on the Eikenberg just as Van Aert was making his big move.

At the time of writing, Ganna will not be riding the Tour of Flanders on Sunday. Instead he’ll be at home in front of a giant television, enjoying lunch, and resting ahead of an increasingly realistic attempt to improve on his previous best sixth place at Paris-Roubaix.

It makes sense but it does also highlight the poor record Team Sky / Ineos Grenadiers have at Flanders, especially as they won the first ever Flemish cobbled classic they rode when Juan Antonio Flecha took Omloop Het Nieuwsblad in 2010. Since then, they have won Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne a couple of times (Chris Sutton and Mark Cavendish), another couple of Omloops courtesy of Ian Stannard, two editions of E3 (Geraint Thomas and Michał Kwiatkowski), and a pair of Dwars door Vlaanderen (Dylan van Baarle and now Ganna).

But the Tour of Flanders has continued to elude them. Van Baarle’s second place to Van der Poel a week before his Paris-Roubaix victory in 2022 is their best result. Luke Rowe was fifth in 2016, Magnus Sheffield sixth in 2024 and Ganna was eighth last year.

It’s a curious world where victory in a race like Dwars door Vlaanderen does not automatically confer at least four-star favourite status for Sunday’s big one, but in a world where Pogačar and Van der Poel have been taking it in turns to dominate, the smart strategy for Ganna may be to sit this one out and hope for a better opportunity in a week’s time.

Roadbook: A Spectator’s Guide to the Flanders Classics

Online now for Friends of the Podcast is our new mini-series, Roadbook, which will complete your build-up to Sunday’s race. Maybe it’ll inspire you to take a trip to the spring Classics next year, or it’ll enhance your enjoyment of the races from the best seat in the house, your couch. The next episode, focusing on Paris-Roubaix, will be released next week.

Subscribe as a Friend of the Podcast

Next stop, the Ronde van Vlaanderen

The first time I went to the Tour of Flanders was in 1999, when the race fell on Easter Sunday, as it does this year. On Good Friday, I was in Vitré in Brittany for a relatively new race, the Route Adélie, where the British Linda McCartney team was racing. This is my account of that race written at the time.

by Lionel Birnie

Slumped in a plastic chair in Vitré is Chris Lillywhite, the rigours of his 188-kilometre slog around the rolling countryside of Brittany clearly visible on his face. The former Milk Race winner takes a slug of his drink while the Linda McCartney team’s soigneur, Eddie Wegelius, cleans the grime from his legs.

‘I blew on the last lap with about four kilometres to go. It was hard, we knew it would be, but it wasn’t incredibly hard,’ says Lillywhite.

Mechanic Carl Farrell is loading the team car, a smart, burgundy E-Class Mercedes. ‘Nice quiet day, we weren’t called up to the front at all. Just the way I like it,’ he says with a smile.

For the team’s German rider, Heiko Szonn – formerly of the same Telekom under-23 team which produced Jan Ullrich – it looks like it’s been anything but a quiet day. Szonn, the only McCartney rider to have finished with the peloton, makes his way through the crowd towards the car. Manager Sean Yates extends his hand to congratulate him. ‘My legs were like jelly on the last couple of laps. God, it was hard,’ Szonn says.

This is Britain’s Linda McCartney team acclimatising to racing in Europe, but it could easily be any other division two outfit taking its first tentative steps into professional cycling’s big time. The Route Adélie, round four of the Coupe de France, held on Good Friday at Vitré, is the first of two races the McCartneys will compete in during Easter weekend. It will be followed by the GP Rennes on Sunday, the same day as the Tour of Flanders, which may as well be light years away.

Preparing the troops

Yates has summoned his riders to a team meeting in his room at the Hotel La Grenouillère. It’s 11am, an hour and a half until the race starts.

First to arrive are a couple of the Australian contingent – David McKenzie and Ben Brookes. The others filter in and find space to sit.

‘This is the sort of race I like,’ says Matt Illingworth, who is not feeling well, ‘it passes the hotel 13 times.’

One of the most respected riders of his generation, Yates was a hard-working domestique deluxe who rode tirelessly for Peugeot, Fagor, 7-Eleven and Motorola. In his 15-year career, he has sat through hundreds of team meetings. This is his second attempt at preparing his riders for a race – following the GP Cholet in March – and he briefs his riders well.

The respect they have is evident; they listen to what he says.

‘It’s important we participate in the race and ride near the front,’ says Yates. ‘It’ll be hard because there’s a good-quality field but the course isn’t as tough as the GP Cholet. I know we haven’t had anything like the racing we should have but if you ride properly and professionally all the time you’ll know what to do when you do have the legs.’ Brookes and Julian Winn are told to police the early stages of the race and get in any breaks that go clear. Szonn and Illingworth will take care of the middle and Allan Iacuone, McKenzie and Lillywhite are to save themselves for the finale. ‘If we race properly for as long as possible I don’t mind if we get popped on the final few laps,’ says Yates.

Future looks bright

Chris Lillywhite is one of the most experienced members of the team and has ridden many races like this before. He looks more relaxed than some of the others. ‘I did the GP Rennes ten years ago with Raleigh-Banana,’ he recalls. ‘I remember it being tough.’ Now 32, he has realistic aims for the team: ‘We all know how hard it will be for a British team to ride the Tour de France, but the set-up is right.’

A former winner of the Milk Race, Lillywhite had written off his chances of racing in Europe again and spent 1998 racing purely for the love of the sport with the fledgling McCartney team. Then the plans for 1999 were unveiled, with a bigger budget, better riders and a stronger race programme, and Lillywhite was offered a contract. ‘I didn’t think any of this would come along again and I know I’ll never ride for a big team again, but maybe I can ride for a couple more years with the McCartneys,’ he says. ‘I know me and some of the other older guys are not the future of this team, but we still have something to offer.’

Lillywhite believes the way the Telekom team has evolved over a period of almost ten years is an example the McCartneys can follow. ‘Telekom are one of the strongest teams but they started as the small Stuttgart team and built things up slowly. Back then there were hardly any German pros but now they’ve won the Tour,’ he says.

Final countdown

With less than quarter of an hour until the start, Yates comes back to the team car far from happy. ‘The organisers have paid us the start money by cheque and the bank won’t cash it because we haven’t got an account here. It’s a real pain in the arse because we have to pay the hotel bill in cash, buy petrol and pay the motorway tolls. We haven’t got a credit card yet so we need to be able to use the start money.’ It’s a problem which faces all the foreign teams at the Route Adélie.

‘The Slovenian team [KRKA] has the same problem. At Cholet the organisers paid us cash and I thought they’d do the same here but the guy won’t budge.’ Yates will have to withdraw some cash to sort things out.

Cofidis rider David Millar is full of beans, chatting and joking with his friends, although he is still smarting from his defeat by Jens Voigt at the Critérium International the previous weekend. He turns to his teammate Bobby Julich: ‘You hear that Bobby? They say the time gap Voigt beat me by is the equivalent of two centimetres. Two centimetres!’

‘Forget it man, it’s over,’ replies the American.

Millar greets some of the McCartney riders and asks how things have been going. The McCartneys look pleased to see him: a friendly face in this intimidating milieu. Millar’s confidence – fuelled by his fine start to the season – is in stark contrast to the demeanour of the somewhat apprehensive McCartney riders. They are not joking as readily as they were earlier on; the start is just a few minutes away.

There is just time for adjustments to bikes, a quick check that they have bidons and race food, and the slow roll to the start line.

And they’re off

This is the third edition of the Route Adélie, the previous two having been won by Nicolas Jalabert and Jaan Kirsipuu. Following the success of the 1995 Tour de France’s visit to Vitré, when Mario Cipollini won the stage, the local council decided they wanted a race of their own. A sponsor – the ice cream maker Adélie – was found and the race was born, providing the riders who are spared the cobbled hills of Flanders with some meaningful competition. It also gives smaller teams an opportunity to make a name for themselves. Eight of the 17 formations are ranked in division two, and a further two teams are French semi-professional outfits.

The 129-strong field will tackle five laps of a 23.4-kilometre circuit around the undulating country roads around Vitré before eight 8.6-kilometre circuits of the town itself.

In the early stages, the yellow and black McCartney jerseys are at the front but when the break goes they are not represented. Brookes, the 19-year-old Australian, tries to marshal the move but is feeling the effects of a slight back injury and fails to stay with the group.

The big losers are the Polish MROZ squad and the McCartneys. Almost every other team has a rider in the 18-man selection. Nearing the end of the third big lap, MROZ go to the front of the peloton in a bid to pull back the break. The lead is never more than a minute but they manage to stay away. By the time the race reaches the finishing circuit it is clear the winner will come from the escape.

As the race nears its conclusion the crowd lining the narrow streets of Vitré swells, attracted by the prospect of seeing the riders every ten minutes or so. And as the crowd grows the publicity girls get to work, handing out free Adélie ice creams to all and sundry, despite the light showers which fall intermittently.

Daniel Mangeas’ commentary grows more fervent and the crowd cheers. At the back of the peloton, Szonn is hanging on.

Post-mortem

Szonn finishes with the peloton, Lillywhite just behind. The other six abandoned on the finishing circuit and were already back at the hotel.

Yates is pleased that two of his men made it but the frustration of not getting a man in the break is obvious. ‘I told the riders how important it was to show themselves at the front and I had hoped they would get in any big moves that went. I don’t want to be like those directeurs who sit in the team car shouting and screaming when our riders don’t get in the break, though. They know what I expect but I know it’s not as easy as that. I used to suffer like a pig for the first ten races of the year so I do know what it’s like.’

Julian Winn, a stage winner in last year’s Prutour, pulled out with a couple of laps to go. Back in the team’s wagon, parked outside the hotel, he reflects on the race. ‘This was only my second race of the year. The first one was the GP of Essex and then this. The difference is mind-blowing but I learnt a lot today.’

Farrell, the mechanic, is washing the team bikes ready for the following day. Four months ago he was working in a bike shop in Forest Row, Yates’ home town. Now he is preparing the bikes for a professional cycling team. “I heard the team needed a mechanic and when I was offered the job I jumped at the chance,’ he says. ‘Sean said it would be hard work and he definitely wasn’t wrong. Today went okay but I’m just waiting for my first cock-up. I know one day I’ll get it wrong but Sean is cool about it.’

The riders head to their rooms to relax. There is time to reflect on the race, before attending another lesson at the GP Cholet on Sunday.

* * *

Postscript: After the finish, Szonn put on a long-sleeved jacket and leg-warmers and announced that he would ride the few kilometres back to the hotel to warm down, perhaps throwing in a little loop to fully shake the lactic acid out of his legs. Later, I arrived back at the hotel to find Yates leaning on the bonnet of the team car. Szonn still hadn’t returned. ‘He should be back by now,’ said Yates, later still. This was before GPS cycle computers and Szonn didn’t have a mobile phone with him. It turned out he’d ridden in the wrong direction, got lost on his little loop, and spent the best part of two hours trying to find his way back to the hotel. ‘Ah well,’ said Yates, deadpan. ‘It won’t do him any harm!’

This article first appeared in Cycle Sport in 1999.

by Lionel Birnie

After a detour via Paris-Nice, Tirreno-Adriatico and Milano-Sanremo, the spotlight falls once again on the cobbles, bergs and freshly-ploughed fields of Flanders for the first time since Opening Weekend.

The Flanders Classics have resumed with the rebranded Ronde van Brugge, although having watched the men’s race on Wednesday I still think the Road Furniture and Cycle Paths Demolition Derby would be a more appropriate name.

Over the next ten days, the excitement will build to fever pitch as we approach the Ronde van Vlaanderen via the E3 Saxo Classic (Friday), In Flanders Fields – From Middelkerke to Wevelgem (Sunday), and Dwars Door Vlaanderen (Wednesday).

The second part of Roadbook, our quasi travel guide series, is online for Friends of the Podcast now. It features Simon Gill and I talking out our adventures in Belgium and pulls together some of the things I’ve learned from the past 25 years crossing the channel to watch the races.

Here are a few tips if you’re planning to make a trip to any of the Flandrian classics this spring.

Where to stay?
Gent (Ghent) is my favourite city in Belgium and it makes a brilliant base for all the Flandrian races. It’s a busy university city with great bars and restaurants and plenty of other things to do while you’re there. Brugge (Bruges) is smaller and much more touristy but well worth a weekend break and is in easy reach of the coast. Another popular destination for us over the years has been Kortrijk (Courtrai in French), which is very well located for E3 Saxo Classic and Gent-Wevelgem. During the Lionel of Flanders trip in 2017, we stayed aboard the Bootel Ahoi, a boat-hotel (boatel?) in the river Leie, which was great fun. It’s also only a short-ish ride to the velodrome in Roubaix and some of the Paris-Roubaix cobbles. If you are interested in the military history of Flanders, head to Ieper (Ypres). There’s the In Flanders Fields museum and they play the Last Post at the Menen Gate to remember the fallen every evening at 8pm.

What to eat and drink?
It may not be the most aesthetic looking dish – in fact, it sometimes looks like it’s swilled out of the back of a sewage lorry – but stoofvlees, or Flemish stew, is delicious. Tender chunks of beef in a rich, beer-based gravy that goes perfectly with crisp, lightly-salted French fries. Another popular stew is waterzooi. I am not all that keen on the traditional fish version because I am not a big fan of river fish, but the chicken alternative is great. Race day wouldn’t be complete without something from the friterie – a bratwurst, or some other grilled or deep-fried meat with chips and mayonnaise.

Belgium boasts hundreds of brilliant beers – my favourite is Orval, although it’s not Flandrian as it comes from just over the border in Wallonia. Like the climbs, check the percentage before clipping in to avoid an unwelcome surprise! If you are driving, or cycling, or just want a booze-free weekend, there are more and more alcohol-free versions. I can recommend the Leffe 0.0 and the Affligem 0.0.

Where to ride?
Every time I watch the races, my top ten list of favourite climbs changes order. I’ve been lucky enough to ride them all over the years but my top six cobbled climbs – in no particular order – must be the Muur at Geraardsbergen, the Oude Kwaremont, the Koppenberg, the Paterberg, the Kemmelberg and the Molenberg.

Flanders is great for cycling. There are the hills and cobbles of course, but the cycle paths are everywhere and keep you off the busy roads. The bike is king (or queen) too and generally has right of way at roundabouts and other crossings and intersections.

If you’re travelling over for the races, there are organised cyclo-sportives. The Tour of Flanders one is incredibly popular – perhaps it’s got too big because if you set off at peak time it can be frustrating getting caught in the bottlenecks on the climbs. Simon and I accidentally gatecrashed the Gent-Wevelgem sportive during our Lionel of Flanders trip and that was great fun to join for a few kilometres, especially the gravel Plugstreets.

Alternatively, check out Cycling In Flanders to help you plot your own routes.

Best race for a first-timer?
If you’ve never been before, I’d recommend making one of the smaller races your debut experience instead of the Tour of Flanders. De Ronde is brilliant, of course, but the crowds are huge, the road closures make it tricky to get around, and many of the key climbs are dominated by marquees and VIP areas. When the race falls on Easter Sunday, as it does this year, it can be exceptionally busy.

Opening Weekend is a great place to start because you have two bites of the cherry – Omloop Nieuwsblad followed by Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne. Alternatively enjoy a long weekend taking in the E3 Saxo Classic, which takes place on a Friday when lots of people are working, and Gent-Wevelgem (sorry, it’s going to take me at least three years to get used to calling it In Flanders Fields – and another three to remember to add on the From Middelkerke to Wevelgem bit!). These two races have quite different characters and cover a lot of varied terrain giving a real impression of the subtle diversity of the Flanders region.

The cycling museums
There are two outstanding cycling museums that are well worth a visit. The Centrum Ronde van Vlaanderen in Oudenaarde celebrates the history and geography of the race, and there’s a great cafe next door. Last year, I visited the Koers Museum in Roeselare with Hugo Coorevits. The museum has been recently renovated and upgraded and it has a fantastic array of cycling equipment and memorabilia across three floors.

• If you are a current Friend of the Podcast subscriber, you can listen to Roadbook now. To sign up, go to thecyclingpodcast.com. An annual subscription gives immediate access to a back catalogue of more than 300 episodes made over the past decade or so, as well as every new episode of KM0 we release in the coming year. Your support is invaluable too because it keeps the show on the road.

The Lionel of Flanders

Is it really eight years since Simon Gill and I recorded our slightly haphazard, freewheeling five-part series, The Lionel of Flanders? The title was the suggestion of our producer Tom Whalley. The series took us to the three races which lead to the Tour of Flanders. They have shuffled the running order since, and Gent-Wevelgem has changed its name, but the series remains one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done for The Cycling Podcast. We’ve moved it to the top of the Friends of the Podcast feed this week for any new subscribers who want to listen to it for the first time, and for any long-time listeners who want to revisit it as part of their own build-up to De Ronde.

Of course, it’s an especially poignant weekend for everyone associated with The Cycling Podcast, including our listeners, because the Monday morning after Gent-Wevelgem will forever be associated in our minds with the sudden passing of our co-founder and dear friend, Richard Moore.

Four years ago, Richard had covered the race for The Cycling Podcast, witnessing Biniam Girmay’s historic victory. The following morning we received the devastating news that Richard had died. The support of our listeners then, since – and especially at this time of year – is hugely appreciated. Last year, Friends of the Podcast Charlotte Elton and Stacy Snyder made a trip to paint Richard’s name on the road at the Baneberg – which was picked up by the television cameras during the coverage.

If you’re watching the race on Sunday, join us in raising a glass to the Buffalo when they reach the Baneberg.

Online now

Bread of Heaven
Daniel Friebe and Larry Warbasse added an additional layer to our Arrivée analysis of Milano-Sanremo once the dust had settled on La Classicissima. And Hugo Coorevits returned to look ahead to the cobbled Classics.

Winner Winner Trofeo Binda
An early contender for best episode title of the season courtesy of the March edition of The Cycling Podcast Féminin. Rose Manley, Denny Gray and Rebecca Charlton welcomed back Lizzy Banks on her much-anticipated return to the show.

Coming soon

Monday, March 30
We will be back after the weekend to recap the Belgian Classics E3 Saxo Classic and In Flanders Fields (aka Gent-Wevelgem), where Mathieu van der Poel and Mads Pedersen are each aiming for three in a row. We’ll also cover the Evenepoel v Vingegaard v Pidcock v The Rest battle at the Volta a Catalunya. Listen out for that episode on Monday.

Sunday, April 5: Arrivée
We will have our instant reaction episodes covering the men’s and women’s editions of the Tour of Flanders online as soon as we can after the finish next Sunday.

• Subscribe to The Cycling Podcast in your favourite podcast app to ensure you never miss an episode.

The father of the Mortirolo: Carmine Castellano 1937-2026

We were saddened to hear that Carmine Castellano, who was race director of the Giro d’Italia from 1993 to 2003, died this week aged 89. Castellano took responsibility for devising the Giro route in 1989, working under Vincenzo Torriani, who he later succeeded as race director. Castellano ‘discovered’ the Mortirolo, which featured in the Giro for the first time in 1990 and has since become thought of as the original ‘super climb’. The road, cut through the forests in the Italian Alps, supposedly roamed by witches and brigands, is one of the most feared climbs in cycling.

In 2019, Daniel made an episode of KM0 called Il Mortirolo, which you can listen to on our Friends of the Podcast feed. It features Castellano talking about how the Mortirolo became a part of Giro d’Italia history.

Sign up as a Friend of the Podcast

Stacy Snyder’s 2026 Classics-themed cups will go on sale on Sunday (March 29) from her Etsy site. There will be a collection of around 50 mugs and cups available from 10am US East Coast time, which is 3pm UK time (4pm CET).

by Lionel Birnie

When it comes to the spring Classics, we get a lot of emails from listeners asking for travel tips. Over the past 25 years or so, I’ve travelled to all of the races with Simon ‘The Photographer’ Gill – most of them multiple times – and so our new mini-series for Friends of the Podcast subscribers is a meandering collection of things we’ve experienced and tips we’ve picked up over the years.

Roadbook: A Spectator’s Guide to Milan-Sanremo is online for Friends of the Podcast subscribers now and will be followed by similar episodes focusing on the Flanders Classics, Paris-Roubaix, and finally, the Ardennes Classics.

If you’ve never been to the great one-day races before, hopefully the series will inspire you to make a trip. If you have, maybe the episodes will enhance your enjoyment of the races to come over the next six weekends.

Here are some tips for spectators planning a trip to La Classicissima.

1. Make Sanremo your base. Easily accessible from Nice if you’re travelling by air or rail, Sanremo is perfect for a weekend break, especially if you are taking a bike. By all means go to Milan if you want to see the city, or watch football at the San Siro, but on race day you want to be on the Poggio waiting for the race to get to you.

2. If you’re taking a bike, you can easily ride a lot of the course. Either roll out from Sanremo, starting on the 23km long cycle path – pista ciclabile del Parco Costiero della Riviera dei Fiori – which hugs the coastline, then turn round and trace the race route over the three capi, the Cipressa and Poggio. You can do as much or as little as you like. If you just want to ride the last 100km of the course, take the bikes on the train to Spotorno and then ride back to Sanremo. If you’re there long enough, it’s not too far to the Col de la Madone, near Menton over the border in France.

3. If you are there for a few days, visit the medieval village of Dolceacqua or the ‘ghost town’ Bussana Vecchia, abandoned after an earthquake in 1887 and repopulated by artists and bohemians in the 1960s, now home to cafes, restaurants and craft shops.

4. Visit the Mercato Annonario di Sanremo, a large market packed with artisan bakers, delicatessens, butchers, fishmongers and fruit and vegetable stalls. If you are self-catering everything you need is here – fresh, vibrant, top quality local food.

5. Take a stroll round Sanremo’s ancient heart, La Pigna, a network of intricate streets that resemble a pine cone, hence the name.

6. Enjoy a post-race drink in the Piña Social Club, a cosy bar nestled in the ancient streets which feels like it’s the town’s best-kept secret hidden in a wine cellar.

7. Eating out, we particularly enjoyed the Ligurian cuisine in A Cuvea and La Porta Verde.

8. On race day, pick a spot and wait for the race to reach you. We headed to the Poggio early, had lunch at a pizzeria and soaked up the atmosphere as the excitement built. Hopping from point to point hoping to see the race multiple times struck me as almost impossible given the road closures and the speed of the peloton.

• Listen to the episode to make the most of your trip. Thanks to Friend of the Podcast Alessio Punzi, who lent us his apartment for our trip and compiled a list of places to see, including restaurant and bar tips.

Sign up as a Friend of the Podcast

Simon’s photo of Van der Poel on the Poggio descent

In the Roadbook episode, Simon Gill talked about the thought process behind his stunning image which captured Mathieu van der Poel in full flight on the Poggio descent in 2023. Having waited on the Poggio all day, Simon knew he had one opportunity to tell the story of the race in a single frame and this was the result. Prints of this photograph are available from Simon’s website and would grace the wall of any cyclist’s office or pain cave.

Buy Simon's Poggio print

Paris-Adriatico or Tirreno-Nice?

As The Cycling Podcast’s newly-appointed Head of Mediocrity it falls upon me to write about Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico. Before I do, I want to make it clear I love both races even if they start slowly.

After the excitement of Opening Weekend and Strade Bianche it does feel like the WorldTour season has been jammed into reverse when the two point-to-point stage races first get underway, especially when the weather is poor, as it was for much of the week.

The opening time trial of Tirreno-Adriatico felt very low-key, with a sparse crowd and sad looking traffic cones marking the turning point of an underwhelming out-and-back course. Italy still looked half-asleep and my mind drifted to thoughts of closed ice cream shops, cafe owners using those long metal poles to poke puddles of rainwater off their faded awnings, unidentified sea things in pale, greasy batter for lunch and grumpy waiters who only want to take cash.

Paris-Nice is the same, but in French.

However, both races offered drama, even if the weather didn’t brighten significantly enough in France to justify the race’s nickname, the Race to the Sun. There was an intriguing team time trial which put Juan Ayuso into the yellow jersey. Unfortunately for the Lidl-Trek rider, he crashed out the following day as Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s club sandwich helped catapult Visma-Lease A Bike’s Jonas Vingegaard to a stage win and the race lead. Vingegaard was imperious whenever the road went uphill and the time gaps by the time the race reached Nice were more like those you see at the end of a Grand Tour than a week-long stage race. Even the disappointment of the Queen Stage being shortened to 47 kilometres because of the snowy weather, and a peculiar final stage minus the Col d’Èze that finished out by the football stadium rather than on the Promenade des Anglais, failed to lessen the sense that Vingegaard had put down a serious marker for the season ahead. Certainly he is miles ahead of where he was this time last year, when a crash at Paris-Nice disrupted his spring.

Meanwhile, over in Italy Isaac Del Toro delivered again, calmly plotting his way to an assured overall victory and refusing to panic even when Giulio Pellizzari pinched the leader’s jersey from him for a day. Mathieu van der Poel looked ominously brilliant, winning two stages ahead of Milan-Sanremo; Michael Valgren delivered the good news story of the week with his first win for almost five years after a terrible run of injuries, Tobias Lund Andresen continued to demonstrate his improvement and Jonathan Milan delivered his expected stage win, although we’ve since learned that illness will keep him out of Saturday’s Milan-Sanremo.

I love the week of Paris-Adriatico, or should it be Tirreno-Nice? It’s a work-from-home dream – I put the TV in the office on and watch both races back-to-back – although the race organisers could co-operate a bit more to stagger the finishes so we can see a bit more of whichever race finishes latest, which is usually Paris-Nice.

However, the clash of two important week-long WorldTour stage races looks to be increasingly unjustifiable in a world where sports are competing for attention with so many other forms of entertainment. From a sporting perspective there’s no easy way to tell the story of either race. Generally speaking, the riders who have their sights set on Milan-Sanremo tend to go to Tirreno-Adriatico, but not all of them do. The general classification specialists are split between the two races. Matteo Jorgenson, who has won the past two editions of Paris-Nice passed up the opportunity to complete the hat-trick, riding in Italy instead where he enjoyed second place and, if Daniel is to be believed a series of culinary crimes that surpass putting pineapple on pizza. What could it be? Lasagne burritos?

The best rider in the world, Tadej Pogačar, didn’t ride either race, which arguably made them more compelling spectacles, even if Vingegaard’s winning margin was Pog-esque and Pog’s understudy Del Toro did a pretty decent impression of his team leader.

While it makes no business sense whatsoever to schedule the two races against each other, I really like the fact that between them, Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico are the pieces of a bigger jigsaw puzzle. We gained some clues but no definitive answers. Considering the two winners, Vingegaard and Del Toro, are likely to be the hot favourites for the Giro d’Italia, who has the upper hand after that week of racing? On the face of it you’d have to say Vingegaard because of the winning margin, but Del Toro was pushed harder by a stronger field on more dynamic terrain.

Would any other sport split the attention of its followers like this? I suppose golf is similar in that it has competing tours and the best players all come together for the majors. But if we were devising the WorldTour calendar from scratch tomorrow there’s no way anyone would rationally schedule two such important events against each other.

As much as I enjoy the all-you-can-eat buffet week of cycling, I tend to reach the final day with my mind somewhat bloated, struggling to digest what I’ve seen. A whirl of Visma-Lease A Bike, UAE Team Emirates and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe jerseys set against a slate grey sky, racing through sleepy towns and villages witnessed by a sprinkling of spectators snug in their winter coats.

It got me thinking perhaps there needs to be a radical change. Maybe the two stage races should be run one after the other with an overall teams classification based on performances across the fortnight? Or maybe there’s an even more radical format which could really capitalise on the fact they run concurrently? Two races with one classification? A combined points race? Of course all this would require ASO and RCS to co-operate, and the UCI and the teams to agree with a shake-up, but it does feel that the clash which divides our attention and dilutes the storylines is become less justifiable each year. What are Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico actually for? Are they are merely training races for the Grand Tours, an early hit-out for the GC riders, or prestigious events in their own right? At the moment, no one seems to really know.

The Pogačar debate

Last week’s discussion about Tadej Pogačar’s dominance and whether it is robbing races of intrigue and suspense provoked some interesting reactions. Below is a sample of the comments we received by email and via The 11.01 Cappuccino.

The suspense is what draws me to cycling – I want tension until the line, the unlikely breakaway success, and Grand Tours where the top 10 is undecided until the final mountain day. This is what makes the sport so interesting, so dynamic, and so engaging. When all the variables, and unknowns, are sucked out of the race – so is my attention – Rich

I’m not going to say if I find it boring, exciting or somewhere in between. Because, simply, there are no right or wrong answers. If that’s how we feel, then that’s how we feel. What I will say is I thoroughly enjoyed the chat – Michael Holden

The only thing more boring than Pogi at Strade is the debate over whether Pogi is boring or not. I agree 100% that he is boring to watch on TV but absolutely thrilling to watch in real life – Tom Baker

Well said Daniel. Who remembers 1956 Roger Walkowiak, 1966 Lucien Aimar, 1976 Lucien van Impe. We are in the presence of cycling history, greatness, humility and grace and excitement from Tadej. They’ll be sorry when he’s gone – Ian

Bang on Lionel. It’s your favourite movie played over and over and over again – Dion

I really enjoyed the debate between Daniel, Lionel and Brian on this week’s podcast. I know it’s a theme you’ve covered before, but it is probably one of the most salient topics in professional cycling at the moment.

I’ve been following cycling for a long time and have witnessed many eras, and I love watching Pogačar win. When I tune in to watch a race he’s going to take part in, it’s in the hope that he pulls off something spectacular, again, and wins.

I totally understand Lionel’s point-of-view – sporting events need drama, storylines, upsets, underdogs. In almost all scenarios I’d agree that watching a dominant favourite win repeatedly doesn’t make for a great spectacle. Yet somehow, with Pogačar, it’s different. Whilst an individual race might unfold in a predictable way, each race feels like it’s just part of a much bigger and more compelling narrative.

Would Daniel feel the same way if, instead of Pogačar, it was someone unlikeable, or, maybe worse, dull? I don’t think I would, I think I’d have been watching Strade Bianche thinking ‘please, not this guy again’.

Instead, with Pogačar, the feeling is almost the opposite: you tune in hoping he does something outrageous. His dominance doesn’t remove the spectacle, it is the spectacle – Christopher

Arrivée is back for the spring Classics

Our post-race show Arrivée returns on Saturday with episodes covering the men’s and women’s editions of Milan-Sanremo recorded as the dust settles and released within a couple of hours of the podium presentations. We created Arrivée in spring 2022 when we realised that the energy and urgency of our Grand Tour coverage was missing when we recorded our Classics reviews a few days after the races. So, we aim to record as soon as possible after the winner has crossed the line, when the excitement is still fresh and the takes can be delivered hot.

To make sure you never miss an episode of The Cycling Podcast, follow us in your preferred podcast player. That way you’ll receive a notification as soon as a new episode goes live.

Tune in on Saturday to find out who won the races – and how they did it.

Arrivée episodes will be online after the races on Saturday.

Follow The Cycling Podcast

by Lionel Birnie

We had a lively discussion in this week’s episode Goodnight, Siena about Tadej Pogačar’s dominance after he sealed his fourth Strade Bianche victory in five years. Considering the SlovAlien – (c) Daniel Friebe – didn’t take part in 2023, he’s unbeaten on the white roads of Tuscany since 2021, when he was seventh.

The statistics are staggering. In those four editions, he has spent 228 kilometres riding alone at the head of the race and his aggregate winning margin is five minutes and 45 seconds. Enough time to win a couple of Grand Tours in four days.

There is no doubt whatsoever that we are witnessing greatness. Considering the strength of competition and the depth of talent in the modern WorldTour peloton, we can make a cast-iron case that Pogačar’s achievements already eclipse those of Eddy Merckx.

I hope the discussion between Daniel, Brian and myself was a bit more nuanced than the binary Is Pog Boring Or Not? There’s a subtle, but important, difference between saying that the men’s race at Strade Bianche lacked intrigue and suspense and coming to the conclusion that Pogačar is boring or that his dominance is killing the sport.

For a start, Pogačar is far from a ‘boring’ rider. He races with panache and a smile on his face. There’s something charming about his persona on and off the bike. The trademark tuft of hair poking out of the vent of his helmet may have been absent on Saturday but the carefree attitude it seems to symbolise was not. He rides with the confidence of knowing that he can do more or less what he wants on a bike. He looks glorious in full flight too, the embodiment of perfection on two wheels.

Nevertheless, Saturday’s Strade Bianche as a spectacle was predictable. We didn’t see anything we hadn’t seen before. In fact, you could say that was merely a repeat of 2024, when Pogačar attacked two kilometres further from the finish. That’s not to say the race for second place was not fascinating in its own way.

Our discussion continued when we retreated to the dressing room for half-time oranges between parts two and three and we more or less agreed to disagree. In fact, we were wondering whether the debate about whether or not Pogačar’s dominance is boring is itself boring – especially as we touched on a similar subject early last autumn when the Slovenian pulled off back-to-back long-range wins at Il Lombardia and the European Championships. However, the reaction the episode provoked suggests it’s a subject that interests as many people as it divides.

And that is because it gets to the heart of answering the question: What is professional sport for?

For many – the race organisers, team owners, sponsors, broadcasters and wider media – it is a business. For the fans, it is entertainment. For the riders, it is both a job and a passion.

Daniel’s point that viewing figures for Saturday’s Strade Bianche hit a record high shows that Pogačar is good for business. Brian’s point about the crowds in Siena was also a good one. A lot of the tourists were already there, the bike race drew them into the Piazza del Campo for a glimpse of a rider we may well come to think of as the greatest of all-time. Pogačar is cycling’s Elvis Presley, Muhammad Ali, Tiger Woods and Lionel Messi all rolled into one.

Popularity and profile track a bell curve. Pogačar’s exploits at the Tour de France, the Classics, the world titles and the sense that he is rewriting history in front of our eyes means that his popularity is approaching its peak when it comes to the wider public. People who perhaps watch a bit of cycling throughout the year will tune in for him rather than the race. Mauro Vegni’s comment – “There was Pogačar and that was all I needed. The race was on everyone’s lips from the BBC to the New York Times” – perhaps reflects less well on the sport than he thinks.

On the other hand, some dedicated cycling fans who have been following his progress since he won his first Grand Tour stages at the 2019 Vuelta a España and have sat through four similar editions of Strade Bianche, feel the novelty has worn off a bit. They are equally entitled to crave something different, or new. As I said in the podcast, there are certain films or songs I go back to time and again because I love them but that doesn’t mean they are all I want to see or listen to.

And so we have to reach the conclusion that multiple things can be true at the same time. Pogačar’s exploits are extraordinary and can be gripping – and yet I have relatively little interest in seeing him win a fifth Strade Bianche. Certainly I think there’s more sporting merit in seeing him win Milan-Sanremo or Paris-Roubaix for the first time.

Pogačar can be good for business – attracting new people to the sport or encouraging the bike-curious to take a deeper look – while being bad for drama, suspense and a sense of engagement in the moment while an afternoon slips away as he time trials to the finish line.

Star quality has always elevated and then transcended sport, whether it be Merckx, Armstrong, Cavendish or Pogačar. But interest can be fleeting too. Many of the people brought along purely because they had an interest in Armstrong drifted away when their idol retired and then fell. I certainly agree with Daniel’s point about the ‘vacuum eras’ where it can be hard to know who the best riders are. I am certainly not yearning for a glorious era of mediocrity, despite what Daniel and Brian suggested, but Daniel also knows that interest can evaporate quite quickly when the stars fade. The case of Jan Ullrich in Germany and perhaps to a lesser extent the British boom around London 2012 and the Bradley Wiggins Tour win are examples of that.

Perhaps Brian summed it up best when he said that, like beauty, it’s all in the eye of the beholder. We all watch and follow sports for a range of different reasons and we’re all entitled to enjoy whatever it is we enjoy.

Pog-proofing the Poggio?

This is the bottom of the Poggio, photographed by Friend of the Podcast Alessio Punzi at the weekend. Access is barred to all traffic – even Tadej Pogačar and Mathieu van der Poel. There are no plans to make this a gravel section for the finale of Milan-Sanremo but in true just-in-time fashion the resurfacing work is cutting it fine ahead of La Primavera next Saturday. However, a fresh, smooth surface and the right conditions could mean a new fastest time on the Poggio next weekend.

Classic specials from the Friends of the Podcast archive

Over the course of the spring Classics, we’ll be delving into the Friends of the Podcast archive to move some old favourites back to the top of the feed so new subscribers can discover them for the first time and long-term Friends who want to listen again can find them easily.

This week we go back to spring 2023, when Simon Gill and I travelled to Sanremo for La Classicissima with Italian-based journalist Herbie Sykes. During the four-part series, we discover the history of the race, ride the famous climbs and then, on race day, wait for the peloton to reach us on the Poggio.

This mini series precedes a new episode for Friends of the Podcast, which will be out early next week – a mix of travel tips and tales which might inspire you to take a trip to the spring Classics if you’ve not been before.

Subscribe as a Friend of the Podcast

by Lionel Birnie

In an era where so many races can be summed up by simply saying The Best Rider Won, it was probably not a surprise that Mathieu van der Poel dominated Omloop Het Nieuwsblad. In this week’s podcast, Poel Party, I described it as being a ‘paint by numbers’ victory, decided largely by one moment on the Molenberg. Rick Pluimers of Tudor Pro Cycling slipped on the greasy cobbles as they came round one of the bends on the twisty-turny lower slopes of ‘mill hill’. Van der Poel, although well-positioned and alert, nevertheless had to rely on his peerless cyclo-cross skills to avoid Pluimers as he hit the ground. With Florian Vermeersch already pushing on at the front of what was left of the peloton, Van der Poel seized the opportunity and from there it was all fairly predictable. There was a sense that Vermeersch and the other passenger on the Van der Poel Express, Tim van Dijke, would probably have little to respond with when the Alpecin-Premier Tech man decided to make his move, and so it proved. A lifting of the pace as they went through Geraardsbergen, an acceleration as they approached the steeper section up near the chapel on the Muur, and he was away, adding another race to a near-complete collection of spring Classics on his debut. One Omloop, one win.

Meanwhile, over in the Ardèche, the latest journey made by The Paul Seixas Hype Train was a non-stop service all the way to the finish line, with no room for any passengers. A few months ago on these same roads, the Next Bernard Hinault was the best of the rest, trailing more than three-and-a-half minutes behind the Current Tadej Pogaćar in the European Road Race Championships. Seixas was the bronze medallist that day and at the weekend he decided to see what it was like to try a Pog-style solo escape. In truth it was a bit Pog Lite, because in the Euros last summer the Slovenian took off 75 kilometres from the line. Seixas made his move with just over 40 kilometres to go.

It was, though, an impressive victory considering the riders he left behind – Jan Christen, Lenny Martinez, Matteo Jorgensen, Mattias Skjelmose and Egan Bernal were all around two minutes behind, Ben Healy more than five minutes back.

His performance has done nothing to calm the excitement and anticipation of a Pogačar v Seixas showdown in the gravel at Strade Bianche tomorrow (Saturday). Pogačar has won three of the past four editions, with a combined winning margin of almost five minutes, and a total of 150 kilometres spent riding solo at the head of the race. (A quick corrections corner from me, keeping up The Cycling Podcast’s proud tradition of achieving at least 60 per cent accuracy: In this week’s episode I said that Pogačar had yet to experience any setbacks or misfortune at Strade Bianche, somehow overlooking the dramatic moment when he careered off the road and into a field when he was away with 2023 champion Tom Pidcock. Perhaps it’s because Pidcock did the sporting thing and eased up to allow Pogačar to get back in touch that meant the jeopardy was somewhat reduced in my mind but it’s true to say that while it’s been a peerless unbeaten run – he didn’t ride in 2023 – it’s not been flawless. Not quite.)

So while that offers hope to his rivals, of whom Seixas will hope to be one, the fact that UAE Team Emirates are also set to field Isaac Del Toro, who has been collecting Italian one-day race victories the way a child collects Panini stickers, swings the pendulum back in Pog’s favour. Since last March, the Mexican has won Milano-Torino, the GP Industria & Artigianato, the Giro della Toscana, Coppa Sabatini, the Trofeo Matteotti, the Giro dell’Emilia, the Gran Piemonte and the Giro del Veneto. His victory in the UAE Tour shows he’s climbing very well so he will be a valuable ally, or decoy, or Plan B for Pogačar.

• Our Strade Bianche episode will be out on Tuesday as I join Daniel Friebe and Brian Nygaard to review the action in Tuscany and look ahead to what Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico have in store. In the meantime, let’s go back to 2022, and the first of Pogačar’s hat-trick of wins with an episode called A Postcard From Strade Bianche recorded by me and Simon Gill.

Points mean prizes

One thing that Van der Poel’s win in Belgium and Seixas’s win in France may have had in common is that, at a certain point in each race, the focus of the riders behind may have switched to the battle for UCI points when the balance of probability suggested the outright victory was off the table. Fourth place at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad was worth 220 UCI points. Second at the Faun-Ardèche Classic was worth 170. To put that into context, a WorldTour stage win at Paris-Nice or Tirreno-Adriatico next week will net 60 points. The disproportionate awarding of points for one-day races, and the way it incentivises sitting tight and racing for second or third (or even sixth or seventh) instead of going all out to try to win the race, risking tumbling out of the points altogether, is one of the quirks of a system which can be seen to reward caution.

Certainly, since XDS-Astana made it blindingly obvious they were racing for positions and points rather than wins in a bid to avoid relegation from the WorldTour last season we’ve been viewing some of the races a little differently. Sometimes it can be hard to see what is unfolding in front of us, a little like looking at one of those Magic Eye pictures. There’s a subtle influence on tactics too. Teams who are trying to score points can scupper the plans of others who are concentrating on actually winning. The difficulty cycling has is conveying the points-chasing narrative in a way that engages and entertains the viewers without detracting from the race for victory and the top step of the podium. I watch almost all the available televised cycling all year round and I can’t tell you off the top of my head how many points fifth place gets in any given race. It’s got to the point where I now have a copy of the UCI points system handy when I’m watching.

At the end of last year, Daniel’s Trapdoor trilogy, looking at the battle for points and the WorldTour relegation and promotion fight, provided a series of fascinating insights into how three teams – XDS-Astana, Cofidis and Uno X – went about tackling the same problem. In true podcast tradition, that trilogy became a four-parter with the release of Daniel’s ‘heated debate’ with EF Education-Easypost sports director Tom Southam this week. In truth, it was less a heated debate than a thoughtful exploration of the competing incentives and opportunities stage and one-day races offer the teams and it is well worth a listen. Trapdoor: Drive To Survive is available now for Friends of the Podcast.

Sign up as a Friend of the Podcast

Vingegaard hopes to reach the sunlit lands

Last year, Jonas Vingegaard crashed while leading Paris-Nice, lost ground on the uphill finish to La Côte-Saint-André and pulled out of the race before they reached the Mediterranean. The crash disrupted his spring and he didn’t return to action until the Critérium du Dauphiné in June, arguably hampering his preparation for the Tour de France.

In his absence, his Visma-Lease A Bike teammate Matteo Jorgenson won Paris-Nice for the second consecutive year, joining Jacques Anquetil (2), Eddy Merckx (3), Raymond Poulidor (2), Joop Zoetemelk (2), Sean Kelly (7), Miguel Indurain (2), Laurent Jalabert (3), Alexandre Vinokourov (2) and Max Schachmann (2) as the riders who’ve won the Race to the Sun back-to-back.

Jorgenson is turning down the opportunity to win three in a row next week because he’s set to ride Strade Bianche and Tirreno-Adriatico instead, so it’ll be a good while yet before anyone comes close to equalling Kelly’s record of seven in a row. The Irishman’s run of wins in the 1980s, and the history of Paris-Nice, is the subject of a Friends of the Podcast episode I made a few years back, which I’ve bumped to the top of the subscriber feed for anyone who wants to delve into the background of the race before it starts on Sunday. It’s called Paris-Nice And The King.

As for Vingegaard, overall victory in Nice a week on Sunday may be less of a priority than getting through the race unscathed. We’ll get the lowdown on his first race of the season from our own Great Dane, Brian Nygaard in next week’s episode.

That’s enough train puns

We had the Van der Poel Express and the Paul Seixas Hype Train but one rider who deserves a railway-themed nickname more than most is Matt Brennan, who bounced back from a crash in Saturday’s Omloop Het Nieuwsblad to win Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne in impressive fashion. Brennan is still only 20 and it doesn’t take The Cycling Podcast’s cracked and misty crystal ball to predict big things in the very near future. He was born in Darlington and rode for the Stockton Wheelers club so I tried out the nickname The Locomotive in this week’s episode.

The first steam train to count members of the public as passengers was Locomotion No.1, built by Robert and George Stephenson in 1825. It ran on the Darlington to Stockton railway and was capable of reaching speeds of 12 miles per hour. I accept Brennan is a bit quicker than that but The Locomotive (rather than The Locomotion, which sounds like a Kylie Minogue song) fits perfectly.

Bearing in mind my previous attempt at giving a rider a nickname was il sanguinaccio volante – the flying black pudding – for Simon Yates, which got mentioned in the Belgian press and on Sky Sports, I think this one has a better chance of catching on.

Stick to cycling

And so to the title of this week’s edition of The 11.01 Cappuccino. As I waited to record this week’s episode with Daniel and Rob, I saw a video on social media of former world No.1 tennis player Daniil Medvedev, who was stuck in Dubai as airspace in the Middle East shut down following the escalation in conflict in the region and the US-Israel strikes on Iran and Iran’s strikes back at Israel, Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and others.

Medvedev and around 40 other players and officials who’d been at the Dubai Duty Free ATP Tour event, were stuck as flights across the region were cancelled. In the end, he was driven seven hours into Oman, stayed overnight and then flew to Istanbul and on to Los Angeles, arriving in time for the Indian Wells tournament.

It struck me that had the escalation in violence across the region happened a week earlier, when the UAE Tour was reaching its conclusion in Abu Dhabi, a few hundred riders, team staff, media and officials would have been similarly stuck, wondering if they could get out of the region by some route to make it to Belgium in time for Omloop Het Nieuwsblad.

I didn’t mention this in the podcast because, well, it was a hypothetical scenario that didn’t happen, and we try to steer away from speculation at the best of times. But it did make me think about the delicate dance a lot of professional sports are engaged in when it comes to money, power and sponsorship.

Back in 2006, I went to the Tour of Qatar, which was run by the Tour de France owners, ASO, on behalf of the Qataris who were paying the bills. It was the fifth edition of a race which lasted until 2016 and it had already established itself as an appealing alternative to the ‘traditional’ early-season stage races in Spain, the south of France and Italy. The weather was good, the roads generally good quality and free from parked cars and pesky residents trying to get to the bakery while the peloton was approaching. The logistics were simple and borderline luxurious, with a week spent in one very nice hotel. I was working for a magazine at the time and the costs were largely covered by the race organisers, who wanted to ensure media exposure for their client. If we’d been prepared to go to Paris we could have travelled on the charter flight free of charge but we chose to pay our own way to Doha from London. Nevertheless, I was aware that the organisers were providing our bed and breakfast and, no matter how objective you think you are, that thought always occupies a tiny part of your mind. Should I be here, doing this, this way?

In our defence, the magazine probably wouldn’t have spent hundreds, if not thousands, of the year’s editorial budget on covering a mostly inconsequential race in the desert and it’s always better to see a place and experience it before forming any opinions.

I asked to speak to a member of the Qatari organisers and on the last day, as the race made its way up and down the corniche road, we sat in an empty grandstand and I asked about Qatar and the state’s plans in sport. Qatar was already hosting major tennis and golf tournaments. From my hotel room window way up on the whatever floor it was, the only grass I could see was the perfectly manicured hotel grounds and the golf courses. He said that cycling was just the start – the vision was to host Formula 1, the Ryder Cup, the World Athletics Championships, the Olympics and football’s World Cup. I must admit, I was extremely sceptical about any of that happening but over the next two decades Qatar has hosted all those things except the Ryder Cup, which is a golf match played between the USA and Europe, and the Olympic Games. I asked what it was about cycling that appealed and he said that it was a sport that had deep roots and prestige in much of Europe. Although he didn’t say that cycling was relatively cheap and desperate for investment, that sentiment was left between the lines, it was clear that the Tour of Qatar was part of a much longer strategy, a small event that would help nudge Qatar’s name and reputation into the minds of people further afield, bridging the gap between an idea that seemed outlandish at the time – hosting the World Cup – and reality.

And, as we’ve seen, other states in the region have done the same – the Tour of Oman, the Alula Tour, the Abu Dhabi and Dubai Tours which have evolved into the UAE Tour that’s on the WorldTour today. And, of course, there’s the team sponsorship either directly from, or underwritten by, nation states – Bahrain, UAE, the Alula bit of Jayco-Alula.

Of course, any truly global sport should be free to go to all parts of the world, to grow its fanbase and develop commercial opportunities. The Middle Eastern states seeking to expand into tourism, finance and commerce and other industries to mitigate against the eventual decline of oil and gas, were always going to see sport as a fast-track to power in the region and prestige beyond it.

Sportswashing is a catch-all phrase that’s come to cover anything that might have a bit of a whiff about it once you peel back a couple of layers but whenever a company or country sponsors anything it’s doing so for one of two main reasons: to broaden or deepen its profile, or enhance its reputation. To be clear, most of those states I’ve mentioned have been the target of Iran’s missiles, and we must always be careful to separate the general population from the rulers, but they are also authoritarian or autocratic to differing degrees, and they fare poorly when it comes to Amnesty International’s assessments of human rights. While we’re talking about the Bahrain Grand Prix, Qatar World Cup, or the potential Saudi investment in One Cycling or Pogačar’s latest heroics, we’re not talking about the realities of those authoritarian or autocratic regimes, human rights, freedom of expression and association, or the right to simply be who you are, or in the case of the UAE the ongoing situation in Sudan.

And there’s not one standard being applied here either. Russia is still (mostly) banned from international sport, although its athletes will take part in the Winter Paralympics shortly. Israel and the USA are not banned despite being seen as by some as aggressors. I suspect, in the unlikely event that there was a serious move to take the World Cup away from America there’d be bemusement from some and uproar from others. The definitions of war, aggression and defence shift and change wherever you are in the world and whichever direction you’re looking in.

The reason I mention all this is not to pick sides, or suggest what should or shouldn’t be permitted in professional cycling but to insist that we can’t keep pretending that having only one side of the conversation is sufficient, because it’s not.

Without getting into the details of who owned and funded the team, the fact is that ‘Israel’ as a sponsorship entity has effectively been removed from the sport as a result of public and commercial pressure. By default, Israel’s right to have its name in the peloton has been taken away, whereas the UAE’s has not. Is that right or just? I don’t know the answer to that, and it’s not for me to decide, but the wider point is that no one in charge of the sport is prepared to have that conversation either.

There’s a yawning chasm at the heart of the sport which has led to a near-total abdication of responsibility for deciding who gets to play the game. It seems that everyone’s money is good enough until someone has to stand up tall and answer some questions or justify something. When that point comes, everyone looks away and finds something more important to talk about.

At the risk of failing to see the bigger picture, and at the further risk of trivialising what is an awful, frightening and uncertain situation across the Middle East, cycling had a near-miss of its own last week. Had half the WorldTour peloton been stranded in Dubai, with the prospect of riders either missing the opening Classic of the season or facing hazardous journeys across borders to get home, we’d be having a very different conversation this week. I just wonder how much of that conversation would revolve around sport’s willingness to be used, often without understanding or even considering the consequences.

And so, back to the slightly glib line ‘stick to cycling’, which we sometimes hear whenever we discuss anything that strays into the ‘real world’ or politics, I’d suggest that only looking at one side of the coin is possibly not a sustainable approach in the longer term.

And finally, an apology to all Newcastle United supporters…

I owe all members of the Toon Army an apology… A couple of weeks ago I commented on the way TNT abruptly cut short coverage of the Volta ao Algarve stage as Paul Seixas was on his way to a first professional victory. They went to an ad break with a couple of kilometres to go and when they returned they were talking about Newcastle United’s tie against Qarabag in the Champions League. I mistakenly assumed this was a second-tier Europa League tie rather than a really important Champions League game. To make matters worse, and further alienate our friends in the North East, I was rather less than effusive when Daniel explained that Florian Vermeersch is a Newcastle fan. It’s nothing personal, honestly, I just bear a grudge against Eddie Howe, whose Bournemouth team denied Watford the Championship title on the last day of the 2014-15 season. Football supporters have long memories and an ability to hold petty grudges for a lifetime but I’d like to assure all Newcastle fans I thoroughly enjoyed my last visit to St James’ Park in 2017 when Watford won there 3-0. (I’m making it worse aren’t I…?) Anyway, I’ve made it my mission to find out why Vermeersch has chosen to support Newcastle – he was at a recent game against Manchester City – and will report back in the podcast.

by Lionel Birnie

Ten years ago, Simon Gill and I went to Flanders for Opening Weekend. Our first stop was Kortrijk and Peter Sagan’s pre-race press conference. Sagan was the big Classics star at a time when the demarcation between the major one-day races and the grand tours was more pronounced than it sometimes feels these days. We didn’t see Contador, Froome or Quintana lining up for the Tour of Flanders the way Pogačar does now.

Sagan was 26, approaching the peak of his powers, and we were all anticipating the start of an era of dominance on the cobbles. The Slovak was reigning world champion and he’d ruffled feathers a month earlier by riding the Tour de San Luis in Argentina with hairy legs – a bit of a no-no when it comes to peloton aesthetics.

A lot of the press conference was dedicated to the question of whether Sagan had reached for the razor in time for the first big race of the season and he declined to give much away. Sure enough, on the Saturday, Sagan’s legs were still hairy, which probably would have had the gnarly old Flemish spectators sucking on their cigarettes and shaking their heads in disapproval were it not for the fact he was wearing three-quarter-length leg warmers, which was probably the greater sin.

Sagan finished second to Greg Van Avermaet in Gent that day. Perhaps if he’d shaved his legs he’d have done a reverse Samson and had the strength to win? It wasn’t until a couple of weeks later, when stage five of Tirreno-Adriatico was cancelled due to snow, that he finally found time to have a shave. Later that spring, Sagan won his first – and only – edition of the Tour of Flanders with legs as smooth as the surface of the most well-worn cobblestone.

The reason that incident sticks in my mind is that Sagan was an incongruous figure in the old-school Flandrian milieu. He was a bit of an outsider, bringing a touch of brash, flinty mountain biking spirit to the home of cyclo-cross, where they like to think the mud is smoother, silkier and that little bit purer.

Simon and I were in Belgium to follow the race as it criss-crossed the Flandrian fields in the frosty early spring air. I wanted to capture the sounds and soul of Omloop, which signals the start of the Classics season. We encountered the fanatical Flemish fans and soaked up the atmosphere during a day that always feels like the place is waking up after winter.

Listening to an episode from a decade ago, I am struck by how little has changed. The roads still look the same, the fervour among the fans on the roadside is as great as ever, the scent of hot dogs and cigarette smoke (yes, still!) remains, and the crackle in the air as familiar sounds herald the riders’ arrival has a visceral, reassuring quality. It’s a reminder that spring is just around the corner – if it’s not arrived already – with the promise of longer days, brighter skies and warmer air. From here, we disappear into a cloud of white dust at Strade Bianche, before Paris-Nice and Tirreno-Adriatico propel us into the thick of the Classics season.

Flanders Fever, the episode released after that trip to Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, is available to our Friends of the Podcast subscribers. We’ve moved it to the top of the feed so you can find it easily if you want to get into the Flandrian spirit ahead of Opening Weekend. Sign up as a Friend of the Podcast at thecyclingpodcast.com – an annual subscription gives access to our back catalogue of more than 300 episodes, plus new episodes of KM0 as they are released – and it helps keep the show on the road.

This week’s episode will be released tomorrow (Thursday). We’ll review the recent all-you-can-eat buffet of stage races which offered some intriguing clues about the season to come. Remco Evenepoel has looked very, very good in his new Red Bull colours, seemingly winning at will until the road pointed upwards in the UAE when he was no match for Isaac del Toro. Juan Ayuso is another rider to make an instant impression with his new team, Lidl-Trek, by winning the Volta ao Algarve. We will also look ahead to Omloop Nieuwsblad (I still can’t get used to the new name, minus the ‘Het’), which is the traditional curtain-raiser for the Classics season. Mathieu van der Poel, fresh from another dominant winter of cyclo-cross, is due to make his first appearance at Omloop, which automatically adds to the race’s status as a key indicator for the bigger races to come. Daniel, Rob and I will discuss all this and more in The Cycling Podcast this week.

Classsic episodes from our archive

In the meantime, delve into our archive to learn more about the spring Classics. These episodes are on our Friends of the Podcast feed, except where stated.

Flanders Fever (2016)
The 2016 editions of Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne.

FREE: A Postcard From Strade Bianche (2022) – Regular feed
The 2022 edition showcases a new way of racing.

Classicissima – Springtime in Sanremo (2023)
A four-part love letter to Milan-Sanremo, made at the 2023 edition of the race.

The Lionel of Flanders (2017)
A five-part travelogue taking in Dwars Door Vlaanderen, E3 Harelbeke and Gent-Wevelgem.

FREE: Paris-Roubaix (2021) – Regular feed
The 2021 edition was held in autumn after being postponed in April. It was also the first time a women’s race was held.

Lionel of the Ardennes (2019)
Join Lionel and Simon as they discover Flèche Wallonne, Liège-Bastogne-Liège and another side of Belgium.

Subscribe as a Friend of the Podcast

The Cycling Podcast returned ahead of the 2026 season with the now traditional Speculation Episode. It’s a tradition that stretches all the way back to 2021 and it’s an episode that pushes Lionel out of his comfort zone before the season has even got underway.

Nevertheless, Daniel, Lionel and a selection of our regular correspondents gazed into the cracked crystal ball to see what the 2026 road racing season has in store.

With the Tour Down Under in full swing, it won’t be long before the Classics are upon us, and then it’ll be head-long into another busy summer with daily coverage of the Grand Tours recorded on location. The Cycling Podcast Féminin will be released monthly, with the first episode of the year imminent. Arrivée episodes will cover the biggest one-day races, and our programme of KM0 episodes for Friends of the Podcast subscribers will be released throughout the year.

The Speculation Episode 2026

In The Speculation Episode Daniel mentioned he’d made 26 predictions for 2026. Here they are, along with Lionel’s (reluctant) attempts to see into the future.

Daniel’s ’26 predictions

1. Protests about a political, social or environmental cause will disrupt a major race.

2. Even more carbs.

3. The German media will desperately try to push a Lipowitz vs Remco storyline in the second half of the year. If they get any help from the two riders, it’ll also be the most intriguing subplot of the Tour.

4. The Seixas hype train will be the most terrifying white-knuckle ride of 2026.

5. Giulio Pellizzari will be Jonas Vingegaard’s biggest rival at the Giro.

6. A rider colliding with a spectator will significantly impact the outcome of a major race, probably Paris-Roubaix.

7. Polynesian Noni fruit will be the breakout legal performance enhancer/nutrition fad.

8. At some point in the year we’ll see a team employing a galaxy-brained and doomed Pog-slaying tactic that, we’ll learn later, has been concocted either by AI or the team’s data analyst.

9. EF Education-Easy Post will give us two strong contenders for the title of 2026 breakout star – Markel Beloki and Mattia Agostinacchio

10. One fairly major WorldTour team will run into life-threatening financial difficulty. I have an idea who but won’t say just yet.

11. Jonas Abrahamsen will win another Tour de France stage – Foix or Voiron would be my bets.

12. Our Giro podcasts will feature tedious complaints about a final week that looks to have been designed by someone who learned logistics from Ryanair’s definition of ‘Paris’.

13. Visma-Lease a Bike’s Anton Schiffer will have a ‘moment’, if not for a performance then something he says in an interview or becoming the WorldTour’s first ever rider-coach (he’s a Sports Science graduate).

14. Simon Yates won’t be spotted at a single bike race.

15. We and everyone else will continue to call the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes ‘The Dauphiné’.

16. There’ll be a moment, probably very brief, when we in the media will be reading the last rites of the ‘Pogačar era’.

17. There’ll be more than a moment – probably about eleven-and-a-half months – when the inherent boredom of the ‘Pogačar era’ will be the dominant and, yes, most boring trending media topic.

18. Matthew Brennan will win Paris-Roubaix

19. Enric Mas, who always does well in ‘even’ years, will enjoy a career remontada at the Giro, maybe even finishing on the podium.

20. The ‘comeback of 2026’ won’t be Mas’s but he will feature in it: cycling’s best ever fly-on-the-wall streaming series, El Día Menos Pensado, returns early in the year and should be a banger.

21. Unibet Rose Rockets will realise their dream of not only starting the Tour but also winning a stage. Victor Lafay will get it…then immediately announce that he’s quitting cycling with immediate effect, not to open a fromagerie in Japan, as he threatened last year, but to become the world’s first skateboarding ventriloquist. Marc Soler will steal the fromagerie idea and relocate from Andorra to Okinawa, yet still commute to Spanish stage races.

22. Oscar Onley will make a mockery of ‘Second Season Syndrome’ to establish himself as the best climber and stage-race rider in the world behind the Pog-Ving axis of excellence.

23. I’ll successfully complete my mission to achieve universal adoption of ‘The SlovALIEN’ as Tadej Pogačar’s nickname.

24. Paul Magnier will win Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Gent-Wevelgem

25. One of the sleeper, back-channel debates of 2026 will be about whether sprinters are heading for extinction. I sort of think they are – with caveats.

26. At least another 15 riders will give interviews out of which the same pull-quote about cycling not being ‘100% clean’ will be crowbarred onto social media.

Lionel’s ’26 predictions

1. Soudal-Quick Step will do the ‘Opening Weekend double’ winning Omloop Het Nieuwsblad and Kuurne-Brussels-Kuurne. After that, it’ll be a barren spring campaign for the Belgian team.

2. Tadej Pogačar won’t win Strade Bianche – but only because of an unfortunately-timed puncture…

3. …He will, however, win Paris-Roubaix after a long-ish solo attack.

4. The new name for Gent-Wevelgem, In Flanders Fields from Middelkerke to Wevelgem, won’t catch on.

5. Ben Healy finishes on the podium at Amstel Gold, Flèche Wallonne and Liège-Bastogne-Liège – winning Amstel.

6. Thibau Nys will win his first WorldTour one-day race, Flèche Wallonne.

7. Jonas Vingegaard wins the Giro d’Italia but is pushed all the way by João Almeida and pays the price at the Tour, missing the podium for the first time.

8. The Giro d’Italia will confirm plans for a grande partenza in Abu Dhabi (or Saudi Arabia) in 2027 or 2028.

9. UAE Team Emirates and Pogačar will dominate the opening team time trial at the Tour de France meaning Pogačar leads overall from start to finish as he joins the five-time winners club.

10. Olav Kooij will win the first bunch sprint stage of the Tour de France – but will have to wait until the race reaches Bordeaux because of the breakaways and GC riders.

11. Mads Pedersen will win the green jersey at the Tour de France.

12. The same rider will win both Alpe d’Huez stages at the Tour de France.

13. The independent law firm instructed by Ineos Grenadiers to investigate the allegations levelled against the team’s carer David Rozman last year will finally publish its report.

14. As extreme heat becomes more common, technological improvements lead to the creation of a streamlined ice vest that can cool riders for much longer periods and most of the riders start wearing them on very hot days.

15. Gear ratios continue to get bigger and someone rides a time trial with a 70-tooth chainring, larger than the 68T Tobias Foss used a couple of years ago.

16. Groupama-FDJ will be the last of the WorldTour teams to win a WorldTour race – at the Tour of Poland in August.

17. Pogačar will keep everyone guessing about his Vuelta a España participation until the very last moment – confirming his place on the start line in Monaco just a few days before the race. He will go on to win overall, followed by a third consecutive rainbow jersey in the road race, and another European title, on home soil in Slovenia.

18. Matthew Brennan will be the star of the Vuelta – winning a small handful of lumpy stages with punchy finishes.

19. A sports director will reveal the extent to which AI is being used to determine race strategy and tactics.

20. A recently-retired rider – or a rider nearing retirement – will say in an interview that professional cycling has got far too serious, too obsessed with carbs, watts and riding to numbers, mourning the loss of a carefree era that never really existed.

21. Time trial helmet design will get even more extreme. To comply with the new UCI rules regarding ‘traditional’ helmets for road racing, someone will unveil a lid that conforms to the letter of the law with the right number of vents and so on but looks absolutely ridiculous.

22. Anticipating the UCI’s decision to award points for other disciplines from 2027, capitalising on the buzz around the World Championships in Rwanda, and building on the growth of events like the Nedbank Gravel Burn, there are proposals to include a gravel stage race in the WorldTour.

23. The United Arab Emirates’ involvement in the conflict in Sudan provokes nothing like the level of protest or comment as Israel’s actions in Gaza and UAE-Team Emirates face little outcry.

24. Team infrastructure begins to creak at the sheer demands of the WorldTour schedule and there are calls to reduce the number of events and eliminate calendar clashes. Proposals include a two-tier system with development squads eligible to ride the lower-ranked events leading to a complete overhaul and revamp of the entire professional calendar.

25. A group of team owners will reveal plans for a new ‘league’ to revolutionise professional cycling’s business, sponsorship and broadcast model.

26. Now it’s over to you! My tolerance of speculation has been stretched to breaking point so send your ideas and I’ll read out some of the best, funniest or most outlandish in a future episode, or reproduce them in The 11.01 Cappuccino. Email us at contact@thecyclingpodcast.com, reply to this email or comment on this article to make your predictions for ’26.

Catch up on KM0

While we had a break over the holiday period, we released a few episodes of KM0. Daniel’s three-part series, Trapdoor, looked at the battle to avoid relegation from the UCI WorldTour. XDS-Astana survived, Cofidis did not, and Uno-X took one of the available places among the elite. The series provides some illuminating insights into the strategies the teams employed.

Last winter, Lionel travelled to Cardiff to meet the people behind the Maindy Flyers, the junior club where it all began for Geraint Thomas. There was a conversation with James Startt, a photographer and journalist who has spent the last 36 summers on the road at the Tour de France. And, with Simon Yates announcing his retirement, we delved into the archive for an episode recorded just over a decade ago when Lionel travelled to a Lancashire cafe to meet Adam and Simon when they were still in the early days of their careers.

Sign up as a Friend of the Podcast

An interview with Kjell Carlström

In last week’s episode, The Tadej Programme, we heard from Kjell Carlström about the rebranding of the Israel-Premier Tech team as NSN Cycling Team. You can listen to his full conversation with Daniel Friebe and read a transcript below.

Daniel Friebe: So Kjell, I don’t know how much you can talk about this or how involved you were, but it kind of came out of the blue for a lot of people – the team becoming NSN. We knew that the team would probably change identity, but none of us saw it coming: who was going to come on board or who the new sponsor was going to be? Can you talk me through as much as you know or can say from after the Vuelta – how this happened?

Kjell Carlström: Well, I mean, the reality is that we got the demands from Factor and Premier Tech to change the name and the flag, and that was when we really started to work on it. We understood that it was necessary and it was super important to do it. We had a few different avenues immediately when we made the announcement; it was only a few hours, actually, before we got the first contact. And then we went along those roads. We tried to negotiate with them for title sponsorship and some of them looked really, really promising, some of them less so. It took some time, but because we had this existing partnership with Stoneweg – who is, of course, a financial investment company with very good connections – that’s how everything happened with NSN. The others fell through or couldn’t commit in time, and this seemed like a great opportunity to cross over with another sport, which is soccer in this case. So, of course, that’s a very interesting avenue, and at the same time, the fact that NSN is a company that works professionally with marketing and promotion is also something of big interest.

DF: We know your primary responsibility, if I’m not mistaken, is on the sporting side. So when you say ‘we’... No, it’s not? You’re shaking your head.

Kjell Carlström: No, my responsibility is to look after the team. It doesn’t matter what it is.

DF: Okay. Well, when you say ‘We started looking,’ who is ‘we’? Who are the individuals in the organisation that were involved in that?

Kjell Carlström: It was mainly I and Phoebe Haymes – her title now is chief marketing and communications officer.

DF: She’s been promoted.

Kjell Carlström: Yeah. At least she has a decent title. And then, you know, actually anybody that had good connections was invited to rise up and talk about it. And of course, then also Ido Shavit, who has been the CEO for the last few years. So we worked together and we looked into everything that we could.

DF: You probably know which question is coming next. What role did Sylvan [Adams, the Israel-Premier Tech owner] have?

Kjell Carlström: Well, the role that he had was to give us the okay to go ahead and remove himself.

DF: So they weren’t his contacts? I mean, Stoneweg obviously, but...

Kjell Carlström: From some parts, yes. We explored the potential contacts through him as well, but in the end, they didn’t materialise.

DF: Okay. And another probably awkward question, but one I have to ask: is it his money still? Or how much, if any of it, is his money?

Kjell Carlström: No, it’s not. That was the other thing that we needed to look into to ensure we did this in a good way. Fortunately, we found a solution where we could get enough budget for the team to continue as it has been doing in the last few years.

DF: He, I believe, was at the training camp a couple of weeks ago. In what capacity? Is he now just a supporter, or what is his relationship with this team?

Kjell Carlström: Well, the main thing was to finalise the deal with NSN. And then also to ride with the guys, because in the end, that’s what he has always been passionate about. I wouldn’t exclude the possibility that he would come visit the team at some point during the year because he has supported the team for almost 10 years. It is something that has been a big part of our history and his last few years.

DF: As far as sponsorships go, it doesn’t look like the traditional one where a company is just looking for exposure or brand recognition. There’s Stoneweg and then there’s NSN. Can you just explain, to the best of your knowledge, what these two entities are getting out of this? Or what they are hoping for from it?

Kjell Carlström: Well, I think first of all, they want to expand their businesses. Being part of a team and having that kind of visibility is valuable for both companies and brings different kinds of new connections and networking. But they also see a great possibility in cycling – that we can do things better than we have done in the past as a sport. Since this opportunity arose, we are in a lucky situation that they are with us, and hopefully, this will work out perfectly for all parties.

DF: NSN in particular – it’s a fairly new entity and people maybe will have a hard time understanding how exactly they make their money and what their business model is. They see the potential in cycling, but is that in terms of… for example, the One Cycling project maybe materialising and generating revenue or selling the sponsorship of the team? How would you characterise it?

Kjell Carlström: Well, I wouldn’t say that there’s only one thing; I think they see it in a lot of different ways. They promote and host promotional events, they arrange games and things like this, including having rights in different areas of, for example, soccer or the entertainment business. So in that sense, they are making their money and I think it is a big business. That’s just my opinion, of course. But in terms of cycling, I think there are so many different opportunities that cycling could develop further. Those are some of the things that NSN has been saying – that this is something that could be expanded and made better. So I think that’s mainly it.

DF: The mayor of Barcelona was at your launch the other day.

Kjell Carlström: Correct.

DF: And Jaume from Stoneweg talked about the team’s – I think the words he used were ‘Barcelona soul’ or ‘Barcelona DNA.’ How much is the Tour de France starting in Barcelona – perhaps not the main reason for NSN’s involvement, but – how important is that?

Kjell Carlström: I think it’s a great… maybe ‘catalyst’ would be the right word for it. In the end, it is a great opportunity for high visibility and connecting to NSN and the team in that sense. If we were able to do something great in Barcelona, that would definitely be the icing on the cake, no question. So of course we are working towards having a great, great season, but in particular the start in Barcelona. If we could pull off a stage victory there, it would be perfect.

DF: There has been some speculation and concern that, rightly or wrongly and through no fault of your own, you might still be the target of opposition or protests in Barcelona. Even maybe at the Volta a Catalunya and other races. Are you worried about that?

Kjell Carlström: I’m not. I wouldn’t say that I’m thinking too much about it, but the reality is that cycling as a whole is vulnerable because we are on open roads. I think it would be hugely detrimental if that were to happen, no matter the reason. But I think it would be completely unfounded if it were directed at us; that’s my personal feeling. We are a sports team like everyone else, and sports should not be mixed with violent protests. I think protests are completely fine as long as they stick to some kind of rules. It doesn’t matter whether it’s about sports or anything else; it should always be respected in that way.

DF: Obviously at the Vuelta last year it all came to a head and you guys stayed in the race until it ended the way it ended. Would you do anything differently today from what you did at the Vuelta as a team?

Kjell Carlström: That’s difficult to answer because when you live those moments, you take decisions as you go. You take the decisions with the information you have at that moment. Now we have more information and maybe that would change things, maybe it wouldn’t. I don’t know. It’s difficult to answer because you don’t have that information when you’re in the heat of the moment. I still think it was the right thing to remain in the race because we are a sports team. The protests should have been contained. The way they were done was wrong, in my opinion.

DF: We’re not going to relitigate that now. I think you made your position fairly clear you recognise the right to protest up to the point where they become violent. So, to talk about sport for a minute, I suppose this has all happened a bit too late for it to make a significant difference to your recruitment. I’m thinking about, for example, the ‘Catalan DNA’ we just discussed. You’ve got one Catalan rider and presumably you might have a more pronounced Catalan identity in the team in future years, but it was probably too late for that to happen this year. Am I right?

Kjell Carlström: Definitely. In the end, one thing that is clear is that our Catalan identity also comes through NSN. It’s something that we are adopting on the go. But yes, it is there, so that’s clear. At the same time, we are a very multicultural team. We have a lot of different nations represented, whether in the staff or the riders. I don’t see that changing; I personally see the way we operate as a strength. It is sometimes a little bit difficult to communicate between completely different cultures, but because we have such a variety, it makes it better. It is easier to understand different views and communication styles when you have so many different cultures.

DF: So we said it was late to shape your recruitment, but I’m guessing Biniam Girmay was a rider who’d interested you for several months. In fact, I think there was speculation even in the summer that he interested you. Can you talk a little bit about how that negotiation went, even going back to when you first showed interest in signing him?

Kjell Carlström: It was sometime during the year, sometime after the Tour, that there were more and more conversations about it. I think the reality is: who would not be interested in such a rider? I have difficulty seeing anyone who wouldn’t be. Of course, we have been trying to become a team that can win in sprints for a few years. It hasn’t succeeded as we had hoped for one reason or another, so this was a logical next step from our perspective and, I think, from Biniam’s perspective. I believe he saw us as a well-functioning team with a good culture that is really trying to be performance-oriented. That’s something that I think he valued.

DF: If you look at his last two seasons, obviously 2024 was fantastic with the green jersey and stages of the Tour. Then last year he accumulated a decent number of UCI points but didn’t win. I guess consistency may be the thing you have to work on with him. What do you see as the big development points for him with your team now?

Kjell Carlström: Yeah, I think you’re right. Consistency, but in the end, it is a team effort. It is the consistency of key people supporting Biniam to win. There are so many different aspects to it and we are already making sure that we are ticking the boxes and looking through all those different aspects. Hopefully, we will get it right immediately, but it might take a while. In the end, he will be using completely new material and working with new teammates, so this is probably going to be a bit of a process before we get it right. At the same time, I think it is a great opportunity for both him and us.

DF: Any changes on the coaching side for him? I presume so; he’ll be coached by one of your trainers.

Kjell Carlström: Yeah, correct.

DF: And in terms of his programme priorities, is it broadly going to be along the same lines – targeting the same kind of races: Classics plus the Tour de France?

Kjell Carlström: Yeah, I think that’s correct to say. Of course, in the beginning of the season, there’s maybe a little bit more focus on stage races to get ready for the Classics and then trying to optimise the results during those. And then going ahead and focusing more on a Grand Tour and trying to get victories there as well. But the main goal is to try to get him back to winning ways; getting those under the belt as soon as possible is always better.

DF: On the GC front, obviously you’ve lost [Matthew] Riccitello. Is there any chance at all that Derek Gee comes back into the team? I think probably not.

Kjell Carlström: I don’t know. I can’t answer for that, but I guess it’s unlikely. We will see in the next few weeks how things evolve.

DF: Would you be open to taking him back?

Kjell Carlström: Of course. We stated that from the beginning. But a lot of time has passed since then and, in general, it seems unlikely, to be honest.

DF: Is that an area – GC stage races – where you feel a little bit exposed or underpowered because of that and because the sponsors came on board late? Or do you still have high hopes?

Kjell Carlström: We definitely do not have the same kind of firepower as we had in 2024; this is clear. But it doesn’t mean that we can’t explore the possibilities with younger guys who haven’t got the experience yet. Who knows whether they will be able to do it? And then we, of course, hopefully also have Stevie Williams coming back soon from his injury. Now it’s the second year with [Alexey] Lutsenko in the team, so maybe he will also have better results in some of the stage races.

DF: And then final thing Kjell, last year as far as rankings were concerned you did pretty well. You were comfortably inside the WorldTour cutoff. What approach are you going to take to accumulating points in the first year of this next cycle? Are you going to be frantically chasing them, or just racing for wins and letting them come?

Kjell Carlström: Well, of course, it is always in the back of our minds. There’s no question. We were relegated once and we don’t ever want to experience that again. So it’s definitely in our strategy to maximise the points. But at the same time, we do want to win, so you have to try to combine those two things in the best possible way. We think we have a good strategy for that, which Steve Bauer, together with Sam Bewley and the performance team, are creating at the moment. Hopefully, it will work out well. In the end, if you are able to win in the big races, you score points; there’s no circumventing that. That’s the best strategy if you’re able to do it. But if you’re not, then you have to adapt your strategy to something that works for you. We are agile and flexible in changing our approach during the year if needed. But in the end, no matter what, you have to have performing riders, and that’s the main goal.

DF: Great. That’s 20 minutes without mentioning Andres Iniesta, so we’ve done pretty well.

A Wonderful Quizmastime

It’s time for The Cycling Podcast Féminin’s Christmas quiz, a festive tradition as essential as the turkey, mince pies and glass of sherry.

Online now: You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout… would all be worthy advice for our co-hosts on this episode of The Cycling Podcast Féminin. Yes, quizmaster Rose Manley, defending champion Rebecca Charlton and perennial quiz loser Denny Gray are back for another humdinger of a quiz. Join in as they take on such rounds as Blankety Bonk, the Sound Round and the now infamous Cryptic Criterium. No genuine cycling knowledge required but an enjoyment of puns is advisable.

Before all the ugly competitiveness sets in, the team look back at some of their top racing moments of 2025. Tantalising rivalries, career-changing breakthroughs and some French flair all make the list. And we hear from a few familiar friends to find out their top picks from the season too.

And of course no Christmas is complete without a little homespun festive music and some Cycling Podcast-themed gifting.

Keep listening right to the end for a very special exclusive treat from Paul Carella, the musician extraordinaire who also happens to be Rebecca Charlton’s partner.

Also on the agenda, Greek rising star Flyinthesoupis, more allegations of quiz fixing and could that be the sound of Rebecca really enjoying Nienke Vinke’s white jersey win?

Coming soon: The third part of our Trapdoor series

The final instalment of our Trapdoor trilogy examines how Cofidis went from arguably the greatest Tour de France in their nearly three-decade history at the 2023 Tour de France to relegation from the WorldTour 18 months later.

Authoritarian management, shoddy recruitment and plummeting morale have been blamed for the team’s fall from cycling’s top tier, and further evidence for all three is presented here. We find out how and why team boss Cédric Vasseur ‘lost the dressing room’ after that golden 2023 summer before his departure, officially by mutual accord, in the midst of the team’s relegation battle.

Trapdoor: The Fall of a French Institution will drop into the Friends of the Podcast feed on Christmas Day.

Subscribe as a Friend of the Podcast

• Our final regular episode of 2025 – The Juan That Got Away – is out now and features Juan Ayuso talking about his move from UAE Team Emirates to Lidl-Trek and objectives for the 2026 season.

• Between Christmas and New Year there’ll be a couple of new episodes of KM0. The 2025 season marked the end of an era for British cycling with the retirement of Geraint Thomas. Lionel and Graham were in Cardiff at the end of the Lloyds Tour of Britain to witness his farewell. At the start of the year, Lionel made a trip to see where it all began and meet the people who started the Maindy Flyers junior cycling club 30 years ago where Thomas discovered his love of cycling. There’ll also be a conversation with photographer and journalist James Startt, who was recognised in July for reaching the milestone of covering 35 editions of the Tour de France. Listen out for those episodes next week.

Season’s greetings from everyone at The Cycling Podcast

As that’s (almost) a wrap for the 2025 season we’d like to wish a very happy Christmas to everyone who celebrates, and happy holidays to all. We’ll be back in January in time for the Tour Down Under. Until then, thank you for listening, and a very special thanks to all our Friends of the Podcast for supporting us. Collectively you are by far our biggest sponsors and we hope you know just how much we appreciate your support because it enables us to release our regular weekly episodes and cover the Grand Tours on the road.