Never Mind The Balearics

This week's KM0 mini series comes to you from the island of Mallorca

by Lionel Birnie

As sometimes happens, the idea for the title came first and I worked back from there. Never Mind The Balearics is inspired by the title of the classic 1977 punk album of a similar name by the Sex Pistols.

Over Christmas, I started thinking about how to re-familiarise myself with the world of professional cycling after more than a year away from the mic and the mixed zone and thought the five-day Challenge Mallorca, and a visit to see Rob Hatch at The Home of Cycling, would be a nice reintroduction. Other than the UCI Gravel World Championships in Leuven in October, it’ll be the first bike race I’ve been at since the final stage of the 2023 Tour de France in Paris.

All of a sudden, that feels like a long time ago. How quickly things change! Hopefully, a week criss-crossing the island will bring me back up to speed.

The Challenge Mallorca is the stage race that’s not a stage race, of course – five separate one-day races organised by the same people and grouped together with an unofficial classification in a format that makes it attractive for teams that have just finished their final winter training camps. The riders are not obliged to take part in all five races, meaning the teams can give a taste of competitive action to a larger number of riders than would ordinarily be the case.

Unlike the riders, who are free to skip a day or two if they wish, I will endeavour to complete the course and there’ll be a daily episode loosely telling the story of each of the five days.

When I landed on Monday, the sun was shining and the temperature was pushing 20C, a very welcome respite from the British winter. Rob said it was exceptionally mild and felt more like the Canary Islands than the Balearics. We headed down to Port d’Andratx – where the third and final race of the women’s Challenge Mallorca was won by Thalita De Jong – for lunch and the sun shone making the Med look its trademark brilliant blue. I started to wonder whether I should have applied sun cream.

Port d’Andratx.

It was windy, though, and there are showers forecast for the weekend, so I’ll enjoy the winter sun as long as it lasts.

Mallorca is a haven for cyclists all year round, of course. People flock to ride Sa Calobra, the Coll de Sóller, Puig Major or, as I did on a rented mountain bike when I first visited the island on a family holiday as a teenager, up to the lighthouse at Formentor.

I’m looking forward to rediscovering the island, reacquainting myself with the professional peloton, and uncovering some of the stories about cycling in the Balearics. I’ve based myself in Sóller and, from a quick glance at the roadbook, I think the race comes through the town three times over the five days but, tempting as it is to pull up at chair at one of the cafes in the square and enjoy a coffee and an ensaïmada (a sweet bread made with lard and dusted with icing sugar) I will explore further afield, starting tomorrow morning with a trip down to the start in Palmanova and a search for some familiar faces.

Sóller by night.

Originally, the series was intended to be exclusively for Friends of the Podcast subscribers but, early in the New Year, we began discussions with the travel company Sports Tours International about them becoming our title sponsors for the early part of the season.

As well as organising trips to watch the major Spring Classics, the Tour de France and the Gent Six-Day, they offer packages to ride some of the most prestigious sportives in the world, including the Étape du Tour and the Marmotte in France, and the Mallorca 312 in late April. This gives riders the opportunity to do a lap of the island (312 kilometres) on closed roads, or tackle one of the shorter, but still considerable, 225km or 167km routes. Anyway, when they heard about my plan to immerse myself in the island’s cycling culture for a week at the Challenge Mallorca they asked whether the series could be rolled into their title sponsorship package and made available for everyone to hear.

Never Mind The Balearics, a five-part KM0 series, starts following Wednesday’s Trofeo Calvià. It will appear on The Cycling Podcast’s regular feed thanks to sponsorship from Sports Tours International.

Jonny Be Good

In this week’s episode, we reflect on the Tour Down Under, won by Jhonatan Narváez, making his debut for UAE Team Emirates after his transfer from Ineos Grenadiers.

Last week, the first two names Daniel went for when predicting who would excel on Old Willunga Hill Mate – he tells me we’re contractually obliged to call it that – were Narváez and Oscar Onley, who finished first and second. I should have asked him for the lottery numbers.

Anyway, in this week’s episode we pondered whether Narváez was the ready-made winner who got away from Ineos Grenadiers. Having said that, in six years with the team he won just two World Tour races – a stage of the Giro d’Italia in filthy wet conditions in 2020 and the opening stage of last year’s Giro in Turin, which meant he was the only rider other than Tadej Pogačar to pull on the maglia rosa. (It also gives him the joint lead in the Turin Shroud competition, but we won’t get into that again). Sometimes a change of environment can make all the difference and let’s not forget that last year he finished second at the Tour Down Under behind Stephen Williams.

We discussed Sam Welsford repeating his haul of three stage wins and asked whether it will improve his case for inclusion in Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe’s line-up for one of the Grand Tours.

In the final part we looked ahead to the weekend’s World Cyclo-Cross Championships in Liévin, where Mathieu van der Poel hopes to equal Eric De Vlaeminck’s record of seven rainbow jerseys. Can anyone stop him? It seems unlikely but not everything in cycling is predictable.