New Beginnings

A mini series to mark 10 years of Friends of the Podcast episodes

There are four new episodes of KM0 for Friends of the Podcast to listen to, all tied together by a loose theme, New Beginnings.

These four episodes mark the start of our specials for 2025, with (at least) one new episode released each month. There’ll also be the return of KM0 Live from time to time.

Whether you have been a Friend of the Podcast since the very beginning, or have just recently signed up, we’d like to say a big thank you for your support. The funding generated by your annual subscription plays a huge part in ensuring The Cycling Podcast can continue to cover races and keep all our regular episodes free for all to enjoy.

Meet Joe Blackmore

At Christmas, Richard Abraham travelled to London to meet Joe Blackmore, the first British rider to win the prestigious Tour de l’Avenir, a reliable indicator of future stardom won in recent years by Egan Bernal and Tadej Pogačar. After a breakthrough season in the under-23 ranks and a spell as a stagiaire with the Israel-Premier Tech team, the young Londoner steps up to the World Tour for the 2025 season. Next stop, the Tour de France?

Cape of Good Hope

Fran Reyes travelled to the Valencian coast and dropped in on the UAE Team Emirates, Bahrain Victorious and Jayco-AlUla teams as they were preparing for the new season. The so-called Cape of Good Hope is where dreams are nurtured and optimism flourishes before the serious business of racing gets underway.

The AI Revolution

Whether it’s in designing race routes, training programmes, nutrition plans, or improving safety, Artificial Intelligence clearly has a role to play in the future of professional cycling. But where will AI’s influence end? Will it have a say in the outcome of races? Could tactical strategy be set by computers that have learned the outcome of every previous race? Lionel Birnie asks former US Postal Service and Team Sky rider Michael Barry how he sees the future.

Sink Or Swim

Former Dutch national swimming coach Jacco Verhaeren replaced Merijn Zeeman at the helm of Visma-Lease a Bike’s performance department last autumn. Fran Reyes asked him about his transition from swimming to cycling, the team’s coaching philosophy, and the emerging role of AI in rider preparation.

These episodes are all online now for Friends of the Podcast. If you need to re-connect your feed to a new device follow these instructions:

1. Go here: https://thecyclingpodcast.supportingcast.fm/

2. Click login

3. Enter the email address you registered with

4. You’ll receive an email with instructions of how to add your feed

Join the discussion at The Cannibal & Badger

Our unapologetically lo-fi forum, or virtual pub, The Cannibal & Badger opened its doors at the end of last year and we’re hoping that as the season gets underway it’ll be the place for Friends of the Podcast to discuss cycling and the podcast. There are no billionaire owners, no blue ticks or bots, and we haven’t entirely done away with fact-checking either (we aspire to 70% accuracy in all things).

Log in to access The Cannibal & Badger and join the discussion.

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An origin story: Ten years of Friends of the Podcast

by Lionel Birnie

Ten years ago this month, Richard, Daniel and I met up one evening and made our way to the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London’s Portland Place. It’s a beautiful Art Deco building constructed in the early 1930s that ushers you into a gleaming, glassy-blue horseshoe, before you step through a giant revolving door to a world of real TV and radio people.

Our producer, Paul, who worked for the BBC at the time, had somehow wangled us the use of a studio for an hour or so one evening when the building was quiet and the lights were low. He assured us it was all fine, signed us in at reception, and whisked us up in a lift, but until we closed the soundproofed studio door behind us, he spoke with a hushed whisper that suggested that perhaps no one else at the BBC knew we were coming. I decided not to feel too guilty about borrowing this wonderful facility and told myself that my television licence fee would probably cover it.

We’d started recording The Cycling Podcast in June 2013 on Richard’s iPhone, using the bog-standard voice memo app. A few months after we’d started, Producer Paul – or Paul as he was before he’d emailed to introduce himself – offered us one of his old Zoom recorders with a digital display and a foam windshield. It was very well-worn but the recording quality was a lot better than the phone and it improved the sound of the episodes.

Throughout 2014, Richard and I spent a lot of time discussing how to raise money for The Cycling Podcast. We had some sponsorship which covered some of the costs, but not all, and we felt that there was a large enough audience that we might be able charge a small amount for some exclusive podcast episodes – if only there was a way to make it work.

Back then, Apple did not accommodate paywalled podcasts. You could add ‘private’ feeds to the Apple Podcasts app but to actually sell a subscription and collect some money was very convoluted. Spotify didn’t even host podcasts at the time. There was a new thing called Patreon, which looked promising, and a few other platforms that could help creative people generate funding, but none of them really worked the way we wanted our system to work. We ruled out the other alternative, a simple crowdfunding effort, because we didn’t just want to ask people for money and offer nothing in return. We could have sent out podcast episodes by email, I suppose, but it wouldn’t have been very secure and we didn’t want to thank the people who were prepared to pay us for additional episodes by having a system that was actually a free-for-all.

So we kept going round and round in circles. How hard could it be? After all, you could buy music on iTunes, or films on Amazon in one click.

Well, as it turned out, creating seamless technological integration that gives the user frictionless access to digital content they’ve paid for in two or three clicks was surprisingly hard. Perhaps there was a reason Apple and Amazon were multi-billion dollar businesses and we weren’t.

We thought we’d cracked it when we set up a private feed on our regular audio hosting platform but found out the hard way it wasn’t secure enough and that anyone who had access to the website address could find a way behind the paywall. One morning, shortly before our planned launch date, I logged in to find that someone had changed our avatar from The Cycling Podcast’s logo to a picture of three clowns in a car. A painfully accurate image, of course, but also a bit of a concern. Whether it was a malicious act or someone humorously pointing out the unlocked back door, they did us a favour. We postponed the launch and went back to the drawing board.

Step in Peter Orr, A good friend of Richard’s, who ran a digital agency called Intelligent Mobile. Their developers listened to us patiently as we explained what we wanted.

We wanted a secure, paywalled content delivery system that was compatible with multiple other audio platforms, including one owned by one of the biggest companies in the world. We wanted it to be secure so our episodes couldn’t be shared. We needed to take payments and keep a secure database of all our listeners so we could email them when a new episode was added. We wanted the user experience to be easy – or at least not difficult. Oh, and our budget was tiny to the point of being almost invisible.

My memory of that first meeting is that the meeting room had astroturf on the floor and we sat round a table that looked like a giant fried egg, but that may have been the hallucinatory effects of feeling so embarrassed to be asking them for so much while offering so little.

Anything was possible, they said, but ‘anything’ would cost money. The challenge we left them with was to deliver something that would work without stretching their talented developers to the point where it began to cost them more than we could afford to pay. Remarkably, and within a few weeks, they had a working system and the 2015 Friends of the Podcast series was born.

***

So, there we were at the BBC, waiting for Paul to press record and for the red light to go on in the studio to signal that we were, perhaps, becoming proper broadcasters. Our debut episode was a partly-structured, partly-freewheeling round-table discussion of Team Sky’s first five years. From the hype of the glitzy London press launch in January 2010 to the deflating failure of the team’s debut Tour de France six months later, then on to successive victories for Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome, we discussed the team’s fortunes.

My memory was that it was fun to record without worrying whether the background noise of a coffee machine, or cutlery, or loads of other people in a busy bar, was getting too loud. We talked for an hour, left short gaps to drop in some interview clips we’d gathered, and then all went to the pub for a pint.

Finally, we launched the debut show and waited to see if people would sign up to listen to the episode and the ones that followed it. We had no idea what to expect. Would ten people sign up? A hundred? A thousand? The morning we went live I watched the emails drop into the inbox as each listener registered thinking, ‘Wow. Who knew we had so many Friends?’

The system itself was not as intuitive as people would expect today. It took a few clicks to link the feed to one of the mainstream podcast players. But I remember Richard ringing me sounding very pleased with himself that he’d managed to add his Friends feed to his phone. ‘If I can do it, most people should be able to,’ he said.

That revenue gave us some much needed breathing space. In 2015, we didn’t have to cover the bulk of our Tour de France travel expenses from our own pockets. We could even start to think about paying ourselves more than the barest minimum. And, of course, it gave us a budget to try telling some more ambitious stories.

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After five years, we’d possibly drained the well of goodwill at Intelligent Mobile. More subscribers and episodes meant more maintenance, more snags to iron out, and more admin for them. Also, the digital landscape had changed. Having an annual programme that effectively started from scratch every January, requiring longer-term Friends of the Podcast to add a new feed each year, was not ideal.

We tasked Jonathan Rowe, who we thought of as our Head of Winning Behaviours, with finding a new system. A few months went by and he said very little about his extensive search until one day, with typical understatement, he said: ‘I think I’ve found what we’re looking for.’

Supporting Cast was a new company and The Cycling Podcast was one of the first – if not the first – podcast to sign up to deliver paid episodes on their easy-to-access platform.

Jonathan had done a fantastic job of explaining to Supporting Cast what we needed and had more or less asked and answered every question we had about how the system worked, giving us great confidence that it was the right one for us.

In December 2019, just ahead of the 2020 season, Richard’s episode about stage 19 of the 2019 Tour de France, the one that didn’t end, but crowned Egan Bernal as the champion, was the first we added to the new platform.

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Some of the episodes I’ve made for Friends of the Podcast are among the most enjoyable things I’ve ever worked on.

My own highlights include the trip to ride Mont Ventoux with Simon Gill in 2016 when I tried to capture the spirit of the fearsome Provençal mountain. The Lionel of Flanders the following year probably topped that. The memory that stands out is calling our producer Tom Whalley to tell him about my idea of going to Belgium to convey the essence and excitement of the build-up towards De Ronde. ‘If you don’t call this series The Lionel of Flanders, you’ve failed,’ he said.

I’ve always enjoyed the time and space afforded by a longer interview or conversation. My series of Lunch With interviews may not be the flashiest or the most intricate format but there’s something about the simplicity of just sitting down with someone and seeing which direction the conversation takes that I find rewarding. Richard persuaded me to narrate my series of written articles about the ups and downs of covering Team Sky. I wasn’t convinced anyone would want to hear me droning on but Richard’s instincts were right and they worked well.

The fact we are speaking to a smaller, more committed – and perhaps more forgiving – audience has meant we’ve felt comfortable releasing the audio from numerous live shows for subscribers. Similarly, The Road Trips, piecing together audio recorded in the The Cycling Podcar at the Tour de France, became a surprise hit. I think immediately of the Alex Dowsett impression, François inventing Teappuccino, and all the laughs of successive summers in July.

One of Richard’s many great ideas was to ask you, our listeners, to suggest a subject for us to make into an episode. In 2021, quite a few people suggested the three of us just talk about the podcast, its origins, our decision-making processes, life on the road and the job of covering professional cycling. I think we were all slightly reluctant, in case it became too self-indulgent, but in the hands of our three guest editors – Jack Mckillop, Scott Emmons and Nick Busca – it became an opportunity not just to revisit but to re-examine what we were trying to do. Richard died a few months later and although I have not listened back to it since, I am very glad we have those episodes of the three of us piecing together the origins of the podcast and the re-living the excitement of those early days. The same goes for the Introducing… series, My First Tour, and several of Richard’s solo episodes – my favourite being his meeting with Jean Bobet, which I listen to once in a while, partly because it’s a glorious encounter full of warmth and richness, and partly just to hear Richard’s voice again without me interrupting.

Last year, we merged the KM0 and Friends of the Podcast branding and combined the two feeds so there’s a back catalogue of more than 300 episodes created over the past decade. KM0 episodes are for Friends of the Podcast subscribers but the idea is still the same – an episode of KM0 can be more or less anything. A travelogue, a historical journey, an interview, a topical talking point, a round-table discussion. Daniel has done an excellent job, especially at the Giro d’Italia, of making some KM0 episodes that barely touch cycling and yet are essential listening because they tell us so much about Italy, its people, culture and history. Of last year’s episodes, my favourites are Grande Torino, Love & Other Drugs, and 1974, which wove together the Vuelta’s start in Lisbon and Portugal’s revolution. All three are worth a listen now if you’ve not heard them before. The addition of KM0 Live last year – virtual live events – is something we plan to repeat this year too.

Anyway, we hope you enjoy the latest quartet of very different episodes and thank you to all our Friends of the Podcast for supporting us.

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This week’s episodes

The men’s and women’s World Tours are underway at the Tour Down Under. Listen to The Summer of Sam and the first episode of The Cycling Podcast Féminin for 2025, New Year’s Revelations, on your favourite podcast player.