Our Giro starts here...

Girovagando: Join The Cycling Podcast for daily Giro d'Italia coverage

by Lionel Birnie

As soon as I hear the first notes of Cozze by Amaraterra, I know it must be almost May and the Giro d’Italia is just around the corner.

We’re gearing up for the first grand tour of the season now. Our Girovagando preview episode – when Daniel and I will be joined by Brian Nygaard – will be out next week and then daily coverage starts after the opening time trial on Saturday, May 6.

To get in the mood, why not revisit Our Giro, a celebration of Italy and the Giro recorded during the Covid lockdown in May 2020 when all racing was suspended.

Play the theme for our Giro coverage, Cozze by Amaraterra

Girovagando 2023 by The Cycling Podcast

• Daily episodes from the Giro d’Italia with Daniel Friebe, Brian Nygaard and Lionel Birnie

• Kilometre 0 every Monday, Wednesday and Friday (for Friends of the Podcast subscribers)

• The return of the weekly Press Conference

• The 11.01 Cappuccino, featuring Lionel’s 2022 Giro d’Italia diary

• The Girovagando Selection. Wines of Italy curated by DVine Cellars

• Stacy Snyder’s Giro cups

New CPA president Adam Hansen in his Lotto-Soudal days. Photo by Simon Gill

Meet the new president

Adam Hansen was always one of the most approachable riders in the team bus paddock, not least because he always had an interesting point of view no matter the subject. Back in December 2017, I went to a Lotto-Soudal training camp where he talked about his love of European Christmas markets. We’ve heard him talk about his hand-made cycling shoes, his software engineering (he designed a programme a few of the World Tour teams used to organise logistics) and his vegan diet. Hansen is perhaps best known for his streak of 20 consecutive grand tours, which he completed between the 2011 Vuelta and the 2018 Giro. That was the subject of an episode of Kilometre 0 we made.

Hansen was always a thoughtful voice when it came to talking about the riders’ rights and responsibilities too, so I wasn’t at all surprised when he threw his hat into the ring to succeed Gianni Bugno as the president of the CPA, the riders’ union.

Elected just over a month ago, Hansen has been busy reaching out to the riders. He’s visited several races already. I saw him at Paris-Roubaix where he was working his way round the team buses speaking to the riders. ‘I wanted to show the riders that I could hop onto the bus, say what I wanted to say in a couple of minutes, and hop off again,’ he said.

Last week, I called Adam to talk at greater length about his new role and his priorities. It was a typically engaging conversation as he explained the challenge of representing hundreds of riders across the men’s and women’s pelotons. We covered the most pressing issues ahead of him – chiefly the battle to improve safety measures and unify the voice of the riders so they have a bigger say in their working conditions when it comes to discussions with the UCI, race organisers and the teams that employ them. Workers’ rights is perhaps not the raciest of subjects but Hansen brought his experiences in the peloton to the conversation too.

Listen to a clip of the Friends of the Podcast episode…

Vinovagando cases on sale now

Earlier this week, Daniel made his thrice-yearly trip to DVine Cellars in Clapham. I was invited too but, very sadly, couldn’t make, which was a shame because it was an opportunity to taste the wines Greg, Luciana and the team have put together to celebrate the 2023 Giro d’Italia.

As ever, the brief Daniel gave Greg and Luciana was to out-hipster even last year’s cases, with a maximum number of unpronounceable and unknown appellations and varietals. While honoring that directive, they also made sure the wines tasted extremely ‘nice’ – to use the beloved Buffalo-ism. Equally satisfying, when the producer isn’t located directly on the 2023 Giro route, other niche cycling references come to succour – such as the fact that Serafini & Vidotto’s Recantina is produced on the hillside where Joop Zoetemelk won the Worlds in 1985.

The Girovagando Selection is already available now.

One… two… three… Total Demi-lition

Amstel, Flèche, Liège for Demi Vollering. Photos by Getty Sport

The Cycling Podcast Féminin was back and on blazing form this week as Rose Manley, Orla Chennaoui and Lizzy Banks took a close look at SD Worx and their domination of the spring Classics.

That episode came hot on the heels of an incisive breakdown of Liège-Bastogne-Liège in Arrivée, where Demi Vollering completed the Amstel Gold Race and Ardennes triple. There’s also another look at Paris-Roubaix with Lizzy’s reportage recorded on the day, and a discussion of the mass exodus from the Zaaf Cycling Team.

Thank you to Supersapiens

For the past two years, every free-to-air episode of The Cycling Podcast has been sponsored by Supersapiens but, as you may have heard in this week’s episodes, it is time to say farewell and good luck.

We have been very proud to be sponsored by such a dynamic, innovative tech company and we hope that over the past two years we have helped to demystify continuous glucose monitoring technology and explain how it can help people to understand their bodies better and reach new heights.

It goes without saying that their sponsorship has been incredibly important to us. It has helped us to keep the regular shows and our daily grand tour coverage, recorded on location at the races, free for all to listen to. It enabled us to add daily coverage of the Tour de France Femmes last summer and gave us the security to take a risk with a series like the Tour d’Écosse, which ended up winning a Sports Podcast Award. And, on a personal note, using the continuous glucose monitor and seeing how the data related to how I felt prompted me to make some small but significant changes to my diet and helped me on a journey to losing weight and feeling better on and off the bike.

Daniel and I would like to thank everyone at Supersapiens for their support, particularly two of the company’s founders, Phil Southerland and Fitzalan Crowe. Congratulations to Phil for his 3:17 at the London Marathon at the weekend too.

Go to Supersapiens.com to find out more about the technology.

From the Friends of the Podcast archive

Johan De Muynck, the last Belgian winner of the Giro d’Italia

When Remco Evenepoel won the Vuelta a España last summer, he became the first Belgian grand tour champion since… who?

It’s a good question, one that might have you stumped. Even looking at the photograph above might not help you much because his is not a famous face or a household name.

The answer is Johan De Muynck, who won the Giro’s maglia rosa in 1978.

Now Remco – who is already well on his way to superstardom – is seeking to become the first Belgian Giro champion in 45 years, which gives me a good excuse to mention our Friends of the Podcast episode, In Search of the Pink Panther.

Back in 2018, I went on something of a magical mystery tour to find out why, for all their cycling fanaticism and Classics expertise, the Belgians had struggled to produce a grand tour champion in four decades, let alone a successor to the great Eddy Merckx.

I started off at the velodrome named after the Cannibal and asked whether the long shadow cast by the GOAT meant Belgian riders were destined never to emerge from the shade.

Then there was a surreal lunch with the charismatic, actually downright eccentric, Roger De Vlaeminck, followed by a meeting with De Muynck himself, who couldn’t have been more different. It was one of the most enjoyable Friends Specials I’ve put together.